THE JO-TEL … where long-form blogging comes to die

My secretary– who I should mention is a very nice person– is dumb. The fact that she is dumb works to her disadvantage as a secretary, something that I put up with so as to not make waves in the office and, also, because having her as my secretary provides me access to lots [...]

“Thetis”
There is nothing scarier that an afternoon, you and your sister on the beach in the bright sun. Hair curving over the bridge. I have a pipe in my mouth and a hunting cap on like Sherlock Holmes. My acumen suits the weather, like when beauty arrived from sea in a clam. I turn to [...]

Friday. For the last three years, October has been the worst. Work is busy right before the holidays and it is also the busy period of the class I teach. I basically have to spend most of my weekends grading moot court briefs and it blows. I did that most of [...]

If you send me an invitation to join LinkedIn, I will ignore it. Not because I don’t like you or your professional skills, but because I have no idea what LinkedIn is or how to pronounce its name.
Love,
Shark

I have probably seen the movie Beaches, starring Better Midler and Barbara Hersey, five times. The first time was when it first came out around 1985. I was five or six. Recently, I have been somewhat of an innocent bystander to Patsy’s penchant for watching it while hungover on the couch. [...]

“Death Valley Dentist”
Pour me five movies and then sidle across the desert. Just be sure to wrap your camera in towels before you film your protagonist, a victim of his own greed, dying in the sun.
“Marble”
Maintaining your posture, you lean up slowly against the pillar. There is a card game going on with [...]

(1) Director Carl Reiner wrote an autobiography called Enter Laughing that (2) was later made into a Broadway play starring Alan Arkin who (3) would later star in the Mike Nichols’ film adaptation of Catch-22 as Yossarrian who, in the novel, is at one point advised by Colonel Cathcart to (4) “exit smiling”.
-Shark

Shark & Stove: Because We’re Better at Watching Movies Than You
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John Sutherland wrote a 2003 article in The Guardian that sought to examine the impact of Cassavetes’ well-known alcoholism on his artistic output. The article, while well-written, was unwilling to take a stand either way on whether he was an artist despite or [...]

I have done a good amount of dumb things. Tons of lazy things, but lots of dumb stuff too. This one might be the dumbest…
On the eve of my marriage, I was buried in work, so Patsy went down to LA before me to help get everything ready (yes, I understand that I am not [...]

Advanced warning, this post is lame. But I stumbled upon some old pictures somewhere in the rusty innards of my weird laptop and, well, actually they were pictures from my wedding so not that long ago, but they got me thinking about what a wonderfully motley thing life becomes as it goes on– specially, [...]