Serenity’s Journal has a new and most excellent look. Check it out.

I am in ore of her understated cyber-talents.

The Laughing Wolf has a good deal to say about the subject. Take a look.

For those of you who may be following the 9-11 Commission Traveling Dog and Pony Show, please be advised that I have lived in New Jersey all my life, and I have never, ever, ever met a person in the Garden State who talks like Tom Kean.

We prounounce our “R’s” here.

We have a couple Asian-owned produce stores in town. The stores are noteworthy for their cleanliness and their absolutely beautiful and tasty fruits and vegetables. However, I noticed that the owners of the stores make the same kind of mistakes.

The fruits and veggies are displayed, much as one would see them in a supermarket. However, in each grouping of fruits or vegetables is a handwritten sign, which identifies the fruit or vegetable and specifies the price. Here’s the mistake. The signs invariably say:

“apple,” instead of “apples”
“pear,” instead of “pears”
“peach,” instead of “peaches”
“orange,” instead of “oranges”
“carrot,” instead of “carrots”
“pepper,” instead of “peppers”

You get the picture. For the life of me, I could not understand why they don’t use plurals? I thought, “Why don’t they just learn the rule? It’s easy. Hell, maybe I should offer to teach them the rule?”

But then, I got to thinking a little more about it, which caused me to realize that, if I owned a produce store, my signs would say:

“corn,” instead of “corns”
“lettuce,” instead of “lettuces”
“celery,” instead of “celeries”
“kale,” instead of “kales”
“rhubarb,” instead of “rhubarbs”
“cauliflower,” instead of “cauliflowers”

Oy! No wonder they don’t learn the rule. Apparently, there is no rule.

No, wait. Maybe the rule is that fruits are always plural, but vegetables are sometimes singular but sometimes plural. OK, so what is the vegetable rule?

Hair hurting alert!!!!!

English is a bitch. Maybe that’s the rule.

After all my gearing up for the Sopranos and Deadwood, I managed to fall asleep for both shows (not too surprising after a few hours with the Usual Suspects at the Post). I did, however, catch the “west coast” Sopranos at midnight. Because I was still half asleep when the show came on, it seemed a bit ironic that the show featured a complicated dream sequence.

While supposedly getting away from it all in a suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York, Tony is plagued by dreams in which he sees lots of dead folks, ranging from his father, to several people he dispatched himself (e.g. Big Pussy and Ralphie Cifaretto), all the way to his former suicide-successful girlfriend, Gloria Trillo.

I’ve never been a fan of dream sequences, artsy though they may be. For me, they just confuse the hell out of things. Stripping away all the dream baloney, what seems clear is that Tony Blundetto’s former jail buddy (who was involved in persuading Tony B. to do the hit on one of Johnny Sack’s guys) got smoked, and Tony B sought and got revenge. Tony realizes that the shit will now hit the fan with Johnny Sack, and he seems to be contemplating the need to deal with his cousin Tony.

I was too busy trying to sort out Tony Soprano’s dreams from reality to focus on the nuggets that surely were there. I’ll have to give it another look.

I will have to catch up with Deadwood with HBO “On Demand.”

Last night I re-watched the most recent episode of Deadwood. Each episode is definitely worth at least two viewings. Here’s what cracked me up again.

“Now, that’s the way you scrub a f**king blood stain.”

The line was spoken by Al, the evil owner of the Gem Saloon, to the woman with the neurological disorder who cleans the place, after he demonstrated the proper technique to scrub a blood stain on the floor, which remained from the previous evening’s evisceration of a patron.

Peggy Noonan, who went to high school and college in New Jersey, covers the above seemingly inconcongruous topics and more in this piece, which points out why some of us who live in this part of Jersey are just a bit more frightened about terrorism than folks who live elsewhere.

Via Roberto at DynamoBuzz, an excellent Jersey Blog

TJ, husband and his mom came by for a visit and bar-b-cue. She brought this along to nibble on. She provides instructions for putting together this tasty unit here. I figure that she has her eye on Martha Stewart’s gig, knowing that Martha may soon be MIA for a while.

It was delicious, and it went particularly well with champagne. We’re veddy civilized here at the House by the Parkway.

I installed the Google Toolbar (which means that the installation is really, really easy), and so far the score is:

Google toolbar: 41
Pop-ups: 0

It’s great. You can actually see the pop-ups being zapped. Sort of like watching bugs fly into a zapper.

Oh, and it is indeed very handy when in the middle of writing something, you want to do a quick search. It is right there, and you can set it to open a new window for the search.

I’m doing a little happy dance now (not a pretty picture).

Some good news. Bogie’s got a new gig!! The bad news (for us) is that her new job will likely cut into her blogging time.

Not to worry, Bogie. We’ll keep the lights on for ya.