I’ve been designing websites for a few good friends recently, including the book critic and former Lingua Franca and Arts & Letters Daily staffer Matthew Price; the science writer Peter Dizikes; and the science and technology writer Clive Thompson, who wrote the fine piece about “ambient awareness” that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine. Matt’s and Peter’s sites are new; Clive’s site, Collision Detection, is a redesign. Check ’em out!

Last year The Onion’s culture section had this to say about Big Top, my pal Rob Harrell’s nationally syndicated comic strip: “Rob Harrell possesses a classicist’s sense of comic timing … using panel space as well as any comics-page humorist since, yes, Berkeley Breathed.” Andrews McMeel, the publisher of all the Doonesbury collections, just put out the first-ever collection of Big Top strips. My copy arrived from Amazon this week.

I wrote about Rob a few months ago in one of my first posts. We’ve known each other since middle school, when he was a Bloom County fanatic who amused himself by sketching pneumatic babes and other things in his notebook when he was bored in class. You can read Rob’s daily Big Top strips at ucomics.com.

Also received from Amazon this week: a copy of Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames—The d’Antin Manuscript. I’ve owned a xerox of this clever and hilarious book for about 20 years, but I’ve never owned a copy of the actual book. Oddly, my new copy has the appearance of a cheap bootleg: Both the cover and the pages inside were obviously reproduced from a mediocre photocopy of an earlier edition, not from the original plates. Given that the publisher is Penguin, this is kind of surprising. But I’ll be glad to replace my own tattered photocopy with something I can actually file away on a bookshelf.

Last night I went to P.S. 122 in the East Village to see All Stories Are Fiction, my friend Mike Daisey’s latest series of monologues. The show was FANTASTIC. He’s one hell of a talented storyteller. Here is a description of the format Mike is using for these shows:

Last spring monologuist Mike Daisey created 13 new shows in 13 weeks in a daring new series at P.S. 122 called All Stories Are Fiction. Plucking from events that befell him in the years, days, and sometimes minutes before he walked onstage, Daisey weaved together brand-new shows, creating one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-seen-again monologues before the eyes of the audience each and every time.

Now the creator of 21 Dog Years and the monologuist The New York Times has dubbed “the master storyteller” and The Seattle Times calls “a cross between Noam Chomsky and Jack Black” is back at P.S. 122, this time taking aim at nothing less than happiness itself.

The rules are deceptively simple: 45 minutes before show time, Mike goes into his dressing room with a legal pad and a Sharpie and creates an outline. At 7:30 sharp, Mike emerges and tells his tale for the assembled audience for the first and only time. Over two months these monologues will address the essential question of happiness: what role does it play—or should it play—in our lives?

Mike’s doing a new show at 7:30 p.m. every Monday through May 9. I will definitely be going back for more. Tickets and other details are here.

Mike also has a blog.

My very smart pal Peter Dizikes has a fine piece in The Boston Globe’s Ideas section about the way that popular representations of Albert Einstein—”the detached, elderly professor with unruly white hair, a lined face, sloping shoulders, and a contemplative gaze, occasionally given to bemusement”—have obscured the world-historical importance of the scientific work he did when he was younger:

Einstein’s has become the all-purpose face of genius. ”Like a logo,” says Peter L. Galison, a historian of science at Harvard and author of ”Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps” (2003). Used this way, adds Galison, ”Einstein is voided of any meaning at all. He’s just smart or wise.” A recent ESPN.com article wondering if New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick could be considered a genius featured photos of two people: Belichick and Einstein.

This iconography, though it may seem harmless enough, obscures the Einstein who actually revolutionized physics. In this, the 100th anniversary of the year Einstein announced his Special Theory of Relativity, the disparity between the aging celebrity scientist and the formidable young figure upending our conception of the universe seems especially jarring. In 1905, Einstein was an intense, even feisty young man of 26 with many worldly concerns, including a wife and a job. He had dark hair and a solid build. ”A massive body, very heavily muscled,” the English writer and physicist C.P. Snow noted years later.

Stay Free!, the fine Brooklyn-based nonprofit magazine edited by my excellent pal Carrie McLaren, has just launched a blog called Stay Free! Daily. The blog will be maintained by a stable of about half a dozen contributors. Stay Free! comes out twice a year and covers American media and culture from a lefty perspective. It’s great.

Carrie often creates satirical ads and other parodies for the back of the magazine, and I’ve appeared in two of them.

The Indianapolis-based artist Rob Harrell and I have been pals since about 1983, when we started the sixth grade together at Binford Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana. Rob is the guy behind the excellent syndicated comic strip Big Top, which runs in several dozen newspapers around the country. Big Top will remind you of Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County. If there’s a funnier mainstream comic strip being published today, I’m not aware of it. Rob also paints and does commercial illustration; he’s got a brilliant conceptual mind and intimidating technique. The illustration below is from a few years back when he was experimenting a lot with scratchboard techniques. I’m posting it here because I think it’s perfect and hilarious.

As Gawker noted in November, the American Gentrifier cover below appears on the flip side of the Winter 2005 issue of Stay Free!, the lefty cultural mag edited by the brilliant and hilarious Brooklyn resident Carrie McLaren. That’s me holding the baby; it was the first time I’d ever worn a Baby Bjorn, and it may well be the last. (The wife and baby are models too.)

I had nothing to do with the concept or design of this cover; I simply showed up at the photographer’s studio and did my best imitation of an emasculated Park Slope husband. The issue is being distributed free throughout Brooklyn at cafes and other establishments. If you’re rarely or never in Brooklyn, you can buy the issue for $2.95 at a number of bookstores around the country, including one of my favorites, Manhattan’s St. Mark’s Bookshop. The issue is also available via the Stay Free! website.

Carrie apparently thinks I look like the archetypal clueless yuppie, because this is the second time she’s enlisted me as a model for one of the parodies that appear on her magazine’s back cover. Four or five years ago, I appeared on the back of Stay Free! in an anti-S.U.V. parody:

Don’t you love how my belt doesn’t match my shoes? Carrie just marched me around the streets of SoHo posing me in front of parked S.U.V.s. They were everywhere. I was surprised to discover just how many of them there are. I have a driver’s license, but I rarely drive, so I’d never really had cause to notice them.

Carrie had this ad made into postcards, which you can buy on the Stay Free! website.