“The Q&A; column on March 10 with the travel blogger Matt Kepnes, about tips on keeping to a budget while on the road, sought his suggestions on which credit cards to use. One card he recommended was the Starwood Preferred Guest card from American Express. After the article was published, editors learned that Mr. Kepnes has a business deal with a vendor for the card in which he receives a payment every time someone is approved for the card through a link on his Web site. Had editors known of this relationship, they would not have included his suggestion.” (via)

Comedy legend Robert Brackett Elliott is 90 today. Younger readers will best know him as Chris Elliott’s dad, both in reality and on the cult classic “Get A Life,” but he is kind of a big deal in his own right as half of “Bob and Ray.” Here’s a sampling.

I tried uniformly applying a variety of “systems” — note cards, wall-sized outlines, all kinds of things. Color-coding and cross-referencing may or may not have been involved. I may or may not own a triple hole-punch. Ultimately, though, I felt I was spending more time playing reporter/writer than being reporter/writer — the systems search, I realized, was a form of procrastination. Here’s what I do now, and it’s very basic: Bring the scraps back to the nest, arrange them chronologically, develop a timeline that shows everything more clearly, and then build out from there, hewing to that backbone yet following each thread to its known end. That’s just an organizing principle, not the same as story structure.

— This interview with Paige Williams, who most recently wrote that terrific dinosaur fossils story in the New Yorker, will restore your faith and calm your fears! Everyone is a hot mess, from Gay Talese’s crazy shirt-boards on down — and it just doesn’t matter! Now I feel so much better about my own terrible non-system! (via)

Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler is 65 today. I no longer know whether we’re supposed to be surprised or not at this point.

Man, rough morning, right? At least you’re not locked in a glass box in MoMA, unable to pee all day. Could always be worse! Otherwise today in NYC, some bookish things.

Passover begins tonight, and while I do not worship the G_d of Israel, I dig matzo and Observing this Religious occasion because I was raised on Television, where one of the best things I was conditioned to enjoy when I was a child was this movie they put on every year around this time called The Ten Commandments, by the movie director Cecil B. DeMille, and starring Charlton Heston, who would later go on to be a gun enthusiast and star in even cooler movies where he would do stuff like fight apes on a whole planet full of them, be The Omega Man, and tell everybody what the deal was with Soylent Green. (You probably know even if you haven’t seen the movie, but I’m not gonna spoiler it.)

In The Ten Commandments, Charlton Heston was Moses, who was an orphan who got floated down a river in an Easter basket and ended up being raised by the Egyptians, who were using the People of Israel as slave labor, and later on Charlton Heston would figure out he was Moses and needed to lead his People out of Egypt, but before he did, he waged hella Asymmetrical Warfare on the Pharaoh, who was the very cool and bald Yul Brynner, who would later go on to be a Robot Cowboy in the movie Westworld, and then later on tell people to quit smoking, which you probably should, unless you’re like, 80 and you have one foot on the banana peel already, you know? Smoking is bad for you, probably even smoking weed is bad for you, plus it makes zero sense to smoke weed because you can just eat it to achieve the desired effect, you know? But smoking is fun, I know, having fire, playing with fire, puffing smoke rings and stuff, like with cigars. Anyway, Happy Easter in advance, also.

Or “Hoppy Easter!” That’s a little Holiday Saying that gets rolled out this time of year with respect to the rabbits, you know? That TV commercial with the Cadbury Easter Egg Bunny is a good example of a commercial where they got it right the first time, but then the people at the Advertising Agency realized they could milk the goose that lays the golden eggs and bill more hours if they kept “improving” the commercial and running different ones, but the original one was the best expression of the idea that the Easter Rabbit shits out creme-filled chocolate eggs for Cadbury and you should buy some for a Limited Time Only. It is a Miracle of Easter.

In My America, Passover and Easter are part of the same Holiday Season, with Palm Sunday as the kick-off. Palm Sunday is the Religious Event where Jesus rode into town on a burro and The People laid down palm branches in His (and the burro’s) path. I don’t think there’s any special food involved with Palm Sunday, but I always remember they would pass the Collection Basket again for a “Special Collection” at church, after the regular collection, so we would always call it “Palm Sunday,” in quotes, and hold our hand out, the joke being The Church had its palm out, for more loot. Good Friday is in there too, in this time of year, but wow, that’s a bummer, you go to services where they torture Jesus and nail him to a fucking cross. Harsh. Plus, I remember (I haven’t been to church in a while) this part where you say stuff like “Crucify Him,” so you can strap on the guilt-bag and help kill Jesus. No thanks.

So there’s money and jelly beans and matzo and ham and Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson and Yul Brynner and I AM stringing up Jesus and chocolate bunnies in my mind right now for these Holidays, all resting in a basket full of Easter Hay.

I wonder if The New Yorker ever did a cartoon of a rabbit at one of those “brew pubs” doing a “flight” of beer like they do now, so people can taste the micro-brews and figure out which one to drink with their cheeseburger? It would be like, a Bartender rabbit serving the little taste-sized glasses of beer on one of those stupid little flight-paddles to some people and saying, “They’re all pretty ‘hoppy,’” har! Or maybe it’s a rabbit who is the Customer and he could be hoisting a micro-brew and saying in the caption “Do you have anything that isn’t so ‘hoppy?’” Get it? Personally I do not enjoy “hoppy” beer, which is where they put lots of hops into the beering process. It becomes very bitter, and then it takes me forever to drink one, feh. Or the bunny could be, like, the bartender again, and say something to the effect of “Before I serve you, be advised I’ve heard all the ‘hoppy’ jokes,” or maybe he could be rolling his Easter-eyes and going to beer-tasting customers who are also bunnies, “Jesus Christ, ‘Hoppy?’ That’s all you got?” Anyway, if that’s already not a The New Yorker cartoon, somebody should go ahead and do that one, thank you and Hoppy Easter, get it? Or maybe it’s Jesus serving a beer to 12 bunnies and they could use it for the “caption contest.”

Previously: Let’s Clone Everything Right Now So We Will Never Die

Mr. Wrong can converse with you via many medias.

★★★★ The toddler lay on his back, looking up at the muted light in the unfamiliar room, talking himself awake. Snowdrops bloomed in the garden and up on the bank, among the rocks dug up when the garden was first made. The moss, mellow greenish bronze, was steadily reclaiming the lawn from the dormant grass. Goldfinches not yet golden were at the feeders, and a blue jay sharply blue. Where the road rose to the open hilltop, the sky was wide and a little too bluish to be quite gray. Mile by mile, up the interstate and the Turnpike, the day grew clearer, till little pale-blue mirages blinked out in the approaching roadway. Vultures tilted low over the highway, kettles of vultures, one after the next, the turkey vultures veering effortlessly and a black vulture flapping heavily down to the grassy roadside. The plume from the refinery smokestack looked solid as plaster, whiter than the beeches had been. Sun on the auto glass in the Ikea parking lot winked through a curtain of reeds. In the city, the sky was filtered again, and the breeze was light but cold, cold enough that it was worth bundling the children back into their coats from car to apartment building. Out on the avenue, the car disposed of, a reek of marijuana carried up the sidewalk, behind a man in sweatpants walking south.

“2013 marks 35 years of video game music (Space Invaders, released in 1978 was the first game to feature a continuous soundtrack). So we took the opportunity to take a look back at some of our favourite examples of video game music and build a 19 track mashup, combining them with some other tracks we love. The tracks used vary from some of the original 8-bit tracks from the Atari, GameBoy, through ’90s N64 and PS1 classics, right up to modern day symphonic epics that accompany some of today’s blockbuster games.”
 — I am at the point in life where every previous experience or memory is starting to blend together for me organically without warning, so it’s nice to know that this was at least deliberate.

by Kristen Roupenian

Like many other publications, we wanted to create a place for millennials to write important, groundbreaking things about their generation. Here’s one report from the front lines.

The first time I saw Milo was at a truck stop in Vancouver. He was angling for the same ride I was, his cut-off shorts hiked up high over one perfect golden thigh, his shaggy, unkempt hair hiding eyes the color of sea glass and broken bottles. Watching him, I knew that everyone around me — from the burnt out, 30-something waitress slinging hash in the run-down diner to the horny long-distance truckers cracked out on Benzedrines in the lot — they were all thinking the same thing I was: that boy is fucking beautiful.

It was mid-2011 and that year I was a wreck: 23, restless, eternally hungover, my mousy hair scorched newly blonde by the sun. Exhausted from the never-ending project of being a good girl my parents could be proud of, I’d recently embarked on the process of comprehensively burning my life down to its foundations. I was hungry for something realer than the cloistered little life I’d led: I wanted to bruise myself, to dance naked in fountains at midnight, to breathe deep and inhale the glittering stench of the stars. So I quit my internship at the arts nonprofit, dropped out of my long-distance MFA program, and broke up with Bryan, my devoted boyfriend who wanted nothing more than to marry me and raise my children. Then I emptied my bank account down to the last dollar so that I could spend six weeks hitchhiking across Canada. My friends thought I’d lost my mind; my parents threatened to stop helping me pay the rent on my walkup unless I got my affairs in order, and Bryan was texting me every day, sometimes every hour: are u sure ur okay, why canada, I think we shd talk this over, who is in charge of feeding the cat, is it your roommate bc Im kind of afraid she’ll forget. I felt burdened by the weight of all their worry, but I couldn’t travel fast enough, or far enough, to leave the voices in my head behind.

On that hot, bright day in August, Milo and I crashed into each other like two semi-trucks going in opposite directions on the highway. I don’t know if he seduced me, or if I seduced him, or if we were both intent on seducing each other. All I know is that I approached him in the parking lot, my sparkling silver fingernail polish glinting against my tanned skin as I hooked my thumbs into my faded jeans, tugging them down a little to give him a glimpse of what I had to offer. From the look on his face, I could tell he wanted me, but I also knew the only way to keep him interested was to make him wait, to torture him, to force him to beg for it. Bryan had called me “cold,” “an ice-princess”; he said I was a broken girl with daddy issues who really needed get back into therapy, but I knew I was waiting for someone who’d reach inside me and set a match to the dried-up kindling of my heart.

Milo and I caught the same ride down to Calgary, our legs pressed against each other in the back seat, his cinnamon-scented breath hot against my earlobe. With the wind from the rolled-down window tangling our hair together and Beach House’s Teen Dream crackling on the stereo, he told me everything about himself I needed to know: at 43, he was 20 years older than me, an aspiring bassist with two unreleased albums under his belt. He smelled like homemade deodorant and old paint and well whiskey; he had needle marks on his arms, and a line of brown dirt under his fingernails, and one missing front tooth that meant that his breath whistled flute-like through the gap when he spoke. He didn’t tell me he was married, then, or that his wife was pregnant with their third child, though after sneaking a look at the pictures on his phone, I guessed it; he didn’t tell me he was going to shatter me to pieces, either, but from the moment he pulled me onto his lap and bit the back of my neck I knew I was lost.

We only had ten hours together, our limbs entwined together in the back of that truck, the cracked leather seats pinching our asses, but we made the most out of every goddamned minute of it. We ate Slim Jims and slushies we stole from the rest areas, gorging ourselves until we felt sick; we found an old can of Miller High Life on the floor of the truck, and I sucked it down, the golden liquid spilling from my lips as Milo, laughing, called it “the champagne of beers.” We kissed until our mouths ached and then groped each other helplessly through the thin fabric of our clothes; despite the discomfort of the cramped truck cab and the stink of body odor now emanating from both of us, it was the closest to being alive I’d ever known.

Everyone wanted him: the teenage cashier at the 7–11 where we shoplifted during a pit stop, the elderly manager who ran after us, shaking his fist, even the trucker who stared jealously at us in the rearview mirror and muttered for goodness sake what are you two doing back there, don’t you realize that’s rude, but Milo only had eyes for me. You’re so fucking tiny, it’s like I could snap you in half, Milo breathed, wrapping his arms around my waist. I know, I whispered back, I only weigh 122 pounds. I still have a photo of the two of us, saved on my iPhone from when I texted it to Bryan: it’s a self-shot, blurry from the truck’s vibration and the way my hand shook because Milo was finger-banging me at the time; we look beautiful and broken and not long for this world, two gorgeous, coked-up angels flying down the open Canadian highway.

I knew it couldn’t last. By the time we reached Calgary, Milo was craving the black stuff so bad he had to keep bending over to vomit; the driver, sick of us at last, had dumped us by the side of the road, tossing our baggage out into the air like heavy birds behind us. Well, my baggage. Milo liked to travel light. He misquoted Janis Joplin: when you ain’t got nothing, that meant you’d got nothing anyone could steal. He asked me to whore myself out at the Tim Horton’s up ahead so we could get some cash for drugs but I knew I couldn’t do it: I loved being wild with him, but I wasn’t that wild, and besides, gross. He pulled me to him, buried his face in my hair, and whispered that me he loved me, and that he understood, but he had promised himself that he’d hold out for girl whose morals didn’t interfere with his lifestyle. He said that someday I’d grow up, and he hoped that on that day, I’d come and find him; he said that until then, he’d write song after song and every single bass line would be about me.

I kissed him goodbye, my face a pretty, expressionless mask. I felt like my heart had been torn, bloodily, from my chest, but I didn’t want to let him know how much he’d meant to me, so I didn’t cry until he’d turned his back and begun walking down the darkened road. But as he turned the corner up ahead, at last I did start crying. I cried not only for him, but for myself, for my childhood, for everything I had lost along the way, including my wallet, which I could see protruding out of his back pocket. I cried because I knew he was a criminal, and a drug-addict, and an aspiring pimp; I cried because I knew he was no good, and because he had forgotten me already. Mostly, I cried because I knew it was my fault I had lost him, and I cried because, despite it all, I knew he was the love of my life.

Previously by this writer: My Extremely Dead Zombie-Vampire Novel

Kristen Roupenian has never set foot in Calgary.

Snow, snow and more snow! And that’s just the voice-over. “This is winter’s last blast of the year,” says the reporter. “Or maybe not.” It really makes you think.