This morning's "news pollution" (that is, the quantity of unwanted news one cannot avoid ingesting through normal, non-news specific use of the web) is a story about Linda Ronstadt being thrown out of a Vegas casino where she was performing, for having dedicated "Desperado" to Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11. This is your cherished freedom of speech in action, kiddos.

Speaking of which, on the Eyeball Nazi front, Spooky successfully procured a pair black contacts from a British supplier, but they were not nearly as high quality as the lenses I've been getting from LensQuest here in Atlanta since 2002, so she's returning them, and we're both going the @#!@ eye-exam route. With Dragon*Con only five weeks off, there's simply no time left to explore alternate routes. The FDA and all those "concerned parents" and the greedy, alarmist optometrist fucks can suck my eema.

Yesterday, Bill Schafer called to tell me that he's doing a special "no comma" printing of the first edition of The Dry Salvages. It will be limited to twelve hardback copies (those who get the T. S. Eliot in-joke will earn a smile from me). All commas will be removed from the text. Clearly, he's trying to compete with the high grammatical standards set by Penguin's production managers on Murder of Angels. Anyway, I desperately needed something to cheer me up yesterday, and that did.

Today, I'll be polishing The Dry Salvages a little more, tweaking "The Pearl Diver," and e-mailing the latter to a few readers. I also need to choose an author's photo for the Dry Salvages dustjacket.

Yesterday, docbrite wrote in her LJ, "A poster on Caitlin's forum asked her a question about A Murder of Crows (the actual title of her forthcoming novel is A Murder of Angels), and while I'm sure it was an innocent slip of the keyboard, it set me to thinking of all the strangely titled novels I've apparently written in an alternate universe: Lost Souls, Dead Souls, Drying Blood, The Exquisite Corpse, The Value of D, The Value of Z, and of course my new one, Alcohol...." Truth be told, the actual title of the forthcoming novel is Murder of Angels, no "A," but Poppy knows I love her, anyway. And, for the record, I have come to terms with the fact that I've apparently published a novel titled Trilobyte, which I assume must be a Paleozoic cyberpunk story about Cambrian hackers.

It's good, every now and again, to write an entry that has no direction whatsoever. Just go with the flow, nixar.

I read two papers in the June 2004 JVP yesterday, both about aquatic Peruvian ground sloths: "The youngest species of the aquatic sloth Thalassocnus and a reassessment of the relationships of the nothrothere sloths (Mammalia; Xenarthra)" and "The evolution of feeding adaptations of the aquatic sloth Thalassocnus." I don't usually get very excited about mammals ("furballs," as my long-ago mentor Robert T. Bakker used to call them with marked disdain), but secondary marine adaptation in tetrapods (such as mosasaurs) is my thing, and sloths are kind of cool for mammals, and you just gotta admit that the sight of enormous, shaggy ground sloths drifting about in the surf and seaweed of the rocky, desert-bound coast of Miocene-aged Peru is an image far too exquisitely alien not to relish.

We watched two more eps of Six Feet Under last night, and returned to Kya: Dark Legacy, which we never finished playing, and when we finally went to bed, Spooky read to me from Frog and Toad Together, which really could have been titled Frog and Toad Are Gay. It's got a definite Bert and Ernie vibe. And Toad has some serious OCD issues going on...