Blog: THEME FOR GREAT CITIES

I can't believe it's come to this. I used to dismiss discussions about the weather as the ultimate in undesirable small talk -- and I certainly couldn't imagine ever devoting an entire blog post to it. Meanwhile, I was perplexed by people who let so many of the important decisions in their lives revolve around hot or cold, rainy or dry, cloudy or clear: where they lived, where they went on holiday, what they thought of a city in general, if they went out or stayed in. I couldn't believe it when anyone criticized London, my beloved favorite city, because [...]

One of the most unfortunate injustices of life is how the things that offer the most pleasure, if only fleetingly, often do so much damage. No wonder the words "guilty" and "pleasure" get along so well. That goes double (preferably of vodka, or tequila) for drinking, a seemingly endless fountain of pleasure the night of and torturous hell the morning after. Thankfully, the simple pleasures of drinking songs are healthier, and they can continue indefinitely, as long as you want to press "repeat." Country music would dominate any list of the best ones (and where else could [...]

There's nothing I hate doing in Buenos Aires more than I despise venturing downtown. Why leave leafy, leisurely Palermo to head to that Godforsaken concrete jungle where the broken sidewalks are way too skinny to accommodate the throngs of people crowding it? Luckily for me, in the five weeks since I returned to town, I've only had to go down once. This afternoon, though, duty called again, and as I stood in the Subte , squished between the subway door and a car [...]

Or "25 Nooks of Fun I'd Like People to Tickle Me In." Both titles, as well as the general concept, were suggested to me by my friend Adriaan, who was interested in reading the bright side of my recent post "I Hate When People Say That!: 25 Things I Hope I Never Hear Again." I like to think of myself as a fairly positive person, but considering how much more difficult this list was to compile, maybe I'm not so much of one. 1. "Yes" At the end of my professional bio, which [...]

Could it possibly get any worse than this? What if will.i.am and Justin Bieber's "#thatPOWER" and Mariah Carey's "#Beautiful" kick off a new bad habit in pop: hashtag hits? Isn't it bad enough that they're already continuing another one: The hashtag hits are the latest in pop's long tradition of bastardizing English with its song titles. As usual the end results are mixed, with only Carey's single coming close to warranting its hashtag hype. The shameless bit of built-in marketing doesn't ruin the fact that it's Carey's best single in five years (since 2008, [...]

No. 6: "Come and Get It" Selena Gomez As big a star as she is (with or without Justin Bieber as her arm candy), I'm surprised that it's taken Gomez this long to finally score herself a Top 10 hit. I've heard far worse (like her 2011 single "Love You Like a Love Song," which spent forever on the Hot 100 without ever rising above No. 22), but I wish it didn't sound so much like a cold leftover from the recording sessions for Rihanna's first album. No. 11: [...]

At some point, possibly within the next lifetime, if not in mine, people will probably look back at the gay-marriage debate and ask, " What were they thinking?" That gays were once legally barred from calling their civil unions "marriage" will seem as unfathomable as the idea of women not being able to vote or a world without Facebook. In the meantime, the debate continues, with some unexpected players popping up on both sides. President Barack Obama and the First Lady Michelle Obama have been openly endorsing it at least since last year's National Democratic Convention [...]

I've got to hand it to Stephen King. I've never read one of his books, and bits and pieces of Carrie , The Shining and Dolores Claiborne and all of Stand By Me and Misery aside, I've skipped the film and TV adaptations of his work, possibly because being scared has never been my idea of a blast, even when it's someone else whose life and limbs are in danger. Although I've had such minimal exposure to the best of King, I now have a newfound appreciation for [...]

Two recent episodes of two of the major-network TV shows that I watch religiously (the just-renewed Nashville and the just-canceled Smash ) got me thinking: Either television has become way too predictable in its old age, or in mine, I spend so much time watching it (usually on my laptop) that it no longer has the capacity to catch me off guard. (Regarding Smash 's cancellation and Nashville 's renewal, both of which were announced on May 10, is there only room in prime-time for two musicals featuring original songs and dueling [...]

Either I'm becoming a grumpy old man, or I'm regressing to peevish, petulant boyhood, but people really need to start watching what they say around me. In true sourpuss spirit, I've decided to make my latest list a list of what not to say or ask the next time you see me. (Don't stop me if you think you've heard some of these before. If it's not worth saying once, it's worth saying not to say it twice.) 1. "Where do you see yourself in 5/10/15/20 years?" As David Chappelle might say, "Who am I, [...]

" Tengo novia pero vos me gustas mas. " If I wasn't sure that my mystery texter wasn't talking to me earlier during breakfast when a one-word message arrived from the same number declaring, simply, " Linda ," now I was. Unless I've been cross dressing in my sleep, taking the feminine-specific adjective for "pretty," and possibly flirting with random guys with girlfriends, this was clearly a case of mistaken identity. Or was it? I met my ex-boyfriend two and a half years ago on a wild Thursday night in Melbourne when he was [...]

"Money can't buy it," Annie Lennox once sang (on the best track on Diva , her 1992 debut solo album). To be fair, according to Annie, neither can sex, drugs or you . (Keep reading after the video.) In 1964, 28 years earlier, The Beatles had taken the limited purchasing power of funds a bit further: "Money can't buy me love," the Fab Four insisted on their fourth No. 1 hit in the U.S and according to Rolling Stone magazine at one point, the 289th greatest song [...]

In one of the current storylines on The Young and the Restless , Katherine Chancellor -- the daytime soap's matriarch and second-longest-running character (after Jill Foster Abbott Fenmore), played by Jeanne Cooper, its longest-running star -- was given a clean bill of health after undergoing surgery to remove a benign brain tumor. Sadly, real life wouldn't mirror reel art. On May 8, Cooper passed away at age 84 in a Los Angeles-area hospital. She had recently been admitted twice, with her son, actor Corbin Bernsen, providing her fans with regular updates on her health through Twitter. [...]

When Chelsea Handler takes her digs at daytime soap operas on her late-night E! talk show, I chuckle politely and call it satire. Although it's not the most original comic concept (and out of context, pretty much any TV show can be made to look like a complete joke), ha ha ha anyway. But when a publication like the New York Times , one with the reputation of being "the paper of record," jumps on that bandwagon and starts taking predictable swings at such an easy target, offering no fresh insight or depth of analysis, it's [...]

Yesterday I received a tear-stained message from Tobias, an acquaintance in Melbourne whom I'd never pegged as someone with a flair for melodrama. He'd barely batted a brown eye that one time I insulted his intelligence by telling him he had none, then turned on my heel and flounced off. My drunken outburst, though (and yes, I'm going to blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol), was nothing compared to what had recently gone down on the other side of the world. " just called my ex and he picked up while he was having sex so [...]

The world of pop is always a better place when there's new music from Alison Moyet about to enter it. It arrives today in the UK (6 May) in the form of the minutes , which is scheduled to wash up on U.S. shores on June 11. Here are my not-so-random thoughts on the album's 11 tracks. "Horizon Flame" Ambient and futuristic, which are two words one might not have previously associated with Alison Moyet. A post-space age love song (not to be confused with "Yesterday's Flame," Track 1 on 2002's Hometime ), [...]

@AmandaBynes is usually a tweeting disaster, but she's a savvy one. While calling @Drake and @JennyMcCarthy "ugly" isn't going to help her case in Hollywood, it probably did win her some new "followers" because everybody loves a good celebrity smackdown. Beyond the bile, though, there are actually some sweet observations about life and love. Like many 27 year olds, she has a weakness for cliches ("Be careful what you wish for") and platitudes ("win from within," "Love isn't real if it's not forever"), but if you scroll patiently through Bynes's tweets, original ideas eventually emerge. They're so [...]

One of the most unexpected developments of the year in pop so far must be the fact that PSY won't go down in history as a one-hit wonder. No performer of a recent viral hit this side of Baauer's "Harlem Shake" seemed as destined to never again scale the heights of Billboard's Hot 100 as the man behind the abominable "Gangnam Style" (the song and the dance). Then something shocking happened on his way to the cut-out bin: PSY scored another hit. Alas, "Gentleman," the slightly superior follow-up to "Gangnam Style" that sounds like [...]

A few years ago, I took an online test designed to determine how old you are on the inside. After answering a series of health-related questions (Do you smoke? What do you eat? How often do you drink/exercise/have sex? Do certain chronic illnesses, like diabetes and hypertension, run in your family?), you were given your medical age. Naturally, as with your cosmetic age, the further below your chronological age, the better. I turned out to be a robust 34, which was slightly disappointing (damn that genetic hypertension and diabetes, the latter of which I've thankfully avoided thus [...]

I recently awoke from another one of my oddball dreams. It was the latest in a series of head-scratchers, the follow-up to an unconscious nocturnal mini-drama in which I was plopped right into the middle of a fake General Hospital storyline. (See, I am a card-carrying nerd !) In the dream in question, though, I was not in Port Charles but once again living in the apartment complex in Melbourne that I called home for the first three and a half months of this year, only it had doubled in size from [...]