• My friend *Bob is bugged today by a New York radio personality:

“I am at the apartment this morning and therefore have to endure the moronic Joan Hamburg. She was describing in detail the play ‘FaithHealer,’ which just opened. This supposedly media-savvy person has repeatedly pronounced Ralph Fiennes‘ first name the same way Ralph Kramden pronounced his. She has about 1 million loyal listeners. I know from painful experience that the WOR 710 AM radio signal easily reaches to Cape Cod, and for all I know, all the way to England.

(*Names changes to protect people who don’t wish to be publicly associated with me.)

• My friend Mark wrote something funny about cash-back awards here, and something even funnier about Tom Cruise here.

• For A., to see if you’re reading: Do you know any John Sterling home run calls? You know, like: Jorge Posada — “Jorgie Juiced One”; Jason Giambi — “The Giambino”; Bernie Williams — “Bernie Goes Boom”; insert yours here. [via Yanksblog]

I love book gossip: The guy who made up his memoir, the ivy-league girl who copied her novel, Caitlin Flanagan and the whole does she stay-at-home or doesn’t she …

Today Joan Walsh takes on the good mother, John Kenney writes The Great Gatsby. Ta-ta.

(All, or most, from Powells.)

… it costs the U.S. Government 1.4 cents to make a penny?

[from A.]

   A. tells me today that broccoli is the only vegetable that is a flower.  Wow.  And here are some other startling items to read on the train:

• Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated
• Two-thirds of the world’s eggplant is grown in New Jersey
• A goldfish has a memory span of 3 seconds
• A dime has 118 ridges around the edge
• Almonds are a member of the peach family
• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear
• In most advertisements, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10

(from The Funny Pages)

Cathleen Schine reviewed Joyce Carol Oates’ latest, a short-story collection, for the New York Times Book Review last week. Brave of her. It’s so hard to deal with Oates. There’s just so much, an incomprehensible volume — it’s like looking at the sun. What can you possibly say about her how can you possibly take any of it on? I remember discovering her, I was very young and instantly captivated, the words in the books sweet — sticky sweet — and so lyrical and like Roethke’s waltz, lurching happily, horribly along into awful. As a reader I got this sort of sick feeling that I wasn’t in control — I knew she was going to disturb me, deeply, yet I couldn’t stop.

I don’t remember what I read first, and some of them blur together. I remember being affected by Because It Is Bitter … remember ordering it from one of those Paperback Book clubs, but I can’t tell you what it was about. The voice of Black Water was particularly haunting as was her heartless unraveling of the Mulvaneys.

Black Water, like Don DeLillo’s Libra, took me completely out of the real events and characters it was based on. I felt immersed in fiction, imagination. The real story became moot. (Black Water, of course, mined Chappaquidick and Libra followed a character named Lee Harvey Oswald to his fateful climax at a book depository in Dallas.)

I have seen JCO in the flesh twice. Once in college 15 years ago, and then at a book fair in Portland last month. She looked exactly the same each time — 35 pounds wrapped in a simple black suit. She has a girlish voice and waves tiny wisps of arm around as she speaks. It is incongruous to the horrific vignettes of human nature she dishes out. She read her short story “Heat” to a packed and completely still room. After she finished, the woman next to me “wow”d and then asked no one in particular, “how does she recover from writing something like that?”

Ho-hum. Nothing from my own clever mind today, so I give you links from elsewhere:

• Are good old-fashioned paper maps obsolete? A parent at A’s last birthday party told me he found our house with his Thomas Guide. Thomas Guide! Of all the crazy things … (via Arts & Letters Daily)

• I’m having lunch with my very famous poet friend today, here.  Paparazzi, camp out!

• Rocky and Sally Ann are now just Rocky (or Sally Ann. I’m waiting on autopsy results to confirm.)

• Yesterday the guest priest went on and on, and on. And on. (I took my notebook so I could work and got in 1500 words!). His homily was something about science and chemicals and the stages of marriage, though, so since I’m writing about a humorously dysfunctional marriage, I perked up. I think he was lifting from this.