This is what too much random Google-searching will lead to:

From behind a bush scrambles the last remaining Zombie, Zac Hanson, who bites a chunk of Brintey’s shoulder! Britney screams in pain and falls to the ground. The end seems near for her when suddenly Zac’s head is cut off with a large blade by: a non-Zombie Ginger Spice! Ginger helps Britney up.

Britney: Oh, thank you for saving me.

Ginger: No problem. I needed to put my fellow band members to rest.

Britney: But you died two years ago here at Buck’s Rock!

Ginger: Although Isaac Hanson shot me in the head, it was only a flesh wound. I crawled away and recovered in a clinic in Sweeden. I’ve been an ambassador for the UN ever since, deary!

Britney: Oooo!

As some of you may know, it has long been my not-so-secret desire to work for that giant of journalism, Entertainment Weekly. I've been a subscriber for as long as I can remember, and if a week goes by without my issue showing up (or one of those dry weeks after a dreaded "double issue"), I get the sweats.

But after reading this week's issue, I wonder if I should reconsider my longtime "dream job." Huge interviews with Dennis Quaid and George Straight? Sidebars about John McCain, Martha Stewart and Will Smith? Another fat article about country music? Since when did EW become fucking People?? Even the requisite article about The Osbournes mainly focuses on Ozzy's heartwarming role as dottery old family man (albeit with a Vicodin problem). I may not be TRL material myself, but I'm still within the 18-to-34 demo and I say EW has gotten increasingly geriatric lately. When Alan Jackson makes the cover, you know there's a problem brewing. Maybe it's time to start my own entertainment rag. Or, better yet, hook up with some young upstart of a web-zine that won't make me any money, but looks damn fun. Like this one. Nothing's for sure yet, but you might find my byline there one of these days...

* * *

I survived another day of work, though I realize I'm woefully bereft of the proper clothes for it. I manage to unearth a couple of pairs of GAP stretch pants from my wardrobe, but I realized that all of my tops that would be considered "nice" enough for this business-casual office are sweaters. These days the weather has been psycho, hitting 70 one day and the next barely cracking 50. But in any case it's going to get warm soon, and unless I expect to be unemployed forever, I've got to find myself some passable spring shirts. Sigh. Once nice thing about Amazon, they truly didn't give a crap what you wore to work.

Anyway, having managed to dress myself and make it to work on time, I spent a full five hours getting intimate with Excel. I didn't mention before that this company I work for also is involved with producing Puppetry of the Penis, a cultish off-Broadway hit that--near as I can figure--involves well-endowed Australians forming their genitalia into shapes such as "The Bulldog" (I don't want to know). At one point in the day the staff got into a heated discussion surrounding the necessity of the actors to bathe prior to performing. Ah, showbiz.

* * *

The lines between Mike's life and mine are becoming oddly blurred. I already send you readers over to look at his site pretty often because of something he's posted there. Then I went and got a job with his manager, where I spend all day (okay, half a day) fully-committed to the idea of trying to get every human being in the tri-state area to go see 21 DOG YEARS: DOING TIME @ AMAZON.COM (Cherry Lane Theatre, previews start April 15! Tickets available now!). Not that it's a bad gig. It is indeed a great show, I've seen it several times (even paid for most of them!) and I have enjoyed watching it evolve, much like I've watched my own thoughts about my days at Amazon.com change. As I've said before, my main reason for getting involved with this is simply that Mike's a friend, his show is a hoot, and I'm happy to help out where I can.

Going to the office today was odd in a way I didn't expect, though. Although what I'm doing is for Mike's ultimate benefit, I don't really work for him directly. I mean, Mike's not my boss, he's not even around, except for his ubiquitous face chomping the Amazon-labeled bone which is posted on flyers, posters and the cover of his upcoming book. No, I work for Mike's manager, and as such I felt that I was not so much helping out a pal, but in truth pushing a product--a brand, actually--called Mike Daisey^TM. It's like we're not working for Mike, we're working about him. Now if this were some performer I'd never met this would be no big deal (and really, it's no big deal anyway), it just gives this whole thing an added sense of surreality. The weirdest moment was when Mike's manager called and left him a voice mail message, and I couldn't help but think "I know this little piece of news about Mike that even Mike doesn't know about yet." That was strange. I'm sure in some ways it's equally strange for him, but he's probably too busy with rehearsals to notice. :)

After work today I decided to head over to the Rose Center for Earth and Space to check out the space show in the Planetarium (or "Plane- Arium" as they say in South Park). I don't know why I'm moved to pay twice the price of a real movie to sit inside a sphere for a half hour listening to Harrison Ford, but I guess I'm just a sucker for space stuff. The show was okay, the main problems being that it was too short and too dumbed-down for the kids and tourists. I wish they had different shows--a cool one for the kids, a smarty-pants one for people who don't mind if things go over their heads, and a really simple one for the truly stupid. And at least the smart one should be two hours long, with lots of neat shots of Mars and Nebulae and whatever else they got laying around.

After the movie I wandered the halls looking at some neat photographs of the moon, then I took a peek into the gift shop. They had the usual gift-shop swag, with a few cool additions. For one, a softball-sized glass sphere containing water, a little algae, a branch of some sort, and some teensy shrimp ($55). At first glance it's basically just tarted-up sea monkeys, but then again it's kind of cool--an entirely self-contained ecosystem, just add sunlight. You can't really fuck it up. Just don't, like, drop it.

So, skipping that I wandered over to the books. And there I spied Stephen Hawking's newest do on life, the universe and everything, The Universe in a Nutshell. Now, I had just spent the better part of the previous couple of hours pondering the staggering complexities of astrophysics, but I wouldn't call myself particularly literate in such matters. When I tried to read Hawking's last book (A Brief History of Time) some years back, I fizzed out somewhere in the middle, completely lost in his "simplified" explanations (which echoed the time I ambitiously tackled Godel, Escher, Bach at the tender age of 15). But this book is different. See, this book has pretty pictures! I paged through and even though the text is basically incomprehensible, I felt that if I got utterly lost I could at least admire the illustrations until either I got smarter or I find someone smarter to give it to. Either way, I decided, I had to have it immediately.

So I get home, get online, and decide to check up on Mike's blog, as normal. And what do I find but he's put up a link to an article about Stephen Hawking, which references the book I had never, ever heard of before this afternoon, and now hold in my hands! Blimey. Mike! Get out of my mind, damn you!

Hi kids. Can't write much at the moment. Dinner is waiting and I need to get to bed early tonight. Why, you ask? Because I have to go to WORK. You heard it right, folks. Your favorite NYC slacker has a gen-u-wine money-payin' JOB.

Only for two days. I think. And I'm not sure what I'm doing, exactly. Or how much I'll be paid. But heck, it's something to DO, right? And whatever I'm doing will be helping promote the off-Broadway premiere of my pal Mike's show, 21 DOG YEARS. It's a great show, and I'm happy to try to convince these hardscrabble New Yorkers to go see it. Am I a glutton for punishment or what? Anyway, it will be exciting. Or at least interesting. Or at least time-consuming.

Went to a famous Pink Slip Party tonight--at Spa, no less. If any of you saw Made (and you might as well, it's not bad), this is the place where Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau hung out with P. Diddy. I felt so special getting by the velvet rope, while they told the other people (all two of them) that sorry, it was a private party. In truth though, it seems to me that Spa is already old news with the truly hip New Yorkers. They are all going to places none of us have ever heard of, and as soon as we hear of them, they'll go somewhere else. I don't care, I was just there to pimp my resume. I didn't even have a beer.

I'll try to catch you up on the details later. I've got to get some food in me before I die.

Have I mentioned that I’ve passed my six-month anniversary in New York City? Actually I passed it about a week ago, but I’ve been preoccupied with other things. So, six months in the big city, and what do I have to show for it? Well, I’ve seen a lot of museums, been to a few music shows, have attended a party here or there, have had three houseguests, been shopping, seen a bunch of movies, and have eaten out quite a lot.

My repertoire for houseguests has developed a few patterns. I always take people to the legendary Tom’s Restaurant (unfortunately not the one immortalized in Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner, but it should be) for breakfast, to Mitali (or some other Indian place on sixth street) for dinner, and to Halcyon for those post-dinner-but-too-early-to-go-home-yet hours. Daytime activity I generally leave up to the guests, but I help form their suggestions into a travel plan. Lucas was just here, and wanted to go to Central Park and Coney Island. So Friday we met up (after some confusion over multiple Starbucks and multiple Trump Towers) at a Starbucks in Columbus Circle.

[Local Color Interlude: At the Starbucks, an older woman sitting nearby said something to me about the coffee she sent her husband to fetch for her. “This is supposed to be the cawfee of Love,” she said in her thick Noo Yawk accent. I answered, smiling, “You have a husband, you don’t need the coffee of love.” “I do have a husband, that’s right,” she said. “He’s a wonderful man.” It was so cute!]

After a coffee (soy chai for me) warm-up, we walked up the west side of the park, pausing to pay respects at the John Lennon memorial, Strawberry Fields. We proceeded to the American Museum of Natural History, but skipped the dinosaurs in favor of human evolution (we thought it was the real Lucy, but apparently it wasn’t) and the Rose Center for Earth and Space, which had a helpful timeline spanning 13 billion years. Them quasars are fawking kewl.

Saturday, after breakfast at Tom’s, Lucas and I made our way down to Coney Island, despite the fact it was colder that day than it had been all winter. Still, it was sunny and there were a few brave folks riding the Cyclone and other ancient, scary-looking rides. I caught a glimpse of Keyspan park, home of the Brooklyn Cyclones. Have I mentioned that I love baseball? Well, I love even more that a baseball team would name itself after a roller coaster, as opposed to the meteorological event. I can’t wait to see a game there. We stolled along the boardwalk, and I thought it was funny seeing folks running around on the sandy beach wearing parkas and gloves. In the city it’s easy to forget that you live on an island, so I really enjoy getting down to the water. It will be great in the summer, though I suppose much more crowded.

In other news, I did some research on the future Anakin Skywalker by renting Life as a House. The reviews weren’t so positive, so I felt some trepidation, but I really liked it, and our Hayden proved he has the chops to tackle Darth Vader—or anything, really.

Better still, Hayden will be at Celebration II!! I wasn’t holding out any great hope for appearances by key actors in the Star Wars pantheon (the hottest ticket at the last Celebration was three-line bit player Ray “Darth Maul” Park), but for this one the celebs are signing up fast and furious. In addition to the nubile Mister Christensen, author and classic bun-sporter Carrie Fisher will be on hand, as well as Temuera Morrison (Jango Fett), Peter Mahew (Chewbacca), and even Uncle Owen! I’m a little worried that the lines for autographs will be so unbearably long I won’t be able to do anything else, but here’s hoping they find some reasonable way to control the crowds.