Typhoid Lenny
Topic: by Lenny
The clock above the door of something called "Cuts 2000" at the strip mall read 12:00 PM. I awoke this morning with a violent cough and a metallic taste in my mouth, which underscored the obvious: I still have pneumonia, and it's only getting worse. I don't really have the money for the Route 6 Emergency Walk-In clinic. By the time I take care of the co-pay, the co-pay I still owe for the last visit, $20 for an old bounced check and pay the co-pay for the antibiotics that are helping transform this infection into some sort of superviral contagion, I will be out over a hundred dollars.

I'm sitting in the car eating Taco Bell, being stared down by a beady-eyed pigeon, much larger than any I have ever seen. Someone's mother is in the station wagon parked next to me, eating something and reading a newspaper circular with no apparent self-consciousness.

Is this fiscal responsibility? I save over a hundred dollars by not going to the doctor so I spend five dollars on Taco Bell. I can afford this slight indulgence because I have been living off Tina's microwave burritos (five for a dollar at Stop'N'Shop). I ate shitty burritos so I could afford to go to Taco Bell and buy a burrito... I feel like the guy on death row that ordered "shit on a shingle" for his last meal.

F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-Funky
"My point is very simple. The whole human position is no longer tenable."
-- William S. Burroughs, Cities Of The Red Night.

"I don't have much of an education, living my life like it's my vacation..."
-- Dee Dee Ramone, "Funky Man."

Infoshop's PICTURE OF THE WEEK
Topic: Picture of the Week

A mother comforts her daughter, wearing a Shirt with the slogan 'what will happen to us kids?' during a rally against planned job cuts of General Motors German unit Adam Opel AG in downtown Bochum, October 19, 2004. Embittered General Motors workers and readied protests across Europe on Tuesday against plans by the world's biggest carmaker to chop its staff in the region by nearly a fifth in a bid to halt chronic losses. GM's German unit Adam Opel AG is poised to absorb the brunt of up to 12,000 job cuts over the next two years. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

Infoshop.org Picture Of The Week archive.

[I]f we look at an isolated printed word and repeat it long enough, it ends by assuming an entirely unnatural suspect. Let the reader try this with any word on this page. He will soon begin to wonder if it can possibly be the word he has been using all his life with that meaning. It stares at him from the paper like a glass eye, with no speculation in it. Its body is indeed there, but its soul is fled.

-- William James

Jackson [Pollock] had tickets to a play.
Jackson [Pollock] had tickets to a play. "I've seen this play before, but it's so good I want you to see it. It's by a very important Irishman named Beckett. Waiting For Godot is the most important play I've seen. It's abstract."
We had dinner in a place close to the theater and found our seats about middle orchestra. The theater was not full... I didn't get the point of the play but Jackson did. Every line made him cringe, he got more and more into the play, and by the time Alvin Epstein came out as Lucky in the most thrilling performance, Jackson was beside himself. He started to cry.
People around us were shushing him, turning around. It was a quiet play, only two characters on stage, and every sound was noticed. He started to cry, really cry, and then the crying turned into sobs and then it went into heartbreaking moans. He was out of control. I grabbed his arms, pulled him up out of his seat. His eyes were closed. He was lost, not realizing we were in the theater. "Jackson, come, let's go home," I said. I somehow got him out of the theater and into a taxi, and as we walked out of the theater his crying was so loud it was as though his heart was breaking...
Nothing would make him stop. I tried to think about the play and what had set him off, the futility of no one coming. "I'm here. I'll be there when you need me. Don't be so sad please." "It's not that. It's something else. I can't explain."
- Love Affair, Ruth Kligman (68-69)

Seven Day Weekend.
Topic: by Lenny
Today is my last day of work, like, forever...

I have been writing at a feverish clip, so look to this space starting next week for some red hot literary business.

Until then, remember what Sam Peckinpah wrote:

Top Ten President Bush Explanations For The Bulge In His Jacket
Topic: presidential election
from Late Night With David Letterman...

10. "It's connected to an earpiece so Cheney can feed me answers--crap, I wasn't supposed to say that."

9. "It's a device that shocks me every time I mispronounce a word."
Read More...

Bare ambition (certainly we have better things to do)...
Topic: Sex
How to find naked celebrities

When I was a teenaged aspiring film critic, I always read The Joe Bob Report, the newsletter sent out by Joe Bob Briggs. One day, I noticed an ad for The Bare Facts Video Guide, which promised to list all the nude scenes done by every actress you've ever wanted to see naked. Naturally, I ordered it. Soon, it became available in book stores and I always bought the updated version every year.

Now that I'm a journalist, I get to contact people like Craig Hosoda, author of The Bare Facts, and ask him all the questions I always wanted to know when I was a kid. His book now has a CD-Rom companion and he has a website to promote the book, so contacting him through that was a breeze.

read more About.com "Action Adventure" guide here.

O'Reilly Scandal disturbing... and hilarious!
Topic: News and Media
O'Reilly Hit With Sex Harass Suit
Female Fox coworker details lewd behavior of cable TV star

OCTOBER 13 Hours after Bill O'Reilly accused her of a multimillion dollar shakedown attempt, a female Fox News producer fired back at the TV star today, filing a lawsuit claiming that he subjected her to repeated instances of sexual harassment and spoke often, and explicitly, to her about phone sex, vibrators, threesomes, masturbation, the loss of his virginity, and sexual fantasies. Below you'll find a copy of Andrea Mackris's complaint, an incredible page-turner that quotes O'Reilly, 55, on all sorts of lewd matters. Based on the extensive quotations cited in the complaint, it appears a safe bet that Mackris, 33, recorded some of O'Reilly's more steamy soliloquies. For example, we direct you to his Caribbean shower fantasies. While we suggest reading the entire document, TSG will point you to interesting sections on a Thailand sex show, Al Franken, and the climax of one August 2004 phone conversation. (22 pages)

The Smoking Gun article here.

C'mon, Have A Hart...
Topic: by Lenny
the Steve Hart "No good reason for this interview" interview...

SH -- Steve Hart
LF -- Joe "Lenny" Flatley

SH: First off, which do you prefer, Joe or Lenny?

LF: Well, short answer, my name is Joe, but my friends call me Lenny. Call me Lenny.

SH: What are you doing right now, Lenny?

LF: Pecking away here at the keyboard, working on something I have been putting off, comparing "magick" - that's with a 'CK' - with technology. Now I am never gonna get this done. Can I put this interview on my website?

SH: Sure.

LF: Great. When are you gonna be using this?

SH: Well, the project is due tomorrow, so hell. . . I may have the transcript done tonight.

LF: You can do it faster than that! Just hand in the tapes, do it now, wake that professor up! (laughs)

Read more