God-fucking-dammit, why didn't I think of this:

Spotted in, sighed over, and then raged over in today's New York Times:

The economic crisis came home to 27-year-old Megan Petrus early last year when her boyfriend of eight months, a derivatives trader for a major bank, proved to be more concerned about helping a laid-off colleague than comforting Ms. Petrus after her father had a heart attack.

For Christine Cameron, the recession became real when the financial analyst she had been dating for about a year would get drunk and disappear while they were out together, then accuse her the next day of being the one who had absconded.

Dawn Spinner Davis, 26, a beauty writer, said the downward-trending graphs began to make sense when the man she married on Nov. 1, a 28-year-old private wealth manager, stopped playing golf, once his passion. "One of his best friends told me that my job is now to keep him calm and keep him from dying at the age of 35," Ms. Davis said. "It's not what I signed up for."

Not what she signed up for. I guess that whole "for richer or for poorer" stuff was left out of her wedding ceremony.

That seems impossible, at least from my perspective as a New Yorker. There are places in Manhattan where there are Starbuckses across the street from each other, and still they have both lines of caffeine fiends out the door.

And yet... I popped into a Starbucks today as I ran between three movie screenings, and it was almost empty. Which is bizarre for a Starbucks in Manhattan, at least of late. So perhaps it's not so strange to hear that the chain's earnings dropped 69 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, and that the chain is about to cut 6,700 jobs and close 300 more stores (that's above the 600-plus stores the company had previously said it would shutter).

...when it's news that a new hot Web site backed by big names and venture capital will be paying writers:

Sharon Waxman's TheWrap launched yesterday hoping to be the Politico of entertainment news. So naturally, all we wanted to know is if they pay writers.

Sharon left in our comments:

Part of our mission is to provide a home for quality journalism, and that means being willing to pay for it. Great reporting can't be done for free. Consider that an invitation to all talent out there.

Noted.

We knew Barack Obama was a geek, but his chief speechwriter is Jon Favreau? Iron Man director? Went to Vegas in Swingers?

Nah, not that Jon Favreau, it turns out. From the Guardian:

Wait. Did I just post something called "finally: a White House that understands science, technology, and the Web"?

Turns out, maybe not so much.

I learned via Avedon Carol at Sideshow that the White House Web site, which was relaunched yesterday at noon, as Obama was being sworn in, appears to have flushed the records of the entire Bush administration down the memory hole. Click on any link to the White House site in any post at any blog that has been underlining the crimes and misdeeds of the Bush adminstration -- like the link to Bush's last news conference, in which he said something horrifying about how bad a state our economy may well be in, which Tom Engelhardt highlighted at TomDispatch.com -- and this is what you get:

As the self-declared new Secretary of Geek for the Obama administration, I'm glad to see tidbits like these on the new White House Web site, under the Technology section of the national agenda:

President Obama and Vice President Biden understand the immense transformative power of technology and innovation and how they can improve the lives of Americans. They will work to ensure the full and free exchange of information through an open Internet and use technology to create a more transparent and connected democracy. They will encourage the deployment of modern communications infrastructure to improve America's competitiveness and employ technology to solve our nation's most pressing problems -- including improving clean energy, healthcare costs, and public safety.

The Guardian has the satire:

The change we need
After eight long, tiresome years, President Al Gore won't be missed. Even if he did save the planet

The Onion? Not so much.

January 17, 2001: Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'

"We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."

You must see Patrick Nielsen Hayden's stupendous archive of The Onion's coverage of Bush over the last nine years. It's horrifying.

I, for one, welcome our Barack Obama overlord.

Not one word of this is true:

Honestly: coveted positions as editorial assistants? *wipes tears of laughter from eyes*

(via Boing Boing)

Well, not quite yet. But soon. Dubya tells Fox News he's gonna write one a them book things. You know, with the pages and everything.

What's it gonna be about? Bush reveals:

You know, I'm not quite exactly sure what it's going to be, but I'm toying with the idea of maybe describing the toughest decisions I had to make as President, and the context in which I made them.

Well, he is the Decider.

So we might finally learn the truth of that choking-on-a-pretzel incident. Cuz he really had been considering having the nachos, but they were out of that salsa he likes in the White House kitchens, and it was a tough choice, whether to go with the nachos even though they taste kinda funny with onion dip, or to go with the pretzels.

The real question is, Will Bush's book be one with the pretty pictures already colored in, or will we be able to color them ourselves?

(via Taegan Goddard's Political Wire)

Not only is Barack Obama America's first Generation X president, he's our first geek president. Not that the two don't often go hand in hand. Says the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON - Spider-Man has a new sidekick: The president-elect.

Barack Obama collected Spider-Man comics as a child, so Marvel Comics wanted to give him a "shout-out back" by featuring him in a bonus story, said Joe Quesada, Marvel's editor-in-chief.

"How great is that? The commander in chief to be is actually a nerd in chief," Quesada said. "It was really, really cool to see that we had a geek in the White House. We're all thrilled with that."

Can we expect Obama to add a mutant superhero to his cabinet? Or perhaps he could make Bruce Wayne the Secretary of Kicking Ass?

That's the plan, anyway. I'm not much one for making New Year's resolutions, but I'd like to get back to posting regularly here: a bit of geek news, some thoughts on the freelance writing life, maybe some stuff about language, a smattering of other things that particularly capture my interest.

I need to scan some of my pre-Internet writing work, to beef up my online portfolio.

I need to finish up the Doctor Who fan fiction story I started last summer, not just for its own sake, but so I can then go on to post the much older fan fiction I wrote years ago, and also because posting this story in a serial fashion was meant to be a test for publishing other original fiction in the same way.

I'm adding categories here -- just a few -- and tags, though they're still happening in the background. (I'll fix things so they show up as clickable links here on the main page as soon as I can get to it. They're already appearing on the permalink page.)

I'd like to post something new here at least once a day.

Lots of work to do. Back on the hamster wheel...