Here’s a really cool onyx chess set my mom got me for Christmas. Made by genuine Mexican peasants.

Posted for the heck of it:

I had to watch, and now I think: Christ are they going to be this sullen and bitchy all season long?

Can’t figure out if this scene was poignant or silly: Tony is trying to talk his shrink into going out with him, she’s having none of it. He presses her for a reason, she says, “I don’t like your values.”

Tony says “What don’t you like about my values?”

My brain is screaming: You’re a fucking mob boss and a murderer, Tony. What’ s to like about your values?

So far two Annoying Guest Wiseguys Who Must Be Killed By Season’s End have been introduced. We saw a few scenes with the wonderful Robert Loggia, but only snapshots of the totally happening Steve Buscemi. Both of these guys can act circles around the entire cast of the Sopranos … must be written into James Gandolfini’s contract that they won’t be allowed to upstage him.

But they’ll be dead by the end of the season anyway, so why get worked up?

All I can figure is I must’ve been an honest chump whose shoe store got bombed by the Gambino gang in a previous life, because as much as I enjoy the comedy, the irony, the interplay of the characters, etc, a little voice is hollering from the far reaches cranium:

“The Sopranos are Criminals and they Belong in Prison for Life!” They do not belong in a pricey home in a, uh, tony suburb; they do not deserve to have their lifestyle beamed into six million living rooms every Sunday night. They are scum who kill, steal and maim to get their way.

OK, I know it’s just a soap opera with a mafia setting … I know I’m supposed to be charmed by the best talent in cable TV … I know I’m supposed to be able to say, “look, mobsters have lives, too.”

How’d I get stuck with this brain, anyway? Because it’s saying, right now, “how about a TV show about the lives those bastards snuffed out?”

Please, somebody, give me another brain, one that can let this shit slide and let me enjoy the best show on TV.

I wore myself out blogging the Oscars last night, so I can’t get too inspired this morning.

If you need an excuse to do something work-related, check out all of Liz Donovan’s weekend links.

I think that’s gonna do it for today; I’ll have more energy and enthusiasm tomorrow, I promise.

Over at my other place. Come on over and join the fun.

“American Splendor.” Fun stuff. I reviewed it here.

The other day J.D. Lasica, a good guy and good neighbor, invited me to join his online social network at this site called Orkut.com. The site has wonderful potential for helping people find other people they’d never meet otherwise — sort of like storing Internet serindipity in a central location.

A central quirk of Orkut is that it’s an invitation-only service. You can’t get in unless you’ve got a pal who’s already in. At the moment Orkut’s invitation system is broken. I sent out three dozen invitations the other day and none of them have gotten to their destinations.

I posted a note yesterday to Prints the Chaff, my newspaper editor blog, announcing that all these invitations were on the way. Within hours a couple of my most devoted readers — who were among the first on my invitations list — sent me e-mails that found nice ways of saying, “Tom, why haven’t you invited me?”

It was a minor embarrassment and no harm was done, but the exercise seemed to encapsulate how we have come to accept busted technology because we’re so powerless to do anything about it.

Orkut’s Web site has a disclaimer saying, in effect, “the site’s under construction and bad stuff’s bound to happen in the next few months.” But nowhere does the site say, “oh, you know, the invitation-only model doesn’t work right now because the invitation system has broken down.” Kinda like a cut-rate rental car company telling you “you gotta expect some bugs at these prices” and finding out the car you’ve got has no gas tank. The least they could do is tell you where to get one.

The concept of “online social networking” is a fraud when the technology breaks down. That’s why it’s a big deal when a venture like this aggravates the early adopters. I realize a popular way to work the kinks out of a system is to put it out there bugs-and-all and let the users uncover the system’s flaws. If they whine the reply is, “well, it’s beta site, that’s what’s supposed to happen.”

I don’t care, it still irritates me.

We have this fine thing called a union contract that obliges some of us to stay home on Presidents Day, so blogging will be limited today.

I do have one thing to pass along, though: Tim Porter sent some fresh doggerel for my new Banned For Life blog. It’s a collection of handy bits of hackdom assembled by the late Ed Beitiks, who died in 2001 after a long career as a writer for the pre-sale San Francisco Examiner. Beitiks was quite the colorful character, according to his obit in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Beitiks served in Vietnam in 1967 and ’68 with the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division and was awarded three Purple Hearts. In combat, he was shot in the face. The bullet entered through his cheek and left through his mouth, which had been open because he was talking. If not for his gift of gab, the doctor told him, the bullet would have lodged in his face and he probably would have bled to death.

I wonder how many of the Ivy League-minted newsies at the New York Times could claim something like that?

Four years ago I interviewed a 17-year-old hormonal Alaskan guy named Marty Beckerman, who at that tender age imagined himself the next Dave Barry. Now he’s 21, he’s got a new book out and reviewers are calling him a rough mix of Hunter S. Thompson and Lenny Bruce.

Beckerman’s tome, to be released later this month by MTV Books, is called
“GENERATION S.L.U.T. (sexually liberated urban teens): A Brutal Feel-Up Session With Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace.” He’s gotten praiseworthy blurbs from HST, Neal Pollack and a host of respectable people.

I may have accidentally been among the first to interview The Next Big Thing In American Letters. Wow. One of Marty’s latest posts at his Web site is a bash to the face of East Cost literary hipsters. A highlight:

As everyone who’s anyone knows, books and albums are meant to be appreciated, not actually enjoyed. This is why Hipsters pay absolutely ridiculous rents to live in New York City

Scott Shepler, the artist who crafted my page banner art, filled in some colors and made a few nips and tucks here and there. He sent me a new version this morning. You know you’re not really getting art unless it obliges you to redesign the page.