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The Debris.com Personality Inventory

Regular or decaf? Sparkling or still? Red or white? Shaken or stirred? Rocks or straight? Coke or Pepsi?

Paper or plastic? Automatic or manual? Briefs or boxers? Fold or crumple? Shoei or Arai? Metric or standard? Digital or analog? Window or aisle? Nylon tip or wood? IDE or SCSI? Own or rent? Gay or straight? Smoking or non? Real or silicon? vi or emacs?

Bad habit: reading the Sunday supplements. I admit it; I spend 20 minutes each week skimming through USA Weekend and Examiner Magazine and whatever the other one is, I don’t even remember.

There’s always a health or fitness column of some sort. It’s probably in USA Weekend because it’s so USA-Today-like — they boil a complex issue down into 4 bullet-items with a little cartoon illustration, thereby saving the population the need for higher education. They make it simple, so the reader never has to think.

These articles are oddly compelling. Like I said, I read them every weekend, mentally checking off each bullet-point as if the tally would predict something meaningful about my health. In the recent article about hemorrhoids, the bullet points under “prevention” included:

• drink lots of fluids
• avoid meat and dairy
• exercise regularly
• eat high-fiber foods

I read through them all, feeling better with each item — “I already do all that!” I exclaimed aloud. Clearly, I’ll never get hemorrhoids.

So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

Three unrelated bits of music trivia that combine to make me irrationally happy:

• Dream Theater is in the studio, recording a new album
• RUSH is in the studio, recording a new album
• Tim Alexander (Primus, Attention Deficit) has joined the Blue Man Group

Now, if only pasta grew on trees…

A feel-good fable for everyone stuck in a dead-end job, relationship, or life, Tarloff’s book is brilliant, hilarious, and wholly satisfying.

Ezra Gordon’s academic career is in the toilet; to break out of his funk he visits an old college friend on a whim. The friend, it turns out, is a wealthy publisher of pornography, living a life that’s a bachelor’s dream. To help his old pal break out of his writer’s block, Isaac offers Ezra a cash advance toward a “dirty book” manuscript. Ezra accepts the offer, pens a bestseller under a psuedonym, and then his life really begins to twist.

I had a hard time putting this book down. After a number of dime-a-dozen thrillers I found this to be a refreshing blast of intelligent prose, with insightful characters and painfully funny situations.

Also: sex scenes!

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (hardback)