"Step into the realm of thought-provoking talk" with Albertson's BOA radio interview, live right now, or join me AND the host in the chat room. Or join us in Albertson's apartment for a Brooklyn Lager.

Aghast as I am when precious media coverage is wasted on people other than myself, I feel it my spousal obligation to note that my wife has been receiving somewhat positive notices for her performance in the play Proof, in the "upstate" area of New York.

Some excerpts from the local broadsheets
"Even if you do not possess a math gene, you will be swept away by Christina Nicosia's performance as the prodigy who does... Nicosia will draw you into this high-class math mystery like a captured angel, gawky and beautiful, grubby and incandescent in her manifestation. Upstate or down in Gotham, her work with [director Nicola] Sheara is Tony Award material." —The Daily Freeman

"Christina Nicosia's portrayal of Catherine is superb." — Times Herald Record

"Christina Nicosia gives a stellar performance as Catherine... [she] draws on her extensive background in theater to create a complex, multi-dimensional character that keeps the audience curious and engaged from the beginning to the end of the play. The actress is attractive, intelligent, and totally believable in this pivotal role." —The Woodstock Times

So full of praise are these members of the fifth estate — for the show and my wife's performance therein — that none of them manages to do the minimal research required to uncover a truly fascinating fact about Nicosia — she's married to me.

God, I am so sick of the "press." Have I been mentioned in The New York Times recently? Well, why the hell not?

Beginning today, and for the rest of the month of November, all dialogue in the comic strip will be taken verbatim from life. That's right, folks, everything you'll see is 100% pure, uncut, grade A verbiage, produced right here in New York City by genuine JVG and friends. Ask for it by name!

Alcohol of Choice: Beer, with a brief foray into tequila
Role Call: Bass, Bud, Yeungling, Frozen Margarita, PBR, Hefeweizen, Anheuser World Select

Cast of Characters: 9:30-10:45 MLW*; 9:30-11:30 SlayBelle* plus roommate, ColonialDick*, ToughGuyBallet*, Rebecca Hart†, several others; 9:30-5:30am Ninja McFatty*, No Ass O'Barkeep*, TheMidget* (Pseudonym provided by O'Barkeep), ChinaBoy*; 11:30-5:30 MarkTheKnife*; 9:30-6:20am Vaugn Filmy*

Venue Rundown: 9:30pm The Bitter End (on stage: Rebecca Hart†), 10:45pm Peculier Pub, 12:30am Senior Swankys, 1:10am Welcome to the Johnsons, 2:30am Whiskey Ward, 4:30am Apartment in Chinatown, 5:40am The Manhattan Bridge, 6:14am F Train, 6:45am Terrace Bagels

Highlights:
—Frozen Margharitas outside: a tasty winter treat!
—We beat a hasty retreat from Welcome to the Johnsons after NOA'B decides that the person on whom he spilled a drink is ready to rumble. TheMidget: "I was trying to decide how many of them I could take."
—Multiple doorbell rings fail to rouse Lockhart†. Evening becomes 2% less epic.
—Bartender at Whiskey Ward, when VF and I order a 22-ouncer to share: "I don't care, be as gay as you want."
—VF and I decide that a pre-dawn jog across the Manhattan Bridge is a fine way to start my new fitness regime. NMcF demurs.
—Several moments later, I decide that a pre-dawn walk across the Manhattan Bridge is a fine way to start my new fitness regime.
—To hell with the new fitness regime.

Final Analysis: Top to bottom, an evening to remember. Vaguely remember.

* Pseudonyms are either new, or may have changed since previous posts. Couldn't be bothered to look them up.

† This is not a pseudonym.

Me. Just in from a night on the town that included music, drinking, and annoying Lockhart. What could be more epic? More details — and today's strip — after a brief nap.

Oh, I'm having oodles of fun painting candidates for the 2004 Election at 30 section of Blog of Ages. Oodles!

Found: the following note to myself. If anyone has any insight into what it means, please let me know.

The date is easy to decipher, despite the lack of accompaning text: it's the next TheaterSounds reading. But the other note?

Even assuming that I meant to write not "Quali7y: how muck 11 4ke 17," but rather "Quality: How Much I Like It," what the hell am I talking about? Am I reminding myself that I want to write a treatsie on my appreciation of things well made? Seems unlikely. Am I commiting to paper the assertion that the degree of excellence inherient in any given object is directly related to whether or not it is pleasing to me? Perhaps. Or do I mean to rate something on two different scales, empirical quality vs. my own personal feelings about it?

As I seem to have just lost the piece of paper in the crack between my desk and bookcase, it probably doesn't matter.

The New York Post [via Gothamist] reports that "city officials have instituted a rare neighborhood-wide production moratorium," banning all filming in D.U.M.B.O. to maintain quality of life for the residents.

This measure comes as no surprise; DUMBO has already expunged the moneyless artists, why not move on to the moneyed pseudo-artists? In fact, I would like to suggest that this "moratorium" does not go far enough.

I call on the mayor's office to officially designate DUMBO an "Art-Free Zone", allowing the newest crop of residents to live their investment-banking lives untroubled by the bothersome physical evidence of independent thought. Let DUMBO — as the Lower East Side now is — be unstained by the embarrassing enigma of galleries and theaters, the stumbling and intrusive introspections of the creative. Let there be Prada, not art, under the bridge! The future is ABC, not DTX. Is it not time for DUMBO, like Soho before it, turn its eye towards that most American, that most patriotic of all Arts, the Art of Shopping?

And what of the artists? Worry not, they shall still have their place. It is their lot to continue moving outward, a ragtag band of brave explorers, advance scouts for the pulsing waves of gentrification. And, when the last corporate stragglers finally settle into their Coney Island ocean-view condos built on the ruins of Sideshows by the Seashore, we shall have driven all the artists into the sea, never to return.

How I missed Celebrity Justice before now is beyond me. It is, without a doubt, the best news show currently on the air at 4am.

In a matter of minutes, I learned more than I could ever want to know about things I didn't even know I cared about until Liz and Choire started blogging incessantly about them, such as:
• The identity of the man who leaked the Paris Hilton sex tape: "Don Thrasher"
• The outcome of the Rosie O'Donnell trial: Judge rules that the whole thing is stupid

The website features additional gems, such as the There Oughta Be A Law, in which stars suggest new laws too dull to be inane.

The best feature of all: Email a story idea. Naturally, I wrote in to suggest that the world is waiting for an update on the last legal action in which I was involved: the two-and-a-half year-old CBS v. Deadpool case. So far, no response has been forthcoming.

A drink with Lockhart at Local 138 takes an interesting turn when, attempting to take a bathroom break, I burst in on a female bar patron "powdering her nose." Being the gentleman that I am, I throw my hands up in the air, proclaim "sorry!" in a somewhat squeaky voice, and head to the other facility.

"That was an embarrassing experience," I note, when I return to the bar. A few moments later, the woman on whom I intruded approaches and introduces herself, explaining that — since we know each other so well already — she thought she should say hello. She goes on to explain that 1. she was sure she had locked the door, 2. this was the second time she had been walked in on recently, and 3. her strange toilet posture — perched atop the seat as if ready to pounce on a passing rat — was due to lessons learned during her recent travels in India.

"The one thing more embarrassing than walking in on someone," opines Lock when she departs, "is the conversation afterwards."

Perhaps. Or perhaps the most embarassing of all is blogging about the experience.

For the record, the last time something of this sort happened was at the Gothamist/601am Happy Hour at Remote Lounge. That time, it was a man. His reaction: "DUDE!"

Thanks once again to the programming genius of JCN, fans of the randomized JVG: The Comic Strip need no longer rely on clumsy screenshots to save their favorite episodes for posterity. Simply click on any panel, and the browser will display a link which can be bookmarked, shared with friends, or emailed to me for possible inclusion in future reader's favorite posts.

• Randomizer
• Somewhat amusing strip saved using the above methodology

It started at seven.

My mom stars as Lady Macbeth, but the postcards said eight, so that's when the crowd starts dripping in to the stadium-style seating. She's halfway through a monologue when something goes wrong, so: intermission. I suggest — since most of the audience just arrived — that they take it from the top. My cel phone rings. Luckily, it's intermission. People keep coming in.

I make my way over the seats below me and go backstage. I want to tell someone they have to to start over. Flyboard trees are in the wings. Backstage is bright and sunny, a white hallway filled with actors. An olive-skinned woman — maybe the stage manager, but she isn't wearing stage manager clothes — waylays me and escorts me back to the house. We're too late, we have to hop over the big opening dance number. The audience laughs, applauds when we get offstage.

I look for a seat. Puck — played by whatshisname, you'd recognize him if you saw him — appears; head in hand, elbow crooked, lying on his side. Audience: ovation. I wait for him to start the opening monologue. He doesn't start the monologue, there's some modern stuff the writer put in. They're wearing beige afternoon suits and and straw hats, maybe even playing croquet. It's going over okay.

A girl in the seat next to me sucks my finger and lets it go. Her sister is Juliet, she says, that's how she's going to play it. I pull my hand away. The woman on my left is talking on her cel phone. Is it my wife? I tell her to hang up, there's a show going on. She'll just be a minute, she's talking very quietly.

• Try as it might, Font Book just can't handle 5,000 fonts
• 3 hours and one download later, the scanner's working again
• If only Address Book could sync with, say, Entourage
• 10 minutes of the upgrade time installing support for —Swedish?
• Still don't need .mac

Being the eighth in an ongoing series of rare and unpublished works by the author which, for one reason or another, were never presented to the public at large.

Title: The Big Bang
Date: c. 1993
Rejected from: "Rounds Galore! Facinating Rounds Old & New"
Reason rejected: Due to extraordinary lack of motivation as college freshman, delivered several months too late

Xina calls in with a report from the street:

"Ear piercing 'while-u-wait'.

As opposed to, drop your ears off and pick them up later.

...Uh-huh."