Mashed Potatoes Anonymous

Tonight in Santa Monica!

FREE.  All night long. Art. Music.

Be there.

Were I in a street brawl, my trash talk would go something like this:

"Do you have a million cobwebs up your butt, or what?"

and

"I'll punch your balls into the sun and your muff over the moon."

The first part is what I was saying when my dream woke up a minute ago.

Where the Funke are my cats right now.

What if someone's nickname was Crawlspace. Is that someone's nickname? I don't think I want it for my nickname. I feel like I would have had sex with CS at 18. "That one time when me and Crawlspace were in Skullet's van, and we were all fucked up on nitrous, and we didn't have any lube, but Crawl had dumpsterdived some Palmolive . . . "

That is the kind of story you get when you hang out with 'space.

I just ruined a perfectly lovely name. So gross now.

There is a remake happening of The Man Who Fell to Earth? Does this one also show David Bowie's wiener? Is it too late for me to cast the alien? I choose Juliet Landau.

Vallery sent us a bunch of our catalogs to sell in our shop. The gallery only ships via FedEx, so ordering it in the US, or almost anywhere outside Western Europe becomes prohibitively expensive, so they agreed we should sell it ourselves as well.

We ship our international orders via Airmail, which is surely less reliable (and no tracking number available), but it is less than half the price (It will be $14 US for shipping if ordering internationally).

Buy it here (2nd item down).

I’m going to come right out and say it: Cat Deeley is the best host on television. What do you mean, who? Cat! Cat Deeley! She stepped in the second season as the host of So You Think You Can Dance to replace the walking turd that was Lauren Sanchez, and the show (already fantastic as a showcase for raw talent) has been all the better for it since.

Tall, blond, lanky, and sporting a cheeky English accent, she manages to look glamorous in whatever she wears—even a dress seemingly made from pink Reeses Peanut Butter Cups wrappers. More importantly, and unlike many presenters out there, the woman reeks with sincerity. When one of the show’s couples have danced their asses off, she’s the first one on stage applauding crazily, beaming and enthusiastic for them.

Many hosts barely manage to cope with the mechanics of their show. When Ryan Seacrest is revealing weekly voting results on American Idol and pulls one of his confusing “Blake, the audience has spoken, and they feel the opposite of not not disliking you. You may sit down,” stunts, he comes off as some kind of smug dick. Cat, when she’s asked to do the same sort of tension-inducing ploys, sighs and shakes her head in frustration as if to say, Oh, bugger, those naughty producers have gotten me again, too! She’s every contestant’s big sister, offering hugs and condolences when they leave, and gushing with enthusiasm when they’ve done well. On a recent episode, when one of the female contestants had a wardrobe malfunction and limped through the last part of her dance with a pinky toe hanging out of her ballroom slipper (ouch!), Cat actually flung herself onto the floor the moment the routine was over and personally stuffed the wayward digit back into the slipper, without making it seem like she was grandstanding for attention.

I want to see Cat working on The View. I want to see Cat with her own talk show; she couldn’t be any worse than most of them out there. I want to see Cat hosting Survivor. No, The Amazing Race. No, throwing herself into Heidi Klum’s place on Project Runway and coming off as the sanest person on the show. I want more Cat. Lots of Cat. Cat-a-mundo.

Cat for President!

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For the two and a half of you that were interested, I finally have up my best shots from my visit to Toronto two weeks ago. Enjoy!

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Every single day I think about how I don't want to get syphilis, have my nose rot, and have to wear one of those silver metal noses. I have also mentioned it to a bunch of people. Here is the real secret truth: I don't want to get syphilis. I don't want my nose to rot. I do want to wear one of those silver metal noses. I do. Is that vain? Do you want one too now?

My summer shows are Swingtown, Mad Men, The Middleman, and That Mitchell and Webb Look. It's all very exciting for the one that we call Me.

Back in 2002 when I originally wrote the young adult adventure novel, The Horns of Cassaforte, long before it was ever bought by the nice people at Flux and retitled The Glass Maker’s Daughter, I’d originally envisioned the book as the first in a series. I had a clear vision of the next two books, too. The Pirates of Cassaforte would follow, and start with sea battle, a shipwreck, and a rather genteel boy making an uneasy alliance with a nearly-feral girl against pirates targeting the city-state of Cassaforte. The third book, Pilgrims of Cassaforte, was to be all about the younger brother of Risa Divetri, heroine of The Glass Maker's Daughter: a school pilgrimage to a shrine in the countryside, and a political kidnapping.

And at the time, I had to make a decision—was I going to write sequels for a book that I hadn’t sold, or was I going to move on to something else? I was unpublished in 2002, and it seemed to make more sense to move on to a different project that might sell, so I started a novel called Kin (which I never finished, since I sold the idea to You Are So Cursed! while I was writing it. Kin did get reworked and overhauled and completely transformed into the world of Bedlam, Bath, & Beyond, however, so no creative idea is really ever wasted).

Last month, however, my nice editor at Flux asked my agent if I might please provide him with some proposals for two sequels to The Glass Maker’s Daughter. Did I have anything in mind? Boy! Did I!

I’ve spent the last three weeks writing up synopses of the two sequels I originally wanted to write, way back when. And let me tell you, having to sketch out the plot of a book before I put a single world to paper is an ass-backwards way to write.

( Thoughts on plotting. )

Could those of you with Facebook accounts out there (you know who you are, throwing sheep at me and whatnot), become fans of J. D. Warren? My pseudonym would greatly appreciate it.