Watching The Defective
by Your Diva, Robin Pastorio-Newman

You wild thing, you! You know keeping your eye on the ball can be a full-time job, and you never know where the ball may bounce next.
 
You're busy busy busy! You're interested in everything. To make matters worse, you're up to your eyeballs in student loans and credit card debt, rendering that 9-to-5 a dire necessity. How are you going to keep up? One answer is the brilliant and busily updated Fark.com. Fark links to stories from newspapers and news services all over the world, hilariously captioning for readers why readers need to read. The site links to everything from serious political developments to the underplanned criminal activity of the seriously not-smart. Feeling uninformed? Bounce over to Fark and hope your cubicle stifles peels of laughter.
 
NASA bounced Opportunity, a second lander, down onto the surface of Mars and immediately discovered the rocky planet also has rock formations. Opportunity beamed back pictures, NASA celebrated another improbable coup and our desktops get geeky new wallpaper! Spirit, NASA's first superball, broke contact and seemed lost, then bounced back to life. Last week turned out to be a great week to wear a pocket protector.
 
Steve Martin, who's bounced from standup comedy to Saturday Night Live, to movies and essay writing, released his second novel The Pleasure of My Company. It's an unorthodox little book about finding love among the neuroses, tics and phobias, written in a level tone and without the usual eccentricities of celebrity writers. Sweet, endearing and smarter than the smartest of cruel shoes.
 
Over the weekend, the Speed Channel featured extensive coverage of the Barrett-Jackson Car Auction from Scottsdale, Arizona. Car auctions are not up Your Darling's, Your Diva's, Your One True Love's usual alley, but this Barrett-Jackson, as every car aficionado knows, is different. Your Beloved's taste runs toward the elegant Art Deco mid- and late-thirties Auburns, Cords and Duesenbergs, while her delectable companion Paulie Gonazalez, equally conversant on methods of building hotrods and stealing them, prefers American muscle cars and Pontiacs in particular. Paulie was so inspired by the workmanship and astronomical pricing he bounced outdoors and removed the dash from his '60 Catalina for chroming.
 
Busy, brainy, brilliant and boffo. Bounce all you want! With our current polar weather conditions and slick surface conditions, we all want some spring in the air.
 

©2004 Robin Pastorio-Newman