Tuna, it's true- Bay Area sports be rockin'. Sharks tomorrow at high noon.

Short Attention Span Theater

Ok, so Baron and Jackson lost it on national television and everybody's favorite morning word is 'implosion.' I'd still like to be at The Oracle on Friday night, instead of in the Coliseum watching the A's with the T-Ball families. Lucas's team is the Giants, for god's sake. I'm gonna wear my Sharks shirt. And so it goes.

Townes Van Zandt is in my head like those Nellie voices Avery keeps hearing. Just finished the TVZ biography and can declare it total shit. How any editor let that thing go to press is a sad indictment of Da Capo, the publishers who evidently do not read manuscripts.

If you want to wallow in meaningless debachery done wittily, check out Michael Ruffino's Gentlemanly Repose, an account of his sauced days in some hard rock outfit called The Unband (I haven't heard of them either). If you don't mind sketches and episodes with no narrative arc, get on board and chuckle. We get tour stories with Dio, Fu Manchu, Motorhead and Anthrax. Oh, and Def Leppard. He only calls one of those bands first-class pricks. Guess and I'll buy you one.

From George Saunders' "Bohemians": "She said the Catholic Church was a jeweled harlot drinking the blood of the poor," is this week's gratuitous Vatican bash.

Sharks open their series tonight with the Red Wings. If you don't see blobs of dead octopii blackening the ice, the Men in Teel are doing OK.

"Rake" is the most haunting TVZ song. No wait, it's "Nothing." Hold on, it's "Waiting Around to Die." You get the picture. Hide the straight blades.

What's next, Don Quixote or Journey to the End of the Night?

Name that fast food delicacy.

Cormac McCarthy has won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for "The Road."

Hacking At Slop: Q1 FY2007 Numbers

Martin Scorcese owes Walter Tevis an apology. Mr. Oscar badly manhandled Tevis's The Color of Money, and his most egregious deviation is inventing a major character so Tom Cruise could flash the big whites while leaning over the smooth green. This has absolutely nothing to do with the novel, which is about Fast Eddie's mid-life crisis. Eddie does not tutor a young buck in the good hustle in Tevis's novel. I'm also gonna throw some hate in Richard Price's lap, who probably wrote the screenplay with one hand while Cruise's agent twisted the other behind his back.

No, Eddie is not the young stud in the hall anymore, and having settled into a secure and numbing post-shark existence, he wakes up at 50 to realize he is dead inside. When a sleazy TV producer offers him a series of events with Minnesota Fats that 'may' get picked up by Wide World of Sports, Eddie realizes he has set aside the only thing that makes him feel like a man. It takes him awhile to fully embrace his fate, and Tevis employs his big-tourney-at-the-end formula too neatly to further that end, but Eddie's journey of self-realization at the tender age of 50 is poignant. This is a man running from his gifts and trying to be what they say you should, and it nearly kills him. The road back to himself is filled with hard choices, but for Eddie, it's the road of resuscitation.

That's right, it's my annual ritual in futility to get complacent bitches off couches and into barstools for the first round of the NHL playoffs. If you've been paying attention, the Sharks have a rematch with the Nashville Predators, whom the Men In Teel dispatched in a tidy five games last year. It would have been a sweep, but certain people insisted on talking about relationships DURING THE FUCKING GAME, which clearly threw the Sharks' penalty killers off and cost them the opening contest. Steps have been taken this year to avoid such a repeat travesty of common decency, so Nashville will have to do it on their own. I've got ten Vegas dollars saying there ain't a George Jones sober evening in hell it's going to happen.

Sharks vs. Predators

Wednesday, April 11

5:00 PST

FSNBA, CH. 40 on your dial

High Desert Inquiries

Is the Joshua Tree retarded?
Are wins at the table better/worse than wins at a machine?
Will the Sharks advance?
Are the Giants a worse ballteam than when I left town?
When a cocktail waitress says “you can have whatever you want” after asking her if she can take the straw from my drink, is she talking about libations or sodomy?
Is cellulite an epidemic at pools nationwide?
Will Tiger choke through 2007?
Can one enjoy a $50 steak or does the price sway the deliciousness?
Do hookers take credit cards?
Are the Warriors still on the cusp?
Does James Wood know everything?
Is James Jamerson the best bass player ever?
Have you really listened to the Supremes’ Reflections?
Are bath salts gay?
Why was there a hair dryer in my suite?
Do adult movies show up as “purchased movie” on your hotel bills?
Where are my socks?
Why were the record stores Mosher recommended out of business?
Is this the end of vinyl?
Why do people take their children to Vegas?
Is it really a sin to kill a mockingbird?
Will I enjoy this Mary Weiss record?
Why can’t I tan?
Where are the Damnations in the desert?

Both the Warriors and Sharks come up big tonight in key matchups and, oops, the Giants lay another egg. How was that 8 dollar Miller Genuine Draft?

While Baron Davis was sprawling for another loose ball and Steve Bernier was pummeling another cowering defenseman into the glass, Richie Aurilia was dribbling out to third. In golf, according to my father, if your drive doesn't make it past the ladies' tees, you have to play the rest of the hole with your pecker out. The Giants should have to play tomorrow's game with visible members. Really.

Go listen to The Hunches. The first record. Or the singles. Rock.

Of course I had Florida going all the way in this year's teacher's pool, and if not for Acie Law IV's missed layup against Memphis, I would be holding my check triumphantly and standing rounds in the sunshine of the afternoon garden. Is Yannick Noah's son the most cringeworthy act in sports?

Speaking of gardens, my front yard is blossoming nicely after three months of black leaves left a shroud over my green thumb, and that can mean only one thing- contrived hope on Opening Day! I ain't no athiest on just this one day a year, until I watch Ray Durham blow out his knee bending over in the on-deck circle and I can return to the comforts of no belief.

I read RL Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde yesterday, and it's all tell, no show, especially when all the beans get spilled in the last thirty pages. The explicatory letter device to suffuse the reader's mind with light? I've seen Aaron Brooks telegraph passes with less obvious intent. I appreciate the "duality of man" premise, and what a burden would be lifted with parallel lives, but dramatize, ye deliverer of stilted prose, dramatize!

I firmly believe that the Dallas Stars laid down in last night's game against the anemic St. Louis Blues in an aggressively ungentlemanly attempt to avoid the Nashville Predators in the first round of the playoffs. Hockey shorthand- #5 gets the deadly Predators, and #6 faces the far less frightening Vancouver Canucks. That's right, the Sharks are currently tied with the Stars, thanks to the latter's complete lack of professional pride in Monday's pratfall. See ya tomorrow night for the big showdown with the Ducks, when the Men in Teel try to avoid all this by skooting past the formerly Mighty Quacks and win the division.

Bring on the research papers!

There are lessons to discover in Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, and most prominent is that if you're schizophrenic, lay off the sauce. You might also avoid obsessing over amoral, talentless beauties who want your money. And try to remember the bitch you want to kill, or things can get messy.

I have been reading about this 1942 novel for years, but it wasn't reprinted until 2006, so an advance copy ran a whopping five bucks from the good people at Half.com, and expectations played their bitchy hand. Gentle George Bone seeks only love in 1939 England, but he falls into a crowd of selfish petty criminals who let him hang around for the bar tab. When it finally becomes clear that the aforementioned hootch whore, Netta, has only his wallet and not his heart in her sights, his minds clicks and the only crystal moment in his whole life demands he murder her. What follows is the mystery of the timing of his clicks, in which he "blackouts" and awakes anew, without memory and desperately trying to put together the pieces of his past. Will the wrong click match up with four breakfast whiskeys and lead him to her door with a murderous heart?

This reminded me somewhat of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley- spare prose, leisurely pace, and sudden violence. For some reason I expected more lighthearted frolicking, probably because I've never had a hangover. Isn't that some of kind of aperitif?