Yes, she says, doing a short victory lap around the laptop.

I have gotten to Round Three in the BlogMadness Tourney. I am up against a fierce competitor in this round, the witty and evil Charlie of "Where the Hell Was I" and his entry "Can I Buy a Damned Clue Please?". And as I write this, he's ahead of me in votes.

Yes, he's funny, but I'm heartfelt and poignant, dammit. Don't you guys watch the Oscars? AIDS and death is supposed to beat funny every time. So go out there and cast your votes for "Back Home". Please. Please?

Thank you. We can now go back to my usual bitching and moaning about life, the universe and everything.

I'd like to take this opportunity to list ten random things that I find infinitely more compelling than Janet Jackson and her nipple shield. The RLA says that all this brouhaha reminds him of the scene in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex where the giant boob runs amok, and bounces around smooshing people and lactating at them.

1. "President" Bush's AWOL record from the National Guard
2. Why all NASA projects on Mars go wonky (who or what doesn't want us to see what or who?)
3. A multi-trillion dollar nation debt
4. The odds of the Florida Marlins getting a decent baseball stadium in Dade County
5. Paris the city, not Paris the one-pose wonder (does she really think that the 3/4 view and the downward chin diminishes the length of that nose? Puh-leese. The woman looks like a Borzoi.)
6. Speaking of blue-bloods, The Westminster Dog Show
7. Bollywood
8. The Patriot Act
9. What "pipeweed" really is in the LOTR Trilogy
10. My dog, the Jack Russell Terrierist

Check it out: P.J. O'Rourke put a comment on my story about him. He corrected the spelling of his own name (dopey me) and took me to task for implying that the Lone Star is still in existence. I didn't, but it was sloppy writing on my part, and I accept the criticism.

I was so happy to hear from P.J. that I replied to the address he left on the comment. But, alas. If it was really and truly my curmudgeonly idol P.J. who left that comment and address, he didn't want to hear back from me, because the e-mail I sent thanking him for the note came back as "return to sender, address unknown. No such number, no such home."

In the interest of having the last word, here is the note I sent to P.J.:

"If you are, indeed, the REAL P.J. O'Rourke, I'm flattered that you've read my blog and took the time to correct my spelling. I'm also flattered that you chose not to correct my memories of the night we met. But that would be flattering myself to think you'd remember.

I've corrected the spelling of your name in the entry, but I think it was a matter of tense that made you think I was implying that the Lone Star still exists. I'm well aware that it is a thing of memory. Alas.

But then, Wo Hop's (downstairs, 17 Mott Street) is also just a fond memory.

Again,

Thank you so much for writing.

LA

"Nobody wants to hear what you have to say. You will only tell us what we are doing wrong. It doesn't have to been done right, it only has to be done."

The bitch won this one.

My dead friend Gary used to call it arbitrary use of inconsequential authority. I call it working with assholes.

At nine this morning, the PR office approved my new site design. I made a couple of their arbitrary changes, knowing full well that once they saw them in action, they'd hate them. I sent the design off to be made real.
At two this afternoon, the PR office called to say they'd changed their minds about the morning approval and wanted everything different.

My boss called the PR boss, who wouldn't take his call, and left for the day without calling him back. Her flunky couldn't say what was wrong or unacceptable with the design except that I'd done it.

Later in the day I received another call, from someone much higher up the food chain. Based on a misunderstanding of what they were looking at, I was told to remove all the links from our site to the on-line baby photos. The argument was made that we have a hard enough time keeping our babies safe from baby-napping without putting their little pictures on the web.

Yep. Potential baby-nappers shop for babies on-line, I guess.

To steal one of my favorite Dilbert lines: Rats cry when they hear about my job.

I'm off to make myself a slushee. I have a little kid-type ice shaver, and I'm going to make one in my favorite flavor: martini.

Chin chin, sweeties.

Someone asked about an item on my 100 Things list: they wanted me to tell the whole story about the night I met P.J. O'Rourke in a bar.

Let me set the stage. It is March, 1977, and I am living in New York City, in the Village, to be exact. I have just turned 22. This is the opening night party for what will become, for a time, one of the hottest night clubs in the city, The Lone Star Cafe. There is a sizable contingent of Texans living in New York at the time, enough that the New Yorker makes up an acronym (TINYs: Texans Living In New York) and many jokes for/about them.
The Lone Star is at the lower end of 5th Avenue, and sports on its roof a 10-foot sculpture of an iguana, complete with red neon eyes. Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys will become the unofficial house band. I will meet BB King and Lucille there. I will see and hear most of the best country/rock/blues bands of the day. My girlfriend and I will personally cause the cut "Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goal Posts of Life" to be removed from the jukebox because we will play it over and over and over and laugh ourselves sick each time.

But that's all in the future. This is opening night, and they are throwing a Texas Independence Day Party to introduce the bar to the city. And I am there, wearing, what is for me, my casual uniform: a Hawiian print shirt and a pair of army fatigues. I'm drinking shots of Cuervo Gold and backing them with Dos Equis Darks. I am slightly drunk and very, very jolly.

I see, across the room, one of my personal heros. There is PJ O'Rourke, editor of the National Lampoon, one of the best and the brightest of my generation. He is tall and handsome and arguably the funniest person I have ever read. He has not yet become an apologist for the Right Wing. I am going to meet him. I just need to think of an opening line that would be worthy of his genius (and mine).

I go up to him, poke him gently in the ribs with my beer, and say "Hey! Who are you and what are you doing with PJ O'Rourke's face on the front of your head?"

He looks down his patrician nose, from his great height of six-foot and change and says "I AM PJ O'Rourke. What do you want?"

I say, quoting PJ, as a matter of fact: "Lick you all over for a dime. C'mon PJ, say something funny."

What he said was "Get the hell away from me." So I did.

I ended up talking to a man who was a writer for the Atlantic Monthly (I think. There had been a bit more tequilla and beer by then.) We were brilliant. The banter and rapier-like wit between us was worthy of the best odd-ball comedy of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Or Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. He finally said, rubbing his cheeks, where they hurt from having laughed so long and so hard, "You are the funniest woman I have ever met in my life. You need to meet my friend, because he's the funniest man I know. Hey! PJ, come over here, I want you to meet this girl."

PJ still didn't find me amusing "We've met." and took George and left.

Somewhere around 3 in the morning a guy tried to sing the Texas A&M fight song. He was thrown out into the snow by a very angry mob of UT alumni (HOOK 'EM HORNS) and the doors were locked behind him. I had found my neighborhood bar.

PS: there's still time to vote on my BlogMadness entry "Back Home."

Several years ago, my then-boss said to me words that have remained seared on my brain. She said them in front of witnesses. She said:

"I don't want you to come to this meeting. Nobody wants to hear what you have to say. You're only going to tell us what we are doing wrong. This doesn't have to be done right, it only has to be done."
Today I had to go to that same person's office and talk to one of her flunkys about the same topic that she didn't want to hear about then. The bulk of my conversation went like this: "I really couldn't say." "I don't know the answer to that." "Really? You'll have to talk to my boss about that."

Believe it or not, that was good on my part because what I really wanted to say was: "I'm not about to stick a hand into that tar baby. There's no fucking way I'm touching that topic with a ten foot pole." "Why would it be any of your business?" and "Fuck you and die a slow, lingering death. You are an incompetent bitch working for an incompetent idiot bitch and you have absolutely no clue about anything."

Then I came back and sat in my boss's office for twenty minutes and cursed like a sailor for having had to suffer through the meeting. I am a foot soldier in a turf war and just because they're losing, that doesn't mean that the other party isn't going to inflict casualties and damage wherever possible.

No wonder I had a feeling of dread all week.

I came home and sat in the big comfy chair and listened to the rain on my roof. I finished a book. I drank hot tea. I played with my dog. I'm feeling much better now, thank you.