"...and the cuddly, penis-faced Joe Camel must rank as one of the most disgusting apparitions ever to appear on our cultural landscape." Jonathan Franzen, from Sifting the Ashes, an essay on the tobacco industry most recently published in his latest book, How to Be Alone.
This is guy is outright brilliant. Every single one of you should have read The Corrections by now. If you haven't, go out and buy a copy. It's that good. Immediately afterwards, read Stanley Park by Timothy L. Taylor, the sheer quality of which calls into question the fact that it's the author's first full length novel. A few of the characters are a little too obviously symbolic, but it's a wicked read overall, especially if you have any familiarity with the reality of food preparation, the mentally ill, West Coast Yuppie Trash, and ill-advised romantic convenience. So basically, if you're me, read this book, you'll love it.
On a completely unrelated note, if any of my other selves would like to from a reading group, you probably know where to find me.

So well before dawn this past Monday, my buddy and I set off to pick up his "new" 85 Corolla GTS from Rochester, MN. For those of you who don't watch enough anime/don't follow car culture, this is a pretty sweet car. It was basically a straight from the factory street racer.
We made good time to the border, where we got the hairiest of hairy eyeballs from the guards. In retrospect, I can hardly blame them. "So you're a bartender, and you're not working? And you're driving an immaculate, leather interior Integra to Rochester and back in one day just to pick up a twenty-year-old car? You sure a friend didn't offer you a bunch of money to bring this car across the border?" When they finally decided to let us across, they mentioned that, despite what the suboids at Canada Customs had told us, there was a three day waiting period to take any vehicle out of the US. We were welcome to leave it at the gas station a couple miles across the line and come back for it at the end of the week though, so we hauled ass for Rochester.
And I do mean hauled ass. American highways are several orders of magnitude better than ours, and traffic moves accordingly. I was going 130 and getting passed like I was standing still. After a few hours of being stupefied by the efficiency and manners of the Interstate system, we made it to the garage where we were to pick the car up.
Bad news though, as the car had popped out a corroded frost plug, and was absolutely pissing out coolant. Dave (the seller) epoxied it back in, set us up with a hotel for the night, and we went out for dinner with him and his wife while the glue dried. As it always does down south, the conversation turned to drugs, guns, and war, and it turned out that Dave has a loaded semi-auto in the same drawer as the title for the car that he was more than happy to show us when we got back. Scary, scary country.
We headed back to the garage at about nine to take the car out for a test run, and sure enough, it started leaking coolant about twenty minutes after we left. Fortunately, Dave has a huge trailer for his seven hundred horsepower drag racing truck, so he hauled the car back and promised that it'd be running by morning.
It turned out to be another of the frost plugs, and the car ran fine in two test runs, so we booked it back home. To make a long story short, the Americans grudgingly let us take it across the border that night, and the Canadians charged my buddy assorted taxes, fees, and extra tax on the first taxes, and let us drive it home. Where the tire promptly went flat, and the engine refused to start the next morning. The plan was always to strip the car down and rebuild it anyway, but that was some funny shit.

Biggest match up of the year
But seriously folks, you don't want to watch that. Why would you want to watch this year's two most hyped NBA players square off? See, what you really want to check out is this golf special we have on here. It's a "skins" game, so it'll be extra thrilling. Really. You'll love it. After that, we've got some great Australian Tennis for you.
I hate this half-assed prairie town dressed up as a real city. I even hate the fact that I'm reduced to complaining about it.

Apparently, I'm some form of culinary god. Seriously, nothing says "Bow before me" like a well made teriyaki chicken maki.
It opens up a whole new area in the kitchen too. The same thing happened when I got my hands on my pasta machine for the first time...there's so much that you can do with a new technique in the kitchen.
Not that there weren't a few snags here and there (inside-out roll? More like inside-all-over-my-fucking-counter-roll), but the whole thing is way easier than you think it is. I'm starting to question the hundreds of dollars I've put into my friendly neighbourhood sushi chef's retirement fund.

More than a month later, and the ankle is still swollen. It doesn't even hurt anymore, I have near full mobility, and my balance is probably better than it was before I injured it, but it's still half again as big as the other one. Freaky.
Physio, by the way, is nuts. Today started with a "contrast bath" where I alternated between sticking my foot in a jacuzzi, and dunking it in ice water for fifteen minutes. We moved on to some treadmill running to warm up, then five minutes on the wobble board, a circular plate with a half ball on the bottom on which you balance on your injured foot. Five minutes on the "Fitter", a cable driven ski turn simulator thingy, and it was back to the chair for some ultrasound. Yes, ultrasound. I asked my physiotherapist point blank whether he knew why this was supposed to work, and even he didn't have a clue. He said the research started when the American Navy noticed their sonar was killing sea vegetation. Similar response for the fifteen minutes of running interfering current through my foot. They both seem to get the job done, but no-one knows why.