On Apple's slutty new mouse.

New Space Monkeys comic up today. I'll confess -- I've never seen Laguna Beach, but I hear it is untasty, the very opposite of a delicacy, the kind of thing that can turn your stomach to quivering goo sight-unseen. That's what I hear, at least.

There is also, pleasant surprise to me, a new video on the LCP Web site -- or rather three parts of the same video, "Mal-Mart," which I will say in complete honesty is my favorite thing we did of our last show. (And that's including the stuff I wrote myself, which I should pretend to be a pompous raconteur about, but in the face of such awesomeness as "Mal-Mart," I can only bow, scrape and admire.) It was the one video that we would all stop what we were doing and watch backstage every single time.

Lastly, an update to my knuckle dilemma. An alert reader says:

Suck your knuckles and read this. Read the last entry. One word: Microplane.

Hot damn!

I can't get past the person who uses "zest" and "pith" in the same sentence. Sounds like the basis for a very funny sketch.

It was a Friday afternoon, and I had a million other things to do than to suddenly turn house-husbandy, but damned if the KitchenAid mixer hadn't arrived, prompting a quick putting aside of all non-essential, non-pastry matters.

Schlitterbahn could wait. Answering the phone for urgent work emergencies? Sorry. I'm off the clock. What? I'm on salary? Well... uh... I hide from you!

The mixer was about as heavy as a really fat five-year-old and almost as shiny. I dumped it onto the counter, all five parts of it: one U.S. Army tank-grade metallic device, the steel bowl, three beaters (flat, wire and hook, but sadly no Quidditch) alongside the manual/recipe book and warranty card.

Plugged it in and watched horrified as the wire hook began scraping awfully along the side of the bowl. I immediately plotted sending the refurbished thing back until I saw that this is common and you have adjust a tiny screw place in a very awkward place to set the height of the mixer. I searched for a flat-head screwdriver small enough to fit in that tiny nook, but large enough to actually leverage the thing. I did so. Still didn't seem high enough. Tried again. Tried some more. The damn screw fell up and into the mixer. I looked at the intimidating bolts of the thing, knowing there was no way I was every going to be able to get this thing open to retrieve the burdensome screw. I even hefted the thing upside down. I think I may have yelled, "Nooooooo!" But then I righted it, put the mixer bowl in place, and the thing whirred to life, improbably.

So, I know that one of these days, when I'm brave enough to attach one of the myriad attachments to the mixer, that a small and vengeful screw will come flying out of that metal bellybutton to kill me in the eye. My epitaph: "Omar L. Gallaga -- 1975-2007. The quiche came out delicious, though."

That dark thought set aside, it was time to get to bakin'. Over the next two days, I made peanut butter cookies (tasty, but a bit crunchy), blueberry pancakes (not homemade; we had Bisquick in the fridge) and very awesome lemon cream cheese bars.

I don't think I've ever prepared a dessert that involved three distinct baking steps before. I've upgraded computers in less time than it took. But damned if these lemon squares, full of vast amounts of butter and sugar in quantities that could fill a graveyard with diabetics, weren't dee-licious. It was almost worth the awful gashes I've got on my hand from scraping lemons against a grater. Mmm, lemon juice in a fresh wound. That's good baking.

Gwen Stefani guest stars on a new Space Monkeys! comic strip.

Within one weekend, we had a pricey HDTiVo unit with a hard drive crapping out, a laptop whose screen on longer stays up on its own unless you, like, prop it up against a wall or something, a cell phone that can barely make or receive calls in the house and a soaker water hose that ripped apart and needed replacing.

To top it off, I ordered a pizza, went to pick it up, and brought it home only to realize the crust wasn't cooked all the way through and that they forgot the promised sauce. I took it back and they forgot the sauce again. I realized midway through my first slice that Pizza Hut's solution for baking the pizza more fully was to take all of the Veggie Lover's toppings off. Nice, Pizza Hut. Nice.

it just felt like nothing was working. We were supposed to go to a fundraiser in Austin, but to be honest, I was afraid to get in my car -- I could just see it going over some random cliff, a la Toonces the Cat. Yes, never mind that there are no cliffs near my house. Somehow, the Prius would find a cliff and hurl itself off of it, such is the extent of my "No-working weekend."

I thought I got over it, but just a few minutes ago, I tried to get Blogger to post this entry andasdssc avc
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A roundtable discussion on the mainstreaming of videogames (among other subjects) that took, literally, weeks and weeks to write, is now up at Videogamey.

My HDTiVo is dying. NARM!