Brimming with ideas!

With Analog finished, I have turned my attention to the following similarly impractical writing projects (in order of how likely it is I'll ever get to them):

1. A short story I started last year but never finished.
2. A podcast thing that my brother keeps cajoling me to do.
3. A fairly interesting screenplay idea which currently exists only as a constantly-mutating outline. [Note: I've never written a screenplay, and don't really have any idea how, but I'm itching to try.]
4. A much more vague but possibly even more interesting screenplay idea that currently exists as an incomplete outline.
5. A completely insane idea for a novel for which I am still brainstorming but I have a few pages of totally killer ideas.
6. An idea for a novel which has existed in various forms in my head for many years and is in fact my favorite idea but it's regressed to a much more vague form.
7. Another embryonic screenplay idea, this one probably only a short feature.
8. Two or three "backburner" ideas, most of them only a title and a one sentence description, though there is one (probably a few years away) for which I have a few pages of very funny ideas (well, I think they're funny anyway).

Now, bear in mind that nobody is paying me to do any of this, and I do it all for my own unexplainable satisfaction, and all of these things will only start existing if I actually start working on them during my startlingly ample free time when I'm not going to work, reading books, hittin' the gym, or getting myself into a state of cat-like readiness for Spring Training (more on that later). But I'm up for the challenge. The world is not in any great need of any of the above things, but they're going to get them anyway. Look out! In conclusion, I enjoy writing things.

It's all for expensive lawn

I won't get into a melodramatic thing this time, and Mike has already got your music blog needs covered, but allow me just to mention that today is the 10th anniversary of the release of Pavement's Brighten the Corners, one of my ten, probably five favorite albums of all time. I remember buying it on cassette, on a lark, at the Tower Records on West 4th Street in New York. I had never been into Pavement before that, but I had read an interview with them about the new album in Tower's Pulse magazine and they sounded like smart, interesting guys and I had a feeling I would like this one. Like I said, it was a lark. That was shortly before I went home for spring break in March, and I spent most of spring break listening to it while driving around Bensalem and surrounding environs in my parents' minivan (I was ostensibly driving around looking for a summer job, but that ended up never working out). It was, and I presume still is, good music for driving around in cold, wet weather. Wow, remember Pulse? Remember cassettes? I do, but then I'm very, very old. Anyway, if you have it, take a listen to it today or this week. If you don't, go out and buy it, I think you'll like it. The artwork is all in earth tones, and there are cats on the CD.