Ben Mirov's "Taco Wolf"

Says poet and small-press darling Ben Mirov in a recent blog post, regarding the image above: "This is probably going to be the cover of my next book."

Incidentally, you can get a copy of Mirov's most recent book, "Ghost Machine" -- the winner of the latest Caketrain chapbook competition and the book I'm currently reading between bouts of chasing my seven-month-old away from the television cords -- here.

Dan Walsh's "Odds of Annoyance"

While doing research recently for a Genre Whore blog post on the existentialist genius that is the website Garfield Minus Garfield, I stumbled upon the blog of the site's creator, Dublin-based artist, musician and writer Dan Walsh.

Among other gems, the blog -- travors.com -- includes the following keen and wonderfully depressing observation, posted Feb. 22 and reprinted here with permission in its entirety. The post is titled, "The odds of annoyance."

"At the age of 34, with some good luck and modern medicine, you could say I'm less than half way through my life. Taking that as a given, let's make a few assumptions:

> I started interacting with other people, through speech and actions, around the age of four.

> That gives me 30 years of interaction with other humans.

> During that time I've met many people and been in many situations. Sometimes these people have been annoying, and annoying things have happened.

> Let's be optimistic and say I'll live to 100. That means I've had, roughly, a third of all the interactions with other humans, that I’ll ever have.

> If that is the case, and we take into account some basic laws of probability, then that means I probably haven't met the most annoying person I'll ever meet.

> In other words, the most annoying thing that will ever happen to me, probably hasn't happened yet.

This is pretty distressing.

I've met some huge assholes in my time. HUGE.

Casting my mind back on the scale of all the annoying things that have happened to me, inevitably leads me to this conclusion:

Sometime in my future, I'm going to be kicked in the balls by George Bush, while he sings 'I Gotta Feeling' by the Black Eyed Peas."

Puts things in perspective, no?

Bryan Charles to Release a Memoir in October

Former local and fellow Gull Lake High School alumni Bryan Charles announced on his Facebook page today that his forthcoming memoir, "There's a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From," will be released in October.

The book -- which Charles has described on his website as a memoir of his first few years in New York City (after leaving the area surrounding our native Kalamazoo, Michigan) -- follows his stellar novel "Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way" (Harper Perennial, 2006) and the recently released "Wowee Zowee" (Continuum, 2010), a contribution to the 33 1/3 series of books focused on classic music albums.

Charles was working in one of the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11 -- he wrote a great short story about it, published here -- and it will be interesting to see how he addresses that in the forthcoming book, if at all.