Hi, all.  Thanks also to whoever runs the Eroica Trio's MySpace page for asking me to be their friend--I would have asked myself if I'd thought of it.  I love those gals.

I'm here with The Professor and a variety of his assorted kin, to get away from the PO for a couple of days.  Especially after the day I had today, I really could use the break.

But even though I was sure I'd never been to the islands before (Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, et al), I had this weird feeling on the way down that I'd been on the ferry before.  Also, I seemed to recall certain other things, like The Black Dog.  But then, I think a lot of the Cape looks like this too.

This is a link to the conversation I had on the way to the house The Professor rented, where we spoke of The Manchurian Candidate (one of my favorite films).  I distinctly recall, the first time I saw it in the theater, the same sort of deja vu.  The Professor saw it recently for the first time, but his experience was not dissimilar to mine, only the reason for his deja vu was reading a lengthy book about the making of the film.

I'd write more, but I'm sort of being rude by sitting at the computer instead of hanging with the kin.  So I'm stopping here.

More answers to your questions soon though, I promise!

Right, so it's 3 am, and instead of sleeping, I'm typing on my old laptop that's falling apart, which by the way also came from The Professor, only six or seven years ago (and it was out of date then)--please don't confuse me with Andy Rooney, but I do think this planned obsolescence thing is getting out of hand.  Why am I not asleep?  Well, let me put it this way: don't go through most of your day not eating, and then think to yourself, hey, you know what would be good right now?  Some fruit.  Bad idea.

Anyhoo: I promise I will return to answering your burning questions (who knew you guys were so curious about the life of a mailman? oops, sorry, letter carrier) in my next entry (whenever I get around to it), but I figured that, since I'm awake at 3 a.m. on a Wednesday night/Thursday morning, you might wonder, well, what's he looking at on his crappy laptop with dial-up access?

Here's your answer to that question (which, okay, you didn't ask, but nevertheless):

Yahoo! is my home page because that's where I do the preponderance of my e-mail stuff, and now, sadly, is also where I get most of my news and information, since I don't watch television and don't listen to radio.  Since I've started taking the T on a daily basis, I've been picking up this free paper here called the Boston Metro, but (as is the case with me for most papers) I can't really read it because the editing and the journalism are so incredibly sloppy (don't even get me started on the Boston Globe, or as I call it, the "Glob"; I'll tell you more about the Herald later). I glance at the headlines and do the Sudoku puzzles and the crossword.  Yahoo is how I learned that George Carlin had died, a few days ago (and I was just listening to him! scroll down a couple of blog entries), and also how I discovered that global warming may lead to more terrorism.  Great.

(I know what you're thinking: if you, James Wu, are so Mr. High-&-Mighty that you can't even read your local newspaper, what the hell are you doing getting your information off the freakin' web?!?  In my defense, I confess that, again, I mostly skim.  It's hard, being someone who holds the English language in such high esteem.)

The second tab on my Mozilla Firefox browser is dedicated to my amazon page, so I can check on who's buying what from me.  Boring.

Earlier today, I was singing "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window" to myself: I've given up on the boombox in the mail truck and now mostly rely on my internal iPod.  Unfortunately, my internal iPod doesn't always give me the exact lyrics, so I had to look them up, and that's tab 3.  (I don't actually own an iPod, by the by.)

Tab four is the wikipedia entry on Michael Moorcock's most famous creation, Elric of Melniboné.  Yeah, I'm re-reading all six (canonical) books, as well as Alfred Bester's first two novels (well, his first two science fiction novels, to be exact), and also what's on the bottom of this entry (which I just finished, but I love the cover), and Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake (cover not as cool).  But also, Rick Perlstein's Nixonland was so good that I'm re-reading it immediately: I do that whenever I read a book that's so utterly engrossing that I'm turning pages like mad; the last book I flipped over and re-read the instant I finished it was Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (run right out and get that book right the hell now; you're welcome).  I think I own the other Elric books that Moorcock wrote after Stormbringer, but I have to look for them--what I'm using for this go-round is my two book club editions, each of which collects three of the novels.

"That's a hell of a lot of books, James--you're reading those all at the same time?"

Well, yeah.  Did I mention that I don't watch TV or listen to the radio?

"Or go out with girls?"

Shut up, wiseass--actually, I'm seeing a woman . . . later today.  Plus, yum yum yellow and I saw Kung-Fu Panda Sunday.  I confess: I enjoyed it.  Anyway, butt the hell out of my private life, jerk--that's not what I'm typing here.

Where was I . . . oh, yeah, tab number five: if I'm not thinking about Elvis Costello (who's sort of my default mental troubadour), then I'm thinking about Robyn Hitchcock (my other default mental troubadour), and since I recently sold a Robyn Hitchcock disc on amazon (see above), I was wondering if the alternate lyrics to "Driving Aloud (Radio Storm)" were on the internet.  Not only are they available, but so is a transcript of most of SPECTRE (which I'm not selling).  There's only one other musical artist I've seen more than Robyn Hitchcock live, and since you'll never guess who that is, I'll just tell you: it's Bruce Springsteen.  I know: surprised the hell out of me, too, but there you go.  Also: I've seen Hitchcock seven or eight times, but I've seen Springsteen almost twenty.  TWENTY.  TWO-ZERO.  Didn't expect that, did you?  Admit it.  (And no, Springsteen isn't a default mental troubadour for me, but if I am forced to give up most of my CD collection--oh, wait, I am being forced--well, at any rate, I'm never giving up Nebraska, which I consider one of the finest albums ever recorded.)  Incidentally, one of the times I saw Springsteen, I wasn't even expecting him: I was at some other gig back in Washington, DC, and then Bruce just popped up out of nowhere and played a whole set, which was sort of amazing.

While looking for the lyrics to the original version of "Driving Aloud," I stumbled across this little think piece from the Beeb.

Finally: I play the Kingdom of Loathing online.  A little obsessively, actually.  My character's name?  Archibald Leach.

Wow: now it's well after four in the morning--most of the clerks I work with are already starting their day back at the office.  Fortunately for me, though, it's my N/S, so I can go back to bed and sleep in, which I think I'm going to need, what with my wanting to clean the apartment and also seeing a friend who happens to be female later tonight (no, I'm not telling you who).

I would like to take this brief opportunity to recommend that everyone reading this go out and get the new Tin Hat CD, "The Sad Machinery of Spring."  You will never listen to "Daisy" the same way again.  (Although Stanley Kubrick's 2001 accomplished more or less the same thing, this is different, in a good way.  Trust me.)

I would have put it in my "currently listening" thingie at the bottom of this entry, only that seems to have been disabled.  You go away for a couple of months . . .