A couple of weeks ago, I went to see Regina Spektor perform at the Beacon Theater in NYC's Upper West Side, courtesy of a gift from the soon-to-be-Mrs. Deadman.

What a disappointment.

I really like Ms. Spektor, could listen to her breakthrough album 'Begin to Hope' over and over again. But her live performance was uninspired and pretty boring, to be frank. Spektor just wasn't connecting to the audience and it really put a damper on the evening.

Michael Jackson dead?? That's what the LA Times and AP are reporting, anyway (CNN hasn't yet confirmed). Unbelievable.

Earlier today, my brother was bemoaning Farrah Fawcett's death, trying to come to grips with the loss of his most common inspiration for those special, intimate teenage moments. (I kind of remember Charlie's Angels and thinking of Farrah as a sexy broad, but she was a bit before my prime mastubatory years).

Michael Jackson, however, was kind of like my Beatles. So I'm in shock, and surprisingly sad to learn of his premature death.

I've always sucked at making decisions. Leave where we're having lunch up to me and we'll likely be having dinner there.

If there's one thing about modern life I cannot stand, it's the plethora of options we have. Sure the freedoms we now enjoy are terrific, the new opportunities exciting, the potential adventures limitless, but instead I like to focus on all the bad choices we can now make.

I'm usually an easy customer. It doesn't take much to please me. Just treat me fair and show me respect. Work with me if you've made a mistake. Just basic, simple stuff.

In my recent questions column, our own dagblogger Nebton says the biggest risk he ever took was to go to graduate school after 30.

With official unemployment nearing double digits (and the unofficial number much higher), a lot of people looking for something to do are following Nebton's example and going back to school.

This feels like a strange thing to share so publicly, but since I've written about my mom a few times, I also feel compelled to tell you that she has finally passed away.

The end was as fast as the disease was agonizingly slow. I got a call and six hours later she was gone. There were no signs that the end was coming, at least that I would have recognized. Monday she was fine. Tuesday she was gone. It was a very peaceful death. She simply slipped away, with her family around her.

It's been a long time since I've written a Questions column, but now that we have so many new contributors and commenters, I think it's about time we get to know each other a bit better.

Alas, now that online poker has sapped my soul and absconded with my muse to a faraway island, I am forced to look to Cosmo magazine for inspiration.

You've seen a lot less of me on dagblog lately, and while I'd love to put all of the blame for my absence on my Beyonce and the wedding plans which have been set in hot and heavy motion (It's mostly painful, stressful stuff, but registering at Target was hella fun - come to Papa, Wii!!), but there is a much bigger badder beast than Mrs. All-Consuming Wedding at work here - and its name is PokerStars.

I've been a very bad dagblogger of late, but I'm full of good excuses for my badness. First, there was the whole engagement to plan and pull off (and already a fair amount of wedding madness), and then right after that I had to help plan my brother's 40th birthday party, which included a week-long visit from the folks (a surprise to my brother).

Late last year one of my predictions for 2009 was that Facebook would go public, sparking a mini-rally in the markets.

Sorry for my extended absence the last couple of weeks, but the excuse is a good one: I'm engaged!!

First of all, let me just say how awesome dagblog has been of late. In the past few days, we've had fascinating posts and reader discussions about Sri Lanka, California healthcare, incipient deflation, Twitter's raison d'etre, NSA wiretapping, CIA torturing, etc. etc.

I often wish we had more bloggers, a larger audience and even more active commenters, but the folks we do have are so good I worry that if that were so all we'd end up with would be a disappointing dilution in the strength of our output and our community.

My One Favorite Thing this week is Scramble, an anagram word game on Facebook that is basically the online equivalent of the old board game Boggle.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the basic idea is you are given a bunch of letter tiles laid out on a square board and you must string adjacent letters together to form words of at least three letters long, racking up more points for longer words.

It's quite the simple premise ... and also dangerously addictive.

I AM DEADMAN. HEAR ME TWEET!

Big news today. Ashton Kutcher just attracted his one millionth follower on the microblogging service Twitter, a milestone which has generated a fair amount of fanfare, but it's only the beginning as cult leader Oprah is going to feature Twitter on her talk show today and send her first tweet over the air.

Oh, how wonderful.

Excuse me if I don't join in the celebration - if I'm not all, ahem, atwitter with the news - but I have very mixed feelings here.

My girlfriend sent this to me. Do you think it's a hint? Pretty funny in any case.

More animations at Tales of Mere Existence.

When we last left our hero, he was pitifully angsting about whether to leave his home of New York City. Many readers have demanded to know what he decided. OK, no one has actually demanded, but that won't stop him from sharing, nor from referring to himself in the third person.

This financial crisis is more than what it appears.

It is symptomatic of a society that at some point over the last 30 years lost its way by seeking not the road less traveled, but instead the quickest route.

It is the culmination of a mindset that increasingly became interested in pursuing immediate gratification at any cost.

Look around you. In every area of modern life, the shortcut has become the rule, not the exception.

Just a few weeks ago, I fell in love with singer Ingrid Michaelson while watching her perform an amazing concert.

After 35 years of living, I had my first celebrity crush.

I finally have a celebrity crush!

For the first time in 35 years, there is finally a woman out there whose posters I want to plaster all over my bedroom walls, whose biographical trivia I want to accumulate like so many rare golden nuggets, whose live and TV appearances I want to schedule my life around (while still respecting all applicable stalker laws, of course).

There are moments in life, in some lives, in my life, when one becomes unmoored. Something or someone cuts the bond between anchor and ship, and the sailor is cast adrift. Perhaps a violent squall snaps the tether; perhaps a villain slashes it in the night; perhaps you sever it yourself in a drunken flourish of enthusiasm or at a tranquil moment of lucidity; perhaps you simply wake up one morning and find that you've drifted out to sea.