Manning Leonard Krull will sort you out

He (above) sure did me when I happened on his blog and read a few of the hilarious entries.

Examples:


Then last night I was out with my friend Beth in my old stomping grounds around Rittenhouse Square and we stopped for a drink at Rouge. It was dark and crowded and noisy and I was already half drunk, and I noticed Beth saying hi and shaking hands with a middle-aged guy in an extremely nice suit. I assumed he was a colleague of hers or something, and then he turned to me and shook my hand as well, and in mid-handshake I realized he was Philadelphia mayoral candidate Michael Nutter! Ha. Since I didn't know who he was at first, I had totally already given him the hey-how-ya-doin'-yeah-okay-take-care brushoff when I figured it out. Sorry, Michael Nutter! I'll still vote for you from France if there's some sort of absentee ballot thing for Philly mayoral elections. I kind of doubt there is.

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My old job from before I moved to France has hired me for three or four weeks of solid nine-to-five (and then some) full-time-ness! After two and a half years of freelance and working as little as possible, I can't even begin to express how weird it is to be working in an office and chained to a desk again. I'm not at the old place in Rittenhouse Square this time; they've opened a second office in the top floor of the Wanamaker Building, right next to City Hall. Our workspace is a vast sea of cubicles under a high, pointy, church-like ceiling, with dozens of windows letting narrow beams of sunlight in. I can hear the clock on top of City Hall chiming the hours and half-hours. There's so much open space and the place is decorated so nicely, all warm tones and modern and clean and design-y, I actually like working here. After all that time away, I'd almost forgotten about the free Coke machine. Wow.

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I don't have my own cube/computer yet, so I'm working at the desk of a lady who's not here today. I can see from the photos she's hung up that she has bright pink hair. I guess this is where they keep the freaks. I only know about half of the people here nowadays, and the other half have come up to me one by one to tell me they've seen my pictures hanging in the other office. They know my name and know I lived in France and know I make really really good webpages. It's like being the lamest rockstar of all time.

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I'm going to my best friend Marilyn Manson's concert tonight! I don't want to make him nervous before he goes on, so I won't tell him I'm there and I'll just watch the show from my seat with the rest of the audience. I'm going with Steve. He's Marilyn Manson's other best friend! Slayer is opening. Nobody is friends with them.

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I've been drinking too many Vanilla Coke Zeros. Like, about a hundred a day, something like that. I think part of it is that I'm stressed out about their inevitable disappearance, like when they discontinued Diet Vanilla Coke a year or two back, and I had to get my sister to smuggle six bottles into France for me after they weren't even making it in the States anymore. I'll always remember carrying her ridiculously heavy suitcase through Charles de Gaulle airport and asking her, "What the heck do you HAVE in this thing?" and she said somewhat conspiratorially, "It's a present for you," and I said, "... Oh."

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Manning Leonard Krull might well be the best name of 2007.