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The other day I was watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit not that I have a thing for Chris Meloni or anything oh no not at all and the episode started out in a church, where the custodian discovered the dead body of a woman next to the confessional. My mind spun off on an interrogation fantasy involving my daddy Detective Stabler. I was sort of paying attention to the episode as Benson and Stabler discovered that the woman was actually a transvestite prostitute. . . . “Faustus,” Stabler would say, “I’m very angry at your refusal to give up your friend.” . . . The tranny prostitute had been raped and horribly mutilated. . . . “You’ve been very bad, and I’m going to have to take extreme measures to get you to talk.” . . . The word “peccavisti” had been scrawled on the confessional wall. . . . After cuffing me to the table, Stabler would undo his belt and pull down his pants. . . . Benson and Stabler asked a priest what “peccavisti” meant and he told them it was Latin for “I have sinned.” . . . He would rip off my WHAT!?

My shock and horror destroyed utterly the fantasy I’d been enjoying.

Because “peccavisti” doesn’t mean “I have sinned.” It means “you have sinned.”

Rape, mutilation and murder are one thing when you’re fantasizing about Chris Meloni. But bad Latin is something else entirely.

I watched the rest of the episode, dismayed, until forensic psychiatrist Huang pointed out the mistranslation, which in turn gave the detectives the information they needed to apprehend the criminal. So it was all part of the plot!

After the episode was over, I googled “peccavisti law order” and came up with this. I thanked God I wasn’t the only one who was concerned about such things.

Then I went back to my fantasy about Detective Stabler; this time the conclusion was much more satisfactory.

Photocopying scores for twelve actors for the reading of your musical about the concentration camp Terezin: $212.64.

Taking a cab to your apartment and back when you decide in the middle of rehearsal to restore the old opening number, meaning you have no idea how the material will play: $46.

Finding out that the producer of the reading has invited both a woman who was an inmate of Terezin and the man who captured Adolf Eichmann, and they’re both coming: uh . . . priceless?

Luckily, they both liked it, or at least they said they did. I was so terrified that she would tell me my musical had made her wish she was in the concentration camp instead of in the audience or that he would leap up at the first entrance of the guy playing the commander of the camp and shout “Rahm! I’ve been searching for you for sixty years, and now I’ve finally found you!” that I could barely concentrate on what was happening.

But it all turned out okay.

I mean, not the Holocaust. That didn’t turn out so okay. But the reading.

N.B.: Thanks to everyone who submitted entries for the Blogalike Contest. I’ll post them later this week so you can vote.

Can we talk about Governor James McGreevey?

More specifically, can we talk about how anybody ever thought he was straight?

I mean, come on, look at his nails.

But seriously, wouldn’t you have sex with him?

N.B.: You still have a day to send me your entry for the Blogalike Contest.

On Friday I’m having another reading of my musical about the concentration camp Terezin. (For those of you who’ve joined us recently, I’m the composer of the piece.)

I wonder if spending so much time setting lyrics like

And to the ones who cry compassion,
Whining, “Hate is not the answer!”,
I say humans must hate Jews
The way the surgeon hates the cancer.

is having any sort of deleterious effect on my moral fiber.

N.B.: You still have three days to send me an entry for the Blogalike Contest.

A 100-word short story by Neil Gaiman.

older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.

The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.

Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves’ invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.

He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.

Ho.

Ho.

Ho.

N.B.: I am accepting entries for the Blogalike Contest through midnight (Eastern Standard Time) on Wednesday, August 11. So far I have one entry, so somebody is going to win the gift certificate to Powell’s City of Books. You might as well give it a shot.

A few nights ago, I came back home and turned on the television only to find that my digital video recorder, after changing the channel to HBO to record Six Feet Under, had not chosen to record anything afterwards, which meant that the face that greeted me when the set flickered on was that of Sacha Baron Cohen, British comedian and star of Da Ali G Show. I watched about a minute and a half of the show (which I’d never seen before), found it unfunny, and went into the other room; too lazy to have turned the TV off, however, I could hear the mellifluous strains of Mr. Cohen’s voice floating through the air, occasionally resolving themselves into phrases distinct enough for me to make out. At some point, my consciousness alerted me to the fact that Mr. Cohen was singing in a vaguely Eastern European accent, accompanied by a guitar. I focused my attention and realized that I had grossly underestimated him, as what he was singing, a lively ditty called “In My Country There Is Problem,” may have been the funniest song ever written.

Go here to see a video of the whole thing. (Your computer needs to be able to read .wmv files, and it’s probably not safe for work, unless you happen to be employed by the KKK.)

I was going to write a second post about words I’ve had trouble remembering this week (go here for the first such post) but then my cardiologist told me this afternoon that he thought I should probably have open-heart surgery, unless I wanted to risk needing a heart and lung transplant in later life.

That kind of made me stop worrying about words I’ve had trouble remembering this week.

Update, 8/5/04: Thanks for the supportive comments, guys and gals. I’m sorry to have been so dramatic. There’s nothing immediately wrong, and, in fact, it’s not absolutely certain the surgery will be necessary–my next appointment isn’t for another two months, if that gives you an idea of the lack of urgency. The surgery would be more a prophylactic than anything else. Plus, the risk of complications from this surgery is apparently very low. So the current situation is far from dire. I was just mildly freaked out.

Taking a page from this man’s blog, I am going to have a Blogalike Contest.

The rules are this:

Send me a blog entry written in the style of Faustus, M.D. The events and/or thoughts described need not be true to life, though they may be.

You must send me your entry by midnight on Wednesday, August 11. This gives you just over a week.

I’ll post all the entries in addition to one of my own, and then you can all vote on which one you think I wrote.

I’ll send a gift card for Powell’s City of Books to the person who gets the highest number of votes, unless that person happens to be me, in which case I’ll send a gift card to the person who gets the second-highest number of votes.

Then I will reveal the ugly truth and hope to escape the ensuing slaughter unscathed.

The great thing about this contest is that it both a) gives those of you who like a challenge something to do and b) feeds my ego.

Remember: midnight on Wednesday, August 11.

The one thing that came close to marring my experience of Donnie Darko last night (but, luckily, not close enough) was the near free-for-all of conversations going on around me, both between people and on cell phones.

Now, ordinarily I am adamantly opposed to talking at all during a movie; you can understand, therefore, why I believe that allowing a cell phone to ring, answering it, and either proceeding to have a conversation or climbing over everybody to have the conversation outside the theater is a compounded crime so heinous as to warrant instant decapitation.

Which leaves me mystified as to why the gentleman sitting several rows in front of me was permitted to live. His cell phone rang four times during the movie, and he answered it and left the theater each time, coming back after he was done, much to the irritation of his rowmates. After the movie, I ran into a friend of mine, who, it turned out, had been unfortunate enough to sit next to Inconsiderate Cell Phone Man. I asked him what in God’s name had been going on.

My friend replied, “He said his wife was having a baby.”

I stared, agog.

My friend said, “I asked him why the fuck he was at the movies instead of at the hospital with his wife. He did not have a satisfactory answer.”

Can you figure out why I didn’t pull out a machete, pursue this man, and chop his head off?

Because I sure can’t.

It’s entirely possible that somebody could describe the extraordinary movie that is Donnie Darko, but that somebody isn’t me. I am a mere mortal and can only lie prostrate in the face of such brilliance.

Go see it at once.