Emily files her second column for Joliet's Herald News. She's turning 25, and there she finds her premise: "Despite the exciting opportunities I'll have to frequent Enterprise and Hertz, I found a drawback to being 25 that casts a shadow over my birthday: I'm too old to be on The Real World."

The Cartoon of the Week from the New Yorker confuses the heck out of me. See it here. Any ideas?

Related item:

-Archive of New Yorker cartoon analyses

Because it's just so darn cute.

Hey, my name is Lisa. I'm currently a freshman in college, and I think I'm going to be a psychology major, but who knows!

I'm on the girls tennis team and I signed up to be photo editor for our campus newspaper. I'm single at the moment cause the right guy hasn't come along yet!! Hopefully I'll meet him soon :-)

I just got done browsing thru profiles online and i found yours! I just got my webcam working so we can talk as long as you want at my website and it doesn't cost you anything if you wanna watch or see me!

Just Copy and Paste the URL below to visit my free chatroom!

[URL REDACTED]

I hope we get to meet soon… I'll wait for you ;-)

laters, Lisa

And then hidden in white text at the very bottom:

alert oscillatory djakarta village carport spectacle canyon crotchety

electrocardiograph detail audacious amalgamate burnett emasculate belgium incommutable 2

Finally caught up some at the beach.

May 3, 2004:

For those of you playing along at home, please refer to page 63 of the issue. See Samantha Appleton's photo accompanying this story. Why is Jimmy Fallon in al-Sadr's militia? An advertisement promotes Mr. Happy Crack.

May 10, 2004:

Nick Paumgarten reviews Fondue (303 E. 80th St.) for the front-of-the-book Tables for Two. He tells of "a recent Friday night" and teaches me a lesson: "At a nearby table, someone recalled the old rule that when you lose a chunk of bread in the cheese you must,if you're a woman, kiss the man next to you, or, if you're a man, buy another bottle of wine."Paumgarten continues: "The brie-and-basil-leaf fondue was especially viscous and was soon studded with orphaned bits of bread; it was agreed that the blame should be placed on the men. It turns out Pinot Grigio also goes with melted Belgian chocolate and melted caramel, if you drink enough of it."An advertisement sells Tee-PJs, the "most comfortable sleeper you've ever worn or your money back."

May 17, 2004:

The listings mention upcoming performances of My Renaissance Faire Lady. This promotional page also does the play justice.In Talk of the Town, Jane Jacobs talks to Adam Gopnik: "There's a joke that the father of an old friend use to tell, about a preacher who warns children, 'In Hell there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.' 'What if you don't have teeth?' one of the children asks. 'Then teeth will be provided,' he says sternly. That's it — the spirit of the designed city: Teeth Will Be Provided For You."Jacobs later says her favorite song is Shenandoah. Dylan's version?

An advertisement sells "European Beret $10." Visit the haberdasher's site.

May 24, 2004:

Anthony Lane reviews Van Helsing: "Then, there is Kate Beckinsale, whose unhappy purpose, here as in "Pearl Harbor," is to provide what I hesitate to call the love interest. She plays Anna Valerious, whose name would bring intense pleasure to a writer of limericks, and whose attitude toward lycanthropes resembles that of Brigitte Bardot toward stray dogs."James L. Coddington, chief conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, addresses Talk of the Town about restoring a Picasso. "Do we restore every little flaw?" Coddington says to Calvin Tomkins. "Not necessarily. Restoration is a balance between hubris and humility. Just the notion of touching this picture ought to make you stop."Jhumpa Lahiri's "Hell-Heaven" is the magazine's most powerful fiction piece in a while.

June 7, 2004:

Roger Angell contributes "Hard Lines." Angell writes about the long-ago death of a friend, as if to name and pass a ghost.He notes how people react to losses suffered by others: "Oh, no, we exclaim when such news reaches us, but these tales are part of a classic repertory we recognize as our own." And yet with the story he tells, I think he finds the shared suffering to be a blessing.One of the best poetry placements I've seen in the last year in the magazine comes with Angell's story. If you can find Jack Gilbert's "Resume" anywhere online (I can't), it's worth a read.

June 14 & 21, 2004:

The Summer Fiction Issue presents a trilogy of short stories from Alice Munro. The first, Chance, is my favorite. The story is the only one of the three posted online, but Munro discusses the stories in an online-only interview.

June 28, 2004:

Louis Menand eviscerates Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves. But then he relents.Also, the cover decides who should be on the $10 bill.

July 5, 2004:

In the front of the book, the Clubs compilers enjoy themselves. For the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill: "July 2: The sexy rapper Lil' Kim. July 5: Cannibal Corpse, as the name might suggest, is a death-metal ensemble."Then, for the Bowery Ballroom: "July 3: The British band Psychic TV reunite for the third time in their twenty-three year history. Formed from the rubble of seventies industrial-music pioneers Throbbing Gristle, the group has gone through dozens of lineup and stylistic changes. Psychic TV's one constant has then protean leader, Genesis P-Orridge (he recently got breast implants), whose main implants are the expatriate painter Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. This incarnation includes veterans of the local punk scene as well as Douglas Rushkoff, a journalist and 'Frontline' correspondent, on keyboards."Among the issue's longer pieces, unfortunately not linked online (that I can find), Caitlin Flanagan discusses her mother's self-liberation and her own girlhood.

Writes Flanagan: "When I think of what it was like to be a girl then, I remember an endless series of afternoons, each an ungraspable piece of time. I watched television, and hurtled perilously down our steep block on my Schwinn, and dressed the cats in baby clothes. Children didn't have 'passions' and 'talents'; we had hobbies and collections — glass animals and plastic horses for girls, baseball cards for boys, and stamps for geeks of both genders."

"No matter what the writer may say, the work is always written to someone, for someone, against someone." –Walker Percy, quoted in Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own.

Got ice cream tonight at Fat Boyz, our chosen replacement for the ever-extorting island Dairy Queens. $5 for a Blizzard? That money's staying upside-down in my pocket, thanks. I treated myself at the Boyz to a Hot Fudge Brownie Delight and didn't miss Dennis the Menace one bit.

What was disappointing was the Fat Boyz shorts. Last year I saw them briefly in the display case and considered buying a pair. They were red and had FAT BOYZ written on them in big white text. But my money went toward a T-shirt at the Cahoon's convenience store instead. Cahoon's and us, we went way back.

This year, with Cahoon's out of the way, I returned for the shorts. "Do they still have those shorts in the case?" I asked my cousin. "Yeah, but they're women's shorts," she said. "Usually only women's short have writing on the butt."

She had a point. Men's short have traditionally not drawn attention to the butt area.

But I figured these shorts might be different. Over time, fat men have carved out a niche in American society, creating a class of celebrated obesity and hilarious antics (the belly cheer, for one). With such a level of prestiege, I thought perhaps these shorts I remembered would pay tribute to their girth pride and commensurate ice cream-eating abilities.

I stepped to the case to see the shorts for myself. And they were … women's shorts. In addition to the butt lettering — which on my hips would have enjoyed the comic achievement of a wide-load sign on a Geo Prism — the shorts also possessed an unexpected cut. They were not even across the bottom.

The shorts were slanted upward. As if to provide for maximum thigh exposure, a goal I didn't really have in mind. The shorts, I admitted to my eager wallet, were not men's shorts.

Washington Post, June 25, 2003: "If June 25 is your birthday: You're clearing out skeletons. On a psychological level, you're being taken to the cleaners, and your spiritual nature is being transformed. This year you can achieve the impossible as you embrace new responsibilities and make a major transition. Throw limitations to the wind; they're only in your mind. The undertone is honesty and behaving correctly. Love and money is October and November."

Washington Post, June 25, 2004: "If June 25 is your birthday: You should plan a special treat for Saturday. The focus of importance in your life has been making changes this year, and you are still in the process of altering your life in major ways. If your birthday celebration seems a little dull, know you have a lot of excitement to look forward to later this year."

I've gotten his fan mail. Maybe he's gotten mine. Comedian Pat Cooper, enduring tradition, received a round mocking from Friars Club members in honor of the Club's 100th birthday.

Writes the AP: "We don't look the worse for wear after all these years," said Freddie Roman, the club's dean for the past 35 years. "OK, well maybe Pat Cooper."

Even the usually serious Mayor Michael Bloomberg, on hand to declare the day Friars Club Centennial Day, joined the act.

"We have some of the funniest people in the world here today — and Pat Cooper," he said.

In the ocean today, I discovered a new game. I took an inflatable raft out beyond the waves and sat myself square in its middle. I was perpendicular to the five tubes of the raft's width – my legs on the plane, my trunk up the vertical axis – and the vertical weight began to make the balancing difficult.

For the literally imbalanced, such as myself, one's own top has a terrific chance of proving the heavy in top-heaviness. Add water and there the game begins.

Out a ways, I began to kick myself back to the beach and get the waves more birthed and rolling underneath. The raft took more pitch and in more shallow water I kicked sideways to turn and find the rockier yaw. (The sea was angry that day, my friends, like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.) The crests built up and started to tip the sides, but I kicked in a little further.

The wave rode me up, taking the raft faster into the beach, then out from under my back and over my head, tumbling me once with the wave, twice into the sand, and tumble three into a splayed back float-bump over the ground shells, along the shore edge for a return to light and back in the undertow a few yards to get smacked around by the baby waves coming in next. One hand held onto the raft, the other to my bathing suit, both hands moderately successful, leaving my head free to fill with water and sand, the grains of which I'd now certainly be taking home in my ears.

After picking myself up, I trudged in again to spit and get back on the raft. Wash, rinse, spin and the morning was filled. I kept coming back for more and, not surprisingly, so did the sea. The Atlantic has really established itself with its persistence. Eventually leaving the water, I decided I would be the perfect person to start whatever you would get if you crossed Stephen Crane's The Open Boat with a fantasy sports camp.

"Where the land meets the sea and where pleasure meets pain, come get your jollies at Jolly Rodgers' Raftorium, where we put the real in realism and raft in Raftorium…" or something. Maybe our ad agency would even find mermaids to sing a jingle. Maybe "sea only comes when sea's on top" if I appealed to James' maritime spirit. (You know what would make that Ikea lamp really sad, James? "Crustaceans complaining 'bout the noises above.") The jingle mermaids could be beautiful women dressed as mermaids, ugly men dressed as mermaids or even actual mermaids dressed in their native mermaidwear.

Because today was, if anything, marketable. You wanted something to sell at the beach? You could have gone and sold your damn T-shirts. Sucker. What I found out there in the waves this morning was gold, the kind of wet gold that makes old men wet and young women wet too. Water, baby, here there and everywhere, and the natural forces of Earth and I made it all happen.

I've got the badges too. The cut on my right thigh, the shell line on my neck, the bruises on my back. Light injuries all, but signs of the sea nonetheless. These Wednesday markings match the bright red sunburns on my arms and knees – Monday's sunscreen forgetfulness celebration – but are products of a more inspired stupidity.

Pre-written

In cleaning out my room today, I found the June 2003 edition of Delta's Sky magazine, saved for likely no reason. But the issue did contain a good article about bread. Given the continuing debate over bread and the number of people with whom I've discussed bread recently, I thought it deserved a link here.

Also found — a magazine pull-out poster of the slender loris. What is a slender loris? See one here.