Who are you?
I'm an attorney/writer/wonk/critic. I'm only an attorney part-time now, though, so I have one-fourth of my soul back. But I kid. I write here, too. Someday, the plan is to quit lawyering and write all the time. You don't want to see any of my attorney-like writings, because they're so boring that you will seriously fall into a coma and die. And you don't want that. I look like this, kind of, although I do generally wear glasses, so you may consider the un-bespectacled me to be my secret identity.



Who are all these random people you keep talking about?
You can usually tell from the context, but as for a few of them who pop up the most often, Snowmobile Boy is a friend from work. He worked at my old job, and then shortly after I changed jobs, he came to the new job. (Not my doing, purely fortuitous.) He has an extremely nifty wife and an adorable baby. The Suriname Scientist is one of my dear friends from college, and The Professor is another. They're both relatively newly married (meaning within the last couple of years), as are . . . most of the rest of my college friends, come to think of it. FlyBoy lives in Portland, where I went to law school, and as anyone who has ever been lucky enough to meet him would tell you, he is off-the-charts spectacularly cool, and I miss him tremendously. Pool Boy . . . well, Pool Boy is your basic out-of-state poet/sports-fiend/philosopher/nutball/wit. (In, actually, a really good way, although I'd rather you didn't tell him I said so.) Little A and Little B are my unreasonably gorgeous nephews, the children of the beautiful Sister S.

Is it really cold in Minnesota?
Yes, dummy.

What's the capital of New Hampshire?
Concord.

Shouldn't that be "capitol"?
No, smarty, that's only for buildings.

Why are you so bad at getting around in Minneapolis? It's not that hard.
I know this is true. And yet I get lost anyway. They need better signs. Or I need to have a compass implanted in my nose.

What is the Mall of America really like?
It's like being inside a big pinball machine that's ruled by angry fourteen-year-olds. In the positive column? Giant Lego sculptures.

How were the four years in which Jesse Ventura was the governor of your state?
Well, they were long.

Are people from Minnesota really nicer than other people?
Well, they're certainly nicer than people from Wisconsin. And the sample from North Dakota is too small to allow for proper analysis. The only safe answer to this question is, "Not on the highway."

Didn't you used to write movie reviews somewhere?
Yes. Every now and then, one of them shows up in Diversions -- eventually, many of them will migrate here.

Can you name all the chemical elements from memory?
Yes.

Doesn't that qualify as an affliction of some kind?
It does, I think.