Mike Young weighs in off-site on yesterday’s gender boink. “Why do you need to have that stupid haircut to maintain civil order? You don’t.”

Spooky kudos to Nick Antosca, whose book Midnight Picnic is a finalist for a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award in the Novella category. If you’re wondering how to deliver your own congratulations, Nick likes swimming and Cuban sandwiches. Good work, Nick!

There goes my night: pick one.

I am weirdly obsessed with Mark Twain. This is a really interesting NYT article about Twain’s marginalia.

To celebrate the release of Harold Abramowitz’s book, Not Blessed, Les Figues is having a contest that involves remixing selections from the book. The deadline is April 30. Guidelines are on the Les Figues site. I read Not Blessed recently and it’s good. It works by what feels like a literary equivalent of persistence of vision.

Photos of the full set of letters from the Zodiac Killer. [via Christian Bok]

No one cares how old you are.

The Slash Pine Poetry Festival is this weekend. If you’re in or around Tuscaloosa, maybe stop by.

The tree

The native range of the slash pine

When you are reading or editing an issue of a magazine, do you perform a contributor penis and vagina count, to verify a decent mix? Do you perform a race count? Do you verify the range of the letters in the last names?

Anyone want issues 1-6 of n+1 magazine? I’m happy to trade for something? Or whatever.