13 Things on Thursday I Could Have Been Doing Besides Standing In Line at the Doctor's Office With a Jug of My Daughter's Urine

1. Anything else.


2. Taking over Leichtenstein.


3. Learning how to spell Liechtenstein.


4. Smuggling ocelots.


5. Growing an elaborate beard.


6. Learning conversational Greek.


7. Pimping out a smart car.


8. Worrying about the economy (oh wait, I did that).


9. Shaving highly literate quotes into my sideburns.


10. Fixing the grammar on local produce center window signs (pickle's 88 cent's!)


11. Yo quieroing my taco bell.


12. Snake dancing on a black volcanic beach in the Maldives.


13. Getting some flash added on to my grill.

Thank GOD for Zotero!

As a writer, I'm constantly wrestling with research. I spend a lot of time angrily muttering about lack of seamless integration, about not having a real system, about punk librarians . . . well now I may have to shut up.

While I've been researching a new book, I downloaded some Firefox tools and found this divine intervention for serious writers and researchers: Zotero. Just visit the site and watch the video.


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Annual Appeal to All the Ardent Advocates of this Author

It's simple. In order for me to continue to promote Death By Children at the level which currently allows me to write from the comfort of a luxurious sports yacht off the coast of the Maldives while eating fresh caught crab and drink Westvleteren 12 like it was water, I need your support. By support I don't mean money. You can't send fistfulls of money over the internet though so many of you try. No. I mean connectivity. I mean readership. I mean eyeballs.

So show your love, show your undying fealty to my withinering prose. Forward your favorite Death By Children column (you might want to drill down through the tabs at the top of the page) to all of your friends and family, all the people you work with, your neighbors, your ex-boyfriend the bass player for that one band, your kids in college, your old high school chums, and everyone you know on Facebook.

By spreading the word of Death By Children, you will assist your fellow man in their slow crawl up the evolutionary chain by igniting their poor, pitiful lizard mind with the dynamic, highly advanced verbiage you've become accustomed to here, you being such a literate, suave, ultra-hip cool person that you are.

Thank you;

Death.

Why was Adrian Grenier at Hot Doug's Today?

And where was his entourage? And why do I care? I'm not a big fan of the show, not because it's bad or anything, but because, let's be serious here, I'll never get to see it. MY DVR is DOA because my kids have appropriated this machine to use as an electronic time capsule for storing Futurama, Family Guy, and the Simpsons to protect these treasures for future generations against neutron bombs and zombie plagues.

And of course, I support their effort, to a degree, because a) I am afraid of Zombie plagues, and (b), the Simpsons have highy detailed drawings of a working nuclear reactor which future generations might find useful after the apocolypse in order to power up those ancient old gas plasmas to study the anthropological wonder that is (will be) the Simpsons. They will not be using them to watch Entourage, however, simply because Entourage is all about the nuances and situational humor of skinny jeans and hair. You can't find a working nuke plant in that show. Totally useless.

I've seen pictures of Entourage cast members, leaning against cars like a glyph of late-90s-band-flyer-well-heeled-disregard reprocessed by a zen monk feng sui wizard with a PhD in compositional balance, I have, and like everyone else who sees these posters and ads I was instantly compelled to entrain the date and time into the very bowels of my brain, re-schedule everything in my life around its one hour manifestations, and Twit the holy bjesus out of it, but I didn't, and I won't, because I can't watch TV as our cable box (-es, all 4 of them) are fully booked for the aforementioned post-apocalyptic anthropologist TV party, a'la fruit of my loins and Dish Network.

I tried to watch the news yesterday to maybe get a glimpse of the coverage of Uncle Walt's unfortunate demise and enjoyed all of nineteen seconds of it before the little lozenge of doom blinked into existence to inform me that, no, sorry, nice news show and all, but Futurama reruns are on. And that's the way it was.

Later I was watching the news again, having just settled my ample corpus into the couch when the little lozenge of regret informed me, again, that I was mistaken if I intended to continue to infringe on South Park reruns. I hit the delete and an entirely different lozenge winked into existence  to chastise me for even supposing I might watch live TV while it was storing I Didn't Know I was Pregnant! which I happily deleted only to find a ferocious and persistent lozenge alarming me to the imminent recording of Emergency Room Disaster: Pancreas Explosion!

I leaped to my feet, fist full of remote, and speed deleted every single lozenge but they just kept coming: Spleens!; Extrovention; The Sad Story of Little Nell Who Had Cancer but Donated Her Liver to another kid who had Cancer who died!; What's That? Doctor's Real Mistakes Caught by X-Ray!; Real High Speed Chases!; Ice Road Hookers; Lost; Totally Lost; and Seriously, Dude, I Don't Know Where We Are is that a Polar Bear?

I  gave up. I went to Hot Doug's where, after standing in a line that stretched (this part's not an exaggeration) around the building and past two neighborhood houses, for two hours, behind a group of ironically inked graphic artists who started out as two but kept attracting simillarly tattooed cyclists until they were six, all of whom appeaered as if they'd pulled their clothes out from under a hamper in a third floor walk up in 1972 but had had the presence of mind to douse themselves with Axe which made my lungs want to decavitate, to get an Alligator and Cajun Roumelade hot dog, and then, finally, after fighting my way through the hoardes of hippies and Germans who don't seem to understand that the fat guy with food walking toward them and saying  E X C U S E  M E over and over is actually attempting to leave and perhaps they might want to let him through, just out of old school politeness, whatever, and finally, finally, after TWO HOURS of all this shit and they didn't even have the goose fat fries because it's Monday and finally, I walk out, amazed at the sheer diversity of haircuts and ironic tattoos (one guy had a willy wonka candy wrapper on his shin), I stroll past the end of the line, food triumphantly in hand, and THAT'S WHEN ADRIAN !@#$%%^&! GRENIER DECIDES TO SHOW UP!?

I caught his eye and said, 'Good luck, lady, they close in five minutes."

Stoopid celebrity.