I’m walking through Lahaina yesterday with my wife and mother-in-law  when I see David Simon approaching.

I’m thinking, "I have to say something."  So as he’s passing by, I lean in a bit and say, "Thank you, sir."

Nothing.  No acknowledgment at all.  He just ice grills me like Chris Parlow.  We keep walking in opposite directions. He’s looking back at me like a crazy person, and I’m thinking, "Great.  I creeped him out."

Then, he finally says, " Thanks for what?"

"For the show."

He and his wife both throw up their hands, smile and say, "Oh!  You’re welcome!"

Fuck the excellent snorkeling.  Fuck the rum-filled smoothies.  Fuck the amazing seafood.  That made my vacation.

From Cynpsis

Leading the cast of The CW’s Beverly Hills 90210 spinoff series will be Tristan Wilds as Dixon Mills, son of a prominent Beverly Hills family, reports THR. Shenae Grimes plays his sister Annie. Also cast is Michael Steger as the high schools noted politician.

How great would it be if the producers created a back story where somehow Michael ends up living fat in Beverly Hills a la The Fresh Prince?  Can you imagine how thoroughly he would run the school after being in charge of a drug corner? Let Donna graduate?  Let that bitch get out on the street  and get my money!

The writing staff of the show wrote this piece for Time magazine.  In this current, politically charged atmosphere, it’s worth remembering that there are many ways outside of the ballot box for a citizen to bring about a desired change .  I suggest you read it in its entirety, but the gist of it is:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Indeed.

Welcome back, friends.

From The Believer magazine interview conducted by Nick Hornby. 

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.