It’s called gratitude, and that’s right!

Thankful is not my default setting. Open up the panel on my back, and you’ll find “Critical,” “Curmudgeonly,” “Crazy,” and “Skeptical Skeletor,” but “Thankful” is practically a hidden button, squirreled away in a tiny recess that can only be reached via a modified paperclip, like your car’s time-setting function. It’s not that I don’t have a thousand things to be

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Fragments of Dune: The Jake Ten Pas Story

From this day forward, whenever I have the blues, I’ll pray to St. Jodorowsky. For last night, as it was likely written in his original 3,000-page manuscript for “Dune,” I had a religious experience while watching the documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune.” It is entirely possible that my viewing of this documentary, based on the cult filmmaker’s failed attempt to bring his

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Do The Downward Dog Catcher

Damn I hate Downward Dog. If it was an actual dog, I would put it down. Every time the yoga instructor indicates that it’s time to transition into this position, I want to euthanize myself. Whatever sadist thought of this shoulder-grinding aberration of bodily positioning was a sick dog, and deserved to get Old-Yellered with extreme prejudice. The fact that

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Run The Boules

“You gotta know when to boule them/ Know when to school them/ Know when to play a card/ Know when to flail. You never trade your token/ Unless you’re in the Viper Pass/ There’ll be time enough for cackling, once the ship has sailed.” – “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers (in an alternate dimension where Fireball Island, aka Ile Boule

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Asleep in Treme

You wouldn’t think a show set in post-Katrina New Orleans would be a smile factory. Perhaps that’s the alchemical magic of TV right there: It can take an experience that must have been hell to live through and turn it into something so life-affirming and brimming over with infectious groove that your squirms turn to funky grooves. Soon, you’re dancing

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