One night last century when I was a beat reporter for the Journal Newspapers, I had a dream of my entire workday. In this dream, I followed leads, interviewed sources, wrote my story, and turned it to my editor to be hacked to a manageable 15 column inches.

This dream was very realistic. I could actually see in my mind’s eye myself typing out the story on the screen. It seemed so real, in fact, that when I awoke and realized I still had to go into the newsroom and crank out a legitimate story, I actually said out loud to myself, “Now I have to do this all over again?”

That is how I imagine it might be to write a novel in a month. Every day. For thirty days. Like your own personal Groundhog Day that never ends, but with less Bill Murray.

But many idiots prospective novelists will try to do just that starting tomorrow, when they challenge themselves to write 50,000 words during National Novel Writing Month, known as NaNoWriMo and winner of the Most Awkward Acronym award.

That’s 1,667 words per day. Approximately 175 pages. Like Amway, many will try but few will succeed.

Like most delusional people, I have often thought I could write a novel. I put this American-Dream-of-an-aspiration at the top of my list of “Things I Want to do in my Life (But Probably Never Will)”.

I never lack for ideas and often bore The Princess most nights with the latest plot I devised on the bus ride home.

“How about,” I tell her, “a novel about a compelling character who must overcome some sort of obstacle and at the end he would become richer from the experience?”

“Shut up, I’m watching America’s Next Top Model,” she says encouragingly. “Go fix me some bedtime tea.”

My ideas are usually better suited as short stories since they’re not “well-rounded” or “interesting”. This is why I actually admire anyone who can write a whole novel, let alone a good one (not, for example, the highly overrated The Kite Runner).

But I realized recently that, though I didn’t accomplish it in 30 days (seriously, NoNaWriMo, November? With the Thanksgiving break? Why not just pick February with its 28 days?), I have written a novel!

Sort of.

Not counting this entry, I have written on Arjewtino.com 45,866 words over 114 blog posts since March, roughly 402 words per post. I need about 10 more blog posts to pass 50,000 words and I’m not even counting my in the equation.

I know, I know, 124 blog posts does not a novel make. Having a string of disjointed thoughts about and dating shiksas does not mean I met the rigorous NaNoWriMo standards of what constitutes a “novel”.

Whatever. I accomplished something, like with fewer leg cramps. I may not turn in my blog to any publishers, and you may never see Arjewtino in the Barnes & Noble bargain bin for $1.99, but 45,866 words is something I’m proud of.

Make that 46,381 words.

If my blog’s new theme doesn’t prove that I should no longer be allowed to make bets with my friends, I don’t know what does.

Shortly after meeting INPY earlier this year and becoming BFFs over SoCo and limes and our Dodgers-Yankees rivalry, we made a bet on the baseball season. Since INPY documented it on his blog, I’ll let his words speak for themselves:

[Arjewtino] and I have a little wager that I will now make public. He is a Dodgers fan, but I don’t hold that against him. (Not TOO much) It could be SLIGHLTY worse and he could belong to the tribe that is known as Red Sox Nation. (Gag) But, as a true baseball fan he knows of the storied history our two teams share…the anger, the WS run ins…all of it. And since the Dodgers are FINALLY picked to actually do well, we have put this little wager together;

It’s a head to head, Yankees v. Dodgers straight up who will have the better year. If, say the Yankees make the playoffs and the Dodgers don’t…game over. If they both make the playoffs it’s who wins more games/advances further. And if, by the grace of God we meet in the WS (as many are predicting) then it’s a straight up winner take all…

And what is on the line?

Loser has to (1) dress up in the jersey and the hat of the other’s team and allow photo documentation and (2) the Blog gets a makeover in the other teams colors and logos for a full week.

The season started out great for Big Blue as we (yes, we) won 10 of our first 14 games. We started May over .600 and in first place in the NL West as the Yankees played under .500 through June. By the time the All-Star break rolled around, the Dodgers were up 5 games on the Bronx Bombers.

INPY was nervous about the bet and admitted as much to me. Hell, he barely cared about it when he saw the Red Sox build a season-high 14-game lead in the AL East. To his credit, he kept fending off immature attacks from RSN yokels and promised his Satanic team would stage a comeback.

Sure enough, the Yanks’ season, and my chances at winning the 6-month-long wager, started to change.

By the end of July, the Dodgers were up on the Yankees by only a half-game. By the end of August, the Dodgers were down four games and playing like Alyssa Milano was manning third base. Seriously, Tommy Lasorda could have hit better with men in scoring position.

On September 16, the Yankees held a 4 ½-game lead over the Blue Crew.

My team responded to this deficit in typical Dodgers’ fashion: by losing 10 of their next 11 games. The Evil Empire, however, finished the regular season by winning 9 of their final 13 games and securing the AL Wild Card.

Final Line:

Yankees 94-68 (.580)
Dodgers 82-80 (.506); 12 games back

I am an when it comes to betting. I may win at blackjack in Atlantic City or at Roshambo against HAL, but when it comes to wagering my dignity against my friends, I have the willpower of The Princess around champagne and cupcakes.

Still, I felt it was a fair wager and there is some satisfaction in having seen the Yanks get spanked by the Cleveland Indians in the first round. We agreed that photo documentation was unnecessary since neither of us remembered actually saying those words when we made the bet but that the blog makeover was instrumental.

So here it is. Enjoy Arjewtino’s new look this week, INPY. Soak it in, relish the images of Jeter and the NY logo on my banner.

‘cause there’s always next year.

Thanks to Kathryn, a Yankees fan herself, for designing my banner.

Most people by now have heard about Halle Berry’s semi-anti-Semitic on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last Friday night. For those of you haven’t heard, Berry was on the show last Friday night showing off photos she took using Mac’s Photobooth feature, which distorts your face into a House of Mirrors-kind of way.

She took out a photo that made her nose look big and cracked, “Here’s where I look like my Jewish cousin.”

No one laughed and Jay Leno replied, “I’m glad you said that and not me.” The Tonight Show aired the segment though they deleted the “Jewish” part and added a laugh track.

Rightly so, many Jews and goyim have been offended.

But they are offended for the wrong reasons.

Halle Berry’s comment was ignorant at best and distasteful at worst. She claims that shortly before coming out on stage, one of her assistants was looking at the same photo and uttered the same comment. If anything, we should be indignant at her ripping off someone else’s joke.

What I can’t forgive, and what upsets me most of all, is that The Tonight Show added a laugh track.

Let me repeat that: THE TONIGHT SHOW. ADDED. A LAUGH TRACK.

They pretended the “joke” was funny by artificially making it seem like the audience was amused by Halle Berry’s guffaw. This offends me more than anything Halle Berry could say, considering the airing makes her look vapid and desperate for acceptance.

The episode, though, seems to have sparked more outrage than Ann Coulter’s recent declaration that Jews should be “perfected” into Christians. The difference is that Berry is an idiot and less aware of her image than she should be; Coulter actually believed in what she said.

There is a long history of Jews overreacting AND underreacting to perceived slurs, slights, and insults. When people call you a kike or make Holocaust jokes, you kick their ass. When they say it’s funny but you don’t look Jewish, you call them idiots.

Some of the funniest Jew jokes I’ve ever heard have come from friends of the Tribe, usually because they’re witty, self-deprecating, and illuminate something poignant about our collective identity. The most offensive jokes come from people who aren’t Chosen because they’re, intentional or not, cheap, cruel, and sadistic.

By the same token, many non-Jews can easily be too paranoid about offending us. One of my favorite stories involves my friend , who, while we were discussing a few years ago our holiday plans, he said, “Are you celebrating, um, uh, Hanukkah? Did I say that right? Did I offend you?”

Of course, Jews aren’t immune to being overly sensitive to perfectly innocuous comments. Baby Bien once flew into a rage when a mutual friend described Jews as a race, not a culture or religion. I explained to our friend why that kind of comment could offend us but I also explained to Baby Bien why he was overreacting.

So until “Jews 101: How Not to Offend the Chosen People” becomes required reading in school, we’re all going to have to take a deep breath and gain some perspective on things.

Besides, those Photobooth pictures are .

During a staff lunch yesterday, a co-workers raised the idea of throwing a party for our pre-dominantly Indian office to celebrate Diwali. The following conversation ensued:

AJT: “What’s Diwali?”

Her: “It’s the ‘Festival of Lights’.”

AJT: “Cool! So it’s like an Indian Hanukkah?”

Her: “Man, Arjewtino, why do you have to Jewify everything?”

AJT: “It’s the way I filter the world.”

Fictional verbs aside, it sparked a thought. Why do I, as my co-worker so eloquently put it, Jewify everything?

Easter is nothing more to me than a reminder that Passover is coming up; a pinwheel hat reminds me of a yarmulke; and an essay by in which he describes eating nothing but Chicken McNuggets for a week prompted me to ask The Princess if I should try the same thing: but with matzo balls.

One could argue that we all do the same thing, merely filtering the world through the lens of our personal identities and experiences.

One could also argue that, since Judaism has been described by Americans in a poll as the “most admired religion”, we all should Jewify everything.

Think about it:

• Christmas would finally be called the “Christian Hanukkah”.
• The calendar would list today as the 12th of Heshvan, 5768. Also, I could tell people I was born on the 15th of Tamuz, 5735. Just rolls off the tongue, right?
• Fast-food places would serve gefilte fish to go.
• A teenager’s act of rebellion against his parents would consist of getting a B in math class.
• Ann Coulter would finally shut the fuck up.
• Beards would be in style.
• We would read everything from right to left, which makes more sense if you’re right-handed, which most of us are anyway.
• Purim – a time to get drunk, have a festive meal, and give charity to the poor — would become the greatest holiday of the year.
• Every time people gave their spare change to a homeless guy, we would call it an act of Tzedaka.
• There would be more pigs.

So the response I wish I had given, when asked by my co-worker why I “Jewify everything”, is this:

“Why doesn’t everyone?”

The first moustache I ever saw was my father’s.

He wasn’t a cop, a lounge singer, or a porn star. He was Argentinean, which, apparently, was enough reason in the 1970s to grow bigotes.

And though the practice of growing a whiskery pushbroom above your upper lip has since grown out of style in the U.S., relegated merely to certain professionals like Mr. Belvedere and a couple of guys from the Village People, it has continued in Latin America to this day as a veritable — though perhaps misguided — display of masculinity.

My dad finally shaved his moustache when I was 15, emerging from the bathroom cleanly shaved and nearly traumatizing my siblings and me with his new, strange face. Though I never followed in my Papi’s facial hair footsteps, I have sported a goatee and/or beard since I was in college.

Still, who says we don’t all turn into our dads?

In honor of the moustache, several friends and I – Foxymoron (team captain), , Nickels, I Now Pronounce You, Klein, and Rory — have formed the Committee for the Restoration of Trebek’s Upper Lip Hair, a team that will participate in Movember, a month-long charitable event designed to raise money for the .

(There is something poetic, I think, about helping combat the very affliction that strips a man of his manhood by growing the ultimate outward display of said manhood.)

Participating in Movember is, as I see it, an easy two-step process:

1. Start October 31st with a clean-shaven face.
2. Don’t shave for the entire month of November.

Since I figured karma would be pretty happy with this act of charity and would reward me later in life by NOT afflicting me with cancer of the ass, I agreed to take part.

Also, I’ll agree to just about anything short of eating coconut when I’m drinking.

I have said for years that if I could actually grow a big, bushy moustache or beard, I would. Unfortunately, the Jew and Latino DNA in me didn’t combine to create dermis that could push hair out of my face in droves. Left unchecked, my beard merely grows to pubic hair length, after which it gets scraggly and, well, pubic-hair-like.

Still, I am looking forward to my Movember participation and progress. The day before the event starts, my team and I will be going to a barber for a straight-razor shave. We’ll be taking donations and, at the end of Movember, will host a party to celebrate our facial hair efforts.

So if you value your erection or your boyfriend’s/husband’s/friend-with-benefits’ erection, click here to donate for my moustache. You can donate as little as $1, but a $2 donation gets you a tax exemption and a better seat in Heaven, closer to the Jews. I’ll be updating my team’s Movember growth as the month continues.

Thank you.

One of the most frequent running themes at last Friday’s incredibly attended Invite Your Blog Crush Happy Hour -– other than butt-smacking, shot-taking, and indoor-smoking –- was the idea of blogger privacy.

To varying degrees, each blogger chooses his or her level of privacy early on in that blog’s lifecycle. Some choose to hide every aspect of their lives, while others reveal everything about themselves short of their Social Security Number or the fact that they used to participate in Amway.

Most of us fall somewhere in the middle, opting for a semi-veiled kind of security for any number of reasons.

Blogger happy hours, though, have a way of dropping that veil.

We meet otherwise secretive people we happen to read online; we learn their names and their favorite drinks; and we share intimate stories we’d rather forget.

This creates an uncommon sense of camaraderie most of us find unusual but which we all understand. We have to bond with each other lest we allow our private information to be exposed. We tell things to people who already have heavily read, public media with which they could expose this information.

With that said, here are photos of unidentified bloggers wearing black bar glasses from Friday night. No, those are not “Photoshopped” strips of black bar over our eyes; they are actually glasses that create the same effect.

Remember to stalk invite your blog crush.

A British child prodigy named Georgia Brown became the youngest member of Mensa this year when the Stanford-Binet IQ test revealed her to have a score of 152, making her a certified genius.

I was obviously skeptical of this little girl’s IQ score and the test methods used to figure out her intelligence, so I decided to run my own tests and see if I was more intelligent than her.

The first test I ran was to analyze what Georgia could do and compare them to my own skills.

Georgia:
She was crawling at five months and walking at nine months.

Arjewtino:
I wasn’t allowed out of my crib until I was 2.

Georgia:
By 14 months, she was getting herself dressed.

Arjewtino:
I still defer to The Princess and my gay friends for my fashion choices.

Georgia:
By 18 months, she was having proper conversations.

Arjewtino:
I often slur my words, have a slight lisp, and my mom likes to remind me that no one could understand me until I was 4-years-old.

Georgia:
Puts her shoes on and on the right feet.

Arjewtino:
I wore Velcro shoes from Target until I was 12.

Georgia:
Sings “I Can Sing a Rainbow” perfectly.

Arjewtino:
I can karaoke to Green Day songs at blogger happy hours.

Georgia:
Counts to 10.

Arjewtino:
I remember once trying to count to infinity and gave up around 150 when I realized I would never get there.

Georgia:
Uses words such as “arrogant” in conversation.

Arjewtino:
I’m Argentinean. I was born arrogant.

Georgia:
Distinguishes between pink and purple.

Arjewtino:
When The Princess and I painted our apartment last year, she asked me to choose between falu, mauve, and vermillion. They all looked like red to me.

Georgia:
Swims

Arjewtino:
I wore flotation wings on my arms until I was 7.

Georgia:
Dances the ballet.

Arjewtino:
Georgia’s got me there.

Georgia:
Draws an almost perfect circle.

Arjewtino:
My dad’s an architect. He taught me how to draw a perfect circle before I learned how to play soccer.

Georgia:
Distinguishes between a square and a rectangle.

Arjewtino:
I got a ‘D’ in Geometry in 10th grade and got busted for cheating on a quiz.

Georgia:
Explains difficult words to her friends.

Arjewtino:
When my best friend Blue accused me of not being a responsible person, I told him, “I’m not responsible, I’m accountable.” When he asked me what the difference was, I shrugged my shoulders.

This test was obviously inconclusive. I needed an empirical examination.

So I took an online IQ test I found when I Googled “Stanford-Binet IQ test”. I spent 15 minutes answering a variety of questions designed to test my spatial, mathematical, and verbal skills. At the end of the test, I clicked for the results and navigated to this page:

Maybe a two-year-old is smarter than me.

Some of my funniest friends don’t have blogs. But they have Netflix accounts.

And, as their Netflix buddy, I have access to their hilarious comments and synopses of movies they’ve rented.

These are written by GoPats, J-Vo, Tits McGee, and Ladder 49: Part 1 can be read here.

This is the year where everyone learned the term “carbon footprint”. Don’t pretend like you knew the expression in 2006, we all know you’re lying.

More specifically, this is the year we all learned how to “offset” our by recycling more, driving less, and masturbating with the lights off for a change.

But is taking responsibility for our individual impact on the global environment the only way to reduce dangerous emissions? Vanity Fair recently devised a way for each of us to offset the “asshole footprint” we leave on the planet, but I think that is only the beginning.

In honor of — for which I promised to write a post — here are six other “footprints” I believe we should offset to make this world a better place:

DC footprint

Do you talk about the housing market at parties? Do you ask people what they do for a living while drinking Rolling Rocks? Do you complain about the lack of dating options in the city? Do you thumb your nose at people who don’t have a Masters degree? Do you know at least one rower?

3-step plan to offset your footprint:
1. Move.
2. Seriously, get the fuck out of my city.
3. Why are you still here?

(LNS)-behavior footprint

Are you waking up too hungover to even consider puking? Did you drink so much the night before you drunk-texted everyone you know? Do you spend Monday mornings writing on your friends’ Facebook walls on Monday morning about how tanked you’re going to get this Friday? Do you call Adams Morgan Ad-Mo? Do you use terms like “turbo” unironically? Do people hate you?

3-step plan to offset your footprint:
1. Stop hanging out in Georgetown.
2. Put down the bottle.
3. Don’t promote flip cup as a sport.

GOP footprint

Are you a hypocrite? Do you wrap yourself around the American flag and call it patriotism? Do you espouse morality and tolerance while hating anyone different from you? Do you wipe your ass with the Bill of Rights and call liberals traitors to their country?

3-step plan to offset your footprint:
1. Vote Democrat in every election regardless of the candidate.
2. Stop using the word “liberal” like it’s a slur.
3. Adopt a wider stance.

Procreation footprint

Do you have kids? Do they wear Heelys? Do they lack such discipline that they punch people in the balls on the Metro? Did you name any of them Timmy?

3-step plan to offset your footprint:
1. Always wear a condom.
2. Stop having sex.
3. Listen to Bob Barker.

Blogging footprint

Do you have a blog? Do you whine about your problems/neighbors/phone service/boyfriend/DMV/Metro? Have you lost all contact with the outside world? When people ask you how you’re doing, do you tell them to just read your blog?

3-step plan to offset your footprint:
1. Don’t use the Internet for a month.
2. Stop discussing your Sitemeter stats; no one cares.
3. Go outside.

Argentine footprint

Do you think of your arrogance as a virtue? Do you think you’re better than Guatemalans? Do you hate the Brazil/German/England soccer teams? Do you speak Spanish correctly? When you walk down the street in a lightning storm, do you assume God’s taking your picture?

3-step plan to offset your footprint:
1. Stop eating meat.
2. Become ugly.
3. Lose the arrogance.

If you want to promote Blog Action Day, click .

Janet has written a short list of “Really Small Things I Do To Help the Planet”.

Also, to find out how many planets we’d need if everyone lived like you, go here. Here are my results:

Thanks, :