Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

Rumors persist that Cher has Indian heritage. Are they true? If you watch this video, the whole half breed thing strikes you as a little dubious: Cher rocks the outfit, but she's precariously perched on what appears to be a horse that is almost dead. It makes you wonder what kind of Indian would run down to a ponyride, toss aside some ten year old birthday girl and commandeer her mount. Cher's riding style is also suspicious. It is excessively upright. But let's look at the alleged facts: If you reference Wikipedia , you will find that "Cher's father, John Sarkisian, was an  Armenian  truck driver with drug and gambling problems, and her mother,  Jackie Jean Crouch  was an occasional model and bit-part actress with Irish, English, German, and   Cherokee  ancestry." Yahoo Answers reports: " Her mother is of French and Cherokee descent. Her father is of Armenian descent. Cher was born in California and her father left her and her mothe...

Pre-Foosball. Mark on Pier 57 We were on our way back from Pier 57, a pock-marked slab of ancient asphalt and the perfect place for Mark to learn how to ride his spiderman bike. There had been a lot of motivational shrieking. The kid almost pulled off a Triple Donut Dare, but then his chain snapped and that was the end of that. Wheeling Mark's freshly dead bicycle across a park by the west side highway, we spied a lopsided foosball table tucked amidst the shrubs. Of course we stopped for a game. It was me vs. Tom and Mark. I won, final score 5-3. I scored 7 of the goals. I'm a wild kicker and Tom and Mark were missing half their little guys.

Dear Apple, Maybe you think you are making my life easier with these automatic backups and lack of a "Save As" option, but in actuality, you are causing me to go insane. Every presentation I give is a variation of an earlier one. So my workflow is this: open up the deck I presented last week to a prospect with the filename "Deck for Mary Smith," begin to edit it for Sam Jones, save-as the new deck "Deck for Sam Jones." Except with the new Keynote, this workflow is impossible. As the lesser of evils, I selected the workflow option to make an automatic backup of the deck I open up. So as a first step in the new workflow you've forced on me, I have two files: one named "Deck for Mary Smith"  and the other named "Deck for Mary Smith-backup." Except the "Deck for Mary Smith-backup" is actually the deck I presented to Mary Smith, and the "Deck for Mary Smith" is actually the deck I want to present to Sam Jones....

American Rust   This book I just read, " American Rust ," takes place in a small Pennsylvania town named Buell. It's a fictional place where the steel mills shut down and everyone is a meth addict. In other words, it's a postcard from my youth. What I like about this book is that every character gets shafted. Shafted figuratively and even literally, as one character was in prison. I reek with schadenfreude , you see. I rub it all over my head like glitter and boil it in my tea. It's very decadent, untoward and unsatisfactorily fleeting. Almost immediately after indulging in any amount of black-hearted gloating, I feel the beady stare of the Evil Eye . If you are an old Jewish woman on the Upper East side, recognizing good fortune is a sure-fire way to attract demons who will take it away. I frantically ward off them off by pretending to spit three times: ptiu ptiu ptiu. There is magic power in showering spittle upon bystanders. You should know this, Bubbe...