Given that my evenings are usually spent drowning my work anxieties with as much alcohol as possible, I'm here to endorse Three Thieves Bandit Pinot Grigio box wine, which has won many prizes, not least for its taste and its lingering afterburn.** The box keeps it fresh and crisp for days, if (unlike me) you don't finish it all in one sitting and--essential for klutzes like me--makes it virtually unbreakable. A bargain at $7.95 for a full liter, you can buy it at Vine Wine, the finest purveyor of fermented grape in the five boroughs. (Also, it comes in juice-box-sized four packs, pictured above, perfect for your little ones' lunchboxes.)

Another thing that is good: J. Robert Lennon's serialized novel Happyland in Harpers. Lennon is a gifted satirist, and Happyland brings to mind a less caustic Japanese by Spring, by the beloved and inscrutable Ishmael Reed.

So far Harpers has published only the first two parts, and so, being desperate for more Lennon, I picked up The Funnies. I feel embarrassed to say I'd never heard of him before this, but this is because I tend to read only books that one finds in the dollar racks at the Strand. You laugh, but I've become really knowledgable about 1983 tax codes and Martha Ray.

(Speaking of funnies, this is excellent.)

Moving right along, for your listening pleasure, we have the unique and spellbinding Cast King, who sounds like a cross between a drunker Harry Dean Stanton and a more sober Hasil Adkins.

Here's another thing that's been alleviating my usual stratospheric levels of irritability: I haven't read Metafilter in over a month. [Ed note: If the Monty Python reference above didn't totally banish me to the Kingdom of Nerdville, this admission will.] Having this particular monkey off my back has given me not only piece of mind but at least five extra hours of work time every weekday. Monk put it best when he observed, on reading a particularly aggravating thread, "...tell me if you don't just want to take some pills that will make you sleep until the internet is no more and everybody's shuffling around naked foraging for nuts and berries." That sums it up nicely, I think.

Finally, I think I have come up with an idea that will make me millions of money. We've all lamented (in a nanosecond of retrospect) a nasty email we've sent. I want to invent a widget, a plug-in, I dunno, for any email client that with one click of a button would switch your email into "pretend mode" and then you could send nasty missives to your heart's content that, rather than going to the recipient, would disappear into the ether. Kinda like one of those plastic steering wheel contraptions you had on your carseat when you were little. That would be tits.

(And since I'm making suggestions for the betterment of society, I would like to see a comeback of the word "tits" as a term of praise.)

*A friend has suggested that we employ the phrase "That's unrelated to the hand" as a response to any nonsequitur. I think that idea is tits.
**This is actually an incredibly nerdy Python reference and not to be interpreted as an actual description of the beverage.