http://www.gallerynews.com/americanbystander A pox on both your vacation houses. Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:29:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 A horrible thought just struck me. Maybe there is no point in trying to modernize this lovely blog. Maybe it should never move beyond its Abu Gharib-era beginnings. I have found two new homes for this thing. The first was at pt.nbnm.net, the next was at presenttension.net. Both were using ... http://www.gallerynews.com/americanbystander/index.php?p=76 Most of the fun stuff has been hidden away or moved to Present Tension's new location. As there are few WordPress 1.2.2 blogs still standing, we will keep a token sampling of this award-winning journal available for your delight. At least for another few months. http://www.gallerynews.com/americanbystander/index.php?p=75 That's the important thing. That's what all primitive people really want to know about you. They get to the point where they've figured out that you're either male or female (even though they they can't see either a penis gourd or pendulous dugs), and they know your approximate age (somewhere ... http://www.gallerynews.com/americanbystander/index.php?p=48 Monday night I was flying to JFK from Heathrow and exhausted my reading material before we passed Newfoundland. I found Caddyshack listed on the in-flight movie menu, but everytime I looked for it on the assigned channel I got a mid-80s Molly Ringwald turkey instead. And I’d already seen the ... http://www.gallerynews.com/americanbystander/index.php?p=43 Today the Associated Press posted this photograph, without explanatory comment, on its website. If it truly is a photo of President Bush as he looked (say) thirty years ago, then his years of drink and drugs took much more of a toll than anyone has hitherto suspected. http://www.gallerynews.com/americanbystander/index.php?p=37 Last Labor Day weekend I was up at five in the morning and noticed that some oddballs—advertising boffins, I supposed—were blocking off the street outside and setting up a series of double beds in the middle of Sixth Avenue and photographing them from a high rolling platform. Just now ... http://www.gallerynews.com/americanbystander/index.php?p=24 A vile and mean-streaky harridan whom we used to call the Sausage Lady has published a "memoir" (quotations here suggesting a high degree of self-aggrandizing fictionalization) that tells how she was abused and victimized when she was a fat ugly little whelp. She keeps popping up in my occasional ... http://www.gallerynews.com/americanbystander/index.php?p=23 First, the travelogue. For most of the last three hundred years Randall's Island has served as an outbuilding to Manhattan, providing the distasteful municipal functions we associate with islands in the East River and Hellgate: potter's fields, poorhouses and workhouses, insane asylums, disease quarantines, reform schools, prisons. Currently the island is ... http://www.gallerynews.com/americanbystander/index.php?p=22 Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or maybe just indigestion from bad eating (see below) has struck again. Imagine me running three miles on the Coney Island Boardwalk, then six miles up Ocean Parkway (a thoroughfare I'd never seen before, but which was exactly as I'd imagined), finally up Park Circle and into ... http://www.gallerynews.com/americanbystander/index.php?p=21 So farewell then, George Kennan. Seems to me I've been hearing your obituary in my dreams for about ten days. How delightful to read in the Times that you were a gloomy, complicated and morose person, who despaired of conveying fine nuance in a world of political hackery. Whenever I ... http://www.gallerynews.com/americanbystander/index.php?p=19