news

{2008} {2007} {2006}

Irving the Snowchicken is Coming to Town

Forget Christmakkah and Festivus. Our interfaith holiday involves a magical rooster who fills the children’s pants with presents… I wrote this essay on our family’s crazy-fun solution to “the December dilemma” entirely for my own amusement; it was miraculously given prominent play on Salon.com and has generated a ton of highly entertaining response (read the comments here)

Parenting feature on Reuters

Reuters just picked up my feature story on parents’ willingness to come clean about their most humiliating acts of stupidity. Read the whole uncut piece here. The piece grew out of a recent essay involving my five year old daughter, a bad case of the hiccups and a gorilla head, a story that friends and I are turning into a short web video. Stay tuned…

Paperback drops

Rejuvenile is out in paperback from Three Rivers Press. It’s gorgeous, shiny-as-a-toy and at $11, cheaper than a Wii. Order a copy today and tackle a few of the deep imponderables contained therein:

• Are rejuveniles freespirited romantics or hopelessly gullible tools of a vast Madion Avenue conspiracy?

• Why didn’t rejuvenile greats J.M. Barrie, Dr. Seuss or Hans Christian Andersen ever have actual kids of their own?

• How long until Nike launches a high performance shoe system for skipping?

• Are adults who live at home with their parents forging a new interdependent family model or just suckers for mom’s lasagna?

• Is the color of Rejuvenile’s dust jacket best described as yellow, buttercup or goldenrod? 

On the radio

I’m set to appear tomorrow on “Jonesy’s Jukebox,” the radio show hosted by ex-Sex Pistols codger-freak Steve Jones. I’ll be one of three “guest jurors” on a two-hour segment in which he’ll play songs and we decide if said songs are “pants” (bad) or “mustard” (good). Not sure what’s up with the pants or the mustard or why I was asked to appear—must be my gig as music consultant on the Showtime series “Weeds.” Show airs on Indie 103.1 FM from 12-2 pm with a rebroadcast from 6-8 pm.

A Dating Column? Wha?

The L.A. Times just published my column on dating and how my own rather pathetic record with the ladies relates to the self-help juggernaut “The Secret.” The Times website has the abbreviated, family-friendly version; read the full uncensored version here, in the CLIPS section. 

Book review in LA Times

I just reviewed Neal Pollack’s new book about struggling to stay cool in the cultural dead zone of fatherhood. Pollack is a fellow Angeleno with a distaste for Barney and an obsessive desire for his kids to appreciate good rock and roll. It’s a very funny and thoughtful book, and Pollack is keeping a great Blog about the ongoing hilarity of raising his son Elijah. Elsewhere in blogland, here’s a review of my review.

And we’re off!

Three random thoughts on the purpose, construction and organization of this brand newish website:

1 - This site replaces a crappy but serviceable one I made with an EZ-Web Designer Kit six or seven years ago - the main purpose of which was to eliminate the chore of Xeroxing and envelope-stuffing every time I pitched a story. I put the first site together with the help of a friend who I then bugged every time I wrote something new. Now he’s busy being an attorney and raising a family, so it only made sense to create a site I could futz with myself (thanks to the backend application Expression Engine) without alienating friends who actually work for a living.

2 - All praise to Susie, Travis and Matt at Hop Studios, the best little web shop in the land. Cool folks, great techies and artful designers - ideal (and affordable) partners for creative sorts who need a web presence but need help with implementation. Hire them and support expatriate Americans who fled to Canada after Bush was elected!

3 - Re. the pictures on the right hand columns - the potted succulent plants that appear over there on the left (and again on the APPEARANCES page) were photographed at Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA; the boy and girl figures that appear on the HOME and CONTACT pages can be found at the Fairyland park in downtown Oakland.

4 - Feel free to drop me a line if you have any suggestions, comments, questions or spot any errors.

Rejuvenile book group online

Here’s a chance to join a book group - without ever stepping into a stranger’s living room, drinking bad Merlot or enduring the Deep Thoughts of a frustrated English major.

An online discussion group has begun posting messages about my book Rejuvenile. So far a dozen readers are participating, arguing points, swapping stories and picking apart my precious narrative thread by thread....

For this (and so much else), I have my wife Jenji to thank. The book group was organized by fans of Jenji’s Showtime series Weeds which just wrapped up its thrilling second season and which is honestly an incredibly good and funny program, and not just because this season has included not one but THREE product placements for the book. So if nothing else, Rejuvenile has found an audience among stoner premium cable web addicts.

If you’d like to join the fun or read what a gang of surprisingly funny and insightful readers have to say about the book, follow this link to the Showtime Weeds message board. You’ll have to register with the site, but it’s no big whup.

Rejuvenile paperback coming soon

Lighter! More affordable! Just as yellow! Crown/Random House will publish the paperback of my book Rejuvenile on April 24, 2007. Preorder yours now.

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