One of those increasingly puerile countdown programs on VH1 asked the question recently: Why are we men so attracted to women who can kick our asses?

I don't know, but I know that I'm married to one. If I ever doubted it, I can now point to fresh evidence. Laura has joined a roller derby team. They practice in Brooklyn.

Not only that, but her roller derby team's "corporate" sponsor is the Hell's Angels.

And Laura's roller derby moniker is "Hell's Belle."

I rock. And my wife kicks ass.

There's a new series called "Parking Lot" on the cable network Trio. Loosely based on a short documentary from the '80s called "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," which was shot in the parking lot outside a Judas Priest concert, the series interviews hardcore fans and other bystanders hanging around outside various odd events.

Last night's episode visited parking lots outside a Motörhead concert, a Cher concert, and a science-fiction convention—I-Con 22 at SUNY in Stony Brook, NY, to be exact. Bob Howe and I happened to have dropped by the con for half a day to have lunch with Scott Edelman, and all three of us ended up being interviewed at length by the TV crew. A few snippets from our interview were interspersed through the I-Con segment, amongst conversations with pookas, plushies, and one precocious little girl in angel wings who couldn't stop using the word "inappropriate."

Anyway, if you get Trio and want to catch it, the episode is running again this evening at 9:30 pm EST:

http://www.triotv.com/schedules/sched.php3?sdate=01/26/2004

My short story "Strong Medicine" is going to appear in the next annual edition of The Year's Best Science Fiction*, edited by Gardner Dozois and published by St. Martin's Press. The book comes out in July.

I'm speechless.

But not so speechless that I can't remind you that you don't need to wait for the book to read the story (although I hope you'll still pick up the book). It's still available for free perusal at Salon, with the viewing of a short ad.

Damn. Wow.

For some reason, I've been more prone to paper cuts lately than usual. A lot more. Two nights ago I was sorting through the mail, separating ours from the stuff for the folks upstairs, when I accidentally slid the edge of a magazine across the webbing between the third and fourth fingers on my left hand. I think my wedding ring helped guide the incision, because the edge of my ring aligns perfectly with it.

That one bled like crazy, but it wasn't as bad as the one I got the week before. I had a manuscript in my shoulder bag. I reached in for a book and sliced two of my fingers on the manuscript, just below the cuticles. There was one diagonal cut on my pinky but three neat red slits running parallel to one another on my ring finger. I looked pretty funny the rest of that week, typing with two bandages around the tips of fingers on my right hand.

I now view reading material with suspicion. I wonder if George W. had a similar experience.

We all know that food deliverymen will stuff menus into any crevice where people might pick one up, but today I saw the most remarkable example of this phenomenon I've spotted yet. In the elevator in the building where I work, a few menus from a Vietnamese restaurant were crammed beneath the edge of the control panel.

I hate to reward behavior like this, but I admired the ingenuity and chutzpah this took. So I grabbed a menu. And Vietnamese sounds awfully good for lunch.