Annals of facial hair, Mark Twain edition

For some ersatz Twains, the popularity of the autobiography is motivation enough to kick-start a comeback tour. Ken Teutsch, 48, of Dyersburg, Tenn., had all but given up on his one-man show about Twain’s time working on the Mississippi as a steamboat pilot. Mr. Teutsch had not done a show in more than a year and had shaved off the bushy mustache he had grown for the role. Then last fall people began watching clips of his show on YouTube, and inquiries started coming in.

After celebrating Christmas cleanshaven, Mr. Teutsch made a New Year’s resolution to forgo the use of his razor and start booking Twain shows again. “My wife will not be happy, she’s not a fan of the mustache,” Mr. Teutsch said. “But hey, if I can make a little money with it, she might forgive me." —NYT

Peice of mind

From the table of contents to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age:

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler’s “Note-books.”
The story was published in “Collier’s” last summer and provoked this startling letter from an anonymous admirer in Cincinnati:

“Sir—
I have read the story Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to say that as a short story writer you would make a good lunatic I have seen many peices [sic] of cheese in my life but of all the peices [sic ] of cheese I have ever seen you are the biggest piece. I hate to waste a peice [sic ] of stationary [sic ] on you but I will.”

It's a wonderful list

Poundstone delivers!

J'aime:
Morels, pear butter, hush puppies (fried batter!), coconut ice cream, crème brulée, cold sesame noodles, Noah's Bagels (faux-New York bagel chain found only outside of NY), the smell of gasoline, the smell of calamine lotion, the odd euphoria you sometimes feel when entering a tunnel, early risque comedy albums (Rusty Warren, Blowfly, etc.), New York tabloid headlines, Bizarro (newspaper cartoon), Mark Twain, Cyprian Ekwensi, Robert Benchley, Ludacris, Jane Austen, Chick Austin, Richard Dadd, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Disney Concert Hall, Euler's equation, Gödel's proof, Moebius strips, iPhone, contrails, cumulonimbus clouds, drug stores (to browse, not to buy anything), foreign candy bars (just to look at the packaging), junk mail, case histories of "abnormal psychology," Edgar Allan Poe on gardening and interior design, chihuahuas, CuteOverload.com.

Je n'aime pas:
Chocolate-chocolate chip, buffalo wings, the portrait drawings-from-photographs the Wall Street Journal runs, the abbreviation "IMHO," Don Quixote, The Tale of Genji, Charles Dickens, impressionism, Leger, Damien Hirst, country music, torture porn, Microsoft Windows, William Faulkner, Ernie Kovacs, It's a Wonderful Life