Remember that cartoon from yesterday? Yeah.

I am introducing a new feature this week-- The Weekly Short. These weekly shorts will be short short stories. Short enough to be inhaled in a gulp, a breath, a glance. Short like a youtube clip. Short like a CNN.com update. Short like a commercial. It's all about getting what you need -- quick. 500 words or so by really great writers. Not necessarily the great kind of writers who we were forced to read in school (although some of them might be), for school. No, these will be not be stuffy, dry, or lifeless stories. These will not be pretentious. These will not be necessarily instructional. These will be stories life begs to inhabit, and then does, cozily.

The first story, the one to launch this new feature, is "Incarnations of Burned Children" by David Foster Wallace. Wallace was a brilliant man, probably one of the smartest in the past fifty years. But his genius was not an end to itself, although it could have been. But I think he believed that the reason really does exist to serve the emotions. He used his mind as an instrument, a tool, to take him, and then us with him, to another place. And, in doing so, he subtly resculpted fiction and its possibilities. He pushed the upper and lower boundaries of his art form, and, in that way, inspired the format of this blog.

The first lines of "Incarnations of Burned Children:"

The Daddy was around the side of the house hanging a door for the tenant when he heard the child's screams and the Mommy's voice gone high between them. He could move fast, and the back porch gave onto the kitchen, and before the screen door had banged shut behind him the Daddy had taken the scene in whole, the overturned pot on the floortile before the stove and the burner's blue jet and the floor's pool of water still steaming as its many arms extended, the toddler in his baggy diaper standing rigid with steam coming off his hair and his chest and shoulders scarlet and his eyes rolled up and mouth open very wide and seeming somehow separate from the sounds that issued

The full short after the jump. Also available at Esquire.com



The Daddy was around the side of the house hanging a door for the tenant when he heard the child's screams and the Mommy's voice gone high between them. He could move fast, and the back porch gave onto the kitchen, and before the screen door had banged shut behind him the Daddy had taken the scene in whole, the overturned pot on the floortile before the stove and the burner's blue jet and the floor's pool of water still steaming as its many arms extended, the toddler in his baggy diaper standing rigid with steam coming off his hair and his chest and shoulders scarlet and his eyes rolled up and mouth open very wide and seeming somehow separate from the sounds that issued, the Mommy down on one knee with the dishrag dabbing pointlessly at him and matching the screams with cries of her own, hysterical so she was almost frozen. Her one knee and the bare little soft feet were still in the steaming pool, and the Daddy's first act was to take the child under the arms and lift him away from it and take him to the sink, where he threw out plates and struck the tap to let cold wellwater run over the boy's feet while with his cupped hand he gathered and poured or flung more cold water over his head and shoulders and chest, wanting first to see the steam stop coming off him, the Mommy over his shoulder invoking God until he sent her for towels and gauze if they had it, the Daddy moving quickly and well and his man's mind empty of everything but purpose, not yet aware of how smoothly he moved or that he'd ceased to hear the high screams because to hear them would freeze him and make impossible what had to be done to help his child, whose screams were regular as breath and went on so long they'd become already a thing in the kitchen, something else to move quickly around. The tenant side's door outside hung half off its top hinge and moved slightly in the wind, and a bird in the oak across the driveway appeared to observe the door with a cocked head as the cries still came from inside. The worst scalds seemed to be the right arm and shoulder, the chest and stomach's red was fading to pink under the cold water and his feet's soft soles weren't blistered that the Daddy could see, but the toddler still made little fists and screamed except now merely on reflex from fear the Daddy would know he thought possible later, small face distended and thready veins standing out at the temples and the Daddy kept saying he was here he was here, adrenaline ebbing and an anger at the Mommy for allowing this thing to happen just starting to gather in wisps at his mind's extreme rear still hours from expression. When the Mommy returned he wasn't sure whether to wrap the child in a towel or not but he wet the towel down and did, swaddled him tight and lifted his baby out of the sink and set him on the kitchen table's edge to soothe him while the Mommy tried to check the feet's soles with one hand waving around in the area of her mouth and uttering objectless words while the Daddy bent in and was face to face with the child on the table's checkered edge repeating the fact that he was here and trying to calm the toddler's cries but still the child breathlessly screamed, a high pure shining sound that could stop his heart and his bitty lips and gums now tinged with the light blue of a low flame the Daddy thought, screaming as if almost still under the tilted pot in pain. A minute, two like this that seemed much longer, with the Mommy at the Daddy's side talking sing-song at the child's face and the lark on the limb with its head to the side and the hinge going white in a line from the weight of the canted door until the first wisp of steam came lazy from under the wrapped towel's hem and the parents' eyes met and widened--the diaper, which when they opened the towel and leaned their little boy back on the checkered cloth and unfastened the softened tabs and tried to remove it resisted slightly with new high cries and was hot, their baby's diaper burned their hand and they saw where the real water'd fallen and pooled and been burning their baby all this time while he screamed for them to help him and they hadn't, hadn't thought and when they got it off and saw the state of what was there the Mommy said their God's first name and grabbed the table to keep her feet while the father turned away and threw a haymaker at the air of the kitchen and cursed both himself and the world for not the last time while his child might now have been sleeping if not for the rate of his breathing and the tiny stricken motions of his hands in the air above where he lay, hands the size of a grown man's thumb that had clutched the Daddy's thumb in the crib while he'd watched the Daddy's mouth move in song, his head cocked and seeming to see way past him into something his eyes made the Daddy lonesome for in a strange vague way. If you've never wept and want to, have a child. Break your heart inside and something will a child is the twangy song the Daddy hears again as if the lady was almost there with him looking down at what they've done, though hours later what the Daddy won't most forgive is how badly he wanted a cigarette right then as they diapered the child as best they could in gauze and two crossed handtowels and the Daddy lifted him like a newborn with his skull in one palm and ran him out to the hot truck and burned custom rubber all the way to town and the clinic's ER with the tenant's door hanging open like that all day until the hinge gave but by then it was too late, when it wouldn't stop and they couldn't make it the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child's body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.

Dan Wasserman, copyright 2008 Tribune Media Services

Buckley's son fired from National Review for supporting Obama

Nancy Reagan breaks hip

The next President's to-do list

McCain and Obama will sit face-to-face with moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS News at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., in the final presidential debate, dedicated to discussing the economy

See more Hayden Panettiere videos at Funny or Die

(language NSFW)

Marcia was a druggie. And a prostitute. And bulimic. And then fat. And she's written a book all about it. I don't know why that's all so funny to me. No, no. I do, I do. It was her interview yesterday on The Today Show where she talked about how hard her life was when she was on The Brady Bunch.

In her book:

"McCormick unflinchingly reveals it all: Her romance with Barry Williams, the behind the scenes conflicts and jealousies, the heartbreaking death of her onscreen father and friend Robert Reed, her own dysfunctional family, her early dating (including Michael Jackson and Steve Martin), her years of substance abuse, the cocaine binges and drug-fueled parties at the Playboy mansion and the home of Sammy Davis, Jr. with Hollywood's elite, her unwanted pregnancy, her sex-for-drugs one-night-stands, and ultimately how she found the love, support, and faith that helped her triumph over such extreme adversity.">

Is The Brady Bunch still running fresh episodes? Because it sounds like all of this happened to her last season instead of 50 years ago. And did she know she was acting when she was portraying little Marcia Brady? Maybe she just didn't know, and she really did believe she was the perfect little girl. And, I mean, there is no way she can remember any of what happened to her when she was living it up with "Hollywood's elite." Even if she DID trade sex for drugs. Wait, Steve Martin?

The Soup on Miley's Inappropriate Birthday Offer, via I Am A TV Junkie
"My Own Worst Enemy" getting even worse ratings

Anne Hathaway's ex had good intentions

Gale Harold, of Desperate Housewives and formerly Queer as Folk, is in stable condition after a motorcycle accident yesterday

Aravinda Adiga wins the Man Booker prize for his debut novel about the dark side of the new India

The Leather Festival was in the West Village? When?


The NYT's David Pogue discovers the almost perfect charger

Tennis columnist Jon Wertheim's weekly Ad-in/Ad-out

It is perhaps the last great Antarctic expedition - to find an explanation for why there is a great mountain range buried under the White Continent.

Gay schools the answer?

Via The Huffingtonpost:

John McCain predicted Sunday he would beat Barack Obama at the final presidential debate this week.

"After I whip his you-know-what in this debate, we're going to be going out 24/7," the Republican nominee told volunteers at his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, sparking laughter and applause from the group. McCain immediately added: "I want to emphasize again, I respect Senator Obama. We will conduct a respectful race, and we will make sure that everybody else does, too."

We, the viewers, really need to start worrying about our own asses. This is the final presidential debate, and almost everyone I know is exhausted by the prospect of sitting, on our asses, through another ninety minutes of listening to them go at it. McCain is not going to whip Obama's ass. And Obama is not going to whip McCain's, unless, of course, McCain decides to overplay the Ayers card right into Obama's hand: [T]he Obama campaign has seemingly been engineering this scenario for the past week. Indeed, if John McCain brings up Ayers in tonight it may be because he was goaded into doing so."

Well, there's always Rev. Wright?

From a photo series of The Sun on the Boston Globe site The Big Picture:

The Sun is now in the quietest phase of its 11-year activity cycle, the solar minimum - in fact, it has been unusually quiet this year - with over 200 days so far with no observed sunspots. The solar wind has also dropped to its lowest levels in 50 years. Scientists are unsure of tthe significance of this unusual calm, but are continually monitoring our closest star with an array of telescopes and satellites.

John Kenney is 27 years old model born in Branford, Connecticut. He is best known as a contestant of reality series "Survivor: Vanuatu."

Click on thumbnails below to see full size pictures.

It may or may not be the end of Project Runway on Bravo -- Could you imagine watching it on Lifetime? Not me. But tonight is the end of Season 5 of Project Runway. The talent pool was a little shallower than it was in Season 4. (Tim Gunn recently said that Christian Siriano was one of the true fashion rarities), but I think Leanne, in her own hyper-focused way, comes closer to approaching Siriano's talent level than any other designer across all of the seasons. Leanne's cerebral designs manifest natural forms enveloping an artificial scaffolding. She is 180 degrees from Siriano, but, if she were to continue along the circle and move to 270 degrees or more, it's easy to imagine her work taking on the scale and theatrics of Siriano's work.

I also loved Korto. That jacket she made out of seat belts? That might be one of my favorite looks ever on Project Runway. (Speaking of, I've been watching The Rachel Zoe show, and I almost love it. More on her later.)

The boys over at Project Rungay, in their seasonal breakdown of all of the Final Three's looks, give a dead-on review of Leanne's, Korto's, and Kenley's entire output.

Oh, and here is an audio clip of Leanne talking about her time on Project Runway and her big move to NYC.

My pick to win? Leanne.

I'll let her speak for herself.

The Rachel Maddow Show is starting to hit its stride. I really like Maddow. I want to love her, but there are times when she seems to be standing on Keith Olbermann's soap box (although anything that keeps him from using it is probably a good thing). I wish she would leave that thing behind completely and just do what she does best -- talk TO her guests and not AT her audience.

Last night was one of her best shows yet. She sat down and chatted with both John Kerry and Oliver Stone (not simultaneously). In her conversation with Oliver Stone, Maddow melded the roles of politics and the arts into a united goal with this beautiful sentence: "It's a fuzzy line between changing people's minds and changing the world." I don't know if it's entirely hers (I kind of hope it is), but even if it's not, she used it almost the way Obama would have. And that's saying something. (Incidentally, I am not the only one who was struck by this line.)

I think the level of these two Democratic guests appearing on her show is a testament to the promise she possesses as a credible source of news. Is there any doubt that in an overwhelmingly Democratic Washington she is going to become the go-to source? I have a feeling that as much as Olbermann sees himself as Bill O'Reilly's good twin brother, it might be Maddow who steps in and shows him how a sister does it better.

Newsday reports:
A midlevel state appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments Wednesday on whether New York's policy granting benefits to gay couples legally married elsewhere should stand.

The New York Times:
Wednesday's Front Page, Summarized

Tell Me More:
Stories: 1) Searching For Answers To Wall Street's Debacle 2) Coaxing First-time Investors In Financial Crisis 3) Mothers' Panel Tells Parents Take Care of Self

Fresh Air:
Stories: 1) Shining A Light On The NSA's 'Shadow Factory' 2) William Parker Quartet's 'Petit' New Album

Click below to jump to the players . . . or click here to open the podcast player in a new window . . . or click in The Media Bar.

The Media Bar Is Open!

Thom Skinner's beautiful "We Don't Talk" in today's Daily Song
10-year-old Gabi Wilson singing Alicia Keys on The View (and doing right by the song)
Jennifer Aniston in "He's Just Not That Into You"
James Kotecki flopping miserably as a political satirist
And Lady Gaga's video for "Beautiful Dirty Rich"

(click below if you are in the mood to see the players full size)

Television
Gabi Wilson on The View(5:00)


Movies
Jennifer Aniston's "He's Just Not That Into You"
Based on that book by that Sex and The City writer


Politics

I'm not even sure what this is about because James Kotecki is so God-awful I couldn't focus (click screen twice to stop).


Music Video
Lady Gaga "Beautiful Dirty Rich" (3:08)

The New York Post is reporting that Madonna and Guy Ritchie are divorcing after 8 years of marriage.

The Post say that that "because the celebrity couple live primarily in London, the divorce is expected to move through courts there - although it's considered likely the pair will come to a multimillion-dollar settlement, according to the source.

Another source said the impending split comes after a last-ditch attempt by the pair to save their flailing union with an intensive kabbalah course in Manhattan."

They couple is expected to make an announcement today.