Rules:
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.
* Post that sentence as a comment here too.

Oh don't be silly Sunny, Klaus said, we've seen you in your underwear hundreds of times.

Today I:
dropped the girls off at school
ironed for a half-hour
watched Aliens 2
picked up dry cleaning
dropped Weeds off at Blockbuster
listened to the Slate Culture Gabfest
brought Sophie the piano books she forgot to take to school
lost thousands of play chips on Full Tilt Poker
killed time on Facebook
listened to Tell Tale Signs
replaced the washers on my kitchen sink faucets
brought Sophie her 3rd piano book - which I forgot to bring with the other two
got caught for 1/2 hour in the child pickup line at Sophie’s school
listened to the Clash Live at Shea
waited an hour at the library for Zoe to get off the bus
picked up Zoe, where we realized we forgot her piano books
went home to pick up Zoe’s piano books
dropped Zoe off at piano lessons at Sophie’s school (3rd trip today)
watched Sophie at the playground during Zoe’s lesson
picked up Zoe
ran to Burger King (the kids requested “the saltiest fries”)
parked on my parking deck (see picture)
stepped out of the car
stepped off the edge of my deck
fell 5 feet to the driveway below
limped inside
ate dinner
doctored scrapes
had a beer

I’m ready to go back to work now.

This is the dream Sophie told me about this morning:

Sophie was in a league of superheroes: Belle, the Beast, a vampire, Shrek, and the devil - but a cartoon devil, not the real one. They could all shoot light from their hands. Each of them had a different color light. Sophie’s was pale blue. When they held hands, they all shot out a huge beam of all their colors combined.

They were trying to save Elizabeth I and “that soldier guy Zoe was talking about” (Sir Francis Drake).

That’s when I woke her up.

Here’s why McCain won’t win:

His best, most repeated argument for his candidacy is that he is a fighter. Tonight in the debate he went through the list of all the people he has fought: the Democrats, the President, the Republicans, the Defense Department. Question: Who has McCain ever worked with? In a time when the nation is fractured along cultural and political fault lines, do we want someone whose default response - the one he talks about the most - is being fractious?

What’s sad is that in his history John McCain probably has been the Senator most likely to cross party lines and find cooperative legislative solutions. If he can’t understand that what America needs now is a healer, not a fighter, then he will lose. He has lost already.

Lady Vengeance sounds like a misguided product offering from Gillette. In reality it is a film from South Korean director Park Chan-Wook, and the third in a trilogy of what I understand are off-kilter revenge tragedies; this is the only one I've seen so far, but based on my viewing of this, the other two (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Old Boy) will be moving to the head of my Netflix list soon.

Anybody who's seen any movies at all knows how easy it is to show violence, and how quickly it becomes stylized, empty, a cliche. I don't know if there's another movie, outside of the The Wild Bunch, that conveys so much raw emotion through blood. Certainly no movie from Hollywood, which offers splatter in a continuous and steady flow like Big Macs falling off an assembly line. The bloodletting in this movie is Shakespearean - meaning, there's a full understanding that, no matter how bad the bad guy is, no matter how much he deserves killing (and the bad guy in this movie has to be seen to be believed... my mother might possibly read this, so there's no chance I'm going to describe in any detail at all what it is this guy does!), no matter how much innocence he has destroyed, that revenge does not bring redemption to anybody.

Once your innocence has been taken, it's gone. Which is a tragedy, because, if this movie is about anything, it is about innocence - both lost, in the case of Geum-ja (the title character), and sustained, in the person of her daughter, Jenny.

But the miracle about this movie - because tragedies are a dime a dozen in Hollywood and around the world - is how much I cared about Geum-ja. For one thing, Lee Young Ae gives an incredible and charismatic performance in the title role. For another, this movie is a very off-kilter revenge tragedy; I don't know what movies Park Chan-Wook saw in South Korea, but I sense some time spent with the Three Stooges in his past somewhere (because there’s no reason violence can’t be funny too). Adding humor to a stew this intense is sly and unusual; humor implies detachment and it's rare to discover a movie that blends irony and deep compassion so intensely.

Sharla's been working like mad, two classes going simultaneously, as well as a full schedule of clients day and night.

Tonight I got a little tired of hearing the electronic tuba soundtrack on Animal Crossing and asked Sophie if she'd like to draw Sharla a picture to give to her when she got back home.

Sophie picked up a slip of paper - no more than 2'' x 3'' - and said "I already did!" I took a look - it was a mass of scribbly circles. "What is it?"

"She's on the cross!" I turned it sideways. "It's Mom, on the cross?!?" I mentally pictured Sharla's reaction to that. Clearly, that showed on my face, as Sophie backtracked immediately: "I mean, it's Jesus. I'm going to give it to Mom."

Then she went on to explain, and a new religion was born: "He's got the nails going through his ears." I expressed a little surprise about that. "Yes, he was dead for three days anyway, so they took nails and folded his ears down and played with them and stuck nails through them into his head."

And thus we all became Lobetarians.

I've been watching a fair amount of Samurai Champloo, an anime mashup of Yojimbo (with its Meiji-era ronin wandering from town to town cleaning out the bad guys) and hip hop. That's right, hip hop - it's not unusual in this series for a samurai to throw down a little old-school rap before he slices his kitana through an opponent. This is a series that is not afraid to have its own style.

I've really been enjoying it, so I started checking out the director's earlier series, Cowboy Bebop. The animation's a lot rougher, and the aesthetic is a lot more unfocused. And the music is based on this weird Japanese transliteration of what they think is blues ... if you can imagine a Japanese blues band, then you have a sense of how strangely unsettling I'm finding Cowboy Bebop to be. It exists in the nexus where The Jetsons meet Mannix. I'm not sure those two worlds are even supposed to coexist, let alone meet.

The more episodes I watch the more I like it - but it hasn't grabbed me in the same way as Samurai Champloo quite yet.

I've only listened to half of the new Dylan CD today - just what I could hear on the way to school & back. It's great, it's unbelievably affecting, and it's pretty in a way I haven't heard from Dylan since...ever.

There's a lot of talk in the reviews about how this makes up a trilogy with Time Out of Mind and Love & Theft, as if this is just a continuation of those other two records, but I'm hearing a lot that's totally new, a purity of tone and a gentility in the slow numbers, and an empathy in the writing that hasn't been much in play since Blood on the Tracks. I'm not hearing the Dylan of Time Out of Mind and Love & Theft as much as I'm hearing the writer of Chronicles - the recluse turned memoirist, liberating his past from cliches and finding a new way to write about his life so he can tolerate his memories. Maybe it reminds me more of his book because the songs are organized (so far) into chapters: the first two titles are complementary lines from the I Ching, the next three use Muddy Waters as their departure point, etc.

Love & Theft was all about packing everything he loves about our rural past - Charley Patton, dusty country lanes, moonlight dances, and pie - and rafting them down into the present on a Mississippi of words. In Modern Life he's tamed his logorrhea, and if the past is still his underlying obsession, it's not a lost mythical place anymore - the past is alive and vital in the present, just as surely as he is himself.

There's a lot of folkies out there who still resent Dylan for "stealing" old arrangements and passing them off as his own, pretending to be Woody Guthrie, or a symbolist poet, or a Christian, or Lightning Hopkins, or somebody, anybody else. There's something about him that doesn't feel authentic.

In Modern Times Dylan has finally become real.

About 9 months ago, I sent my iBook to Apple because it stopped charging. They opened it up and found evidence of liquid damage ("We think it smells like coffee", the tech said). Not covered. They told me it was probably the logic board and quoted me a $800 charge to fix it - 80% of the price of a new one - so I had them send it back, and bought a new one. Nothing to do but suck it up and drive on.

The old one's been sitting in a box in the corner of my basement since then...I was too disgusted to open it or look at it.

Last week, I finally opened it, and took it to MacAuthority for a 2nd opinion. The problem? Turned out to be a DC-in cable, which they had in stock, and replaced...for free.

When I turned it on, it had a Simpsons season 4 disc in it. Wondered where that was! Bonus.

Zoe and I are watching To Catch a Thief. Right now I can get her to watch any movie with Cary Grant in it - we've already seen Charade, North by Northwest, The Philadelphia Story and Talk of the Town. Next will be Arsenic and Old Lace and His Girl Friday, then maybe My Favorite Wife? I think it's totally fitting that Cary Grant is Zoe's gateway drug into the world of old movies.

He is, after all, my spiritual father.