Nancy describes her multiple sclerosis tingles as "a dream that my legs are having ... a pointillist kind of numbness" and wonders if neurologists really write down their patients' poetic descriptions of pain, and if they get together after hours to laugh at them.

I don't know about the latter, but I know they do write them down, because I used to read neuro notes at the hospital and they're pretty entertaining. Most of those guys are no Oliver Sacks, but they know a good line when they hear one.

Here's my own humble effort: the chronic owie I've had for about the last year resembles a spongy dishrag wrapped around a stale baguette jammed diagonally through my shoulderblades to the back of my neck, in place of the muscles that are supposed to be there—the whole assemblage being periodically wrung out to dispense half a cup of the brackish sour coffee that it's soaked in. I can't really complain, because if I started exercising or doing yoga again or just stopped spending 50 hours a week at a desk, it would probably go right away. But, Nancy, feel free to use the above for some really annoying minor character in your novel.

Big long article in the New York Review of Books about how, surprise surprise, Afghanistan has not developed into a livable or democratic place in the two years since we started blowing it up.

But, silly me, when I read this line—

In a multilateral division of labor, the US is training the new Afghan army; Germany is training the new police force; Italy has responsibility for legal reform; Japan is responsible for disarming warlord militias; and Britain leads the anti-narcotics effort.

—all I could think was,

(*) By the way, have you ever wanted a "teaching module" for that joke? Here.

and who are the lovers? (*)

I went into a frenzy of filing today and found a bunch of photos from last year that I hadn't put up here, from various public events. Click on these samples to see what they're about:

The people who maintain the Iraq Body Count counter have written something worth reading about the ongoing war and the generally accepted terms for speaking about it. You may want to start reading at the last section, which describes a case of civilians being treated with the utmost concern to protect them from a stray bomb—a 60-year-old one in Milan, Italy.

My roommate, and my friend who is my roommate's new squeeze, recently got in the habit of playing this Charles Trenet record which features "Boum," the cutest little Cute Frawnch Song I've ever encountered—a moon-in-June ditty with sound effects, suitable for sing-along by besotted five-year-olds.

Normally this might be insufferable, but since there's been some similar boom-boom going on in my own life, all I can say is awwwwwwww.

My typical experience in the past was more like the Don Martin Sound Effects Dictionary.

Anyone who might go there probably already knows this, but I'll be at the Alternative Press Expo here in SF on February 21 and 22, sitting at a little table with the swell swells of Hi-Horse.

I don't have any new books, just these old ones, but I did do one single new page in the new Hi-Horse anthology [I'm listed on their web site as me, but in the book it's "Hob"]—a tiny story about my grandma's bookkeeping days at the trucking company.

When I went to APE last year, I had just moved to San Francisco literally the night before, and had gone without sleep for the previous week drawing and stapling together comic books. The year before that, I flew into town for 48 hours and was jetlagged the whole time. It may be more enjoyable this time since I'm just being lazy.

OK, my web site needed to be more silly. So I scanned some of the stupid/funny/frightening clippings that I normally just put on my fridge, and made a new page for them, which may or may not be regularly updated:

Gallery of Interesting Decisions by Newspaper Editors and Advertisers