Babbling Point

~ She's back! And I'm not talking about the Terminator. Well... I guess she's deadlier than the Terminator. "When my mother died two weeks ago the general reaction was one of surprise (surprise that I even had a mother). It is easier to think of me as a product of spontaneous generation, or of some hideous experiment that escaped from a laboratory." -- Jessica Zafra, an excerpt from her upcoming Twisted column, "Sympathy for the Mutant". Jessica emailed: "I think this comes out Monday. Please don't disseminate. Hey, let them buy their own copy of TODAY." Well, I'm not disseminating it... I'm promoting it! Like a duitiful Twisted disciple. So, remember... TWISTED resumes in the pages of Today on Monday. Plans for world domination continues.

The Muse known as Penny Lane Alex Sheldon (LUKE WILSON) is an author whose writer's block is the least of his problems - he also happens to be flat broke and owes Cuban loan sharks $100,000. After hanging him out the window and destroying his laptop computer, the thugs give Alex an ultimatum: pay up in 30 days or wind up dead. The only way Alex is going to get that kind of money is by finishing his novel, which is currently less than one sentence long. "Adam Shipley had given up on love. Art was to be his mistress. And so it was that in the summer of 1924, he took a sabbatical from Andover to write, if not the Great American Novel, certainly something that would make the world sit up and take notice." He's got some idea of what he wants the story to be.... He just can't seem to get it out onto paper. Now lacking both inspiration and a laptop, Alex secures the services of opinionated stenographer Emma Dinsmore (KATE HUDSON) to help him complete th...

LOOKING FORWARD it's uncharted territory in the outskirts of town, it's a dark valley and we only have crude torches for light sources. i'm proposing we make camp and start a bonfire, make scouting excursions in twos or threes, come back to camp and tell the tale of the formidable wooly mammoth with the daliesque tusks. later on, we gang up and hunt the beast, slay it and come back to camp with big slices of elephant meat for dinner, as we perform the hunt for the wives and kids before we go to sleep. we wake up the next day and start packing up, but not before writing-up a nice neat note on a previously-blank spot on the map: "here be mammoths. awful when raw. cook for a day over open fire. tastes like chicken. moving south. hear tigers have tender meat on chests. looking forward." FROM AN EMAIL I RECENTLY RECEIVED