A long time ago, I wrote an article about a bunch of young Americans in Prague. Details magazine, then edited by the fast-rising James Truman, bought the article and gave it the headline Wild, Wild East.

Now, nearly a dozen years later, a New Yorker editor has gathered a bunch of short stories by people like Arthur Phillips, Josip Novakovich John Beckman, and Charlotte Hobson about life in Eastern Europe and titled it… The Wild East. I thought that title cliched even in 1992. But I guess, like amber, some cliches become so ossified they take on a new brilliance and attraction.

Unfortunately, so far at least, none of the fiction I’ve read about the decade after the fall of communism come close to the weirdness and wildness of that time. Fiction just can’t compare.

Footnotes: #1 many of those young Americans are now bloggers: Matt Welch, Amy Langfield, Ken Layne, Doug Arellanes and Ben Sullivan. Other bloggers I met in the Wild East include Rick Bruner, Nick Denton and Emmanuelle Richard. I guess you could call us the “Wild East Blogger Bunch.” Grunt. OK, footnote #2 I’ve met a couple of people in bars through the years who claimed they moved to Prague after reading my brilliant prose. Was that you? Leave a comment.

Pancakes and sausages with friends, then scrimaging soccer three kids vs one father, then to the botanical garden, where we saw a praying mantis, many blue tailed lizards and monarch caterpillars and chrysali. And we played chess on the giant board.

The photographer: “The point is moot, for we already know the identity of the man in the picture. He is you and me.”

Several weiss beers tonight with Todd Melet at Tyler’s Taproom. Todd connects newspapers and advertisers, and in his spare time, aims to boot the local mayor out of office for hanging a swastika-festooned American flag behind his desk. (Update: looks like Todd woke up Sunday and started to blog.)

Rounding up “creeping aspirations,” CNN reports that “The median size of a newly built home in 1970 was 1,500 square feet… by 2000, it had increased to 2,300 square feet, even though the median family’s income hasn’t changed much.”

An economist attributes this to “expenditure cascade,” in which everyone tries to catch up with the Jones. Perhaps the baby boomers, constituting America’s consumer center of gravity and now at their earning peaks, also account for this bloating of expectations.

Time to go long wheel chair manufacturers?

Here’s a sound for every occasion. (Thanks Mom.)

WashingtonPost.com: “These suit-coat-wearing men and high-heeled women gracefully sipped chardonnay while figuring out how blogs could increase their business revenue.”

Not everyone can dance or be hip, and not everyone can blog. For many, it will be more cost-effective to Blogad, underwriting some of the bloggers who’ve already mastered the form?

“For some why” (rather than “for some reason”) and “just a second” (useful anytime.)

“The boys and the girls don’t sit together not because they don’t want to but because everyone has a best friend and everybody’s best friend has a friend and usually those people are all boys or all girls, so you end up with a table of all girls and a table of all boys.”

Blogs get more praise for being hives of influence in this article by Joseph Jaffe. (Via MarketingWonk.)

“Blogs have become virtual community centers where connectors construct web-like beacons outwards and reach out to interested parties who in turn perpetuate and strengthen the momentum generating from the organic and ever-evolving message board.”

When you target your message, why not aim for the bull’s eye?

Some notes on recent activities:

After tossing the baseball and basketball, we spent the morning weeding/mulching the school’s garden. Saw a toad, an egg-laden spider, hundreds of crickets, monarch caterpillars.

I went to a PTA meeting last week. Didn’t realize Dads don’t do PTA… I was the only male among 30 people in attendance.

I traded in my Road Runner Cable modem, which had been turning off unbiden… the lady at the counter exclaimed “something definitely ain’t right here”… turns out her modem had done the same thing and she sees lots of these trade-ins.