After two months of health wobbles, I am way behind.  On a lot.  Over 100 emails stacked up.  Holiday shopping not done.  The book is a race against time.  And here we are in the greatest constitutional crisis since Nixon, and it’s only gonna get more interesting, and I can’t even find time to blog, rant, joke, and complain about the richest bunch of lies which may ever plop in our laps.

But I’m well enough to travel, and so I’m taking my planned trip to Australia.  No way I’m missing this trip.

I’ll be gone anywhere from a week to a month, depending.  What this means for the blog we’ll all find out together.  I might fall asleep on a beach and be eaten by sharks, flood the site with pictures of cute wallabies, miss complaining about this criminal White House that I suddenly burst into frantic ranting, or look too Lebanese in the wrong neighborhood and wind up in intensive care.

You’ll just have to pop back after your own holiday.  Next post from Oz…

This came in the email from a reader who wants to remain anonymous.  Why, I have no idea.

Maybe they’re worried that Bush has ordered the NSA to secretly wiretap pudus.

They wouldn’t mind.  Pudus love tapping on wires.  Tap, tap, tap, they go.  Sometimes they even dance, their tiny trotters making a sound that makes them giggle.  Tikky-tikky-tik, tikky-tikky-tik-tik.

What the NSA doesn’t realize is that this is actually a code.  "S-T-O-P-L-I-S-T-E-N-I-N-G" they are saying.

Pudus are very sophisticated little animals.

Just a reminder — they’re open for suggestions from the public.  (Hint, hint.)  And it’s a fabulous way to find other blogs you’ll enjoy.

Have fun.

David Ruttenberg is one of my oldest and dearest friends.  I have no brothers by birth, but if I could choose, he’d be one.

We met about 20 years ago in Chicago, where we were both working for a
company that designed and built custom audio mixing consoles.  Our boss
was a well-meaning jerk whom we both liked very much and quite loathed,
depending on the day.  So we bonded while walking in 14-degree weather, eating
Vietnamese food, comparing the latest outrages, and trying to figure out how to escape being 23 years
old.

I moved out here, quit the music business, and started doing whatever the hell it is I do.  David moved to Florida and has become an
accomplished and sought-after producer, engineer, and composer, working
with people like Stevie Wonder and Peter Gabriel.  He’s pretty brilliant, frankly.

After entirely too long, David has finally just released his own first CD,
and — this is very much what kind of person he is — every dime of
profit will go to Margaux’s Miracle, a foundation in South Florida devoted to fighting various childhood cancers.

Sounds like a deal to me.  I’m proud as hell of the guy, and I want to say so in public.

Great music that saves lives.  If that isn’t a cool holiday gift, I don’t know what it.

Courtesy Aussie bud Jono, we learn of this:

He suggests, and I have to agree, that the program may have been tried with more success in the west, although the hybrids are apparently now used as TV anchors and pundits.