Headline from Today's Sun Times: Acting River Grove mayor defeats genital-piercing rival

Ending one of the more bizarre suburban mayoral races, acting Village President Marilynn May stomped challenger Paul Collurafici, a tattoo parlor owner who argued the suburb was being left behind but found his occupation a bigger campaign issue.

(Village Trustee Raymond) Bernero questioned why Collurafici made no mention of his tattoo studio on his campaign Web site and why he removed photos of pierced vaginas, nipples and other body parts from his company's Web site after launching his mayoral campaign.

"I'm a big fan of vaginas, but this is really gross stuff," Bernero told the Sun-Times. "This is close-ups of women's vaginas with stuff stuck through there."

Bernero later sent a letter to the Sun-Times, apologizing if he offended anyone but sticking by his "blunt honesty" in attacking Collurafici's honesty.

"Finally, please let your readers know that there is no 'fan club,' " Bernero wrote. "It was a joke. All requests for membership, along with submitted dues, will be returned promptly."

About a quarter of the two dozen supporters at Collurafici's election night party sported tattoos, ranging from Grim Reapers and skulls to naked women. One supporter who identified himself as "Tattoo Mike" had Frankenstein-style electrodes inked on his neck.

Collurafici says he has no tattoos or piercings, but inherited the business from his brother, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1996.

Bernero wasn't buying.

"He said he kept the shop as a memorial to his dead brother," Bernero said. "Most people light a candle. You don't pierce vaginas."

I would agree with Bernero that conventional wisdom is that folks don't express grief via genital piercings. But I'm hopeful that with the recent deaths of the Pope, Teri Schaivo, et al that I might be proven wrong.

It's a little bit of nerd heaven today.
In my office while rice boils and fish thaws for dinner.
What has brought on this nerdy bliss?
A few things.
For one, last night I took the first in a series of classes from 500 Clown. You know of The Blue Man Group, right? Well, if the Blue Man Group is U2 then 500 Clown is The Ramones, the scrappy, less exalted version of the same thing (in this case, European art clowning rather than guitar based anthemic music.)
There was a time in my life when I thought that I was going to write screenplays or do standup or otherwise be an entertainer. So when I took classes like this I thought that I was actually doing something worthy, I was developing my craft. Because when you try and describe a theater/improv/acting class to someone it's hard to not sound like an idiot.
For instance
Here's the first exercise we did last night. We divided the dozen people into two groups. Here were our instructions. "Everybody has to carry everyone else and everybody will get carried by everyone else. You can speak if you have an injury or other safety issue that needs attention but otherwise no talking. Okay go."

Well what the hell do you do with that? In the retelling, I mean, not in the doing. I remember the first class I took with Del Close, he divided us into two groups and said, "Invent a ritual. It might take an hour or so. Go."

It is, as you might imagine, difficult to re-tell these stories of how one spent one's evening without adding in, "one day, I will be developing sitcoms and we will be rich, rich, rich!" Pretty much everyone you've ever heard of who has come out of the Chicago comedy scene-John Belushi and Bill Murray through Tina Fey passed through Del.

These days I don't think I will be having much to do with sitcoms and so taking a class like the one 500 Clown offers, the one where I learned about being physically expressive on stage, are just for fun, a hobby.

It says quite a bit about me and sports that the thing that pushed me to enroll in the workshop was that I signed up to play on a volleyball team which was so, so not my thing, that when I thought "I can think of a MILLION things I would rather do than this!" that the thought of having to figure out non-verbal ways of carrying and being carried by a bunch of strangers sounded like a huge improvement.

Anyway, I totally loved it and if you don't get it, that's okay. It probably won't translate into something mainstream and lucrative for me down the line. It's just my idea of fun.

Today I learned that I don't have to leaven my story for Advanced Magazine writing with the elements I had thrown in there just to make it sound better. I can focus on what I want to focus on. Which is toupees. More another time...the timer on the rice just went "bing".

I bought the new ATLANTIC today, the one with the David Foster Wallace piece about Talk Radio. DFWallace makes me happy, except for the times when he gets on my nerves. If you've never read him try A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again where he writes about his week on a cruise ship.

The DFW style is to go deep, deep, deep into a topic, with a million footnotes which themselves have footnotes. He is the master of the tangent, the aside, the trifle that earns focus.

So two things; one is that he has a piece, a fucking humongo 35,000 word piece (for frame of reference, 500 words is about 2 double spaced pages) and the designers of the Atlantic have come up with an ingenious system for his footnotes making them more like hypertext. Really, even if you don't care to read 35K words on right wing talk radio, pick up a copy of the magazine (the link doesn't seem to lead you to the story) and see what they did.

Basically, everyplace where you might put a footnote, they've put the word in a color. Then the footnote appears in the side of the text, in that color. If you've ever used the feature in Microsoft Office that lets people write their notes in little bubbles that appear next to the text, that's what the effect is like. And it works wonderfully.

Nerdilicious.

Enough with the pope nerds already. Yes, yes he was a very spiritual man, we get it.
My favorite was when NPR dug up one of the pope's boyhood friends from Poland. So the poor man was 1)incredibly old and hard of hearing and 2)not a native speaker of english.

Fortunately the 80-something told us that the pope was a very spiritual man. So at least that's cleared up.

Daniel Gross, writing in SLATE, uses an economic metaphor to talk about the Republicans. Like an overheated stock, the party may have peaked and begun a decline.

Given their triumph in last November's elections (and their behavior since), the Republicans have nowhere to go but down. Indeed, polls and nimble online right-wing media types (Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan) are already starting to call a top in the Republicans' stock. The House and the Senate can't agree on the basics of a budget, the dwindling but vital core of northeast Republicans can't abide their southern and western compadres, and Tom DeLay is morphing into Jim Wright.

today's Washington Post discusses the effects of the Schiavo case on the party

Aggravating GOP frustrations are disturbing new polls, including a CBS survey that found that 82 percent of Americans -- including a whopping 68 percent of people who identify themselves as evangelical Christians -- think Congress's intervention was wrong.

Of course we haven't even gotten to Social Security (Bush's First Defeat per Jacob Weisberg) and, oh yeah, Iraq.

I am done hearing about feeding tubes, persistent vegetative states, all this fun stuff.
I'm big on death with dignity but not at all thrilled with the prospects of someone, vegetative or not, starving/dehydrating to death. Of course there is no medically assisted suicide since she can't commit suicide since she is a vegetable. Sigh. This is a mess.

I have a co-worker who is loud, rude, generally unpleasant. Oh and nerdy, not in the appealing "I'm super passionate about an esoteric subject" way but in the too much science fiction way. And not so good at using his indoor voice.

Apparently a conversation at his desk got a little heated because he just said "not 'Trekkies'! Trekkers! Trekkers!"

so now you know

On Wednesday night I went to hear Jeff Chang read from his book "Can't Stop Won't Stop" in an itty-bitty gallery space in the West Loop. I got there about 20 minutes before it started and took a folding chair a respectable distance from the handful of other people there. I was complimenting myself on having such great taste and being so cool as to be one of the few people there...this lasted about ten minutes and then 75 or so people came in, jammed into the doorway, sitting on the floor and otherwise making the gallery staff nervous with the way they would brush up against some of the art.

The book is subtitled "A History of the Hip Hop Generation" and it is a big, nerdy wet dream. Scholarly without being a Greil Marcus wankfest, Chang begins the narrative not with DJ Kool Herc DJ-ing in a Bronx rec room but with post-colonial politics and music in 1960's Jamaica.

One thing that I thought was especially interesting was what he had to say about the non-comprehensiveness of the book. Some might ask-what about all the activity in Atlanta/Philadelphia/Miami/Brooklyn/Insert Geographic Locale Here...how could you leave THAT out of this history??? The answer is that he set out to write a history from the street level that looks up, rather than a view from the top down. And to do that, you have to limit the geographic focus.

From the corrections section of The New York Times, via the website Regret The Error:

An Editorial Observer column in The Times yesterday incorrectly cited lyrics from a Michael Jackson song. The phrase "mamase mamasa mamakosa" ends the song "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," not "Working Day and Night."

While not actually blogging lately, I think about blogging all the time. And really, it's the thought that counts, no?

Feeling crappy today...I have a class tomorrow afternoon and, as part of the class, we are to include an analysis of a magazine and interview someone who works for the magazine, including their quotes in our report. It doesn't have to be a high-up person; an intern will do.

Naturally I have put this off and put this off since it's much better to dread something than to actually do it. Anyway today I called and, surprise, I didn't get some intern answering phones at the front desk but I got the switchboard for the conglomerate that owns the magazine.

After convincing the operator to find an intern for me, I got an intern's voice mail. Sigh.

So it's entirely possible that I will not have any quotes tomorrow which would be a bad thing (and a bad grade.)

*UPDATE* total false alarm; I got through to an editor, got my quotes, all is fine.

Thanks for scrolling past my whining though; it's genuinely appreciated.

My new, favorite place on the web is called 43 folders (not to be confused with 43 things) which is one big Virgo Nerd Central. All sorts of interesting solutions to too much chaos, not enough productivity.

Going through the archives, I found an interesting tip-Vaccuming The Lungs or How To Breathe Deeply When You're Nervous. It goes like this:

1)Exhale everything
2)Bend over at the waist (which gets the last bit of air out) and don't let any new air in
3)Stand up and wait about 10 seconds...by this time your body is craving a nice inhale
4)When you can't stand it anymore, breathe.

As the author says, this "reboots your lungs." and moves you away from nervous breathing.

Seth Stevenson writes for SLATE about television commercials, among other topics. From his review of the Superbowl ads:

Cialis runs a spot backed by old-time pop hit "Be My Baby." And I have to say, erectile dysfunction and the Philadelphia sound go great together.

It's a big day for dolls in the news.
There is, of course, the hoax photograph of the captured American soldier who is, in fact, a doll (nice pics here)

Here in Chicago we are into the second day of the story about a new doll from the American Girl collection. I pass by "American Girl Place" every day going to and from work...it's sort of a Nike Town of dolls. "Marisol", the newest American Girl doll is being hyped in one of the store's display windows (she likes dancing lessons too apparently.)

All the American Girl dolls have stories outlined in books. Marisol's story is that she grew up in the (real) Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. In the story, Marisol's parents say that the neighborhood is a bad place to grow up-they move the family to the suburbs.

Pilsen residents are pissed and local politicians are speaking out. Leading to today's headline in the Sun Times:

Politicians beat up on American Girl doll