Lately, a huge chunk of my Facebook news feed has looked something like this: I love the cute way [Manly] gets hiccups when he's been laughing too much. My amazingly awesome wife surprised me AND my parents by driving up and fixing us dinner so I could stay here tonight and get a little more needed rest. Blessed to tears! Love him #concertjunkies Those are three real entries from acquaintances on Facebook... posted within the last two hours. There's more where that came from. Remind me to get a journal specifically for sappy observations and scrapbooking couples pictures if and when I get a serious boyfriend/husband. Something tells me it will be more meaningful to have things like these written down for a significant-other to read now, and treasure later.* Or maybe it's just me. But I can't imagine putting stuff like this up for the whole world to see. I'd rather share it with people that mean a lot to me. Family, close friends, you know -- but certainly

My editor told me today to GO FOR IT! I'm to write a weekly lighthearted column for our entertainment page. My first column runs Friday. And it's about peewee football. :D

The paper I work for recently switched to a "paywall" on its website, which, in case you haven't followed all the hype about media, means you have to pay to access the articles after you've read a certain number per month. It's like the New York Times has instituted. As you can imagine, there are plenty of people upset that the paper's now charging for something that it previously offered free. There's even one commenter who's like, "I pay for internet! Why should I pay to read what's on it?" And somebody else compared the newspaper website to Netflix and said Netflix charges less, so ergo the paper is charging way too much. Here, therefore, is my rant. To get this out of the way: When you get Internet, you're paying for the conveyance of the information. You're not paying for any of the information itself. Complaining that you already pay for Internet is like complaining that you have to pay for something out of a catalog

My editor got sick Friday, the very morning I emailed her my spec pieces for that column I mentioned, so I have not heard any response from her. I'll definitely post when I do! In the meantime, entertain and inform yourselves with the following random links... Only Canada, China, North Korea and the U.S. allow abortion after viability for any reason. 40 maps that will help you make sense of the world... including one showing where 29,000 rubber duckies made landfall after falling off a cargo ship in the middle of the Pacific... Which finally answers the question: How long would it take a rubber ducky to travel from the Hawaiian Islands to England? Somebody went looking for a novel about women that's not about love, and thinks they're frustratingly rare . I'm not sure what the big deal is -- it's just as easy to learn from a guy's "going it alone" novel as it would be from a girl's. Unless, of course, you admit that guys and girls have fu

We have this page we do at the paper I work at that runs every Friday with a list of interesting things to do over the weekend, a movie review and some piece of outlandish entertainment news (like, Justin Bieber arrested again!). Along the side of this page runs a weekly column, something lighthearted or localized to set the tone for the weekend. We've been a bit frustrated by this column for various reasons, so I asked my editor a couple of days ago if we could replace it. She asked, what with? And I may or may not have volunteered to write the weekly piece. So, she said, write me a couple spec pieces -- that's journo lingo for "these are the pieces that will forever convince you of my fantastic writing ability" -- and we'll see. I wrote the spec pieces tonight (or... this morning?). I present them to her tomorrow. I mean today. If she likes 'em, I'm on the hook for writing something rather amusing each week (kind of in the style of the Life on my O

My, my, my. I've been so neglectful of this poor little blog over the last few weeks. Not least because I went on vacation! So today was my second day back at work after my long-awaited, thoroughly enjoyable six days off. It was surprisingly not that stressful (c'mon, I work at a newspaper, it should be really really stressful!). I did have The W's song "The Devil Is Bad" running through my head, of course, in mockery of the new content management system which we've nicknamed SkyDevil. It's the main source of our frustrations these days. Nevertheless, the pages got done early tonight -- when does that ever happen?? -- so I came home and watched "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog." I had seen it once about four years ago, during sophomore year of college I think, but never since. It was surprisingly endearing, and now I pretty much want to watch everything that Joss Whedon ever directed. (That would be Firefly, and the companion movie Serenit