So, those of you who read my blog regularly (all ten of you) may have noticed that I was MIA all last week. I wish I had a good reason for my lack of communication, but I don’t. The fact of the matter is, my wife was out of town (Way out of town. London, to be precise) last week, and if I’m being honest, it’s very difficult for me to stay on-task when she’s not around.

Tempting as it is to do the revisionist history thing and post a bunch of entries time-stamped for last week, let’s just pretend that it never happened (which is, in itself, a revisionist undertaking. Tautology! Look it up, kids. Also, what’s up with all the parentheticals today?)

Since only TWO of the aforementioned TEN readers have taken me up on my Meet the Fans Monday feature, I’ve decided to ease us back into the swing of things by interviewing myself. This exercise is two-fold: it give me a chance to mention Chuck Klosterman’s latest book Eating the Dinosaur, which examines the nature of the interview from the quasi-philosophical angle that Klosterman does so well, and it also allows me to talk about myself, which I love doing.

How did you first discover Ex-Boyfriend?
I started designing some stuff. It needed a name. And “The Beatles” was taken.

5 10 desert island musical artists?
Yikes! Idlewild, The Smiths, Waylon Jennings, The Who, The Beatles, The Cure, Miles Davis, Wilco, Elliott Smith, and Blur. I will rue this list on the days when I crave some Johnny Cash, Radiohead and/or Oasis.

Tell us about your pop cultural guilty pleasures.
I don’t ever really feel guilty about the stuff that makes me feel good… but I suppose the stuff that is the most incongruous with my persona would be my appreciation of certain Britney Spears singles, Jane Austen novels, “good” romantic comedies (Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, etc) and Gossip Girl.

What kind of tees do you hope we design next?
The kind that sell a lot! Ideally, stuff with monsters and robots and critters. You know, the usual.

Favorite haunts on the web?
Alright, time for some true confessions… I’m a bit of a sports nut. Not exactly the sort of thing you’d guess based on my job, wardrobe, haircut, listening habits, etc. But I LOVE baseball and football. So a lot of the places I visit deal with sports. Pretty much every one of the Yahoo! Sports blogs is choice. Fangraphs.com. CamdenChat.com. All are pretty entertaining reads. But I also love to drop in on chromewaves.net, because Frank Yang and I share a lot of the same taste in music (and I like free mp3’s), videogum.com is excellent because Gabe is one of funniest bloggers I’ve ever read. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention andiamnotlying.com, which is partially contributed to by my friend David William, who is an amazing artist “living the dream” in hipper-than-hip Brooklyn. And of course tastespotting and liquorious!

Do you have any pets? What are they, what are their names?
I think this is pretty well-documented, but I’m pwned by two cats, Oliver and Bigby. And let’s not forget the seemingly never-ending parade of foster animals.

If you had a time machine, where in history or the future would you go?
The future. To paraphrase Brian Fellows, I don’t do dinosaurs.

Beer, liquor, or wine (be specific)?
Beer and wine are more or less in a dead heat. I love a good Belgian-style wheat beer, but I also like a nice, flavorful copper, amber or red ale. As far as wines, I’ve graduated from the “I only drink whites” camp to almost exclusively reds. I tend to shy away from the drier stuff—no merlots for me, thanks. I like a nice full-bodied shiraz, cabernet savignon, malbec, or pinot noir.

What’s the first thing you notice about the ladies (or dudes if you prefer them)?
Teeth/smile. I can look past a lot of physical flaws, but bad teeth are pretty egregious.

Cake, pie or cookies (ice cream and candy are also acceptable, but be specific)?
This is tough! I love Starbursts. I like cupcakes a lot (though I’m pretty no-frills; plenty happy with vanilla-on-vanilla), and certain pies really get me going (key lime, blue berry, pumpkin, pecan). I appreciate a well-done cookie, but they’re more of a stop-gap dessert in my book—a sort of “well, if there’s nothing else around” treat. My wife’s cherry cheesecake is pretty awesome, as is her pumpkin cheesecake topped with toasted pecans and caramel-bourbon sauce.

As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, my wife and I love fostering animals for the Maryland SPCA here in Baltimore. The drag of it is, there are so many foster “parents” on the books with the MDSPCA that you only get a call about once every 4-6 months asking if you’re available. And just as our luck would have it, the last call we got was just days before we left for our tortuous fight with the Icelandic ash cloud back in May, which made it impossible to devote the two weeks the kittens needed before they were ready for adoption. I was pretty bummed, because, y’know, I love kittens, and it was very likely I wouldn’t get another call until this Fall.

Thankfully, I got another one on Wednesday, and promptly prepared our master bathroom for our fuzzy visitors. Five kittens, four boys, one girl, all named after Trueblood characters. Let the cuteness commence!

Bill

Eric

Eric & Bill

Lafayette

Sam

Sookie

My bathroom is now full of kittens. There are 5 of them: Bill, Sookie, Sam, Lafayette and Eric. I’m fostering them for the MD SPCA. I’ll take more/better pictures later and share them on Friday but in the meantime, here’s a preview of the cute:

Our Marines, not only brave and selfless, but also kitten-rescuing. Awww! We just love this story of the three US Marines stationed in Afghanistan who rescued a group of kittens.
“I found Keykey tangled up in c-wire one day in the beginning of the deployment, I took him in and fixed his wounds. He was also extremely malnourished so I constantly kept an eye on him and fed him until he got back to good health and he has been by my side ever since,” said LCpl. Chris Berry.

One of two things is happening here:

1. This cat strongly disapproves of the kitten’s choice of haberdashery.
2. This cat is wildly jealous of the kitten’s superior cuteness.

Either way, poor kitten.

Ahh kitties, you even make something as gross and sad as the BP oil spill a little better:

P.S. New tee, Paris at Night:

This* might be the most ingenious plan ever to drive up tithing at church; market God’s love to people that are already up early on Sundays — the poop-scooping demographic.

Initially I was surprised that this was a church in Massachusetts; proselytizing is usually the province of Southerners. But then, those unitarians episcopals are nothing if not inclusive. That said, where’s the special service for cat owners? The way my boys act, they could use a dose of religion every now and then.

*Note the irony in The Salem News using a witch on a broomstick as its logo. I’m sure those Puritan girls burned at the stake 400 years ago are chuckling about this down in Hell.

Oh my this is a lot of cuteness

Maybe you thought the internet was a series of tubes, but apparently it’s made of cats.

As excited as I am for my upcoming European vacation (May cannot arrive soon enough), stuff like this just serves to make me pine for a Tokyo visit in the near future.

(Via Cute Overload)