So, Mujo Goes To A Nudist Beach and Sees Everyone Talking On Cell Phones. He Crams Toilet Paper Up His Ass, Leaving a Tail, and Says, Look! I'm a Fax Machine!

Read this:

For the English alone, but more for the mordant and devastatingly witty depiction of the impotency of self in history and the writer's soul in purgatory. The best post-911 novel I've read since Powers' Echo Maker.

The ending is a cop-out, but all endings in novels are cop-outs by necessity. Now that I'm reading better (s'funny, the timing), I remember completely how ending a novel satisfactorily - for both author and reader - is the unsolvable problem.

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• But it is good politics.
• But it is good politics.
• True, though who wasn't prepared for the shit-eating?
• Bipartisanship is another word for complicity.
• This could be fun.
• Any doubt we'd be writing the same posts, if .06% truer, had McCain won?
• Your 2012 GOP Preznit nominee?
• The courageous foresight of assholes.
• The courageous compassion of assholes.
• Christers scare the bejeebus out of me.
• Your photoshop of the day.
• Obama's two constituencies.
• What if HRC signs on for State?
• What is the Real Moco?
• Sockpuppetry.
• Rules-lawyering.
• Extreme Beer. Two words: Brooklyn Pilsner.
• New Coover short story (sub rqrd, but you sub to Harpers, so no worries.)
• Meditation on Bond girls. It needs mentioning the two best Bond girls were Steed girls first.

Updates later. Or not.

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So I email good friend Dr Z, a big fan of Steely Dan, this, and he responds:

The other thing is that, besides being believable, and knowing Fagen possibly factual, it is equally funny or not funny whether you like or hate Steely Dan. It is a masterful inside joke.

Almost thirty years ago, while regularly visiting the frontal lobes with Park Mrebilic and Kark Mantarow, I listened to Steely Dan according to Park and Kark's obsessiveness, and it didn't suck.

Think of the classic Grateful Dead joke - what did the Deadheads say when the dope ran out? - and substitute Steely Dan, and true.

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Quick, get this in your head!