I love Nabokov so, so much; Invitation to a Beheading did nothing for me. Don't remember disliking it so much as finishing and thinking, "Well, that's now I book I've read."

As much as I came to loathe reading Heidegger, I'll stand up for Being & Time. That's one of the few books that really felt as if it changed the way I thought. (I mean, maybe it changed it for the worse, but still.)

My problem with Carol is that I can't hear the name and not think of the terrible Horatio Sanz SNL character.

So what if they're in a can? I would drink G&Ts out of a toilet, honestly.

I've got an assload of beer stocked up that went undrank from the holidays, and I've finally recovered from the cocktail-pocalypse that occurred when I visited by brother recently, so I should be all set to get crocked during the snow.

I loved making beer—all the fun of chemistry lab, but you can get drunk at the end of it—but don't have the storage space to do it anymore.

"I can't? Watch me!"

The Grimes video has a severe 'white guy in Kangol hat' deficit, though.

I keep listening and listening, waiting to get tired of that album.

- Cato the Elder

It's the first of his that I've read, and I was very impressed, but I'm in no hurry to read anything else of his (though I will eventually); only so much black despair a body can take.

Right? First I read what she wrote, I had to make sure I hadn't surreptitiously swapped the books in my head. And The Goldfinch, as I recall it, never quite lost its romantic view of NYC wealth and culture—-not that I would necessarily think of that as the greatest of its flaws.

If you didn't like Secret History, I kind of doubt The Goldfinch would be up your alley. I can sort of see why Caitlin would think it romanticizes the NYC elite less than TSH, but let's just say that wasn't my impression.

Finished The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi: a noir-ish dystopia set in the Southwest of the very near future, where a massive, unending drought has turned the region into a new Dust Bowl, and the states use every means, legal and otherwise, to keep refugees out and their rights to a diminishing supply of water…

I've had to cut out Civ & the various Paradox games (EU, CK, Victoria) out of my life. If I install one, you might as well immediately cut to 18 hours later to see me sitting in the same spot, no light but the computer monitor, muttering 'just one more year, just one more year.'

OK, now we're really even for the STD billboard thing.

I did find that out after some digging, and that's eminently sensible (and humane); but the initial impression was still one of utter wtf-itude.

I remember being amazed when I learned that Andres Breivik got something like 20 years for his murder spree.

But this is the telltale sign of the reactionary mindset: an incoherent depiction of the designated out-group as both powerless, thus deserving of sneering contempt, and near-omnipotent, thus justifying the monomaniacal obsession with the out-group's threat.

Nah, man. Biden rides with George Thorogood & the Destroyers 4 lyf.