In case you didn't notice, I was forced to bail on the Blogathon, because competing time demands and some personal tasks (namely looking for a new apartment) made it impossible for me to drum up sponsors by the deadline.

I apologize to the . . . umm, one of you who offered to sponsor me. By all means, go and enjoy the Blogathon. It's a terrific idea, even though I wasn't able to make it work for me this year.

Not to be broken-record-like, but Sarah knocks another one out of the park with her new Tomato Nation baseball essay. She manages to write about baseball without writing it about in that sentimental, "I love baseball and I'm a girl, isn't that fascinating" kind of way that annoys me so much. Yay, Sars!

It's official . . . I'll be Blogathon-ing for Doctors Without Borders on July 27th. The way this works is that if you are interested in sponsoring me (that is, donate to DWB), you to go the Blogathon site and sign up. They'll let you know how to do it from there. Yes, teeny donations are fine. Yes, they will help you know how to do it.

If you have a special request for something you'd like to read ("I'll give you twenty bucks to tell the raisin joke"), just let me know. I'm sure we can work something out.

So sign up. You know you want to. It's Doctors Without Borders, man! I'm going to be awake for twenty-four hours. The least you can do is give up a couple of cappucinos.

I have been meaning to link to this forever . . . Paul Gilmartin is the "Paul" in "Paul and Annabelle" on Dinner and a Movie on TBS. But he's also just damn funny, and one morning on the radio, I heard him recite Tim, the Die-Hard Packer Fan. It was one of the funniest things I ever heard, although I must admit that having a person handy to do it in a strong Minnesota/Wisconsin accent for you may be crucial. It's not broken out into verse on Paul's site, but it reads like a Doctor Seuss poem, so read it in your head that way.

I love you, Paul.

Here is one of the more preposterous lawsuits you'll hear about this year. This girl really does not know when to quit. I realize the end of your fifteen minutes is painful, but . . . this?

Ah, and for those of you who have been missing Pamie, I assume you've heard she's back. And she brought a book deal. Yay, Pamie!

Snerk. Omar is funny.

In other semi-interesting news, I am waving the lonely, lonely Justin-Guarini-hating flag over at TWoP in the American Idol forums. That kid is a male Celine Dion, and I don't care how many screaming fanatics tell me otherwise. CELINE DION, I tell you.

You know, when I read about people who run with the bulls, I always wonder what exactly they want out of the experience. It's like, nobody wants to get gored, but everybody loses if nobody gets gored. It's the prisoner's dilemma of risking your life.

Speaking of prisoner's dilemmas, I am becoming a fan of both Friend or Foe and Russian Roulette on the Game Show Network. If you haven't been watching, FoF is a classic prisoner's dilemma -- you and your partner have a pot of money at the end. If you both vote "Friend," you split it. If one votes "Foe" and the other votes "Friend," the "Foe" voter gets all of it. If both vote "Foe," nobody gets anything. The wonderful thing about it is that I can prove you should always vote Friend, and I can also prove you should always vote Foe. I can also prove that no matter how much they tell you that the trick is to figure out what your partner is going to do, it actually doesn't help you all that much to know what your partner is going to do. It is the fact that I am interested in that kind of thing but appreciate the opportunity to shrug and put it down when it starts to make my head hurt that makes me a writer, and not an academic.

As for Russian Roulette, when you lose, then drop you through a hole in the floor. That's pretty much all there is to it. You'd be surprised how entertaining it is. I laugh every time.

And over at the Food Network, I watched a bunch of shows on July 4th about various regional festivals around the country. Very cool, including a half-hour about the Lobster Festival in Rockland, Maine, which is about ten minutes away from the little house where my family stayed, which I recently wrote about over in the journal.

Strange things on cable have been my delight of late. I don't know why.

Wow, I suck. Sorry for the break. I'm not dead, just resting.

And for those of you who haven't heard, I'll be starting work on the Big Brother recaps over at TWoP next week. Oh, yeah, baby. It's on . . . three times a week.

More soon, I promise. Theoretically, the real design for the site is on the way, although so far, I have gotten fairly far into the process, only to discover I have accidentally stolen the color scheme/style of Chicklit, Fresh Hell, Pound, etc. The limitations of web-safe colors are a pain in the butt. You all have 16 million colors, right? . . .