mikegerber.com

For those of you stuck at work, there’s always Something Awful’s Photoshop Phriday. This week’s topic is “rejected software.” The first few pages are a bit IT for me, but it warms up.

Talk of sodomized nuns touched a nerve with at least one reader. A. Bourguilleau writes to say: “Yes Michael, these kind of things happen in France. some nuns get sodomised on cathedrals (and sometimes in cathedrals, but that’s another story). You might be interrested to hear that a lot of obscene scuptures and painting used [...]

A Twisted Grace from Garry Goodrow

Friend Garry Goodrow sent me this poem, which I liked a lot. If you pass it along, please attribute it to him. NOTHANKSGIVING No thanks to Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, (and Condoleeza, that oily girl,) nor to Ashcroft and his team, the ayatollahs of the new regime. No thanks to William Rehnquist and his clique, who [...]

Ooh la la

My wife Kate is constantly lobbying for us to move to France, which would result in a speedy death-by-dairy for yours truly. However, I read something today that may make me reconsider. An article about a flap over a poster for a jazz concert ends thusly: “He recalled that a gargoyle on the nearby cathedral [...]

Oh great, now I have a Joy Division song stuck in my head

Moving on, there’s a new parody of “Animal Farm” out, with a supposed anti-capitalist bent…Is book publishing “a field that the rest of our culture has begun to regard with the quaint benevolence one feels toward children and old pets”? I would say no, I like my old dog Lucy much more than that, but [...]

Agree/Disagree/Don’t Know

Check out this site’s list of the 100 Best Albums of the 80s, and I bet you’ll waste 30 minutes like I just did.

Bad Sex

England’s annual prize for Bad Sex in Literature is about to be awarded. Here’s an article, along with one of the entries, which, needless to say, is awful. My friend Dan sent me this bit of interesting clap-trap: a Weekly Standard writer pens a paean to Star Wars’ Empire.

Talk to yourself

A Swedish scientist is claiming that talking to yourself–in funny voices, no less–is good for you. Now I know why I only get one cold a year. I’m doing a reading–or in my case, a mumbling–tonight; After-Words Books, 23 E. Illinois St. It will also be simulcast via satellite hookup at Wembley, Japan’s Budokan, and [...]

Barry’s Long March…

…is proving much more pleasant than Mao’s. Editor Simon revealed today that my mongrel will be at #7 in the London Sunday Times list this Sunday. Yowsa! While emceeing the National Book Awards, Steve Martin got off a good line or two. While presenting a Lifetime Achievement Award to Phillip Roth, he quipped, “If he’s [...]

A Reading, and a Roundup

People at Chicago’s After-Words Bookstore (23 E. Illinois St) have extremely unwisely asked me to do a reading at their store this Friday, Nov. 22nd at 8pm. So anybody in the area who would like to endure two hours of mumbled punchlines and half-bemused muttering, shouldn’t miss it! In more Barry news, it continues to [...]