National Novel Writing Month comes to an end tonight—at midnight! But our series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished will carry on. Here's the next entry.

Where are all my End of the World Party invitations? The characters in the novel I never finished—the promotion for which I foresaw myself being very busy with this month, incidentally, the timing of the book's publication being part of my brilliant meta marketing concept—were buried in End of the World Party invitations by now. In the mid-pre-post-apocalyptic world I imagined, December 23, 2012 was the new New Year's.

These parties would be taking [...]

This cat swims and newsman Anderson Cooper is ON IT. (via)

I kind of take back everything bad I've ever said about Anderson Cooper (except why does he keep wearing what look to be winter-weight suits while he is on assignment in July, in Santa Barbara?) after this interview, conducted after Sarah Palin's surprising, crazy and transparent resignation as Alaska's government. Oh it is wonderful, and only gets more hilarious and maddening as it goes on. The only people crazier than Sarah Palin are the people who are willing to work for her.

Sure thing, boss. And everyone who's ever asked Anderson Cooper straight up if he was gay and then taken flack for not being able to print it lifts a hearty gay middle finger! Eh, whatever, no hard feelings, God bless, let's all slide down the firepole in our converted firehouses together.

In the immense new report to the President, "The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling," from the National Commission on such, there's just about one whole paragraph that's getting people all riled up.

Last night, a big exclusive! That English woman that everyone loves who sings pretty show tunes even though she does not look like that little twiggy Sarah Brightman girl.

Anderson Cooper will come around and personally try to ruin your life now, with hidden camera jerk pranks which take up peoples' lunch hours and hours of their lives that they'll never get back. Reports one victim: "ultimately what I felt was not anger or amusement but a profound helplessness. When it was a man being awful in the back of a restaurant, I couldn’t do anything. When it was an actor being awful in the back of a restaurant, I could do less. I had been working with rules that were not rules. I had made assumptions based on experience and observations, assumptions made invalid by a [...]

Just the other night I was watching Anderson Cooper's variety show on CNN, and right before a commercial break, Mr. Cooper showed about seven seconds of wobbling and grainy footage of a burning truck speeding down a highway. "A burning truck on a highway," he said (or words to that effect). He looked, and sounded, very concerned. "We'll tell how it happened, and where, right after this."