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Why is my blog blue?

Mom was always trying to get grandma to move in with her girlfriends

I love this piece in Slate today...

It aired at 9 p.m., between 227 and The Facts of Life, two other gynocentric comedies, the one celebrating the role of women in holding communities together, the other inculcating a fetish for prep-school girls. But The Golden Girls—about a group of older women sharing a Miami house designed like a multichamber sunroom—trafficked in something like pop feminism, and it's terrifically apt that Arthur played the Carrie Bradshaw figure in a sketch deftly spoofing on Sex and the City.

...Golden Girls boasted characters who were sharp in their humor and secure in their freedoms, which included the freedom to be mean. The show's most biting laugh lines—which are shaped so well that these scripts would work for radio—achieve that ideal bitchiness animating The Women.

I hated this show when it was actually on, but, in syndication, when I had mysterious free cable and could watch four episodes a day, I fell into a weird sort of post-cancellation fan trance--it's one of the things that got me through grad school. That explains why there were so many kitchen table scenes in my plays (except that I would replace the cheesecake with bourbon; now I'm back to cheesecake again). It was my first GG. You all know (I think) what #2 and #3 are.

"I had a baby."

From Sara Levine's awesome new story. Yep. This is pretty much what it's like:

I had a baby.

“Why’d you have to have a baby?” Denny wanted to know. “There are so many babies on this block already. You know this neighborhood’s really changing. First the Starbucks and then we got a Gap.”

Good Jim

McManus in Paper Cuts. He's working on a new poker book:

I’m in the copy-editing/fact-checking/caption-writing stage of “Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker,” a longish account of America’s, and lately the world’s, favorite card game. It will be published by FSG in October.