Bought DFW's latest and already almost sort of done, his (David Foster Wallace's) latest being Consider the Lobster, an essay collection, the title essay being from Gourmet and netting inclusion in Best American Essays 2005, which is the only reason I can fathom for why this book was released now, because most pieces were written in (in the order they appear in the book) 1998, 1999, 1999, 2001, 1994, 2000, 2004 ("Consider the Lobster"), 1996, and 2005 ("Host," which appeared in The Atlantic, which I read in that version and whose subject, honestly, didn't deserve the effort but which industry (shock jocks, talk radio, etc.) probably did), except for maybe DFW just doesn't write that many essays or much journalism and the publisher had to wait a long while for enough material to make a book (except two essays predate his first 1997 collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which means maybe they weren't good enough to make it in then but are fine now, ten years later?). Except it's always remarkable to me how entertaining his (even ten-year-old) writing is, and how he hasn't let up on his quirks of mixing precision and colloquialism, academic jargon and modern slang, gigantor paragraphs and wiseass footnotes that hang on like remoras to the white bellies of several sharks (I mean, pages, his footnotes go on sometimes for a page or two or three). I'd already read two of these pieces, in shorter form, when they appeared in Harper's and The Atlantic, but there were 8 others to enjoy, and especially notable is the piece on John McCain, written originally for Rolling Stone but here DFW was allowed to publish the full version (the original Word Doc named probably something like "McCain RS Story_Wallace.doc" instead of the eventual "McCain RS_edited v 8 reedited 8c approved w changes 8cii.doc") and thus surging up to 80 pages, etc. Anyway, meanwhile, the gecko's alive and digging baby food, my wife worked til 9 pm or so last night at the free clinic and is today exhausted but humbled to be in the graces of fortune, my daughter's home sick, I've already grocery-shopped for ice cream and jello and antibiotics, and when I sat at my desk, finally, I glimpsed the warning label on this glass bottle of club soda, empty, between the candle and the computer's speaker, and thought how absurdly ridiculous ("Cap may blow off"? like, any time? like, from Gatorade to Gren-Ade? "Gimme your money! I've got club soda!") and yet evocative of the oh-so-many lawsuits that gave it birth. "Point away from face and people." Uh. Okay. And suddenly Dick Van Dyke, Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey are engaged in competition to see who can keep the bottle pointed away from their face and drink it at the same time.