Dear Maija, I’m in a fantasy baseball league with a coworker and a bunch of his weird family members and their friends. Last year my buddy won a football league that most of these same dudes were in and nobody paid him the league fees.  

I’m sort of playing “navigation lady” with my friend Benj Clarke. We’re both on our cell phones with Benj trying to locate my secluded street in Westwood. It doesn’t take him long to figure out how to get here, but why would it? He was the circulation manager at CityBeat, so he knows Cincinnati’s streets pretty well. He also loves The Beatles, as do I, and I could always tell that music is where his heart is — that being a full time musician was his dream. That dream is now a reality.  

We here at Mini Gauge love a good prank. We’re seriously bummed about the proliferation of caller ID because we can no longer telephone our editor at 4 a.m. and tell him we’re a leader of a right-wing conservative group planning a “Tea Party” in his backyard.   

Late on July 1, I was folding clothes at the Laundromat when my mom called, and I complained that there were no stories that night. It was quiet. Too quiet. I sat on top of a folding table, my feet dangling, when Mom and I got on the topic of kids. I told Mom that I wanted to adopt a little boy. “If I had a girl, I might send her back,” I joked.  

It shouldn’t come as too much of a shock that — some 140 days or so after he took office — President Obama has acted in a way on two important issues that shakes the confidence placed in him by many supporters. As I told some skeptical Democratic friends during the weeks after the election, Obama might have campaigned as a progressive to shore up support, but he’s really more of a centrist ala Bill Clinton.  

I´ve never really been a fan of Ron Howard. I grew up watching him, first as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, then later as Richie Cunningham on Happy Days. And while his all-American appeal was winning, those characters belonged to a time and place of innocence as lost as paradise.   

Eight weeks ago Jin (not her real name) escaped a violent relationship with a Korean man, and she now has thoughts of suicide because of the shame and guilt she feels.  

I'm sitting at the bar in Buddakhan restaurant at 713 Vine St. downtown. It's late Thursday afternoon, and I'm having my usual vodka and tonic. I'm starting to feel more relaxed, less grumpy. Maybe the surroundings have something to do with my improving mood.  

Chances are audiences will recog nize something familiar in Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais). He’s a sad sack, a man with no real connection to the teeming humanity around him, a mis anthropic mess living on the most dense ly populated island in the modern stream — Manhattan.