It’s nice to know that we’re all getting old together.

“New research using rats suggests that even when individuals are forced to exercise, they still benefit from reduced anxiety and depression.” Seriously, though, rats. Not getting smeared with eye makeup to see if they will explode reduces their anxiety and depression. Let’s not go crazy and start applying this to humans, because man I do not want to exercise no matter how sad I feel.

“Hundreds of fans lined up outside the El Rey Theatre across town earlier Saturday for a chance to attend the spontaneous show. Buyers were limited to one ticket, and they were required to pay with cash, show a government-issued ID, wear a wristband with their name on it and be photographed. Their names were verified at the venue, which has a capacity of about 700. Cameras and smartphones weren’t allowed inside the Echoplex, which usually plays host to hipster bands and mash-up dance parties. The lack of personal recording devices made the [band’s] performance feel even more exclusive and old school, freeing concertgoers’ hands of the gizmos that have become commonplace at concerts nowadays, and further bonding the crowd, many of whom built up camaraderie during the confusing ticket lottery earlier in the day.”
 — “In the future,” said the mysterious man who appeared before me on that strange November day in 1979, “telephones will be tiny devices which you carry on your person with you no matter where you go. Some of them will be able to tap into a vast network of cat photos and song lyrics. And when you go to a concert you will spend the whole time filming the show with your tiny phone rather than actually watching the musicians.”

“But what will the music be like?” I asked.

“Oh, it’ll still be the Rolling Stones,” said the man. “Also the president will be black and everyone’s going to be upset that the first active pro-athlete to announce that he’s gay isn’t a bigger deal,” he cackled ominously before disappearing in a cloud of smoke.

“I was born here. The G train is not a train.”

The nights are getting warmer and it won’t be long until summer comes! No offense, but this current season of spring has pretty much been crappy and we are now about a groundhog-hair away from being done with it. Yeah, as soon as all this pollen stops killing us, it’ll be summer time, and I know there’ll still Global Warming, but I want to have an enjoyable summer, so I’m basically not gonna think about Global Warming this summer, even when it’s 120 degrees and the pavement is soft enough to claim a shoe! Don’t wear flip-flops out on those city streets, people, please.

This summer, the one that is going to start happening any day now — don’t be fooled by the calendar — I say it’s gonna be hot because it’s summer, man, that’s why and that’s all, and besides, sweating beats freezing. Don’t think about the polar bears, except when they do those annual things in the newspaper showing the polar bear at the zoo “cooling off” and he’s so thin from not being an outdoor Polar Bear he looks like a sloppy dog going into that swimming pool for the photo-op. Endless summertime for Polar Bears, that’s all this all is.

I read this thing in one of the Magazines in my pile of pre-recycling The New York Times papers about John le Carré (not his real name), the guy who writes all these depressing spy novels, and he said you’re supposed to have a “splinter of ice” in your heart just to be a writer, and since I’m writing this mess, I am a writer, but the only ice splintered up in my heart is a Popsicle, dude, seriously, let’s have some summer! Bomb-pop style! Summer is coming! Let’s eat!

Yeah! My thoughts at the turn of each Season turn to Thoughts of Food. So now it is the Foods of Summer, if you will, but mostly toward Corn, my thoughts, which you should never boil. I am gonna roast so much corn this summer, seriously. But not on the sidewalk with eggs!

Corn goes with everything. It goes with vegetables and salad, it goes with fish, it goes with meat, it goes with hot dogs. Roasted Ear of Corn is one of those “wow factor” items, especially if you are “entertaining,” and you hit the table with a pile of roasted corns all coated with flavors (see below). “Wow exclamation point,” people will say. You watch.

So look, like I said, don’t boil the corn, man, you gotta roast it over some flames or some coals or electric grill man, it’s all good, just get some corn on the cobs, and then either pull all the corn husks off or if you want things to be more complicated and Artisanal or whatever you can carefully peel ’em, the husks, and leave attached to the bottom so you can put it all back up after you put some stuff on it. Good stuff! You can even use those frozen corns in your Grocer’s Freezer, the ones that look like they are about a third of a cob each? It almost doesn’t matter because corn basically does not taste like very much, but once you put on stuff, it doesn’t taste like anything else but corn. With stuff on it. You’ll see.

You need some kinda oil or fat, because that should go on first, so you will have something for the stuff to stick to. Butter is OK, but olive oil is probably better if you want there to be a Health aspect to this. It could even be corn oil. I know, I know, the guy who wrote the book about how the whole world is made outta corn won’t be thrilled with this maybe, but really, it could be corn oil, although flavorwise, I think you should go olive oil. Personally I go olive oil and then some butter. I know. It could even be like, in a certain situation, say you have an item in the cabinet you never use, but you don’t want it to go to waste, so it could be using up that can of spray-on pan nonstick pan coating stuff. I’m not kidding, you’re gonna cover up that corn with so much flavor, it won’t even be a thing, the base coating, and you finally used up that can, so please recycle.

OK, so you lube up your cob, and then you just go crazy mix ‘em-ups, seriously: simple stuff like salt, pepper, chili powder, paprika, oregano, cilantro, garlic powder, celery seed, grated parmesan, any kinda cheese you can get fine enough. Basically any kind of flavor dust is fair. If you have left over packs of chicken flavor from your Top Ramen, dump ’em on the corn: Flavor. Try all kinds of different versions until you get the one you like, and eat the mistakes. Squeeze some lime on there right before you eat it. It’s corn, it will never taste Bad unless you burn it to carbon-black. You can also go sweet, with sugar and cinnamon, stuff like that, honey. I mean honey is some other stuff you can put on corn, honey.

Then once you have all kinds of flavors all over your corns, you can wrap ’em back up in the husks and be all precious and tie the tops with string, or wrap de-husked corns in foil, or just do what I do and throw those bad boys right on the grill unprotected and cook ’em and turn ’em and turn ’em and cook ’em until they start changing color and looking good enough to eat. Ideally you want to get them to where the corn kernels are a little chewy, and all the stuff you used to coat the kernels is browned or caramelized or whatever. There’s a lot of water in corn so it’ll take a while, but this is the whole point of doing summer-y food processes, you now have time to enjoy a beverage, engage in idle banter, listen to music, anything but think about why it’s hot. Corn goes really good with beer.

Mr. Wrong can converse with you via many medias. Corn photo by Heather Harvey.

“In the corner office and the boardroom, women are ‘leaning in.’ But there’s one place where they’re still wracked with anxiety and shame. “
 — Can you guess where it is? IT’S THE BATHROOM! Where shitting happens! Shitting BY WOMEN! I may need to lie down for a minute.

“As a side project, [anthropologist Andrew Irving] decided to record the inner dialogues of people walking in New York City — to map part of the city’s thoughtscape, layered beneath its audible soundscape. He approached strangers at different points in the city [and asked them] to wear a microphone headset attached to a digital recorder and speak aloud their thoughts as he followed closely behind with a camera. He would not be able to hear what they were saying, Irving explained, and they would be free to walk wherever they liked and continue their business as usual. ‘I was surprised by how many said Yes,’ Irving says — about 100 in all. By overlaying the recorded audio onto the videos, he has created portraits of individual consciousnesses on a particular day in New York City — transcripts of people’s inner dialogues that remind one of works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and other writers who were especially interested in recreating the mind on the page. He calls the project ‘New York Stories: The Lives of Other Citizens.’”
 — This is the kind of thing you will either be utterly fascinated by or have absolutely no patience for, so proceed on that basis.

CHAPTER SIX.

— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 29, 2013

well, if she confesses and he kills her, great. the question is will she kill him first? BEAT

— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 29, 2013

no, but i can — i can — yes, we can — BEAT (off, left) sherrill, can you — get gary maloney

— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 29, 2013

END OF CHAPTER SIX.

— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) April 29, 2013

So this is happening.

“CUPERTINO, California — April 28, 2003 — Apple® today launched the iTunes® Music Store, a revolutionary online music store that lets customers quickly find, purchase and download the music they want for just 99 cents per song, without subscription fees. The iTunes Music Store offers groundbreaking personal use rights, including burning songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for personal use, listening to songs on an unlimited number of iPods, playing songs on up to three Macintosh® computers, and using songs in any application on the Mac®, including iPhoto™, iMovie™ and iDVD™.

‘The iTunes Music Store offers the revolutionary rights to burn an unlimited number of CDs for personal use and to put music on an unlimited number of iPods for on-the-go listening,’ said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. ‘Consumers don’t want to be treated like criminals and artists don’t want their valuable work stolen. The iTunes Music Store offers a groundbreaking solution for both.’

The iTunes Music Store features over 200,000 songs from music companies including BMG, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal and Warner. Users can easily search the entire music store to instantly locate any song by title, artist or album, or browse the entire collection of songs by genre, artist and album. Users can listen to a free 30-second high-quality preview of any song in the store, then purchase and download their favorite songs or complete albums in pristine digital quality with just one click.”
 — Not stealing music turned 10 years old yesterday. Where did the time go? I mean, I guess I know where it went, but thinking about it just gets me kind of down, in that ten years is an awfully long time in the life of a human being and if you actually take a moment to consider all you’ve done with the last decade it really makes you wonder: What was the point of all that? Even those few flashes of fun, were they worth all the suffering and tears? If someone came up to you right now and said, “I will let you live the last ten years over again, but you can’t change a single thing,” you would say, “Keep walking, buddy,” because even if your last ten years were awesome (and they weren’t) there was still much more bad than good in them, because that’s the way life works during any span of more than a couple days. So those ten years are gone, and now you’ve got to face the rest of them. Are they going to be any better than the previous decade? Don’t be stupid, of course not. Things will continue to suck — interspersed with increasingly brief moments of semi-satisfaction designed to somehow con you into not ending it all because the illusion that there is a chance things might get better is oddly powerful even though you know in your heart it is a bitter lie — until you die. Anyway, what was the first song you purchased on iTunes? I’ve switched computers a couple of times since then so it’s hard to tell exactly, but it looks like I either went for Tweet’s “Oops (Oh My)” or Trina’s “B R Right.”

“To find out what kind of caffeine ingestion Joey, Chandler, Ross, Phoebe, Rachel and Monica had over the 10 seasons of Friends, we need to make a few assumptions. First, given their famous mugs, we’ll assume that they drink 20 oz. coffees. Second, we’ll assume that each friend consumes maybe two of these enormous drinks each episode. Finally, we assume that this kind of coffee mainlining happened over each of Friends’ 236 episodes. If each friend drank two mugs of coffee over each episode, the whole gang downed, in total, 445 gallons of coffee. “
 — Have you ever wondered how much coffee the pretend people on the ‘Friends’ television show drank? You have? Really? Let me tell you something: It would not kill you to read a book every now and then. Seriously.