Thank you for this

Thank you Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, and Warner Brothers for Batman.* More precisely, for a Batman that finally acts like the obsessive creep who made me fall in love with comic books that second time. If it takes five more movies to get to Ron Perleman or some other old large person to play my favorite old large curmudgeon, I'll be happy.

Yes, I am always asking for more.

Thank you Angelfantab, and David Foster Wallace, for:

the funniest footnote I've ever read. And the only time I've read something that has made me laugh so hard I squeezed water out of my eyes.

"Table 64's beloved and extemely cool Hungarian waiter, whose contract forces him on Tex-Mex Night to wear a serape and a straw sombrero with a 17" radius^53a and to dispense Four Alarm chili from a steam tanle place right underneath an ice sculpture (of Pancho Villa) and whose pink and birdlike face on occasions like this expressed a combination of mortification and dignity that seem somehow to sum up the whole plight of postwar Eastern Europe."
53a (he let me measure it when the reptillian maitre d' wasn't looking)**

an opening that made me think again and again "the horror, the horror" and that maybe Wallace was doing something with the Heart of Darkness on the open ocean.
Examples include, but are not limited to:

-"I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh."***
-"Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you'll have a pretty good idea what FT.Laud. looks like today."
-"Apparently FTL.A. is always just your sleepy midsize airport six days a week and then every Saturday resembles the fall of Saigon."
-"A second Celeberity crowd-control lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about our luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of the Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler's List."

It's good. I shudder to think what his fiction's like.

Thank you advising office and lady of the three degrees for your quick response time, and making me feel like my graduation is a priority.****

Thank you bald dude on the bus for answering my rhetorical question about why, exactly, there are so many news vans outside of the Wex. (John McCain is leaching off of Lance Armstrong. Meanwhile crowds in the hundreds of thousands are flocking to see the considerably less Transylvanian, slightly more Obfuscating Canidate in Europe.)

Thank you Columbus for the metal plates that make it sound like there is roadwork going on even when there isn't.

Thank you every experimental magazine, (half of them) that accepts online submissions.*****

Thank you humans for building and populating libraries.

- "Knowledge is power," right? The existance of a library always strikes me as hugely philanthropic at some point when I visit one. I visited the ColPubLib yesterday. Aside from a barren referance section, they have a shitload of stuff. Close to a hundred computers with JSTOR access, all sorts of audiobooks, cds, and dvds, comic books, and books. My god what books. Eat your heart out half-price. A copy of morphology of the folktale I had to special order from a certain full-price retailer who will always go unnamed barring some sort of three-digit compensation, a four copies of IV, three copies of "Consider the Lobster and other essays." Way to go CPL.

*I guess I should thank W.B. or the producers or someone. Creative bias...
**Yup, it's a footnoted footnote. Also, the parenthetical is mine.
***Second paragraph line. Definitely going into my rolodex of examples for lines to use when you want to tell the reader "you know, I may have to write this but you don't have to read it."
****This is the beginning of a series of completely insincere thank yous. It will be ugly. You can skip them.
*****Okay, I'm over it. Incidentally, fuck online submissions if you just publish online. Call yourself something other than a magazine. Like a website.