 As an adopted son of the South and a Kentucky Colonel, I was delighted to return to Texas.
Here is the Grand Ole Opry from which Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Stevie Ray Vaughan from 1861-1865. Lance Armstrong lives there now.
See also: Austin Improv Festival
The face of anal leakage
 It really is a larger project than this MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant allows me to tackle, but the random clip-art faces that help advertise some of our nation's most sensitive products always fill me with reassurance.
The above couple appears on the Cialis site. He is sharp and rugged-looking. She appears frail, but game. The message? Please Emmylou Harris until it is your time, too.
 This woman appears on a page explaining Plan B, the emergency contraceptive that is about as expensive as flowers and some chocolate. Plan B, a contraceptive not an abortifacient, should not be confused with RU-486, a Van Halen album.
 Word on the street is that Barry Bonds tried injecting hemorrhoids, too, but if this image is any indicator, girls who need Plan B are also prime candidates for 'roids.
 Olean is the manufacturer of Olestra, the fat substitute that has been known to cause embarrassing anal leakage. Notice how none of these fun-loving folks is shown below the waist?
 Finally, this helpful customer service representative can help you or a loved one with shameful ear mites.
Denounced by rappers
 Members of the hip-hop and rap community, of which I am the leader, have denounced Kevin Federline for his recent hip-hop stylings at the Teen Choice Awards.
The editors of hip-hop-themed King and XXL magazines skewered the performance and K-Fed's image. "He's a joke, basically," said XXL editor Elliot Wilson.
I, too, know the pain of being denounced by rappers, and having been the subject of several NWA albums still stings. At one point Dre had my record company surrounded. It took 'Pac's death and the sacrificial shooting of three members of my entourage to even things out. But I never made peace with Easy. I miss you, dawg (pour beer on grave).
I hope Federline and his detractors work things out. There be too many homies in da ground.
See also: Kevin Federline skewered over Teen Choice performance
 With today's ruling by the International Astronomical Union that Pluto is no longer a planet, ending a 75-year stint in that exclusive club, a few things occurred to me.
My eighth grade science teacher, Mr. Lherault, was lying.
"He was just following orders," you might say. "He was working with the information he was given."
That's all well and good, or good and well, if you like alphabetical order, until someone dies.
Not that anyone is dead. But the question is: Can I sue Mr. Lherault? I really want to explore a career in nuisance lawsuits.
Remember all those Red Sox fans who died between 1919 and 2003, thus never seeing their team win a World Series, and how their survivors placed little Red Sox flags by their graves when, in 2004, the Sox finally won it?
We should exhume them and send them to Pluto.
Will people for whom Pluto is an essential part of their horoscope now begin acting erratically?
The mnemonic for the obsoleted nine-planet solar system went like this:
- My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets
That's fine, but if your mother shows you nine planets now she would be arrested and labeled a fraud, so rigid is our country's intellectual code. I have composed several options for tomorrow's crop of textbooks, making an effort to wed the often distant concepts of science t0 real life.
The first deals with the sudden inability, in class, to stand and give an oral report:
- My Very Excitable Member Just Shot Up Noisily
The next tells the painful truth about Hobos:
- Most Vagrants Exhibit Manners Just So Unbelievably Noxious
This was the headline in the Amity Gazette:
- Munched Vixen Encounters Murderous Jaws Shark Under Nightfall
I received this text message prior to my first date with your mom:
- My Vagina Emits Murky Juices So U No
Students should be warned against pole dancing in Ho Chi Minh City:
- Mesmerized Vietnamese Enthusiastically Maul Jiggly Stripper's Undulating Nipples
See also: Pluto Not A Planet, Astronomers Rule
How to Wreck Your Life
 Will I see you in Texas?
I will be returning to Austin's Out of Bounds Improv Festival (and miniature golf tourney) on August 31 with my new show "How to Wreck Your Life". The festival will feature about 30 acts from around the country.
Doing a solo improv show is huge fun; I've put together a few over the last several years (it is odd that both I and Haley Joel Osment can measure our careers in decades now). The odds of making out with audience members exponentially increases when you don't have a troupe involved (not that I would - I am scared of the public).
Read more about the festival here.
51 steps to the ocean
...and, at low tide, about 7,200 more.
Getting in trouble
 I derive no thrill from watching people getting into trouble and being found out.
From my earliest memories of watching television and seeing a protagonist lie, try to cover it up, and then get caught, I would often just turn off the TV. Watching movies like Shattered Glass make me a little queasy.
I recently watched Match Point and had to shut it off, partly because of the trouble the protagonist faced but also because the movie was such a disappointing, out of touch retread of better Woody Allen movies.
This has something to do with my robust guilty conscience. Upon observing the things Harvey Keitel's character got up to in The Bad Lieutenant, my friend Sherman would say, "He's getting into so much trouble."
Anyway, here is another story of someone getting into trouble, in this case a Wired reporter who is alleged to have invented sources, created aliases to post on newsgroups favorable comments on his own work, and then watched the whole ball unravel with some simple editorial sleuthwork with e-mail source code.
While the story is cringe-worthy, it is good to see an organization be accountable to its customers.
See also: Wired News Writer Faked Info
Visiting your home and feeling like a tourist, pt. II
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino was in the next room, but I no longer had the local voter's right to demand he take a photo with ACI.
We were at Doyle's Braddock Cafe, an excellent and ancient bar and restaurant around the corner from where I used to live (and featured, most recently, in Mystic River). While the mayor was in one room, we were greeted by Boston rock legend/Doyle's waiter Rick Berlin, who requested we buy his CD, the hustler.
The menu was more fancy than it was when I left, reflecting the Celtic Tiger aspect of Boston's changing Irish population.
Visiting your home and feeling like a tourist, pt. I
 Approaching the Dunkin Donuts in Dorchester Lower Mills on the day a water main broke near the Neponset River bridge in Quincy. Three hours of traffic. Different traffic. The type of traffic I'd forgotten.
I can't describe why a three hour traffic jam in Los Angeles is different from a three-hour traffic jam in Boston, other than one leaves one with a sense of hopelessness but a very good cup of coffee.
News from the world of work
 I heard two former employers on the radio yesterday.
One was Jon Murray, co-creator of "The Real World". He was being interviewed on Talk of the Nation about MTV's 25th birthday. The other was Harvey Levin, mastermind of celebrity-stalking site TMZ.com, pontificating about Mel Gibson on KROQ.
I admit that I knew exactly what I was doing when I signed on to those jobs, and I've reconciled myself to paying for it. I'm ashamed to say that I did it for the money.
Something Neil Conan asked Murray regarding "Real World"'s role in popularizing reality television seemed applicable to both exes.
"Can you sleep?" he asked.
(Conan wasn't being very objective.)
Spectacles
 ACI got glasses today. She is 22 months old. I got mine, I think, when I was three. Will it be different for her?
I often wonder who I would have been if I hadn't been the Kid with Glasses. Glasses helped with two things: I learned how to fight and I learned how to spell. I became pugnacious and bellicose.
I think her spectacles look great on her. She's still getting used to them. I hope she grows up not caring how they look (unless she wants to tint the lenses purple or something, which I'd be all for, but at that point my approval might be a hindrance).
My basis of comparison for the cruelty of children is now two decades old. Perhaps children are no longer ignorant, fearful, and cruel. Maybe I have nothing to worry about. Just in case, though, I will offer to kill thr first person who calls her "four eyes" and she can fight her own battles from that point, seeing how easy it is.
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