Brian here. Sorry for the absence. Had kind of a busy week. Not only working on the last of my papers, but also doing MFA/social things. Fun times. But let me get right to the breaking news...

Brittany Murphy died? At 32? Crazy. I never followed her work closely, but I liked her. Both the CNN and BBC News articles mentioned Ashton Kutcher's Twitter update. CNN then went on to quote from two or three other famous people's Twitters. Look, it's cool if celebrities want to use Twitter. And it's cool if they want to use Twitter to offer condolences (however tacky a forum to do so that seems to me). But seriously, CNN? You're going to use Twitter as one of your main sources of information in the article? Granted, not a whole lot of info has been released (probably) since the story is still so fresh. But why not just make a shorter article, like BBC News did?

Ugh. I wanted to do something funny here since I haven't done something funny in a while. Instead, I just ended up cutting a poorly-written old-man rant about the internet and how it leads to stupid people doing stupid shit all the time. (I cited the IMDB message boards for Brittany Murphy's profile.) Guess I'm just not feeling the funny right now.

But hey, we're almost at 150 posts. With this, that leaves two posts for Adam and one more for me, then we're there. Nice.

I've been listening to Josh Ritter's The Animal Years album recently. "Thin Blue Flame," in particular. It runs nine-and-a-half minutes and never gets boring, to me. Here is one of my favorite lines: "If what's loosed on earth will be loosed on high, / it's a hell of a heaven we must go to when we die."

I'm headed down to Virginia tomorrow. I'll be back a couple days before the end of the year. I'll check in one last time then. Hopefully with the funny.