The Onion: Have you adjusted to life in France yet? Any thoughts about moving back?

David Sedaris: No. We just bought an apartment, so I think we're here for a while. But I went out two days ago, and I realized I'd forgotten my lighter. I've been here for three years, and I still couldn't ask anybody for a light. I know the words, but I just couldn't quite bring myself to do it. I heard this record on the radio, so I wrote down the person's name, and I went to the big record store here looking for it, and again, I couldn't bring myself to ask where it was. I didn't even know what category it fell under, so I found myself looking through every rack they had, when it would have been so much easier just to go and ask. But I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Again, I knew the words. Even if I got it a little bit wrong, I could say, "What is the home of her record?" I could have said something. It's not the end of the world if I get it a little bit wrong.

Sunday afternoon I dined at that Scottish restaurant, McDonald's, and had one of my usual arguments with the clerk: I asked for medium fries. She said they had small and large. I point to the board: Small, Large, Extra Large. The one in the middle, I said. She stared at me with complete incomprehension. Large, I said, deciding that today's lesson was falling on deaf ears. She found the appropriate pictogram on the keyboard, and announced that my bill was $4.80. I said that couldn't be right; I pointed to the various items I'd ordered, adding them up on the fly - which seemed to strike her as some sort of witchcraft. She had no idea what I was talking about. A shift leader was summoned. […]

Scorpio: (Oct. 24--Nov. 21):
Give in to progress this week. Replace that throne of skulls with a comfortable, ergonomic Aeron office chair.

Sagittarius: (Nov. 22--Dec. 21)
This is a great time for your career. Which isn't a good thing for everyone since you're a coroner, but hey.

Alchemists, Counterfeiters and False Witnesses
These falsifiers are subjected to a demonic everything bagel of torture; darkness, stench, disease, thirst, filth, and really loud noise. It lacks poetry, except in the literal sense, but you've got to admit it would be pretty unpleasant to deal with. In fact, I'm giving up alchemy right now. I just got this cool philosopher's stone from the Fingerhut catalog, but no, out it goes. I feel… cleaner now.  B

Thieves
The punishment if you're a thief is having snakes tie your hands behind your back. And then sometimes the snakes bite your neck and you burn into ashes and then you arise again from the ashes. And you're naked. Which just goes to show you that one person's eternal ignominious torture is another person's fetish art Web page.  B-

I happen to think nearly everybody--especially those one might find in the odd issue of People magazine, including me--is frightfully boring, Especially me. And Tom Cruise. Tom and I are alike in only this way. I remember in 1987, a freelance writer for Rolling Stone came out and spent a week with me, then returned to his loft in SoHo, only to find that after he typed in the words, "Big-beaked Berkeley Breathed lives in Iowa with a flatulent mixed-breed lab and has trouble with deadlines," he couldn't find anything else to say. Years later, he tried to sell the piece to Penthouse--I'm not making this up--and their fact-checker called to confirm that the writer had watched me get seduced by a woman and her twin teenage daughters in the laundry room of the apartment complex. I'd driven the poor chap over the edge of biographical desperation with my stark boringness. I'm still working on becoming more interesting. This year, I started listening to Celtic music and collecting vintage ray guns. If you don't think that's more interesting, well, then, you agree with my wife.

"He's got issues."

"Every one since 1974."

Honestly, admit it… you've considered it before. What would it be like to mix the Scooby-Doo 'Mythos' and the 'Cthulhu Mythos'? Well, so did we. And seeing as how we're rabid MYTHOS CCG players and obsessed with our favorite cult cartoon Scooby Doo, we figured what the hell, why not just create the ultimate MYTHOS expansion set. And thus, this beast was born.

Went to dinner tonight at Pane Vino Dolce, a neighborhood restaurant so popular, so highly prized, that it doesn't even have a sign outside. Very spare decor. Very spare tables. I had the stuff-encrusted chicken in adjective sauce; my wife had the grouper on a bed of fennel-infused napkins, or something like that. Hers came with shrimp, each of which did a masterful job of impersonating a common pencil eraser; a few bites into my entree I realized that it was, in essence, fried chicken. Except it was Fried Chicken reinterpreted by someone who believed that out of Col. Sanders' 11 herbs and spices, ten of them was salt. (And the eleventh was sea salt.) I shouldn't have been surprised, since the very name of the place - bread wine dessert - leaves out the main course, which ought to tell you something. Good bread.

I decided, however, that my own lack of familiarity with what people are actually buying in bulk was far too shaming, and so I sat down and listened to the ten best-selling albums in the United States according to the July 28, 2001, issue of Billboard. These were, in descending order, "Songs in A Minor," by Alicia Keys; "The Saga Continues…," by P. Diddy & the Bad Boy Family; "Devils Night," by D12; "Break the Cycle," by Staind; "Survivor," by Destiny's Child; "Jagged Little Thrill," by Jagged Edge; "Take Off Your Pants and Jacket," by Blink 182; "Lil' Romeo," by Lil' Romeo; "Skin," by Melissa Etheridge; and "Hybrid Theory," by Linkin Park. I'd caught a couple of minutes of one of the Destiny's Child videos on TV, but, then, so has everyone who has access to a television. As far as I was aware, I had never previously been exposed to the work of Blink 182, D12, Lil' Romeo, Staind, Alicia Keys, or Linkin Park. In fact, I had to ask myself, Who are these people? What do they sound like? And what's with the numbers in the names?

Sagittarius: (Nov. 22--Dec. 21)
Your date will somehow fail to be pacified when told that your tail is not, in fact, prehensile.

Gemini: (May 21--June 21)
A team of FDA physicians and researchers will soon come out with a 45-page, item-by-item recall of everything you've eaten in the past six months.

Leo: (July 23--Aug. 22)
Your love for the classic American folk song "Goodnight Irene" will soon have the media referring to you as the Goodnight Irene Slasher.

Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough and looked don't-fuck-with-me enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife.

The best thing - in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing - about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get hurt, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

It did not matter, Shadow decided, if you had done what you had been convicted of or not. In his experience everyone he met in prison was aggrieved about something: there was always something the authorities had got wrong, something they said you did when you didn't - or you didn't do quite like they said you did. What was important was that they had gotten you. […]

Aug. 7, 2001 | AGAWAM, Mass. (AP) -- For the second time in as many weeks, riders at a New England amusement park were injured in a roller coaster accident.

Twenty-two people were sent to hospitals, mostly with minor injuries, after two cars collided Monday on the Superman Ride of Steel roller coaster at Six Flags New England.

The park remained open through the evening but the ride, one of the park's seven roller coasters, was closed. […]

Filmmakers Allen and Albert Hughes (MENACE II SOCIETY and DEAD PRESIDENTS) will be directing a film based on the FROM HELL series. The film stars Johnny Depp, Heather Graham and Ian Holm and should be in theaters in 2001.

Initially, Kitchen Sink Press optioned the FROM HELL film rights three years ago to Touchstone, and New Line acquired the option in turnaround. However in 1999, Twentieth Century Fox acquired the rights.

Initially, the $30 million project was also initially slated for a September [1997] start on location in London, with a script by Terry Hughes (The Butchers Wife) and produced by JD Productions, with Alan Moore as a consultant.

Then filming was delayed until the fall [1998]. Then the production company split, with producer Don Murphy starting his own production company, Angry Films, as well as having a first-look deal with Columbia Pictures. Murphy will continue to work with his old partner Jane Hamsher regardless of the breakup on the film.

Incidentally, the two are also working on the film version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, also at Fox. At the Sundance Film Festival [1999], the Hughes brothers maintained that they were still interested in making the film.

In 2000, the film finally entered production, still directed by the Hughes Brothers, with a cast featuring Johnny Depp as Inspector Frederick Abberline, Heather Graham as Mary Kelly and Ian Holm as Sir William Gull. The film is expected to arrive on screens in 2001.

VOLCANO, Hawaii (AP) A 26-year-old Navy man was rescued after he fell 85 feet into the summit crater of Kilauea Volcano while trying to retrieve his baseball cap, park officials said.

After he was pulled from the crater on Sunday, Lt. j.g. Scott W. Larson walked to a waiting ambulance and was taken to a hospital for treatment of a broken toe, cuts and bruises, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park ranger Mardie Lane said.

A paramedic and park ranger were lowered by rope and harness to retrieve Larson from a tree that had broken his fall, and all three were raised to safety. Were it not for the tree, Larson would have fallen another 100 feet, rangers said.

NEWARK, N.Y. -- Who stole the garden gnomes of Newark? And who set them up to look like they were playing baseball?

Village police were recently dispatched to a local ballpark, where they discovered 24 ceramic, plastic and concrete figurines posed in various spots around the field as if they were playing baseball.

"We pulled right down into the field with the gnomes, and we were laughing too hard to say anything," said officer Tim Vanderlinde.

As residents of this rural western New York village pondered the question, members of the "Garden Gnome Liberation Front" last week announced they would cease local gnome thefts while they focus on helping start other local chapters.

Garden gnomes have come up missing from lawns across this village 25 miles east of Rochester since the start of summer. Mysterious calling cards signed by the GGLF were left in their places among flower beds.

Anderson was a former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and a winner of three Nebula Awards and seven Hugo Awards.

The fleshy nostrils of dinosaurs have been put in the wrong place by other experts for more than a century, says Lawrence M. Witmer. In a study appearing Friday in the journal Science, he says the dino nose should be at the front of its long snout, not back nearer the eyes as depicted in models and pictures.

YOU WALK INTO A JOB INTERVIEW. You sit down across from your potential boss. You examine this individual and the surrounding office for clues, desperate to figure out if you could stand to work for this person, at this place. Then you spot it, hanging on a wall: A poster of a canoe on a still lake. Underneath is a slogan:

"SUCCESS: Success is a journey, not a destination."

Your first thought is either:

A) Su-per! I am so with the program!

Or:

B) Oh, no. I might as well walk out of here now.

Sagittarius: (Nov. 22--Dec. 21)
Cupid will take aim at your heart next week, killing you with the .45 he keeps handy for major assholes.

Capricorn: (Dec. 22--Jan. 19)
You will soon have some very entertaining stories about how three species of wombats became endangered.

Pisces: (Feb. 19--March 20)
By strange coincidence, this week is the 60,000th anniversary of the invention of the hand ax, a device that figures heavily in your future.

posted Monday Jul 30, 2:33 pm by Dave

Who says those SEC filings and BusinessWire press releases never come in handy?

According to Scholastic's financial projections, there won't be a new Harry Potter novel for their Fiscal Year 2002 (which spans through May 2002). So much for those rumors that the fifth novel would be out in time for the movie."