25 Random Lies About Me, issue sixteen

16. I was once called upon by a friend in the police department to take part in a ransom drop because I looked like the brother of the victim.



The experience was pretty intense. I had to wear a wire and everything.



I brought a suitcase full of unmarked bills into a bus station, sat down where I was supposed to, and waited. The victim came in between two guys in trench coats. We made the exchange, and then the police moved on the kidnappers in the parking lot, leaving me with the man I'd helped to rescue.



It was one of the most awkward conversations of my life. We had nothing in common. For one thing, he was a kidnapping victim, and he'd gone through a few days of interrogation and torture. For another, he liked baseball. Even our taste in music was different. He really didn't like it when I asked him about his family. Plus, he seemed anxious and irritable to the point of rudeness. Finally I stopped asking him personal questions and we just sat there in silence.



The next time my police officer friend called and asked me to take part in another drop, I said no. Kidnapping victims are not as sympathetic as they seem on TV.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue fifteen

15. One time I was struck by lightning.



I didn't gain any super-human abilities from the experience, and it hurt like a mother!



All in all, a big disappointment.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue fourteen

14. I may or may not be a secret agent, working for the CIA.



That's all I can say about that.

But I am.

Seriously.

On one highly classified mission that I can't tell you about, I may or may not have been sent by our government to shoot one of our own sitting senators with a dart which makes an otherwise intelligent man ramble on in a way that's designed to be career ending.



In fact, this senator experienced this kind of attack multiple times. He may or may not be vice president now.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue thirteen

13. In high school I raised carrier pigeons.



Once I sent a long, eloquent letter to an ex-girlfriend who was older and had gone off to college. The letter begged her to take me back and to give the long distance relationship a try.



I didn't get an immediate reply, and shortly thereafter I headed across the country to go to a different university. Two years and three serious girlfriends later, I found a pigeon dead on my doorstep carrying my high school sweetheart's reply. She said she was willing to make it work and would stay faithful until she heard from me. I wrote her an embarrassed Dear John letter, but since the pigeon was dead I attached it to the leg of a neighborhood stray cat and just hoped for the best.



I don't know what happened to that girl, but I can prove that I've sacrificed for love, because that cat scratched the hell out of my hand and I have the scars to show for it.

Stop Podcasting Yourself: Literary Bloke

I love podcasts. It's become something of an addiction. One of my favorites is "Stop Podcasting Yourself". I highly recommend it.

On this week's show, the hosts, Graham Clark and Dave Shumka, asked listeners for suggestions for a literary figure to be a part of the League of Extraordinary Blokes. If you're not sure what a bloke is, think of Jason Statham.



Anyway, Graham and Dave started out just creating a list of blokes, then it morphed into creating a musical band composed of blokes, then blokey scientists, and now a shout-out for blokey literary figures. As someone with literary aspirations (failed, heartbreaking, soul-crushing, just-got-another-polite-rejection-letter-this-week kind of aspirations) I thought I'd share my two cents. Now, I'm not a bit blokey. I don't cheat on my wife, I rarely get a chance to drink, and I'm a pacifist, so bar fights are kind-of off limits. In fact, take Jason Statham, give him some glasses, remove his muscles, and take away his everything-that-makes-him-a-bloke, and you've got me. Basically, we share a hairstyle. But I can think of some writers who are blokey.

And alive. They have to be alive.

My first suggestion is Max Berry. He wrote Jennifer Government, a fabulously blokey book that will crack you up while it gives the middle finger to multinational corporations and the free market utopia they'd like the create. And how do I know Max Berry is a bloke? Just look at him.



My second suggestion is Salman Rushdie.



This guy is so blokey he pissed off the Ayatollah Khomeini and had to go into hiding, where he hung out with guys like Bono from U2. Meanwhile, he married a supermodel, got divorced, and is rumored to have moved on to some other Bollywood starlet. This guy has won a Booker Prize, and I'll bet he would also headbutt you if pushed to it. Super-blokey!

The most blokey writer I can think of who wouldn't qualify isn't Earnest Hemmingway. He was just a dick. Sure, he was a genius, but he was a jerk, which isn't the same thing as being a bloke. No, the most blokey ex-writer is Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.



He reportedly thought of the idea for the brilliant, absurdist five-part-trilogy when he got drunk and passed out on a hilltop. When he woke up and looked at the stars, the premise came to him. Now that's blokey! Unfortunately, he died at 49. Was his death blokey? A bar fight? Headbutting a member of the paparazzi? Sleeping with a supermodel he'd just rescued from an evil gang leader? No. He got off the treadmill at the gym and had a heart attack. Not blokey. Still, when he told the story of his moment of inspiration, he originally said it happened in Australia, then changed his story, claiming it happened in Spain "because it's easier to spell." Now that's a bloke!

25 Random Lies About Me, issue twelve

12. At the age of seventeen I was nominated for a Nobel Prize.



I really wanted to win one for literature, but, due to some combination of typographical error, mistaken identity, and a brief experiment with a new category of prizes, I almost received one for xenobiology, a fringe science speculating about the biological, anatomical, and evolutionary nature of alien life.



I didn’t win but, come to think of it, this may be why my particular bus was picked up by that flying saucer a few years later.



I’d never really put the two together before. Hmm.

Jindal's Strange Rebuttal

I know it's piling on to pick on Bobby Jindal's speech now that it's been so universally panned by critics and pundits on both sides, but I did want to make a quick point. His key anecdote was about an incident during Hurricane Katrina, when he walked into an office and found a local sheriff struggling to get help from the federal government. He swooped in and saved the day, the story goes, and this is supposed to show us that the government is inept. But here's the thing: He was a congressman at the time. Couldn't that also be a story about how government can be good? Also, how seriously should we take a critique of the government when the central narrative is one where a Republican congressman rescued a local sheriff from the inept federal agency run by... a Republican president? This could also just be a story about why no one should elect Republicans. You know, it just might be better for the Repub Party if it turned out that Jindal made the whole story up.



Oh wait. He did! Check it out!

Now Bill Kristol can be wrong somewhere else!

Let's take a little break from the 25 Random Lies About Me project (more to come) so I can return to one of my favorite subjects: the remarkable way Bill Kristol manages to always be wrong.

So Kristol got canned at the NYTimes and is now writing a less frequent column for the Washington Post. Look, I understand that papers want to find somebody to be their conservative voice, but George Will, Charles Krauthhammer, and David Brooks all do the job just fine without reading like... well, like Bill Kristol. And if people want a Neo-Con, they can read Christopher Hitchens. Bill Kristol is a Bush water carrier, and Bush has left for Texas, so he's a man without a platform.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his advice to Republicans today in the Post. He concedes that Republicans "need fresh thinking in a host of areas of domestic policy, thinking that builds on previous conservative achievements but that deals with the new economic and social realities." But he offers no ideas himself. Instead, he says they will have to be politically agile to make up for their lack of ideas. Then he offers his political strategy:

"Obstruct and delay."

"Obstruct and delay"? That's Kristol's idea for a Republican strategy?

A Republican friend of mine was telling me just the other day that Obama would lose in 2012 if the economy hasn't recovered. But we both agreed that the only way he could weather that is if the Republicans did nothing but obstruct and delay, thus earning the ire of every person who could possibly benefit from this government program or that one. And let's face it, we could all see a windfall from some government program. Obstructionism will hurt my friend, the conservative police officer just as it will hurt me, the liberal school teacher. It will hurt the assembly-line worker just as it hurts the CEO. When Republicans obstruct and delay, they take the burden off the Dems, who would have to be choosing winners and losers, and make themselves responsible for every loser. This is a political strategy bereft of both intellectual heft and political savvy.

Way to go again, Bill!

25 Random Lies About Me, issue eleven

11. Speaking of Australia, in 2004, when former Midnight Oil lead singer Peter Garret was elected to Australia’s House of Representatives...



...the other members of the band, which had officially disbanded in 2002, decided to search for another front man.



Through some mutual friends and some interesting turns of events which would take too long to describe here, they found me. I was their lead singer for just over eight months, during which time we went on a world tour and starred in a reality TV show on the Australian version of the E network, which Australians spell “NetworkE”.



My performances were mostly met with good reviews, though some critics felt that I skewed the band too heavily toward their later work, favoring songs from Earth and Sun and Moon over classics like “Beds are Burning”. Soon, it became apparent that I would either have to leave the band or end up serving in some high capacity in the Australian government...



As an American, the second option didn’t sit too well, so I came back home just in time for the birth of my son Noah, who’d been conceived right before the guys and I headed off to Tokyo. In fact, the dates are so close he might not even be mine, and may be the child of bassist Peter Gifford, who we called “Giffo”. Even my faithful wife Paige is not immune to the charms of bass players, and who can blame her?

25 Random Lies About Me, issue ten

10. Though I’m not good at building electronic things, like Phil’s time machine, I’m pretty handy with older technology, and something of a history buff. Once, I decided to test out the theory that the people of Easter Island came there in dugout boats from South America.



I created my own simple seafaring craft and set sail from the Oregon coast, intending to land in Hawaii, which is roughly equidistant.



I didn’t quite find it and sailed halfway around the world, finally arriving at a small city on the south side of Australia named, ironically, Portland.



While there I became a walk-on member of their Australian Rules Football team, and in 2006 we won the Western Border Football League Premiership.



I thought about staying, but got sick of the way people spelled things like “Centre” and “Theatre”, so I came home. The team went on to win the premiership again in 2007, which should make me happy, but somehow it just felt like a big FU from the guys, like they wanted to show that they didn’t really need my help.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue nine

9. As a child I loved Legos...



...and would build replicas of medieval castles in order to perform enactments of historical events.



My dad caught me reenacting the beheadings of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, and refused to believe my explanation.



My parents took me to see a psychologist who happened to be a member of our church, and who offered to give them a discount.



It turns out that discount child psychology isn’t as great as it sounds. The man decided that only shock therapy could control my urges to cut women’s heads off.



It took me years to learn to control my facial ticks, and even now, if I shuffle my feet on carpet, I can touch people and give them small third degree burns.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue eight

8. I once saw a dust-bunny under my desk hop a few times.



Then it settled on a new patch of dust to chew on, but I could have sworn it looked over its shoulder as it did so, wary of any nearby dust-wolves.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue seven

7. While my mother was pregnant with my younger brother, Joe, she would take me to the University of Illinois library.



She liked the peacefulness and found that I could entertain myself easily there, thought I was only three years old. She didn’t pay much attention to what I was reading (it was an uncomfortable pregnancy, and as long as I was quiet she was happy), so she remains unaware, to this day, that the first book I picked up was one on speed reading.



After devouring it, I quickly made my way through almost half of the library’s ten million volumes.



Eventually, in the education section, I found a book which convinced me that speed readers often trade comprehension for speed. I became convinced that comprehension was more important just a few books down the shelf, and abandoned the project. Funny tidbit: Because of the design of the library’s stacks, I’ve read thousands of books about agriculture, and I’ve never read a single thing about the nation of Mozambique.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue six

6. My favorite foods are mushrooms, oysters, and cooked spinach.






In fact, I really only eat things those food philistines among us might describe as “slimy”.



I find this has a… dramatic effect on my digestion.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue five

5. One summer I had a brief but torrid affair with Claire Danes.



One night we had an argument while driving down 101 near one of her homes in Los Angeles (we frequently shuttled to her other home in New York, and sometimes made the tabloids when we made out in popular restaurants), and on this particular night Claire became violent, causing me to crash her BMW into a divider.



She walked away from the accident, seemingly unscathed, but it turned out she suffered from some memory loss because she couldn’t remember me at all. She went off to Yale that next fall and I returned to college. I’ve completely recovered from the heartbreak, but my shoulder still hurts when it’s about to rain.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue four

4. I have a human eyeball in a box in my attic.



It’s a souvenir from a bar fight I got into once. I tried to poke the other guy in both eyes, but he blocked using the vaunted three-stooges-defense.



It turned out my middle finger was longer than his four fingers were wide, and one of his eyes popped out onto the pool table. I grabbed his eye, along with the quarters we’d both left on the edge of the table (we were arguing about whose turn it was), shoved both in my pocket, and ran out of the bar. I kept the eye, but I think I spent the quarters on a parking meter.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue three

3. I was once abducted by aliens. I was on a greyhound bus ride from Cincinnati to Spokane. Somewhere in Montana the whole bus was picked up by a flying saucer...



...and transported into low-Earth orbit where the passengers were interviewed telepathically by small green creatures with over-sized heads. I’m not sure which passenger turned them off to our species (perhaps all of us disappointed them in some way), but they made it clear they were disgusted with us and would no longer have anything to do with our planet. Then they put the bus back down in South Dakota, lengthening our trip, which irritated the passengers more than anything.