Check the bill. Check it out. Don't expect much 'til midnight, curl up in a nice formless doval presaging puppies, chew a bund loaf, make out with bullish dolls. This is how fair hoodlums child. You can see, I'm living unlocked, a 3-4.5 billion hoarder. It's appellate Thursday (and you can't win). To 2010.

The wrong blockbuster got filmed in 3-D. Avatar's porno-proportioned figurines framed in state-of-of-the-tech snuggies evidence big-screen anxiety sheeting a densely preachy storyline with a putrid, old-timey 3-D graphemic system (overlays that almost show) to convey frontal motion and narrative flow. The only visual wonder comes with an infrequent snow flake or ember floating down to the viewer's nose level. That is cool.

On the other side of the megaplex, Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law in Sherlock Holmes map out glamorously rough-house and possibly new dimensions for middle-aged male companions. Downey has survived his transfusions, apparently, and jolts through Sherlock Holmes as if his brain courses with creamed monkey blood. Look. Deeply planed but inventively unwrinkled, Downey's Holmes snarls and snorts — enacting British hood-expressions that Downey's American, unconvincingly received accent could not, queue to zed. Nicely done. That. Meantime Law's Dr. Watson spends the greater part of the film off, looking away. It's the kind of off looking that intimates passive aggression that dares not speak its love, that of an unrealized poet who betrays anyone else in sight. Had Holmes's cluttered quarters, had XIXth century street markets, below, or had the Crowley-esque dungeon across town — had any of these been touched-up in 3-D, I'd have followed the tale more gleefully. I rejoiced just a bit, though, in Downey's Holmes's condemnation of Law's Dr. Watson's bourgeois aspirations toward proper marriage to a woman on the outside. In Sherlock Holmes these four belong to each other.

Here's an alternative caption: it's good to see birds feasting on dry cat food...

I told him they were starlings. — Geof Huth

Answer: (c).

Your advantage expires, ___________. (a) Floppy Bear; (b) Roomba Rider; (c) Balloon Prick; (d) Anthony Marshall.

Schools of poetry are nonacademic outfits scattered about guesswork and lucky breaks. It's always funny, you move to the city, a raver scripted by infantile alienation. Again. It's not too late! Optimism pays.

Still, the future is night-blinded. There's less to publishing now. Sixty thousand fewer jobs. Young arrivals to the city will be wandering into the new wrong play. Gummy and purple, the meat looks like condiment chopped into little squares of hypnotic drumming.

Back when, I was pulpy, one of those gear-heads spinning in perfume. T'was massive parallel handsome vistas. I learned to project smiles and grimaces. Learned good is bad. Bad is good. Show up invisible. Totally insane. Libido.

I learned a comic needs a vertical monkey bar and stage time, a star range that's speckled, plenty of blank tenderness to smolder in met colors, spoofy galvanized pastels. Best of all what I'd do worked for me. Works for you?

Everything will be on schedule now. I'll get to know you, in and out. We don't care about nuts or consumers unless they live on a palatial estate. (I'm a stay-at-home myself.) I take it like a man. Bad dog. Like déjà vu.

On the drunken cul-de-sac everyone is there, crook, athlete,
A party guy comes to terms of the century, 19 or 20.
Sitting down delivers more baubles, the video goes up
Treacherous cycles per second, hand scrolls, as well,
And now the performance capture and firelight are complete.
Principally it was shade that clawed him, I mean with you
I bet, hey! Open the curtains. Let's steal the show
One that runs down before it's wasted, then throw
You at a target, sleeping with you, blackmailed. I'm
Looking for a mnemonic to store in a palindrome before self
-regard kicks off, missing something awful and closing in.

One takeaway with immediate resonance for me from the NYT's annual "Year of Ideas" is research by psychologists Francesca Gino, Michael Norton, Dan Ariely reported in a paper "The Counterfeit Self: The Deceptive Costs of Faking It." The authors hypothesize a link between wearing counterfeits, feeling "fake" or inauthentic, and behaving unethically. This means I am in you. O Hickory. (Or Dickory.) Together we are performing metempsychosis ahead of the Joneses. (Also, from this year's ideas, cows with names yield more milk.)

[Graphic adapted from Mr Bingo's illustration.]

The 47 Ronin, Part II. It's that time of the month again.

Cocktail jazz: Nobody looks or sounds good here, and because this is still 2000-and-something there's commentary on the comments there. At the end of the first decade it's great if we bitches and pups are "all having a great time"; the gauging of laughter and cross-examining tail off, after all, into unbright corners. Highball glasses tinkle and clink in the cool of the room. Try not to look old.

Long story short, I like something or someone I can save. Kinescopes and call backs and earlier bits. I'm a tortured collector, a slob, and I have very few expectations slurping down Pease porridge upriver while the pros refine their material (which was my material?). (I wouldn't know.) Spooky like aspirin for the soul, a slice of toast flash-dances out through the mail slot but nobody notices in the past. I've watched the footage.

You were touched. Transgressive languor zigzagged down one shoulder. I had to say something. I chose any car in the aisle, because it's Olympic, and because I like to gamble with your money, brooding of course, doing something earlier enormously mysterious with time. I was and am alive with burdens. The sun is shining, nipping, filing matter, spinning nationally, capturing the dress casual of mirrored jerk-offs, meaning it but not being tempted. Facing these total strangers I had to say it again, go outside to compare apples to a sopping experience. To take on the flood zone, de-license the observers, that's the virulent point of view. Gushing is a close shave. Kenny said if you drop the itch I'll save on the next night.