What It Is: 6/21/10

What I’m reading: Imperial Bedrooms

What I’m listening to: Walking Wounded, You Could Start a Fight in an Empty Room, and High Violet

What I’m watching: Honeymoon in Vegas, Boondocks, and the end of the NBA finals. And then I watched these highlights from Ron Artest’s postgame press conference, which is one of the most joyous things I’ve ever seen:

(The full-length version is here, but I couldn’t get the embed to load properly. Grr.)

What I’m drinking: North Shore #6 & Q-Tonic

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Discovering a turtle, re-enacting Kung-Fu Hustle, and lounging around.

Where I’m going: Nowhere. Except for a visit or two to my office, I likely won’t leave the house much in the next two weeks, except for dog-walks and lunch-breaks.

IMG_2532What I’m happy about: Taking a break from Saturday’s work and going to the NJ Comics Expo (it was about 15 minutes from my home), where I met some older cartoonists and editors and saw a bazillion comics from my youth, now 50-cent fodder in longboxes. Oh, and I saw the Batmobile. I also met Irwin Hasen, the guy who created Wildcat and co-created Dondi, whose solid-black eyes made him the Antichrist of Little Orphan Annie’s world. Mr. Hasen looks about as 91 as he is.

What I’m sad about: How I basically give up the month of June every year. But that’s the job, and it’s preferable to the alternative.

What I’m worried about: Top Companies issue. I’m one profile off-schedule already.

What I’m pondering: Why I downloaded Imperial Bedrooms onto my Kindle. I mean, sure, it was only $9.99, but am I really that interested in how Bret Easton Ellis treats middle age for a bunch of rich Angelenos? Maybe I just need some mental decompression for the next week or so, while I’m writing around 2,000 words a day of pharma company profiles.

Also, I was catching up on past issues of Interview this weekend, and it struck me that there’s just about nobody who would be The Great Get nowadays, that interview subject whom no one else could reach. I mean, sure, there’s Thomas Pynchon, but how many people really care about his writing nowadays? So, I guess I’m wondering, is there one interview that you’d hear about and say, “Wow! I can’t believe they got [x] to sit down for an interview!”?

There’s nothing wrong with you that I can’t fix. With my stats.

Possibly the greatest basketball-to-comics non sequitur ever, courtesy of ESPN’s NBA preview article on Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey:

Morey grew up reading Bill James’ Baseball Abstract and later worked for the stats guru, but his geekier tendencies might actually have more to do with his boyhood love of comic book anti-heroes who cut against the grain, figures like Frank Miller’s Dark Knight. “In a league in which 30 teams are competing for one prize, you have to differentiate yourself somehow,” Morey says. “We chose analytics.”

What’s great is that this article is all about using calm, cool reasoning and “analytics” to explain the decision to trade for Ron Artest!

Bonus: Did I mention that the annual Virtual Memories NBA Preview will be posted on Tuesday morning, just in time for the debut of the 2008-2009 season? I just did!