Cutting-and-Pasting an Awesome Love of Lauren Bacall

A minor gripe as I'm putting together spreadsheets of various businesses: Please, business people, don't let your graphic and/or web designer talk you into putting your business address and phone number in a graphic and not also in plain text that can easily be cut and pasted. People want to google map you, or cut and paste your phone number into their Palm Treo so they can call you and make an appointment. Make it easy for people to use your contact information.

Related note to self: while making calls to writing clients, cut the word "awesome" out of business vocabulary. I'm not saying I'm going to go all the way over to "splendid," but "awesome" is too 1986 to afford me much credibility as a writer. Also, stop signing e-mails "LYLAS." (Just kidding on that last one.)

Via Reuters, from Britain, a headline that offers hope to the lonely and text-inclined: Dreamed up phone number leads man to a bride.

"David Brown, 24, says he woke up one morning after a night out with friends with a telephone number constantly running through his head. He decided to contact it, sending a message saying 'Did I meet you last night?.' Random recipient Michelle Kitson was confused and wary at first but decided to reply and the two began exchanging messages. Eventually they met and fell in love."

And, in keeping with the totally random nature of this post, a rarely seen clip of a 1970's Lauren Bacall singing "But Alive," set in a gay bar in Greenwich Village. It's hard for people of my generation to see Lauren Bacall in anything and not expect her, at any moment, to break into a description of the delicious moistness of Fancy Feast cat food. At any rate, this clip, see once on tv and lost to the ages until being recently posted on YouTube, is mesmerizing.