COMING SOON TO A SUBWAY PLATFORM OR THE SIDE OF A BUS NEAR YOU:

• Crime is the disease. He is the prescribed course of antibiotics.
  
• He borrowed twenty bucks last month - and now it's payback time.
  
• You will believe a man can eat a fifteen-pound bag of meal.
  
• Sometimes love has the strangest odor.
  
• That isn't a hat.
  
• He puts the "homey" in "homeopathic surgeon!"
  
• Be perturbed. Be mildly perturbed.
  
• See it again, in focus this time.
  

it's all in lowercase, so you know it must be art:

woke up this morning with light entertainment in my eyes. warm outside, but freezing in the overground walk-in closet bunker i call home - i can see my breath, so i pantomime smoking for half an hour until i start pantomiming bronchial spasms, then i stop. stretched. arms covered in printer's ink and pulp - that tabloid duvet and samizdat pillowcase don't provide much comfort anymore, and besides, i find myself with an almost uncontrollable urge to pee or to run in a big wheel or to eat a breakfast consisting solely of pellets. and i'm all out of pellets. the water's been turned off again, so i can't wash, and if i leave the house, i just know those cheap assholes from the dyslexic school pull my shirt up and try getting yesterday's headlines from my neck and torso. so i think i'll stay in bed today. if the phone weren't on the other side of the room and broken, i'd call up the arts council and ask for another grant - i could call this "sloth #14." but i won't bother. keep it on spec. the critics will think more of me for it.

See? Back already. And the show-offishness must go on (I had something to post regarding an excerpt from Martin Amis' new novel, Yellow Dog, but the Guardian site has taken it down for some obscure reason, so it can wait): Sundays are the days for live-ish broadcasts on This Is Radium Crass, particularly my weekly series designed to showcase some of the not-so-old radio stuff I've gathered over the years, The Gold-Plated Age of Radio. Today (Sunday, despite what the post-date says), I'm presenting episodes from a couple of recent-ish British wireless comedy faves, The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Knowing Me, Knowing You (starring Steve Coogan - best known if at all in the States for playing Factory Records honcho Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People - as his most famous creation, the fatuous and clueless chat-show host Alan Partridge). The broadcast kicks off at 3 PM EDT (with repeats throughout the day likely) if you're interested (see link to your left). Please, someone be interested...

Is anybody still paying any attention? If so, apologies for not doing my part to clog up the pipes with insignificant minutiae for a full month. What can I say? I had a splendidly satirical mock travelogue based on my recent travels to the west coast set to go, only to return home and have my personal life cave in completely almost immediately upon touching down. Now the usual squirmy little attempts at wit that I fling around like a sporadically-constipated ape hardly seem worth it. And I loathe whining self-pity (wine-pitted self-loathing, on the other hand...), so I'm not about to add a "how many bitter tears I wept today" counter to this little corner of the net, or otherwise yak up the miserable confessionals in a pseudo-public forum like this. Writing my way out of this seems, at times, like an attractive option, but the words ain't really coming at the moment. (That said, pecking out this little excuse note is beginning to spark the smallest of flames right now - don't be surprised to see something more substantial here relatively soon, as I'm nothing if not completely self-contradictory.)

Anyway, this is just a public notice of apology to everyone who's expecting something from me, whether it be discs, dubs, books, reviews, critiques, phone calls or e-mails. Or blog entries. Gimme a little time, folks.