With time at the office feeling like an ever-losing battle against the backlog (while the frontlog tends ever more to join the backlog as the trivial-but-unstoppable-crisislog becomes the order of the day and I start wondering if I need to become a David Allen disciple), homelife being a combo of (mostly joyful) childcare and (mostly annoying) homecare (tonight I scrubbed the dining room floor. Actually for the love of Jebus got down on my knees and scrubbed. Because why? Because food, toddler, and gravity, goddamnit) and the occasional nanoburst of actual writing for myself, I barely respond to emails any more, let alone find the time to y'know, post things on this supposedly regularly updated Webbe-Page.

And this is going to be hardly an improvement over silence, but I've never let that stop me in the past. Here in no particular order, the hurdy and the gurdy that of late has been playing at half-volume in the back of the Wombat offices.

• Saw Wedding Crashers in a purposeful search for close-to-hand escapist fare. I wish only to inform you that the first half of the movie is extremely funny, and Vince Vaughn not so much steals ever scene as he does pulverize it with frenetic talk and then carry it away with the permission of every one else involved. There is no need, however, to remain in the theater once the plot-driving charade is exposed. If you have seen any three films aimed at an audience younger than 40 in the past twenty years, you will literally be able to recreate the entire balance of the movie in a dinner conversation with your companion, in a few short minutes, down to the "I missed my chance to find the one" montage (and the bland mope-rock played over aforementioned montage). So don't sit there and wait for it to get good again. Just leave and know you laughed exactly as much as you would have if you stayed for the whole thing, and you'll get to dinner that much earlier, which is all to the good, right?
• At The Reading Experience, critic James Wood has made a surprise appearance in the comments to a post taking to task Wood's recent (and in my view, very perceptive) review of Cormac McCarthy's new book in The New Yorker -- sorry, the original Wood piece online is gone now, but maybe one of you knows how to find an archived link? Anyway, Dan Green, the Reading Experience creator, didn't like Wood's take on McCarthy and said so, and Wood then showed up in the comments with an articulate attempt to respond. Green's failure to really rise to occasion notwithstanding, it makes for good reading, if that's the kind of thing that interests you, as it does me. (Found quite belatedly via Beatrix, and of course it was on every lit blog around last month too, which shows you where the Wombat has [not] been.)
• They were filming an episode of Rescue Me in my neighborhood and Dennis Leary said "How ya doin', kid" to my daughter as we went past him. Which I thought was nice. I'm just saying. Helena, meanwhile, was trying to see if she could give her doll a face-burn by dragging it along the pavement, so she really didn't notice.
• The Ruminator's interview with Fran Leibowitz is worth a look, if you like her, and I do, even when she's just, you know, doing that Fran Leibowitz thing (via Maud Newton).
• Once again I'm finding the Polish Poster store terrific. Last time I wasn't savvy enough to pick an artist and browse, but that's a particularly rewarding avenue. Posted by BT at August 11, 2005 12:12 AM