Before I turn out the lights ...

Friday morning I head out for a three-and-a-half week vacation in Europe. I may check in with a post or three, but I don't expect Cole Slaw Blog to be a major priority. With a little luck, I'll come back with a couple stories in which corruption, silliness and clarity are simultaneously achieved, along with a some pictures of pretty castles and pretty ladies.

Between now and mid-October, this site is in my co-blogger's hands. I repeat: Flop will be manning the oars of this creaky skiff alone. Get it? If he commits acts of libel, writes something outrageous, or you're just left confused, I'm not accountable. If he upsets you, I apologize for both of us.

Before I go, here's the good stuff that kids go for:

• Zadie Smith's new novel gets a rave review from New York Times hard-ass Michiko Kakutani. On Beauty apparently is modeled on Howard's End and set in Boston. I loved White Teeth and even though I found The Autograph-Man disappointing, it was a benign failure. It's a great feeling, falling in love with an author who's only a year or two older and knowing that her career will be around for your entire adulthood. Roth and Updike are getting up there in years; Chabon and J.S.F. are never going to make the cut. I'm grateful for Zadie Smith.
  
• Neil Young has a new album, Prairie Wind, coming out on September 27. It's going to be more country than rock and roll. I like Neil best when he's with Crazy Horse wailing on a guitar, singing something about dread and mortality. If he did that all the time, though, he'd probably go insane, and almost any new Neil Young is interesting.
• Spinachdip got ignored by the Times. To which I say, just as well. Not only would the Times ruin his street cred, it also would cast him in the role of some kind of bizarre Starbucks watchdog for the Lower East Side. (Click here for my take on how the Times would depict Flop and me.) Nobody needs that distinction. It might be satisfying for a couple of days, but then it would feel weird.
  
• This one is too nasty to be recounted on our demure little blog. Nasty and depraved, yet hilarious for all reality TV fans.
  
• Currently reading Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, a Shakespeare biography that pieces together moments in his life with passages in his plays. Very readable and interesting.
• Political Humor has assembled a list of the stupidest quotes about Hurricane Katrina. You'll have read or heard most of them already, but there are a lot of neglected gems here: "You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals...many of these people, almost all of them that we see are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold." –CNN's Wolf Blitzer, on New Orleans' hurricane evacuees, Sept. 1, 2005; "I've had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word 'unrest' means that people are beginning to riot or, you know, they’re banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I've had no reports of that." -FEMA director Michael Brown, Sept. 1, 2005.

I'll aim for a couple of dispatches from the road. Thanks for watering the plants,

-CrimeNotes