A moment of silence, please, for the death of Mildred Benson, a.k.a. Carolyn Keene, creator of the Nancy Drew series, without which we might never have been introduced to the terms "titian-haired," "blue roadster," and "girl sleuth."

So I have to admit that I am of two minds about this whole Bernie Mac phenomenon. I mean, on the one hand his show is actually pretty funny, for a sitcom- he does this very caricatured, fake-mad, scary-eyed thing when the kids piss him off, and his armchair comedy routines seem sort of irreverent and innocuous at the same time. On the other hand, there's this article about him in the New York Times magazine, about how GROUNDBREAKING this show is, and how beloved Bernie Mac is in the tough streets of Chicago where he spent a scrappy childhood, and how when some woman comes up to him to ask him for advice about her wayward teenage son, he takes her aside and tells her to punch him under his right eye and he'll never misbehave again, and filtered through the New York Times reporter- and, from what I can gather, most other media outlets as well- this is supposed to be just all Part of the Act. But really, I can't help thinking if some guy came out with a sitcom, in this day and age, where he joked around a lot about, say, wife-beating, everyone wouldn't be quite so amused about it. And at the same time, the fact that I get so uptight about this makes me feel super-white, and that maybe I just don't understand cultural differences and whatnot. So there you have it. I'll laugh, but it makes me squirm a little bit all the same. That said, I have watched the show in question maybe three times.

What am I doing for Memorial Day, you ask? Let me share some of the ingredients with you: road trip; midwest; strapless lavender dress; uncomfortable heels; someone breaking a glass under a cloth; too much champagne. Yes! It's another wedding, this time a Jewish one, in the great state of Ohio, which I don't think I have ever actually stopped in despite having driven through it more times than I can count. I am of course in something of a panic at this point, having not decided what to wear to the rehearsal dinner, and knowing that my calculation of the level of formality will, no matter what, be way off, so I might as well just wear ripped jeans and have done with it, and I have not bought a wedding present yet, which doesn't really matter because of that one-year rule, but in reality I sort of know that if I don't do it now I may forget about it entirely. I also may well be expected to give a toast of some sort, being in the wedding party and all, which I look at with a significant amount of dread. Perhaps I can resort to my tried and true format of haiku, and write something amusing which will be all of three lines long. And of course there is the issue of the 8 hour drive out, which I am taking with some boy I have never met before, and who I am desperately hoping has decent taste in music. Please, anything, as long as it is not a) experimental jazz, b) wall-of-sound indie rock, or c) Steely Dan.

Went to a screening of Insomnia last night, in which Robin Williams plays a character that seems to be what Robin Willams would be like if he went around the bend just a little bit more, and Al Pacino doesn't sleep for six days (hence the title! subtle, eh?) and spouts a lot of cop cliches while floundering about in a plot that makes no sense in the midst of the beautiful Alaskan wilderness. The man sitting in front of me made two calls on his cell phone during the course of the movie, which I had heard people do but had never actually seen it myself, and he was one of those guys who you know is just WAITING for you to tell him to shut up so he can start a fight with you, so I didn't, and it would have been unforgiveable except for the fact that the movie was so bad it was kind of a nice diversion.

So I'm sitting at a bar in a kind of remote area of Williamsburg, a great bar with a refreshing lack of 22-year-old trust fund punks with perfect hair and no jobs, not to mention great DJ'd music (I was trying to remember the words to a song by The Flying Burrito Brothers and then they were all of a sudden playing it) and a live band that included a fiddle, several shirts with embroidery on the shoulders and one fantastic mustache. So I'm sitting at the bar with this guy (not the owner of the mustache) and I notice that it kind of smells like vomit, and I'm thinking it could not possibly be the case that this is how this guy smells, and I'm really hoping that he doesn't think that it's ME, for god's sake, and I'm just wondering if someone threw up, like, right under where we're sitting and it didn't get quite cleaned up enough, but I don't say anything, because there really isn't anywhere else to sit and you don't want to be all choosy about where you sit in a place like this anyway, like it would be weird to get up and move after you'd established yourself at the bar and the cute bartender was giving you free Stellas, so I just pretended not to notice it and eventually it kind of blended in. Funny how that will happen after the third beer.

Side effect of working from home: I am developing my parents' radio habits. I listen to NPR morning and evening, day in and day out. I have even developed a tolerance, if not a liking, for Brian Lehrer's 10 a.m. call-in show, in which government officials and Brooklyn hausfraus call in to drone on and on about otherwise actually interesting topics, like the diminished municipal water supply, or Mayor Bloomberg's position on whether the city should be reading a book together (he thinks we should, but it should be his autobiography).Usually I can take about twenty minutes of that before I reach my droning limit and go sprinting across the room to turn it off. Then I put on something loud and raucous for a while and try to get some work done. At 4:30, more and more I tend to remember that it is time for All Things Considered, the news show with the brassy theme song that irritates my sister to no end. (An interesting Pavlovian phenomenon, that.)

Went with much trepidation to Attack of the Clones... and was not disappointed, thanks to my low expectations... quite a scene outside of the actual film, though. A line wrapped around the entire Ziegfeld block, with more people wielding umbrellas than lightsabers, thanks to the shitty weather. I sat in a weirdly empty midtown diner before meeting my friends, and ate a waffle for dinner while the waitress leaned against a booth and stared at me... (and you, you know who you are, really should have been there with me, eating mediocre diner cheesecake and then waiting on line with me with the rest of the reluctant Star Wars freaks).... it was certainly essential to see it in the midst of a humongous crowd of people who cheered at the slightest provocation (including, inexplicably, the Technicolor logo) and who you could tell desperately wanted to be convinced that it was actually a good movie... and hey, what's not to love about Jedi warfare? Favorite worst Hayden Christensen line- and there were loads of them- "I hate sand." All in all, a Friday night well spent.

As I am now on the home-work schedule, I am finding myself increasingly familiar with the other Brooklynites who run in my circles... particularly in the exercise realm. At the gym every day around noon, there is Older Guy Who Stands on His Head; Meathead Guy Who Grunts Overly Dramatically While Lifting; Personal Trainer with German Accent and Wacky Sense of Humor.... meanwhile, in Prospect Park, the crowd leans heavily toward mothers with strollers, bikers in really ugly spandex, and the inevitable Overweight Guy on Rollerblades Struggling Up the Hill. But the real enigma is the Guy Who Kind of Looks Like Jesus- I may even have mentioned him here before, I'm sort of obsessed with him. He's bearded, really skinny, wears a T-shirt with the sleeves cut out, seems very likely that he would not smell that great... and he is ALWAYS out there. Today, on my third pass around the bike trail, I ventured a smile at him. Does he recognize me? What does he do with his life besides circle the park? (Come to think of it, he may be thinking the same thing about me, at this point....)

Last night, at a screening of About a Boy, I was in the bathroom and the woman next to me sneezed, like, really emphatically and loudly, so I said Bless you, because it seemed to be the sort of sneeze that needed affirmation. But she didn't say thank you, and I was briefly offended. Perhaps, however, she was simply surprised that a stranger said bless you at all. Is that weird? I mean, it's not like it actually has any religious overtones or anything. In any case, I maintain that it's good form to thank people who say bless you. Now if they say GOD bless you, that's another matter....

In case you were wondering, the movie was pretty okay. Not earth-shatteringly brilliant or anything. But Hugh Grant does a good job of reigning in his stutter, and there is a heartbreaking middle-school recital rendition of "Killing Me Softly"' that is worth the price of admission.

See, this is what happens when you go into used record stores and start randomly buying anything that costs ten bucks... I've been listening to The Who's Tommy for the past three days and now I've got this song firmly stuck in my head. I'm still sort of piecing the whole plot together, though, having never actually seen the thing, not even the cheesy movie version... apparently somewhere along the way he starts seeing and hearing again. That seems sort of unlikely, doesn't it?

Thanks to Anne, I got a little culture in my life Friday night at the Film Forum, where we joined a truly eclectic crowd for a showing of Lagaan, a fabulous four-hour Bollywood epic involving oppressed peasants, cricket and a whole lot of singing and dancing. Oh, and a strapping romantic lead by the name of Aamir Khan, who, as it turned out, was keeping a low profile in the back row of the theater, much to the girlish giggles of all the women who realized it. The elderly couple sitting next to Anne were adorable right up until they lost their will to sit quietly, somewhere during the third hour: he began loudly narrating the plays of the cricket game, as if they were actually at a match and not in a small, chilly arthouse theater. Nevertheless, a great film, not least for its mockery of super-bland, ultra-stuffy English culture- and, by association, our own. The more foreign films I see, the more I'm convinced we really don't know how to have a good time.

The weekend was rounded out perfectly by two things: First, my discovery of the holy grail of summer footwear, the elusive Converse one-star slip-on, which seems to have been abandoned by most stores in favor of the vastly inferior Chuck Taylor mule (just picture that- in what way is it a good idea?) but was kept in stock, in a shoebox that was really showing its age, in a small sneaker store in the west village. And second, dinner at an old-school Italian restaurant in Coney Island, where we sat in a brightly-lit ballroom full of Mylar balloons celebrating various occasions, waiters a good thirty years older than any you'd find in Manhattan, and a clientele that could easily have done double duty as extras on The Sopranos. Everything on the menu involved breading, even the artichoke. Divine.

New York is the best place on earth to live, no doubt, but it's sorely lacking in one crucial area. I was jonesing for old country music last night, as I find myself doing so often lately (a lingering reminder of my departure from the heartland?) and couldn't find one damn place to go... every bar here that's associated with the word "country" is either filled with cheeseballs (see Rodeo Bar) or Coyote Ugly-style waitresses dancing on the bar (see Red Rock West), neither of which really fits the bill. Can it really be true that there are no good country dives in this whole city?? Maybe there's hope: I found one tiny bar last night that might have to become a regular spot- it has a jukebox that juxtaposes George Jones and Metallica, not to mention cheap beer and decent pinball- but it was still full of people who looked like they'd rather be at a White Stripes show. I want to find that elusive, perfect bar that escapes the categories of tourist, hipster and frat boy... am I just deluding myself?

Extreme gross-out item of the day: NPR's Morning Edition has a new sponsor, and it is a food product called, get this, "Smart Beat Fat-Free Cheddar Flavor Slices." I mean, good god. Even I, a self-respecting vegetarian-who-hypocritically-eats-fish, cannot fathom being desperate enough to consume something called a cheddar flavor slice. Slice of what, exactly? In any case, it's certainly not something I want to be thinking about at eight o'clock in the morning. Why can't Krispy Kreme sponsor my morning news?

I am sitting in the window seat of a bar on 8th Street in the east village last night when all of a sudden a fire truck comes screaming down the street; my date is grumbling about how the damn firemen think they can just do whatever they like after 9/11... and then another comes, and another, and another, and they all stop right outside the bar we're sitting in, and an old fireman with a striking resemblance to Lou Reed jumps out of the truck, smoking a cigarette, and kicks some garbage bags away from the fire hydrant and turns it on with a giant wrench. Water floods the street, not quenching any identifiable blazes. Small crowds of people have gathered now and we are all asking each other where the fire is. Nothing seems to be amiss, and there's no smoke... Lou Reed fireman begins yelling at our waitress, "Is this your garbage? This your garbage?" She assures him it is not. He asks a manager at the restaurant on the other side of us. Nope. He rings the doorbell of the apartment nearby and asks the super, a half-asleep elderly woman, who says no too. Lou Reed fireman now grabs a couple of the many bags of garbage, swings them into a separate pile, and says, "OK, two for you, and two for you, and two for you," dividing them into three piles, then yells at all of the assembled potential garbage-offenders NOT TO STACK THEIR GARBAGE ON THE FUCKING HYDRANT. A handful of other firemen, in full uniform, stand around watching the show. Then they all get back into their trucks and drive away.

Not only does the new Spiderman movie live up to the hype, it goes above and beyond: the best part, in my opinion, is the fact that J. Jonah Jameson's hair looks exactly, but exactly, like it did in the comic strip. This may be yet another indication that I am really a geeky fourteen year old boy at heart....

A huge, huge shout out to Mark for telling me about the dancing banana, which has been entertaining me for a good day and a half now and enabling me to keep my sanity whilst working from home writing a brochure about a hack business school. Best quote from him on the subject: "The banana is the most athletic of all the fruits."