From a survey of Domino’s pizza delivery drivers: best pizza tip $$ nights of the year: 1. capture of Saddam Hussein 2. Madonna/Britney kiss most common fake names used: 1. Paris Hilton 2. John Ashcroft Other interesting facts gleaned from the survey: “people with “Dean for President” bumper stickers on cars in their driveways tipped […]

By their dramatic nature, earthquakes and catastrophic floods are the sort of human tragedies that always grab the world’s attention and evoke the sympathy that inspires individuals and governments to reach for their checkbooks. … And when an earthquake renders 70,000 people homeless on the day after Christmas, when people in Western countries are feeling […]

A special note: these are, for the most part, not movies that were released in 2003, but movies that I watched in 2003. Viola, I get to list movies like ‘Death to Smoochy,’ ‘Exotica,’ and ‘Boondock Saints’ alongside ‘X2’ and ‘Identity.’ What fun this is. Categories are basically arbitrary. They are Foreign films, and movies […]

The year draws to a close, even though it’s just another way of adding segmentation to a river: a little curious, maybe a little vain, but at least it’s something that allows us to keep on with the pretense that we know what we’re doing. Another line in the laughably egocentric ledger of human progress. […]

Christmas is a time when things once miraculous have been turned into plasticized mass-produced re-creations whose meaning is incorporated into a wholly self-serving dogma of a Holiday of Consumerism. The sacred and the diverse have been blended together into the mundane. Gift-giving has transcended symbolism to become both an ends and a means, a cycle […]