I am fascinated by Junkyard Wars. It's a great show.

I'm in Little Rock for a wonderful Turkey Day. If you plan on driving on I-40 anytime soon, you might want to take the pig trail down to Ozark, and then take 64 and avoid I-40. A 3 and a half hour trip yesterday turned into a 5 and a half hour trip. Damned construction.

Mike has made it to Guanajuato (which, as near as I can tell, means something about bat poop, I think.). It looks like he intends to stay there for a week or two or such to get his Spanish skills better. He seems to be having a great time, despite all the bat poop. Maybe you should write to him. Traveling by yourself can be lonely.

Speaking of traveling by yourself, I have two weeks off soon. I've decided that I'm going to take a mini-road trip and travel all around the back roads of NW Arkansas for a day, going to all sorts of little flea markets and such. I always have said that I wanted to go exploring, but I never take the time. So now I'm going to take the time. Should be fun. Hopefully I'll find lots of really cool records.

Neat quote from David Sedaris on Dave Eggers; I find this interesting as a bookseller:

"In conversation, Sedaris is rather like his writing: funny, sharp-witted, but seldom really mean. Except when the subject moves to a certain young writer whose first book's back cover featured an admiring blurb from Sedaris himself. An act for which he received little thanks. 'Dave Eggers is a huge pain in the ass. A huge pain in the ass,' says Sedaris. 'I went on a tour last year and he had just been on one before me, so I was visiting a lot of the same bookstores he'd been to. And I would go to stores that were actively unselling his book. Like, someone would go to the counter with the book [A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius] and the staff would say, "Actually, that book's not very good. No one likes that book. You should read this instead." Because Dave Eggers would have been in that book store the week before and yelled at the people who worked there and treated them horribly. He's a horrible person...but he's a really good writer.'"

Via Kottke.

It got too damned cold.

I usually love the cold, but I'm just not feeling it this year. I want warmth in my bones.

I have always loved Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. If you haven't read it, you're missing some spectacularly amazing science fiction.

If they do it right, it could be amazing TV.

Rockin' out to Mr. Roboto.

A very odd thing happened yesterday.

My friend Wil, who went to high school with my friend Clint, who used to be my roommate (before he moved to LA;they're slowly working on a comic book together) came up to see me. Wil's mother is from Okinawa. Wil knows about my obsessions with exotic or strange cuisines, and so he brought up a package of Japanese Curry for lunch. It was quite good. We made Chicken Curry, and added carrots and potatos and onions. As far as I understand it from Wil, the Japanese style of curry is very influenced by the English notion of curry. Consequently, it's a very different thing from Indian or Thai curry. It tasted kind of like someone took the sauce from beef stew and added curry powder to it. It's not what I thought of as curry, but it quickly grows on you.

So, after lunch, and after watching My Neighbor Totoro (done by the same guy who did Spirited Away), we went to the Korean Market on South College, and to the Ozark Natural Health Foods Co-Op.

While we were at the Co-op, the check out girl asked us if we were brothers. Wil is half Japanese, but has long hair and a goatee. I have longish hair and a goatee. I GUESS I see how someone could ask that. The odd thing, is that people used to ask that about Mike and me, whenever we would go somewhere. Same thing with Clint, back when we both had long hair.

I guess I just look brotherly or something.

According to Mark Pilgrim's neat little app, I should be reading the following sites:
greg.org
NPR
Fray Day 6
Mena Trott
The Raven
and Blogging Network Northwest Chick

It mostly works with blogs and sites like that.

Well, Mike has made it past Tijuana and has made it all the way to Mazatlan. You can see pictures of Tijuana here, thanks in large part to our friend Nick. He's doing the updating for Mike. You'll have to page down some.