“Writing and writer’s block are very particular kinds of experiences, and not necessarily ones that translate to the human experience.” I’d actually argue that being at a loss for words is a far more universal experience than losing your life to the monkey on your back. But I do agree that the writers-in-movies genre is an inherently clubby one. So I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re going to devote an entire movie to the ins and outs and the insularness of the writer and his process, then for goodness sake, make it funny. Or make it scary. (I’m speaking of course of The Shining, but I know you haven’t seen it, and honestly, it’s nearing the witching hour and simply typing the words has guaranteed that tonight I will sleep with the lights on. So let’s move on.) Right, so if you’re gonna make a whole movie about how fucked up writers are, then at least make us laugh. Block is bad, but it can comically bad. Heroin is just bad bad, and tedious to watch. We are all, as you say, grasping blindly for something to give our lives a little meaning, a little hope, a little poetry. But poetry in a bottle is obvious. Now, poetry in physics-defying communion with one’s own literary creation (Stranger Than Fiction)? Poetry in confronting one’s own personal and professional burnout in a pink fuzzy bathrobe while carting around the upstart writer who's gonna knock you off your throne (Wonder Boys)? That is something unexpected and harder-earned – and infinitely more rewarding for the viewer. At least a viewer like me.

... before I head off to play basketball: Kim Jones just admitted that she'd rather watch Funny Farm than a film by Billy Wilder.

Film incentives are rightfully the buzz around Texas right now with the next session of the Legislature just around the corner. But they're also getting some national attention, including as a "pork" addition to the government bailout of the mortgage biz. It seems a national fix for film incentives, primarily aimed at equalizing the playing field with Canada, made it into the bill's language: According to Broadcasting & Cable magazine, it will "extend and modify temporary expensing rules (they were to expire at the end of this year) that are meant to discourage the flight of TV and film production to Canada and elsewhere by expanding the number and type of deductions that can be taken in the year of production.

I've already resorted to numbering. Bad sign. 1) I didn't say that junkies make less meaningful characters – merely less interesting characters. Sure, there are variations from character to character – in what drove him to drink or to drugs, in what prize possession of his mother's he'll hock for that next fix – but the frame of the addict-writer-narrative-arc is depressingly monotonous.

Thank god we have a free media and Fox News to debate the crucial issues of our day:

It was delightful to see Pamela Des Barres’ 2007 book, Let’s Spend the Night Together (Chicago Review, $14.95), released in paperback. As the Mother Superior of groupies, Des Barres’ interviews with the old-school and contemporary groupies was eye-opening, at least for me. I know a few of these women personally but reading them recount their halcyon years was enlightening, sometimes salacious, and sometimes sad. (I should say up front that there’s a chapter on the Texas Blondes and me). Let’s Spend the Night Together, like Des Barres’ groundbreaking I’m With the Band, is a keeper. In the end, we were all women who made a dream come true, that you could reach for a star and bed him; none of us seem traumatized or otherwise permanently debauched by the experience. Des Barres’ Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (Chicago Review, $14.95) has also been released in paperback. This sequel to I’m With the Band was dishy and readable – her writing style is always chatty, witty, and conversational – but paled compared to IWTB.

It's a Seventies/Eighties flashback in Lakeway where the independent comedy Code Enforcer is in the middle of a 21-day shoot with Erin Moran and Eddie Mekka starring. You remember Joanie "Shortcake" Cunningham, Ritchie's lil sis on Happy Days, but may have a harder time recalling Mekka, who was Carmine "The Big Ragu" Ragusa, the singer/dancer on Laverne & Shirley. Greg Dorchak and Steve Cauley started writing Code Enforcer, a tale of a homeowners' association gone wrong, while working on another film. Since both writers live in subdivisions with home owners' association, they had plenty of experience to draw on. "There are a lot of new subdivisions going up all across the country – and most of those are governed by HOAs of some sort. Some lines in the script were taken directly from real situations," Dorchak says. "It was impossible to put everything I wanted into this story; it would have been 300 pages long." Steve Cauley and Greg Dorchak are the co-writers and producers, with Cauley directing and Dorchak performing.

Point two: not all addicts are junkies. Take Paul Giamatti’s character in Sideways. He’s a classic failed-writer-with-an-addictive-personality. Unlike heroin users, however, all of his habits are legal, socially acceptable, and even expected from a single, middle-aged man whose life has fallen apart. There’s nothing a junkie can say to someone that justifies his/her addiction to heroin, no explanation beyond the main one: that heroin is their lifeblood. But what makes Miles so brilliant is his literary ability to justify his addictions and paint them not as outgrowths of his failure as a writer but as minor, even poetic, indulgences of the intellectual class. He deflects questions about his alcoholism by assuming the role of the pompous wine connoisseur; he justifies his self-obsession by painting himself as a grand, tragic figure in the Hemingway mold (even going so far as to crib Hemingway’s words when describing himself); he sees his romantic failures not as a manifestation of his fear and self-loathing but as cruel punishment administered by fickle Gods out to destroy him.

Don't look here for my take on the Texas Longhorns' victory over No. 1 Oklahoma or the Horns' subsequent ascension to the polls' top spot. Look for it instead in the print edition on Thursday. Frustrated? Think how fans of the Texas State University Bobcats feel. This past weekend they upset the No. 3 McNeese State Cowboys in a nail-biter, but most of the Austin media ignored it. Yep, the Bobcats of the school formerly known (and forever known to some alumni like yours truly) as Southwest Texas State won 45-42 in a game that wasn't actually that close. So why no mention on Austin television? Why did the local daily only post it on its Web site (uh, guilty as charged here, too)? They ran the scores of other Texas university matchups, including such titans as Mary Hardin-Baylor and Texas Lutheran. I'm baffled.