I was walking down the Bowery on Saturday minding my own business when I bumped into a guy with a TV on his head. As you do!

This article in The Guardian is rather amusing. Except it cost 30 people their jobs so it isn’t. The gist: a cockroach crawled across the news desk during Turkmenistan’s 9pm news show, Vatan. This went unnoticed by the news staff and the show was repeated at 11pm. Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the country’s president, didn’t see the funny side and fired 30 people from the main state news channel. At least it wasn’t a cooking show! The Guardian includes this lovely bit…

I feel faintly embarrassed to admit that I read advice columns. But Cary Tennis is on Salon and he says things like this: What about having a little humility and saying, You know what, I feel better when I paint duck decoys, so I’m painting duck decoys. And fuck you, get out of my garage. And don’t call them figurines. They’re duck decoys.

I love NYC so much that I give it a great, big bear hug most days but if I don’t escape every so often to stare at the horizon and look at some trees then I start to go a bit ker-azy. So my recent blog silence can be explained by the fact that I was in Canada hanging out on this beautiful Pacific beach. A belated Happy New Year to you all. My friend says this is THE YEAR…

I’m going to be taking a little blogging break over the next couple of weeks. There may be a few posts here and there but they probably won’t be terribly intelligent or interesting. You have been warned. I know this is rather infantile and I’m sorry to be veering so dangerously close to LOL Cats territory but I watched the 1975 Jamie Uys doc Animals Are Beautiful People last week and this scene made me laugh so hard I felt…

Ah December. It’s that time of year when you take stock of the year gone by and think about the year to come. Everything about this season feels like a bit of a cliche but, festive hubub and cacophony aside, the days are short, the nights are long (the Winter Solstice is nearly here) and this is a time for thinking and planning and thinking some more. So in that spirit here’s a sweet film from Lev Yilmaz. I saw…

I was feeling a bit bah humbug over the weekend. I love this time of year but seeing everybody frantically shopping (me included) made me feel a bit queasy. I felt like I should go see What Would Jesus Buy? and stop participating in this seasonal shopocalypse. But I sat down to watch It’s a Wonderful Life on Saturday, while I knitted myself a woolly hat, and suddenly the world seemed ok again. My roommate and I decided the perfect…

Via Boing Boing: check out this anti-landmine project featuring a free runner covering 50,000 square meters in London without touching the ground to highlight how hard it can be for people trying to get around in landmine affected areas. The commercial in the video section of the website is also worth a watch.

I had a lovely time watching clips from This American Life last night at Stranger Than Fiction in the charming company of Ira Glass and Chris Wilcha. I have never actually watched the TV show, mainly because I don’t get Showtime and am afraid to add more channels to the terrifying smorgasbord of my telly experience, but I’m going to purchase some episodes from iTunes now that I’m in my very-late-to-the-early-adopter-party phase with my iPhone podcasting, movie-watching lifestyle. Anyway, my…

This is why I love McSweeney’s and will be buying their journal (sprinkled with Dolly Parton quotes!) for myself for Christmas. I think it’s a motto to work by.