March Madness
No, it’s not the basketball tournament…it’s the one-week-late March edition of your favorite NYC-centric literary journal, Spindle Magazine!
Log on now for new poetry by Roger Bonair-Agard, Gerard Sarnat, Jeanann Verlee and Beverly Wilkinson; short fiction by Tim Clancy; and creative non-fiction by Anne Germanacos.
Plus, keep an eye out next week for our featured columns: Coffee & Brooklyn, Myers Music Machine and On the 1.
Monday Mash-Up, 3/17/08
1) I am swamped. Between the start of the new job only one week away (which kicks off with a trip out to Cincinnati) and the [mostly good] stress of our impending house purchase (attorney review is winding down; inspection is on Saturday), I’m a week behind on Spindle‘s March update and am going to have to burn the midnight oil tonight, after attending a Little League Coaches meeting, to get it done for tomorrow.
2) I am thrilled. This will be the oddest and coolest job transition I’ve ever made as it’s effectively a promotion but with a change of employer and scenery. The additional responsibility is a welcome challenge, even with the sharply raised stakes, as is the opportunity to put my stamp on two more magazines. Coupled with the success of Spindle, and my not-always-clearly-thought-out career goals are starting to come to fruition. Throw in the new house, our dream house by almost every realistic definition, and the fact that in general, things seem to really be falling into place all of a sudden — ie: as I’m typing this, our lender just called me to say rates dropped and we just locked in for 5.5%! — and I find myself looking both ways 5 times before I cross the street!
Spring Cleaning
I spent the morning updating the backends of this site and Spindle’s — WordPress 2.3.3 and Joomla 1.0.15, respectively — as well as a number of the plug-ins and modules that had new updates released recently, and finally found a new WP template I liked better than my previous one which had a couple of cosmetic bugs I never could figure out how to fix.
The picture up top is temporary, at least in size, because I ran out of time, but any feedback on the readability and functionality of everything else would be most appreciated.
PS: Yes, thanks to a hectic couple of weeks, I’m behind on the latest Spindle update which was scheduled for 3/11 but am hoping to have it ready to go on Tuesday morning!
Lucky to be Black
I really am trying to lower my political caloric intake right now — and, for the most part, have, thanks to a hectic few days of dealing with the adventures of buying a house — but the events of the past week have simply been unavoidable and difficult to let go unremarked upon. The posts I haven’t written this week would have reflected negatively on my chosen candidate, blistered your eyeballs and, in a few cases, possibly even ended casual friendships with a few Clinton supporters who are otherwise wonderful, rational people.
In a situation like this, you hope someone else will put what you’re thinking into more palatable words, and earlier this week, Keith Olbermann did exactly that. Today, it’s RJ Esko over at the Huffington Post, responding to Clinton supporters who send him hate mail “every time I criticize the Clinton campaign strategy.”
The Ideal Woman
Men’s Health reports on an “ideal woman” survey by some British dating website:
There’s no accounting for taste. Some guys go for Salma Hayek, others for Jessica Simpson.
A British dating website polled 66,000 men about their female ideal and came up with someone who sounds closer to Jessica than Salma: blue eyes, long blonde hair, 5-8, 130 pounds, extremely fit, etc.
(Yes, we know Jessica has brown eyes. We were speaking generally.)
The Brits also said they like her to wear glasses sometimes, have a wacky, optimistic personality, not smoke, drink occasionally, and make less money than him.
Never mind that anyone who thinks Jessica Simpson is more attractive than Salma Hayek is crazy in my book, and we’ll ignore the apparent libidinous librarian fetish (mainly because I kind of understand that one!), it sounds like British men are a bit insecure on the financial front, what with preferring their ideal woman make less money than they do. That makes no sense to me.
Interestingly, British women are apparently superficial golddiggers, so that might explain things a little bit:
Olbermann on Ferraro
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=qXBXD2zizIY] "This is not a campaign strategy, this is a suicide pact." Amen.