robotnik2004 | "I collect spores, molds, and fungus."

papersource has already done the work of sketching out our trip last week to New York. It was a great time, with large doses of two things I do find myself missing in London: big city life, and my friends. We got to meet Steve’s new girlfriend, who is bubbly and cute and wry and fun and a delight, and to reconnect with a dozen or so people we haven’t seen in way too long. We ate extremely well, saw Syriana—the thriller that’s more depressing than Traffic!—and checked out the spooky-tawdry nineteenth century spiritualist photographs at the Met.

In honor of the spiritualists, I coughed up considerable ectoplasm. I was fighting a wretched cold the whole time we were in the city, but my strictly observed regimen of air travel, beer, lack of sleep, and stepping directly into every frozen slush puddle in Manhattan somehow failed to vanquish the bug. The worst was at the newly reopened observation deck on top of Rockefeller Center, all cool and art deco and crazy high and windy cold. I got some sort of super-combination hiccuping cough going there, and basically rained down loogies of pestilence onto the crowds milling around the giant Christmas tree, seventy stories below. (I don't feel too bad, really. They were in line to see Alec Baldwin host his umpteenth SNL; their sensibilities can't have been that delicate.) The sickness finally lodged itself in my throat and rendered me utterly voiceless for much of this week.

Say, that reminds me: I’m quite tickled by reports of this new(-ish) Lovecraftian(-ish) RPG(-ish), The Shab-al-Hiri Roach. It's the game that asks: "Are you willing to swallow a soul-eating telepathic insect bent on destroying human civilization? Not even if it will help you get tenure?" Story of my life, man.