It’s a phrase that has a number of interesting endings. Sure, there’s damn and darn, but there are also more colorful expressions like rat’s ass, tinker’s cuss, and airborne intercourse.

Anyway, speaking of giving, last week’s column was about Maimonides and the eight levels of charitable giving (and how it relates to the old Batman TV series). You’ve probably noticed that I am not always instantaneous with my column updates. However, I’ve arrived at a reasonable solution. I have added to the sidebar, under current projects, a link that says “The Pun Also Rises”. This is a link to a search for my name on the Transcript site, which should always bring up my most recent columns. As an added bonus, if I am performing at some newsworthy local event, or have been arrested for making jokes at a funeral, it will probably find that too.

My column from yesterday was about cliches. Yes, there should be an accent, but I’m too lazy to find it. For professional correspondence — and this is a trade secret — I tend to use Google to find a page with an accented e, and then just copy and paste that at the bottom of my document, to use whenever I need it with more pasting. But it’s 2am and right now, I’m not feeling professional.

The latest episode of my non-professional freestyled reporting is now available at www.NewsInRap.com. Tomorrow night (well, okay, technically tonight) I’m performing with the Royal Berkshire Improv Troupe at the local theatre, which is also not technically professional. And although I’m not a professional board gamer, I probably spend as much time gaming as one. My latest addiction is Dominion, which we acquired barely a few weeks ago. We’ve already played two dozen games,

Today I ate a pizza at a restaurant called “Hold the Anchovies”, and roughly 10 minutes after I ordered, while sitting at my table, it suddenly hit me: I can’t believe I didn’t order anchovies.

Me!

If you read my column today, you’ll find out that I’m the featured reader tomorrow at Papyri Books. After that, I’ll be performing at the Red Room and probably freestyle rapping in a manner not entirely dissimilar from the News In Rap podcast that I just posted. It would seem to the untrained eye that I have a penchant for self-promotin’ and linkin’, but that’s only because it’s true.

I read a news story that Sarah Palin masks were selling like hotcakes in the two weeks before Halloween. I guess it’s clear what some people are most afraid of. If you want to know what I think people are most afraid of, check out my most recent column. And no, it’s not Sarah Palin.

In other news… well, I’ve been reading a lot of other news. And freestyle rapping about it. A nerdcore beatsmith by the handle of Pelicaine has crafted for me a very charming news show theme song, which got its inaugural use yesterday in my www.NewsInRap.com podcast. Like a hot librarian, I advise you to check it out.

And speaking of other news, I just had to share this tidbit from Losernet. It’s a tiny news item, but basically, a funeral home is trying to convince people that the staff there aren’t creepy and weird. And this is their best idea.

Apparently the RSS feed on this page has stopped working. I’m not sure why, but I guess if you’re reading this, it’s either finally fixed itself, or you don’t need the RSS feed anyway. I will continue poking around and trying to fix it so you can get Reliable Seth Stuff.

Speaking of which, like clockwork, here’s my column from yesterday. I’m still a little sad about that, but I think I made the right choice. Also, now that the presidential debates are over, I’m converting my freestyle rap podcast to a more general news format. I’ll be trying to post one episode a week at www.NewsInRap.com, so go listen to last night’s episode and hear me rap about the news as I read it so you don’t have to.

Or seven, possibly. That’s why you should go read this article about the seven powers we really want to see on Heroes. If you dig it, Digg it. If not, well, then maybe you’ll prefer my most recent column, which was about tissues.

Last week, I performed my stand-up act for the first monthly Comedy Open Mic at a new local restaurant. I used a lot of the same material I used four years ago at a conference in Ohio, but for some reason, it didn’t go over nearly as well. I’d have thought a crowd of humor writers would be a tougher crowd then a bunch of local folks attending a comedy night, but I was wrong.  Oddly, the local folks seemed to really dig the improv we did post-stand-up, which (to my mind) wasn’t a patch on my carefully crafted routine. Oh well; that’s why I do improv stuff.

…fry, fry again.

I’ve always had an unhealthy love of fried food. I am perhaps best known for my signature dish, the fried burrito, which I learned from an old highschool friend of mine. But in general, I’ve always believed that frying anything makes it tastier. My column this past weekend examines why that might be the case. But now that we have a deep fryer, it’s tricky to only use it occasionally. Especially since every time we use it, we end up with delicious food. Most recently, we made vegetable tempura* and fried calamari, which was unsurprisingly delicious.**

Anyway, I remember always arguing with people that frying any food would make it better. When I was young, people would offer ice cream as a counter-example. But having gone out for dinner recently where fried ice cream was on the menu, I must say to those people: Time to find a new counter-example.

* An amusing meal because it lets you eat plates of deep fried food while thinking to yourself “This is probably healthy.”

** Or in the case of the calamari, squidelicious.

I don’t know if you saw this story, but a huge study showed that it’s not just women who make less money than men, but men who believe in gender equality make less money than men who don’t. I wrote a column about this because I was very surprised.

I can’t help but be curious as to what other belief sets are associated with higher earnings. Do racists earn more money? Does a belief in Scientology suggest you’ll have a higher income? (If your name is L. Ron Hubbard, yes!) What about people who enjoy Velveeta? With infinite correlated data points, there are probably a whole lot of really fascinating statistics just waiting to be discovered.

So, my column last Friday was about current health scares relating to contaminated food. One of these was the big powdered milk scandal in China. And then I realized that the other day, I was wearing a “Got Milk?” shirt. And a very very wrong idea occurred to me, which is something along the lines of a “Got Powdered Milk?” shirt with a little stick figure baby with X’s for eyes lying at the bottom.

Nope, much as I may dislike some politicians, I’ll never be able to run for office.

Writing about writing. Although I suppose this blog post is now meta-meta-writing. And every time I mention it, I add another meta. I never met a meta I didn’t like.

Anyway, yesterday’s column was about J.K. Rowling and her lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. And I just finished next week’s column, which was supposed to be entirely unrelated to writing, but I ended up dropping in a footnote about a famous author… I bet you know who.

I sometimes wonder if our perception of time is based entirely on relative lengths of time experienced now and time already experienced previously. Because waiting ten minutes used to seem like a year, but these days years are going by in a matter of minutes, and I have it on good authority that it just gets worse. Bad authority?