I continue to hear gnashing of teeth over this whole Sweet Valley Size business, but a week later I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s nothing more than a bullshit Size 4 sack of stupid provocation, a crazy flack stunt to rid the Wakefield twins of their misty nostalgic associations and try to get them on the same bitchtastic bandwagon as the Gossip Girl and Clique books. And we all took the bait by blogging about it, hooray! Now let’s never buy these books again, and keep our fat fingers crossed that the reissues don’t sell, and subsequently the books get pulped to make recycled paper wrappers for delicious, delicious hamburgers enjoyed by future generations of pre-teen girls who will hopefully not run off and purge them in order to fit into a Size- Whatever-Is-Perfect- at-the- Moment. Agreed? Okay, then!

I’m doing one of those photo-a-day things at Flickr, wherein I try to take one half-decent photo a day, or at the very least POST one half-decent photo taken on another day when half-decent photo opportunities were more plentiful than they are on the particular day of posting. Yeah, hope that’s clear. Anyway, I’m trying to stay honest.

Oh, if you were wondering why you couldn’t get to Candyboots the last couple of days, I accidentally let the domain registration lapse. Oops, sorry. It’s back up! Sorry! Renewed all the way up to the End Times now, I swear.

The new BUST is on newsstands now, and if you buy it you can read my Pop Tart column on Britney Spears as well as a short interview I did with Ira Glass. I cannot quite bring myself to erase the recording of the original interview phone call, in which I laugh very loudly and horsily over every other thing Mr. Glass says. The gulf between the droll NPR radio career persona I often imagine for myself and the sad, sputtering reality is vast indeed, but oh well. As for the Britney piece, I wrote it when she was a bit more spinny-eyed than she is now, back when her future lifespan was looking as scanty as those shirt-dress-thingies she’d wear to the liquor store, and I figured I’d better write the column and gather her crazy roses while ye may, you know? But in a way I’m kind of glad that my article is a tad less relevant than it used to be. Perhaps you understand, too.

First: Bring back the dark chocolate Bounty Bars. I know that officially Bounty Bars haven’t been sold in the U.S. in years and years, but you can find the milk chocolate ones at any one of the four or five Greek and/or Mexican produce stores I shop at, and for a few exquisite months this summer and fall, they all carried the dark chocolate ones, too. The dark Bountys are sort of like Mounds, but Bounty : Mounds :: Belvedere : Absolut. Or Barbra : Celine. Or, if this were 1984, Guess Jeans : Palmettos. (And guess which kind I owned.) But anyway, dark chocolate Bountys are awesome, and have no almond traces to poison my boyfriend the way Mounds bars do. And so we’d snag one every couple of weeks until I guess the stock was depleted, and they gradually disappeared from one Bouzouki-muzak-blaring produce-mart checkout aisle after another. Now there’s only the dubious Balkan candy, and those sawdusty honey-and-sesame-seed thingies, and, of course, the totally unremarkable milk chocolate Bountys (in the blue wrappers) to remind us of what we’re missing. O red-wrappered Bounty goodness, when will you return? And if anyone has seen them lately at other Eurotrashy grocery locations around Chicago, please let us know.

Also, we wish the universe could bring back the little bitty grocery store around the corner from our place. We don’t know how long it was open; we thought it had opened shortly after we moved to the neighborhood because we went by and saw a “Grand Opening” banner inside, and we thought, hey, let’s give this guy our business, because he just opened and it’s the nice thing to do. And then after a year we realized that the banner was still up, and then we wondered if perhaps the owner kept it up all the time because he read in Ghetto Grocer Monthly that it was good for business if people thought you’d just opened; but by then it didn’t matter to us, because we liked that it was close, and that it was a half-decent produce store where you could get eggplants and ginger and lemongrass and coconut milk. And the guy was nice, too. And then on New Year’s eve afternoon we went over there to get limes and it was closed, with all the signs down and the windows ominously covered, and it appears to be very profoundly gone, and we are sad, and we hope Mr. Owner guy is okay.

Final plea: That How To Look Good Naked keeps on being an impressive show. I’d heard good things about it, but sometimes I can be really steadfastly cold and tiny-hearted when it comes to unabashedly cheerleaderish love-your-body sentiment, and I figured the show would be just a lot of chirpy encouragement to Love Our Curves with help from Carson Kressley, the Magical Gay. And while I guess it was a lot like that, I wasn’t at all prepared for how sniffly and verklempt I got during the first ten minutes, possibly because Carson and the girl on the show were both so very open about the distinctly fatty nature of her initial unhappiness and not just making vague mumblings about being “too curvy” or “plus-sized.” But while I was won over, I still nurse an icy little shard of skepticism in wondering how long it can keep going, how many bits of Jedi self-estreem wizardry can Carson really have—he won’t always get to work the miracle of the better-fitting bra, will he? Or the “really great skin” thing? But maybe an even better question is: so what if it is just the same little tricks over and over? So what if they only interviewed the nice strangers on the street, the ones who looked at her picture and said she was pretty? So what, maybe my stingy bitter soul will be saved after all? We shall see!