August 1964 was brutal. I'd say I don't know why it sticks out in my memory, but that'd be a lie. My cousin Phillip, bird-brained kid that he was, went and got himself shot over in Vietnam. 17 years old and eager enough to leave home to lie about his age. I was in Richmond helping the cigarette people update their phone system. It was a mess, some glorified closet full of girls at switchboards barely able to see from all the smoke. My first recommendation was "ventilation". I never smoked myself (a topic I skirted during that entire gig) and I've always hated to see a pretty girl puffing away. Some folks think it's alluring, but me, I think it takes away some of the magic. I guess it's because you already know how she's gonna smell. That's why the girl at the hotel bar that last rainy Thursday night caught my eye. It was a room full of flaming tobacco but she hadn't lit up all night. After an hour of nursing this and that, I drank my last ounce of courage, picked up my suitcase and grabbed the seat next to her.

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I stopped reading after he bludgeoned the songbird to death.

But let me back up.  

I first heard about Manny Howard when he was a guest on The Colbert Report.  Howard turned his Brooklyn home and yard into a farm, with the challenge to live off it for a month.  


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dolphin-free tuna

and street corner petitions

for tomorrow's sake

beans that brew a buzz

wake up the sleepy worker

in the gray morning

rabbits out of hats

card tricks and doves up the sleeves

secrets to amuse

The stars don't need trained professionals to read them. Fate has been moving since before humans appeared in this world and it will work its wonders after we've gone. That's why we like to invite new people to our humble blog to read the weekly horoscopes from a fresh perspective.

We caught Norman Grivvel trying to walk out of the Zen Ramblings office with a dozen jelly doughnuts and a laptop computer that definitely weren't his. He had gained entry to the building using an ID card stolen from one of our shipping and receiving people then posed as a health inspector when he got to the break room (the site of the doughnut theft). If it weren't for the tattle-tale ghost who lives in our walls we might have never apprehended Norman. Rather than press charges, we compelled Mr. Grivvel to read this week's horoscopes and to try to be a more honest person in the future.

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Chapters

1       2

3       4

5       6

7        8

9        10

11      12

Just four months into the making of this film, the funding for our first year of research and photography ran out. Part of that was my fault. I had been a bit too optimistic about how far we could stretch each Euro because I wanted so badly to get this project off the ground. The rest of the extraneous spending came from unexpected costs. Pricey hotel rooms, exorbitant taxi cab fares, unmarked tolls, bribes, taxes, equipment registration. Key lime pie. Even with my tiny crew the idea of taking on the entire former United States in one go seems, well, naive. Reluctantly, we packed up all the footage and equipment we hadn't already mailed back to England and boarded a plane for home.

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Because the Zen Ramblings Zodiac Squad's astrolabe is on the fritz, we've decided to allow the individual slated to be this week's guest horoscope reader to lavish our readers with some practical advice in her area of expertise. Worry not, we'll be back to presenting a weekly analysis of the stars in eight days' time. For now, we're handing over the floor to one of America's leading zombie survival experts, Ms. Vivica Browning of the Smith-Binder Walking Dead Response Corporation.

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in the shadow play

we dance to the radio

love tears us apart

Robert Smith alone

with his weird makeup and hair

is a post-punk god