Christ is risen, I am floored. An afternoon snooze and a cancellation of the calendared drink with my little sister, the grunge-Pakistani cinema-hipster Kink, with her flexible morality and her three-hour haircut. Monkey Woman is in mourning: a childhood friend, whom I also knew slightly, died of a brain aneurysm suddenly, at 36 years of age. Holy moly. No work lined up for the week, so I think I will go nocturnal for a day or so. Let's get some pizza up in the joint and get up out from under all this paperwork and brainwork, shall we? I got Abraxas boy off his column, at least, at last. Conference call with editing client tomorrow evening pushes that deadline back, and the Gotham Gazette one has simply fallen by the wayside. Well, maybe I can get that done tonight. There's $100 in it for me if I do.

After that wonderful speech, I think we should all give him the clap. The enigmatic mahi-mahi mãe (pronounced "my, my, my," a very obscure Portuglish pun, carrying a ukele) is always copy-catting me: The foregoing interpretation error is a sample of the delights to be found at her new Translation Geek Web log. Relatedly, I am writing to a German friend I have just met online and say, "Sorry, keine Deutsche." She says, "You know, that could be translated as, Sorry, no German chicks." She is a former teacher of DAF (= ESL, only auf Deutsch or whatever. Zippy?). Says I, says I, "No, what I meant was, I regret that I currently lack a German woman." I am a smooth operator, am I not? Heh heh. I embellished that story to make it funnier, to be honest. Embarassing all around. Suddenly, I no longer know how to spell "embarrassing" so I paste it into Word and spellcheck it: Clippy offers "embracing" as a possible alternative.

Saturnia's Day: "Although Bellerphon was able to defeat the female tribe of Amazons, he was in turn defeated by the Xanthian women, who lifted their skirts and used the apotropaic power of their genitals to drive him away from their city." Why do I identify with this hero's destiny? Amori plus debet scena quam vita. I am reading Centaurs and Amazons on my way home from midtown. In classics mode when I need to be in column and editing and translation mode, all simultaneously. But I should be forgiven, and here is my excuse: I felt like shit all morning and my ulnar nerve is twinging something fierce. JAFCJR writes to say, " It has been good and heartwarming to read in the BT: 'I am enjoying my life and times, feeling stronger and more secure than ever for having weathered the last mile or so of slippery horseshit and land mines along the old road of life.' As for me, I grow too soon oldt und too late Schmart! Then there is also the phenomenon referred to in 2 Cor.4:16 (yeah, go look it up!) to which I can only say, Boy I sure hope so!! Sompin's got to get better." I nearly have to write back to say that I am taking it all back. Unwarranted optimism.

But running lines of Latin hexameter with my student picked up my spirits. She is a smart one and cranked out 100 lines for me no problem. Very sad to see the self-inflicted wounds on her arm, but I she will be one of those young folks who will have a bout of depression early in life and does not ever relapse. But this most noble creature, heu tristis, & lachrymosa commutatio, o pitiful change! is fallen from that he was ...

Hercule! Drinks with the Kink and delivery of a gift to the Monkey Woman tomorrow. Okay, back to work.

Trembling Before Hum-nity: Kinko the Kopycat and I sit AIMing aimlessly while the Holy Land burns down, glad we are secular humanists. I keep joking about this because events there are too terrible to contemplate otherwise. I got tons too much to do, especially after I fell to snoozing through the sunlit afternoon. A box arrives with the remainder of my grandfolks' personal effects after the sale of the house and auction of its movables. Great studio portrait of a foxy Aunt Sue in her redheaded Barbara Stanwyck lookalike prime, that woman knew how to have a good time. Otherwise it is a Pandora's box, no time for it now. I got roped into an American League—only fantasy baseball league, how did that happen? Web conference call tomorrow a.m. for the draft.

DNB [Do Not Blog]: We predict this acronym will make the dictionary by 2004. I propose "confidentiality prophylaxis," but the thing is just not catchy, people just say "huh?" But oh, if you only knew. My friends are terrible degenerates, hopeless romantics, and copyright infringers, every one, though scrupulous about copyleft. Just ask Kinko the Kopykat.

Four-letter word: Speaking of why "love is totally obtuse," Match.com's Venusmail turns up "I have a pilot's license, a master's degree, and competed in national figure skating competitions." She also sings opera, needlepoints in the style of Roy Lichtenstein, and works now and then as a body double for Uma Thurman. She is Buckaroo Banzai's sister, Billy Rose. Laugh while you can, monkey boy. Hmmm. Aw, hell, I'm in enough trouble already.

In the sky when you die. It's Passover and Easter in the two-for-one monotheisms (the first installment, some say, was better with the original cast and before dubbing, but who can resist a miniseries?), with Eid al-Adha a few weeks gone now. Lamb, ram, or matzoh, please, God, Iuppiter omnipotens, bearded thunderer, tetragrammaton, eat anybody else but me. Accept all substitutes. Have I insulted everyone equally? I admit it, I snuck out for ashes ("know that ye are dust and to dust ye shall return") and even offered to accompany Emma to Mass. She seems very interested in the pro forma group confession plan ("We did naughty things, yada yada yada, why bore You with the details, You've got a universe to run!") and blanket absolution we offer over in the Anglican fold. Fifty percent less guilt, but with all the great organ music you remember. And everybody can have sex! Join today! Do I get a bounty if I bring one in?

Devo ter dormido com o cu virado para a lua, or, adnuit coeptis: Feeling pretty lucky at the moment. All the F trains got axed because of some mysterious "smoke incident" at Union Square, so I walked over to 50th and took the 2 to Atlantic Avenue, emerging on Pacific Street and crossing Flatbush to dine on superspecial multi-meat Cambodian noodle soup ($6.50) at the eponymous Cambodian Cuisine. Walking home in the dark, the Twin Towers memorial beaming all the way up to the orbiting Enterprise, white blossoms busting out on barren ornamental fruit trees even though the other trees are still leafless, so meshugginah are these inbred monsters to get this spring thing rolling, oy, like a fallen angel with a brand new tubal ligation. Worked my cu off today. Mike Cohn called from 250 Park Avenue South to report from the scene of the last days of Internet World in the fashionable precincts of the city. I note that the Webmaster over there has placed the editorial staff biographies in a folder called "miscellaneous." That about sums it up. I left my father's prayer bell there, stuffed away in some drawer, apparently. I will use it to pray to Santo Expedito, who always has a glass of whiskey to keep him kindly disposed to my well-being. You have to work to keep your luck, and propitiate the vast, obtuse, capricious, and irrational forces all around you. And then there is the dilemma of Emma and her Ursula Buendia of an overshadowing matriarch. Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?

My Christopher Logue books arrive. I am crawling into bed with them now. Column to file in the morning, interview at Aquent.

What the kat dragged in: "The Underpants" was a lot of fun, a clever farce and a classic New York people-watching event. A curtain made of underpants surrounds the stage, and drops suddenly to the ground to reveal a man yelling at his wife because her underpants fell down around her ankles just as the Kaiser was passing in parade. My review will focus on the significance of fake mustaches to the dramatic action. If you sit stage left at the Classic you get a disconcerting view of the fine spray of spit and pathogens cannoning out of the actors' mouths as they project their lines to the back of the house. A pair of warranty-expired Andy Warhol factory products in the audience were especially notable, the woman so surgically altered she looked like someone famous who died 30 years ago—Doris Duke?—and could barely walk, the man bald and middle-aged and dressed all hip-hop, resembling Michel Foucault as sleazy crack-addicted gigolo, both looking like they needed artificial life support. Knocking down a big steak and Laphroaig after Laphroaig at the Fanelli Café with Maximin, who is 99-percent cocoa, and with whom détente seems possible, no suicide bombers or tanks necessary. Cannot reach XDrive this morning, and would not know what to do with the files I found there if I could until I get a lot more coffee in me.

Taking care of biz: Stranger and stranger, behinder and behinder. I am enjoying my life, feeling stronger and more secure than ever for having weathered the last mile or so of slippery horseshit and land mines along the old road of life. A phone call comes in from another floor asking for my help translating a Spanish Excel spreadsheet. I say sure, just make sure you forward my résumé to the Bowne Translation Borg collective. Got to run. I am ready to be assimilated.

Shout out to Kajagoogle: Iggy wishes to extend his thanks to Uncle Kajagoogle for kindly allowing the zhlub who feeds him to pay him Tuesday for some cat food today. We have, of course, forgotten our Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic today. My editor at the Gotham Gazette fails to advise me in advance of his editorial calendar and only writes to tell me I am over deadline. It's always something. Work expands to fill the time allotted here, so there are many interstitial blocks of time to double-bill, the way those fancy lawyers do, you know, like in The Firm with Tom Cruise.

One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth: Hanging around midtown last night after a first meeting with my student, a slim, intense, ethereal Korean girl in sidewalk-dusting bell-bottoms, a streak of purple in her jet-black hair. I assigned her lines 469-519 of Book I of the Aeneid (the ekphrasis of the temple of Dido) as a diagnostic exercise and made arrangements to speak with her AP Latin instructor to coordinate pedagogical aims and methods. This I will enjoy. Waiting for Emma's social calendar to clear, I hang around in the café at the Times Square Virgin Megastore after some nice meatloaf at the Applejack Diner at 55th and Broadway (the old Broadway Diner across the street is shut down). Let's see, I have some notes on the megastore experience, but they are too disjointed. The megastore is too disjointed. Tejano blares over the PA while videos of heavy-metal hairbands assault you from all sides, just for starters. Whiskies and whispers followed with Mme. E. Abraxas the Energy Gnostic is clamoring for his column, so I will have to make that a priority for my stolen moments this morning. Engineer of the month: Andre Tritarenko: "Modern civilization is impossible without wealth of energy, but it is uneasy on the environment." Delivered unto my psychologist her stern lecture about proper bibliographic citation, successfully parrying her attempt to get me to do the work for her. Tonight: Underpants [do a Google search on "classic New York stage underpants"]. Over and out.

As above, SO[be]LO9W57: I am an idiot, I left Outlook Express downloading e-mail to my machine at home every 15 seconds and so have no mobile commerce with the universe today from my remote location. If you must reach me, there is always Hotmail. I am hitting up a pal for $50 at lunch, how sleazy can you get? When are these bozos going to pay me? Staffsheets says my timesheets are approved, so show me the money, honey. I have an appointment with an editorial placement agency on Friday, so I may not have to be doing this junk much longer. Slept beautifully, had a weird dreams. Must be that phone conversation with Emma on the edge of sleep. Meeting my Latin student this evening at the Donnell Library Center for a first session, then perhaps a late supper with my new Antipodean friend from the south and east, some TV (my cable is still out, dang it). Working like a dog on editing project and column-writing I swear, in the interstices between the make-work that comes into my inbox here. Boondoggle city, dude!

It is my duty to report: That Jolielaide subsidized my evening at the Vanguard yesterday. Having consolidated my checking and savings account balances online in order to be able to extract a twenty from the ATM, I prevailed upon the eminent explicatrix and HTML hand-coding paranoiac ("HMTL e-mail is a nightmare from hell, what, are you kidding? I use PINE!") to split the difference between her student discount and my full-fare admission. She received a $4 drink credit, which afforded her a $19 value for $15, while I received a full $10 drink credit with my $25 cover + drink full fare, of which she paid $5, taking pity on my decrepitude and demonstrating saintly generosity, asking only that the matter be blogged in detail. Thus, I got two free Budweisers, while she had to fork over another $1 for her glass of house white. Great seats with a view of the chanteuse between two big-haired Jersey girls sharing a bottle of the fanciest champagne on the house. Fun, fun, fun.

Economic indicators: are on the rise as I receive two inquiries about gigs that actually sound good. One is an invite to submit an orçamento on the translation of a weird Brazilian sci-fi novel of 125,000 words, a month's work. Any hints from the Antipodean translatrices about competitive pricing, and must I really bid in terms of arrobas and reais? The other is an editing contract with one of those Big 5 consulting firms on the Avenue of the Americas, though the guy I am negotiating with is a complete hard-ass (a joke: it's one of those nepotism things I have always wanted to benefit from).

Détente with the PRM and other foreign policy matters: Possible détente with the People's Republic of Maximin: got free tix to see Underpants at the Classic Stage Company on Wednesday. Saw "Naked" by Pirandello there with Mira Sorvino last year, you know, from The Mighty Aphrodite, I liked it. Mira has the loveliest feet. A civilized occasion for subtle diplomacy and negotiation of borders. Let there be peace on earth. Poor Emma, meanwhile, is sad and blue. Stressful life, that swell and witty lady. We send intermittent inspirational e-mails to her cell phone [fancy, no? I want e-mail on my cell phone!] throughout the day.

Daily FUBAR: The elevators here at SOLO9W57 are in funky shape, it's too frightening to describe. There are sloppily dressed union dudes here putting up little plaques about "inconvenience" and "state-of-the-art upgrades" and drinking a lot of coffee. Oy vey gevalt. New York freaking City.

Anonymous non-English article or chapter in an edited book, title translated into English, multiple editors of multivolume series: Quick, the APA citation format. Quick, quick!

Dueling Similes: I admit that I have slept most of the day, now scraping pennies together for my return to the Vanguard with JL, who is in some kind of fettle today as we exchange dueling spring-themed lyrics. My opening sally is a song by Alan and Marilyn Bergman called "You Must Believe in Spring," transcribed from a performance by the diva in question.

You Must Believe in Spring

When lonely feelings chill the meadows of your mind
Just think, If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
Beneath the deepest snows
The secret of a rose
Is merely that it knows
You must believe in spring

Just as a tree is sure its leaves will reappear
It knows its emptiness is just a time of year
The frozen mountain dreams
Of April’s melting streams
How crystal clear it seems:
You must believe in spring

You must believe in love and trust it’s on its way
Just as the sleeping rose awaits the kiss of May
So in a world of snow
Of things that come and go
Where what you think you know
You can’t be certain of

You must believe in spring ... and love

This, writes Jolielaide, is "primavernal optimism" which she is "loathe not to counter with withering cynicism, I respond with the seasonal inverse." There follows a snarky memo from The Copy Desk about whether it is not perhaps "loath" that's meant, countered by the usual attitude from the Department of Close Reading (formerly Explications de Texte 'R' Us), who think they are above the rules, regulations, and routine paperwork. Beside the point. Ms. too-smart-for-her-own-good transcribes the riposte from memory, which I would not believe if I had not heard it for myself, cranking out reams of verse while walking down Second Avenue. Edna St. Vincent Millay:

What lips my lips have kissed and where and why
I have forgotten. And what arms have lain
Under my head till morning. But the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply.
And in my heart there stir a quiet pain
For unremembered lads who not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
As in the winter stands the lonely tree
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one
Yet knows it[s?] boughs more silent than before,
I cannot say what loves have come and gone.
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that sings in me no more.

Very apposite! Notice, says JL, the dialectic of memory ("I have forgotten,"unremembered lads") and knowledge ("Nor knows ... yet knows") brought together in the concluding couplet ("I cannot say ... I only know"). I think she devotes insufficent attention to the melancholy undertones of the reiterated "must believe" in my entry. You need to hear the diva delivering it, perhaps. Mid-term exam: compare the personification of trees in each poem in relation to themes of knowledge, memory, and faith, with reference to Saint Augustine and C.S. Peirce's critique of the Cartesian tradition in "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities." You have 30 minutes, pick up your pencils and begin. Yes, Bart, spelling counts.

Blogger FUBAR: I could not get my posts for Saturday out of draft mode and onto Blogspot for some reason [no explanation forthcoming from Pyra], so I repost them now. As if you can't miss a single moment of my existence, my millions of readers ...

The UPS guy rocks, for once: He drops by late last evening to deliver the following: Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, The Footnote: A Curious History, The Dictionary of the Future—I think I can get a lot of Kulchur Vulchur mileage out of that one, a lexicon of marketese—and Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West. Just when I was thinking I would have to schlep to the regional distribution center in Maspeth, wherever that is. Zippy would enjoy the footnotes book, a history of the genre in historical research—another technology honed to exquisite precision by those pesky Germans he's always on about, and grandfather to the hyperlink. Global business depends so much on the local factor in the great value-chain of agoraphobic e-consumerism.

Must I go out? I must, I discovered I do not own a copy of the Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association after all and must bus it over to Park Slope to pick one up being held for me at the local branch of the plastic fantastic superchain. Meanwhile, I am walking my translation client through the process of getting access to my XDrive shared folders so they can upload some digital images for me to inspect. It used to be free to register. What a PITA. I have to wait until two for my tutee to phone and to finish up with my translatee. Hopefully Emma will phone up, too, and we can wander the yuppified blocks of 7th Avenue. There is actually a good flea market there, come to think of it. JAFCJR is puzzled by the state of contemporary poetry as embodied by the works of Joseph Doyle [the "quasi-Welsh" ode to the letter e will be in the archives tomorrow] as explicated by his brother Brian.

SELAMAT DATANG DI HEPTUNE: "Heptune's purpose is humor and information, preferably both at the same time!" The best Web site ever posted from Guam I discover in a quest for jazz lyrics at one in the morning. Get jazzy and traditional baby names, browse fart FAQs, and learn about the cuttlefish, "the sentient cephalopod." Thinking about moving to Guam? "Read here about our typhoons, our climate, geography and other basic but fun information, with lots of pictures of typhoon devastation!" And much, much more. Magaera is a Polynesian polymath, and the woman I am going to marry. In the image above, "we see (from left to right) Anguirus, Data, Dr. Smith, Akhenaten and Cab Calloway playing poker for rotifers. Betty Boop is the rotifer girl, providing rotifers (in the little jars) as needed."

Friday Nite Twilite, Sipping on a Bee-Yah: Both hard-drive search engines (desktop and laptop) are grinding away in search of the word "contos," because I know that I did a translation of a passage from one of Hilda Hilst's Contos d'Escarnio—yes, I already know about that Word file of Contos Fluminenses by Machado d'Assis, poor choice of criterion—that I was particularly fond of, but those I thought I sent it to say they have not archived it on their own drives. Yada yada, the whole schtick about memory and engines that search your drives and like that.

But To Be Brief: Emma, creatively blocked doing design drawings for tomorrow's meeting, phones up and sings "That's All" to me and then rings off. This pretty much wipes out my lingering resentments and terrors concerning all the evils unto which the day was sufficient, or actually it's vice versa, the day unto which the evils were sufficient. I finished a five-hour job in one hour by composing a recursive Photoshop 5.5. action [I ♥ macros and HTML 4.0 character entity references] that zapped 35 TIF files into JPGs embedded in PDF for rapid assembly in Acrobat, just like presto change-o. Commuting mojo less potent today [see below], but still only had to wait two minutes for a G train home, which always puts a song in my heart, and this morning not one of those funny, smartass schoolkids cut in line at the bodega when I was trying to buy my coffee. Beer and lightbulbs on the way home. In fact, come to think of it, I was resigned to being late this morning and was astonished when I totally mojofied the entire G-A-F experience to show up at security at 9:01. It's like that Twilight Zone where the guy throws a quarter in a cigar box and it lands on its edge, upon which he has the power to I think it is read minds.

JA Writes: to invite me on a male-bonding camping trip in September—"No Robert Bly ... We will walk in the hot sun for 2 to 5 miles with backpacks and a donkey and a horse or two ... A couple of you will get bitten by rattlesnakes, and one of you will get kicked by the donkey and one other will fall off a cliff. The rest of us will spend the days caring for the injured and disposing of the dead and pretending we don't know anything about it ... You might see bears, mountain lions, wild pigs, rattlesnakes and other dangerous creatures, and flies that bite, mosquitos and bugs that crawl on you in the night ... Most of you won't know most of the people being invited. That is ok. Basically they are a mixture of energy engineers, permaculture dudes, musician, artists, and a few other strange dudes that I have met and liked here and there." I wished he had mentioned peeing on logs, that's the best thing about Nature, just peeing any old place. This invite also cheers me.

Flames, Fames, Tomes, Guides to Style, and the Mysterious Return of the Dookmeister: I get a sort of mysterious sample text to translate for a literary project of 125,000 words through my ProZ mail. Do not see such a bid in my bid list. Huh? The Dook actually mails me up today after ousting me from his circle of philosopher-winos months ago, and brusquely, too. No explanation for the change of heart. Wanted to know if I remembered a woman from our Ethics and Morals seminar of two decades past. I actually did. As I recall, she was really into that whole univeralizability problem surrounding the Categorical Imperative, which is, of course, a propos of the flame-fest that broke out here today on an earlier post. Yikes! I will now: work up an intake questionnaire for my tutee, polish up the Latin transcription, and search for the goldarn APA stylebook, which I know I had Amazoned to me in the past few months. Let's see, ACS, FT, NYT, Folio (a bootleg copy), Einsohn, Chicago, AMA, WIT ... because I have a $300 editing project due Monday, not to mention a column, and JL got psyched to do the Vanguard on Sunday night to worship at the altar of jazz divahood, and ... and ...

Do You Know I Care, or Don't You Care to Know? In an unusually entertaining and un-infuriating column, William Safire writes in the Sunday magazine that "the sophisticated innuendo of the 30s and 40s is being newly appreciated by a generation not then born," though I like to think I have been hip to sophisticated innuendo all along. Amen to that, anyway. Carol Sloane's set at the Vanguard last night reprised a new album on the very theme of time passing, absent friends, still finding the energy to get the mojo working. It was fantastic. Must find the tune she introduced as the first song she ever sang at the 'Guard, opening for Oscar Petersen in 1961, which makes her ... the beneficiary of a pact with the Devil? Something naughty (and more verbally Pagliaccian than the deffest rhyme by Dre or Dogg, even) by Ben Webster about the rabbit sneaking into the carrot patch to feed his "carrot jones." This stout little old lady ("Beautiful set, thanks so much," says I, lamely—"Yeah, thanks, dearie," says she—can really, really cut the mustard. Really. Really really. Gee whillikers. Of course, I remember seeing Ella in the mid-80s and she could also still pull a lot of tisket from her tasket. There were weird Japanese hipsters there writing down the set list, which I actually kick myself for not doing. I am going back this weekend, if I can.

In like a lion, out like a lamb. The temp dropped 40 degrees in the space of a subway ride from Times Square to Christopher Street. It was the first day of spring. Holy cow! More juxtaposition of extremes from the universe. Surely some revelation is at hand? Emma and I had to duck into this weird Russian bar across the street, the nearest shelter, where the nice barmaid let us hang out after hours, smoking and drinking Coronas, listening to Joãao, Astrid, and Stan, keeping an eye on this klatch of tough-looking teenage Russian girls partying in the corner, who thought we were pretty amusing too.

Notes on the Death of Civility: Just a brief note on a controversy I got involved in through my conversations with Nona recently, who was embroiled in a massive flame war on a foodie BBS ("I hate acronyms," says Nona, who has a long list of specific grudges) called Chowhound. Lacking time to treat the subject fully, interesting as it is, let me just say that it was fascinating, and horrifying, to witness the way the responses to a couple of West Coast girls inquiring about proper dress at fancy New York joints ("Should we wear hose with dresses?"—to which the sensible answer is, of course, "yes, unless you want to freeze your ass off") evolved into a discussion on the decline of standards in comtemporary society, which then itself devolved into a slanging match on the meaning of civility that was itself notable for a blatant lack of the subject under discussion. Comparing someone who expresses annoyance with those who wear jeans to a fine establishment to the Taliban is a bit over the top. Who are these people, and why don't they get a life? On the other hand, as I kept trying to get the word in edgewise, the whole subject is pretty much a tempest in a teapot, given the clubbing of baby seals, the rain of smart bombs, and all that sort of jazz. Food, for crying out loud: it's just a way to get energy to apply to work, sex, and reading books.

Blog Smog? Do the Dog!Congrats to JB for jumping on the bandwagon with the rest of use belated cultural trend-chasers with the cleverly titled My Simultaneous Self. We will have to tutorial him on the technical nuances and the virtues of pithiness, of course. Editors, and especially copy editors: Nag, nag, nag. By the way, I had another miraculous commute today. Even the freaking G train arrived in a timely fashion. How long before this karmic bubble bursts? I write in haste. Yada yada yada.

Cartography and the Vanguard: As consolation and reward for having to work on stupid maps all day long, I am going to go see Carol Sloane tonight at the Village Vanguard with Emma. The woman has pipes. In fact, so does Emma, who crooned a few lines of "Imagination" last night on the phone. Icy fingers up and down my spine. I have agreed, sighing, to another week of labor on 57th Street, meaning I will actually make my rent on time this month for the first time in some deal of a while, and will be busy, since I am starting tutoring next week as well. All this to the detriment of quality writing time, dag nab it. So happy that D2 clicked to comment (see below)! Everybody should, even random weirdos wandering in from out of the blue. What else? Got a couple of bids in at ProZ, as always. Lovely day in the Apple, I can see the grand edifices of Central Park West from here.

Mondo Jazzmo New York Funkadelia: Sometimes you download more information more than you can possibly process given the clock-speed of your brain. Such was my conversation last evening with Nona the diamond-dealing force of nature, who boiled a lobster alive while on the phone with me last night ("c'mon, m****f*****r, are you ready to DIE?") and insisted that I tell her why Monkey Woman likes to call me Lobster Boy. I sincerely do not know. Revenge? There is something really hedonistic about two persons with DSL talking on the phone and researching one another's conversational allusions in the background while simultaneously playing MP3s into the telephone receiver. We might as well just set up a Groove conference. It is very cyberpunk, of course. When we all have Personal Area Networks, we will walk around in a cloud of background data and our autonomous software agents will seek out and filter all pertinent facts. "I'd love to meet you for coffee, were it not for that felony conviction for cannibalism, so sorry." At any rate, one product of the conversation was this item:

Anna Russell: "Jolly Old Sigmund Freud," from Backwards with the Folk Song

I went to my psychiatrist to be psychoanalyzed
To find out why I killed the cat and blacked my husband’s eyes.
He laid me on a downy couch to see what he could find,
And here is what he dredgéd up from my subconscious mind:

R: Hey, libido,
Bats in the belfry! [x 3]
Jolly old Sigmund Freud!

When I was one, my mommie hid my dolly in a trunk,
And so it follows naturally that I am always drunk.
When I was two, I saw my father kiss the maid one day,
And that is why I suffer now from klepto-ma-ni-a. [R]

At three, I had the feeling of ambivalence toward my brothers,
And so it follows naturally I poison all my lovers.
But I am happy now I’ve learned the lesson this has taught:
That everything I do that’s wrong is someone else’s fault. [R]

[Repeat R two more times]
This was a useful addition to my cultural repetoire. Emma, meanwhile, is mad to hit all the jazz clubs. Let the money start rolling in, please, I want to live. [Thanks to Pombo and Mme. Vocabulando for recommending me for that musuem catalogue translation, in that regard.] My Latin client turns out to be kind of an overenthusiastic amateur. I can say no more, but it does look like I will be paid. I will end today's post with another item from the multimedia gabfest, from Professor Tom Lehrer (ibid). Do you see a disturbing subtext emerging here? Lobster Boy-ling, et cetera? (I think Emma and Nona may be the embodiment of the yin and the yang, respectively, of yesterday's immaculate cast of the Ka-Ching, and the horns of my dilemma.)

I ache for the touch of your lips, Dear,
But much more for the touch of your whips, Dear.
You can raise welts like nobody else,
As we dance to the Masochism Tango.

Let our love be a flame, not an ember,
Say it's me that you want to dismember.
Blacken my eye, set fire to my tie,
As we dance to the Masochism Tango.

At your command, before you here I stand,
My heart is in my hand (yecch!)
It's here that I must be.
My heart entreats,
Just hear those savage beats,
And go put on your cleats
And come and trample me.

Your heart is hard as stone or mahogany,
That's why I'm in such exquisite agony.

My soul is on fire,
It's aflame with desire,
Which is why I perspire
When we tango.

You caught my nose
In your left castanet, Love,
I can feel the pain yet, Love,
Every time I hear drums.
And I envy the rose
That you held in your teeth, Love,
With the thorns underneath, Love,
Sticking into your gums.

Your eyes cast a spell that bewitches.
The last time I needed twenty stitches
To sew up the gash that you made with your lash,
As we danced to the Masochism Tango.

Bash in my brain,
And make me scream with pain,
Then kick me once again,
And say we'll never part.
I know too well I'm underneath your spell,
So, Darling, if you smell
Something burning, it's my heart.
Excuse me!

Take your cigarette from its holder,
And burn your initials in my shoulder.
Fracture my spine, and swear that you're mine,
As we dance to the Masochism Tango.

The War on Terror continues, meanwhile, but the death of irony has been greatly exaggerated.

Shampoo, Cat Food, My Commute, and the Alienation Effect of the Means of Mechanical [Re:]production: Thinking on the way home that if I were to make a regular thing of going back to the nine-to-five that I should dedicate a Web log to my commuting experience each day. A premise for a postmodern novel. Today's was miraculous: The F pulled into 57th Street as I descended the stairs, and there was actually a seat. A miracle. I sat next to a sullen Nuyorican teenager on my left and a corpulent dowdy lady on my right. I was only elbowed in the head twice. At Jay Street–Borough Hall, the A train was waiting right across the platform, and one stop later (mirabile dictu) a G train was waiting with open doors to carry me two stops to Clinton-Washington. Seamless, fateful, mojo-ridden transit connections like this are a rarity, like casting the I Ching and getting Hexagram 2 [The Receptive] with six moving lines, morphing into Hexagram 1 [The Creative], which I did this morning. I have it on my personal digital assistant. It portends violent contrasts and catastrophic change, yes? "É favorável encontrar amigos a oeste e ao sul, evitar amigos a leste e ao norte." Avoid people from the west and north, seek out people from the east and south. Does this mean I should go to Florida? Emma is from Southeast Asia, but why assume everything has to do with one's social life? Because one is a yang-brain, I guess.

Back to Our Story: No, but I actually remembered to buy cat food and shampoo—I neglect such trivial yet essential (especially to Iggy) details sometimes for days on end, my thoughts in Laputa, Island in the Sky—and felt much better after an Earl Grey at Tillie's. My bank account was empty, but fortunately two checks had arrived last night and I had remembered to tuck them last night in my jot book in the lefthand pocket of the coat I actually remembered was the one I intended to wear today. I was in the groove, I'm telling you. We were working on a huge series of maps all days, maps of the "footprints" of various media empires—I think I can say that without breaching my nondisclosure responsiblities. Quite dull but hectic. Work, work, work. And now for beer and noodles. The Merm heeded my design advice, by the way. Yea, even the high and mighty translatrices of the Antipodes heed my humble but groovy counsel now.

Two's Day and All is, Well, Hell: Back at the Banc of America HQ at SOLO9W57. Why with the "c"? Do not tell a soul, but I have attempting to get through the proxy server to achieve instant messaging capability, but to no avail. Sorry, Kajagoogle, Ninawug, Moqui, and all the rest. You will just have to e-mail my sorry a-s. Neither can I FTP through the mutha. Dang. I am reading in the Economist about the latest political scandal in Brazil ("Sarney's Stash"). Tsk tsk. It's like their soap operas: fast-moving, overwrought, sexy, and vastly superior to ours. João, pater sirenae aenigmaticae Sanctipaulensi, once told me the following joke:

An American mayor meets a Brazilian mayor at a conference, and invites him to visit his city. The Brazilian mayor is picked up by a limo at the airport and whisked away to a lovely mansion.

"My," says the brasileiro, "You live well for a public servant. What is your secret?"

"Well," drawls the American, "do you see that highway overpass over there?" "Sure," says the antipodean alcalde. The American pats his pocket and says, "Ten percent. You see that hospital over there?" He pats his pocket: "Ten percent."

"I see," says the man from down South America way. "Well, this has certainly opened my eyes. And now you must come and visit me."

Arriving in Brazil, the American mayor is picked up by a military helicopter and whisked to a 50,000 acre ranch with a faithful reproduction of the palace at Versailles in the middle of it. "My god!" he exclaims. "You live like a king! What is your secret?"

"You see that highway over there?"

The gringo looks around at the blasted landscape and peasants riding donkeys over it and says, "Um, actually, no."

"Exactly," says the Brazilian, patting his pocket. "One hundred percent."

Apologies to those who have heard the joke before. I repeat myself because I am a Turing robot.

I have a student, I am happy to report. A young lady from an Upper East Side high school has fallen behind in AP Latin and needs intensive tutoring on the Aeneid. I will, of course, compel her to buy Bill Anderson's excellent The Art of the Aeneid, which the main New York Public Library does not have, alas: It would fall in between the Art of the Admiral and the Art of the African Negro. Bill wrote recently to congratulate on my return to labores latinitatae. He's the dude, and I will have to read his essay on Virgil's re-imagining of the Iliad, since I just ordered all of Christopher Logue's Iliad series recently from Amazon. Of course, what the poor girl is more likely to need is a handle on that pesky locative, that nasty hendiadys, and that special ablative of things having to do with wearing togas.

FUBAR: That Enigmatic Mermaid is outblogging my sorry gringão behind like a house afire. Dang it, now I have to buy The Dictionary of the Future just to keep up with the latest memes. My project list now includes: Latin AP tutoring via Tutor.com; the Maximilian-Heinrich translation project; the American Psychological Association stylebook editing project; my weekly energy column; and the graphics stuff, not to mention the three items in the queue for Kulchur Vulchur. My diamond merchant friend smokes cigars. Emma and I will see a movie later this week, maybe. I am listening to Femi Kuti and the postjazz Dietrich-as-faux-cowgirl stylings of Norah Jones. I am reading ... what am I reading now? Maximum Minnie crawls out of the silence. What do I do? Strip down to underwear, stick a cat on my feet, and retire under the duvet to fall to snoring with a book open on my chest.

I Don't Like Mondays: First 9-to-5 M-to-F working week in ever so long and I am already pissing and moaning. In the words of Blind Willy Johnson—or was it Muddy Waters? or Chester Arthur "Howling Wolf" Burnett?—"I can't be satisfied." Verbo Volant says, "L’important n’est pas d’avoir mille idées, mais d’en vivre une." I am gazing out the 22nd-story window at the HVAC plant squatting atop the green-patina copperwork on the roof that majestic pile of stone, the Plaza. Plumes of steam obscure Old Glory from view. The scene resembles one of the sets for Battlefield Earth.

Sunday Evening Random Conversation: My friend said she was getting obsessive about preparing for her interview last night and went incommunicado, so I wound up having a couple of scotches at a restaurant near Carnegie Hall—how did I get there? I practiced—with ... let us call her Emma, as in Bovary, not Goldman. A remarkable person, a very enjoyable conversation. I continue with my mission to commune with my fellow beings more often. The workings of karma are peculiar, however, just as the likelihood of catastrophe is perpetual.

Rather Switch Than Fight: I can't read the New York Times anymore, except to glance at it online. I am resolved to take up the Wall Street Journal as a regular habit instead, balanced by the Nation. Better writing and reporting, less freaking elitist attitude, and more pertinent to the beats I am trying to develop. An excellent story about Bosnian Muslims today in the lefthand column, and an interesting take on how global free trade has affected New Zealand, which the writer characterizes as "the victim of hypocritical international trade policy on the part of the world's biggest countries." Sounds like the rhetoric of Porto Alegre, almost. I know, sorry, boring. I am always making banal resolutions and taking them very seriously for about fifteen minutes. I am also working my way through the Library of Posthumanity. Time for a smoke break. More coffee! That smoky scotch last night pretty dang well zonked me good.

From Reuters | Breaking News from Around the Globe, some comforting news for a gentleman just celebrating his tenth Winter Olympiad:

Older Men Make Better Lovers, Psychologist Says

LONDON (Reuters) - Older men are better lovers and have fewer impotence problems than their younger counterparts, with the "male menopause" a myth pedaled by drug companies to sell their products, according to a British psychologist.

Dr. Lorraine Boule, from Sheffield University in northern England, told the British Psychological Society conference that men became more skilled sexually as they get older, British newspapers reported on Saturday.

"Older men sustain erections for longer, are longer coming to orgasm, and satisfy women better. Sexual activity does diminish with age, but the quality should get better," she was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.

Boule's conclusions were based on a survey of 185 married professional men aged 30 to 60. While 22 percent of men under 46 suffered erectile problems, only 16 percent of those over 46 did.

She dismissed as nonsense the idea that men needed testosterone as a hormone replacement therapy in the same way that some women take estrogen to ease the effects of menopause.

The male menopause was a myth spread by drug firms to boost the multimillion dollar market for impotence treatments, she said.

"Life should really begin at 40 for those who have the right mindset," the Times quoted her as saying.

Weekend Sports Wrap: My friend CR, formerly of the G+J empire, gives me a tip on a gig at Martha Stewart Omnimedia she says she will recommend me for. Mostly I have been doing the bequests of Max-Heinrich all day. Amazing how all the random squiggles begin to resolve into meaning if you stare at them hard enough. Blew off writing, discouraged. Maybe tomorrow, that review, line up stuff for the week, pitches. Talk with a new acquaintance, RL, who starts recommending so many good Web sites that I have to ask her to stop. I will mention only ZeFrank, genius of the age. So me and R are gonna have a drink tomorrow. My cotillion dance card actually has a signature on it, reserving the minuet. Of course, R has this URL, so I must be circumspect about shouting "yippee!" That problem of audience again. Sent Moms a Playmail today, which I also recommend as a funky timewaster. The head of Dubya reads the message aloud in a synthesized female voice. You can also select talking orangutans, Linux penguins, and cats. The age of Snowcrash and The Hacker and the Ants is upon us. Missing out on a groovy Greenpoint party tonight, listening to downloaded Billy Preston and Sly and the Family Stone ("Many things on my mind / Words got in the way ...") and now hitting the hay.

Simian Person: Just talking on the phone with Monkey Womyn, who has been offered a chance to bid on the craft services contract for a "feminist erotica" film being made in Williamsburg. She has promised me an exclusive story if she gets the gig. She is bumming out about her online dating on Nerve, so we brainstorm up a good name for her new profile. It boils down to two Barbara Stanwyck (née Ruby Stevens, Brooklyn, 1907) characters: Dixie Daisy of "Lady of Burlesque" aka "The G-String Murders"—you will want to read that plot summary—and Sugarpuss O'Shea from "Ball of Fire," the best comedy ever. A minor character in the former named Lolita La Verne (" a stuck-up diva") was also considered, but O'Shea won the day.

In the Vicinity of the Crown Jewel of Fifth Avenue: Working across the street from the Plaza Hotel today and next week with some goofy people. It is, narcotic is the word, to go whooshing around in elevators and padding around in air-conditioned corridors of cubicled hierarchy after so long. The hours and days and weeks fly by, money comes in, you sink into a dream-state.

Briseis, with breasts so beautiful they envy one another: I tried mightily all day to get someone to accompany me to "War Music" tonight after Luxie crapped out on me, bummed and foetal after a shouting match with the principal at the school where she teaches part-time, but I bucked up and had a glass of wine at a nice café on Christopher Street and worked on eking out my Latin manuscript. I had forgotten what a rewarding process it is, manuscript study. It's a puzzle and a mystery and a dig for dinosaur bones. You cross-reference memes and semes from all different spheres of knowledge to start patching it together. I am really consumed with it. I found out that a German professor had compiled Capelli's treatise on Latin abbreviationes into a Macintosh 68K database that you can run from inside a shell on Windows, and also developed a version for the Pocket PC, so I wrote to him about whether is runs on the latest version of Windows CE. I compiled a bunch of things from here and there (mainly the Catholic Encylopedia and the list of sigla for the Catechismus Catholicae Ecclesiae into a little Access database of my own, based on the one I developed for collecting translation memory for ProZ. Then I went to see the play, in the basement of a run-down community center in a dicey part of the West Village. Wow. But I ramble on. Took the 2 down to Atlantic Avenue and walked home, stopping off for lamb shank at Chez Oskar, the best way to meet your meat, visibly a hunk of creature hacked off. If you read Kulchur Vulchur, you know of my encounter recently with some very well-organized PETA propaganda. Images of that hog butchery footage was running through my mind as the three women in the cast mimed and declaimed the carnage in Books 16–19 of the Iliad. Now, sleep. Come on now, Igmonster, warm my lonesome feet.

The Missouri Land: I receive a letter from a certain E. Tom Kuefler, Jr. of Iron County, Missouri, about 10.31 acres of undeveloped land purchased by my grandfather some years ago. He would always threaten to run off and go camp on it when he got disgusted with city life, squat by a campfire, eat beans, raise pigs. The tragic refrain of Colonel Sellers in Twain's The Gilded Age—"The Tennessee land, my boy, the Tennessee land"— always reminded me of that nostalgic look in his eyes. It became very important to him as he felt the Alzheimer's eating away at him. Mr. Kuefler, now, has bought up all the adjoining lots:

The land in question is a long way from the nearest public road over very rough, rocky terrain and there is no vehicular or utility access to it, legal or otherwise. [... "or otherwise"?] The only way to obtain legal vehicular or utility access to it would be through my property and would involve a very costly legal process which would very likely amount to no more than the actual land is worth, not to mention the actual cost of constructing a road over the rough terrain! [I like the structures of repetition in this paragraph ...] Also, the boundaries of this tract in common with my land have never been surveyed. In fact, given these and other circumstances, I believe that I have already been in possession of this tract for a number of years.

Something something "squatters rights (adverse possession) ... avoiding the expense and complication of communication through attorneys ..." A sharp Ozarkian, this Kuefler. It will be fun to write him back. Meanwhile, the facsimile of the Latin manuscript arrives. It appears to be a bequest of property ("littera fundationis") to the Church, involving one Maximillianus Henericus, archbishop, by the grace of God and the holy mother Church, of Cologne. ("MAXIMILIAN HEINRICH (1650-1688)" ... was archbishop of Cologne ...") It is going to take me some time to make out these facsimiles, do a proper diplomatic edition. While I am poring through Capelli's monograph on scribal abbreviations in cartae and codices (the essential reference still after all this time), I will have a peek at Jan Tschichold's treatise on the invention of the ampersand. What a weird task, under the circumstances. Working 9-5 at Banc of America for the next six days at an insultingly low rate of pay. Miss Miss Maximin a little.

Dark Night of the Sole: Up late banging away at things neglected, such as signing up with the agency in France that wants to use me regularly, a small triumph, and thank G-d for those. Check out their funky Flash dossier. Invoicing, finally, and shoveling out the cat box, finally, and chatting up on Trillian a very interesting person—let's call her Nona—in the diamond business on 47th Street. Now there is a New York story to dig into a bit. The postman is supposed to bring me my 18th-century Latin manuscript to translate today, so I had better catch some ZZZZZs and be up by 10:00 a.m.

Quotes of the day: "Adventure is making the distant approach nearer but romance is having what is where it is which is not where you are stay where it is." Gertrude Stein said that. And this from Thomas Szasz: "The modern erotic ideal: man and woman in loving sexual embrace experiencing simultaneous orgasm through genital intercourse. This is a psychiatric-sexual myth useful for fostering feelings of sexual inadequacy and personal inferiority. It is also a rich source of 'psychiatric patients.'"

And with the bleaker point of view: Andrea Dworkin: "The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it." Oh, man. Oh, man, oh, man.

Blogomania: The Merm actually shows up on AIM this afternoon, having once declared instant messaging to be "the work of the devil." She commands me to download a multichannel IM system called Trillian. Do thou likewise. I recently read a pretty decent article on the subject in the much-reviled YIL. She reports a huge spike in traffic to her blog after renaming the thing "Enigmatic Mermaid Does the Web." My site traffic: zeros across the board. If you were watching my dorm cam today, meanwhile, you saw that I retired to bed midafternoon and nodded off over John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy and am only now bestirring myself to sluice out the stables. I am acclimating myself to a night-skewed activity schedule in anticipation of working four to midnight shifts starting soon. DjJWerewolf submits the following, which I place on the record as an exhibit for my upcoming testimony before the Interstate Commerce Commission on why the Internet should be dismantled immediately. In the same category is this submission from a certain man of God of my acquaintance who should desire to remain anonymous when shooting such vile nonsense around the Internet. I mean, a certain decorum, if you please, et cetera. Meanwhile, if you have a writerly bent, or know someone who does, please invite them to participate in Kulchur Vulchur: 400 words or less, with surprising coherences outweighing relevance in the editorial selection process. Finally, the Donnas are God, subject of an upcoming Vulchur essaylet.

Adieux, Maximum Minnie: A shocking and inexplicable development of the past couple of weeks. Mystified. But we move on. Luxie suggests I start hanging out at the Kitsch Inn, which has a pretty interesting list of patrons, if you check the link. Me and Lux went to a lecture last evening at the Studio School by her old mentor, Jake Berthot. I fell asleep in the middle, serious oxygen debt (they turned the freaking ventilation off so the talk could be recorded without the noisy whirring of fans), but the gist of it was that the man does amazing work, is engaged in a deeply felt creative process that extends over decades, and has absolutely nothing coherent to say about it. I find that kind of comforting. You can get stuff done without being able to explain exactly how you do it. We discussed this over dinner at this comfy Italian joint, where I slurped down some sinfully good carbonara on top of an antipasto of frutti di mare. I wangled a pair of tickets to a press preview of Verse Theater Manhattan's production of Christopher Logue's "War Music," a verse adaptation of the Iliad. "Initially booked in September of last year, this dazzling all-female production was cut short by the 9/11 terror attacks." All-female cast. Intriguing as hell, possibly inspirational. Unforeseen stimulation for no $$$ down. You can't beat that. I have been thinking of doing a piece of creative writing that follows the form of the classical rhetorical progymnasmata. Maybe a Maximin post-mortem, who knows? Or memories of the 1970s. That was a very weird decade.

Gross Tumult Signifiying Change Without End: That's a line from a poem by David Gascoyne. It fits the day so far and the vicissitudes thereof, but at least work is coming in: flat $400 bid accepted on a Latin project, and the BofA graphics work slated to start "soon," though the agency is a bit of a flaky outfit. We will see. Got to make sure I call up my other agencies and let them know I am in demand. They have such a high turnover of callow reps that they have no institutional memory of my graphics genius and hyperefficiency. Got a good reception on my pitch for a story on the engineers in the trenches at Enron Energy Services, have a feeling I could actually sell this. I recently made fun of the book Radical E: From GE to Enron—Lessons on How to Rule the Web, and maybe justly so, but there were a lot of really smart, talented people executing those projects and they have a missionary zeal that makes for good quote and controversy, in light of the lambasting the Enron subsidiary is getting over the appointment of its CEO as Secretary of the Army (the Army was a subscriber to one of EES's risk-management plans, which offered fixed-rate wholesale energy, the profit lying in the company's faith in the ability of cutting-edge energy management and efficiency programs to overcome price volatility). I am actually starting to learn someting about all this energy stuff, and I love being able to use the word "arbitrage" in a sentence, as you know. Other than that, only the SOS to report: laundry to do, invoices to send, blah blah blah. I saw the ephemeral Twin Towers memorial for the first time last night, which looks nothing like this: twin searchlight beams ascending into the low-lying haze like a movie premiere. Underwhelming and sad. Iggy, the world's largest cat, since you asked, is fine. We're putting him on a diet and kicking his fat butt out into the back yard more regularly now that things are warming up. Bring me a squirrel, you bum! We'll have Granny Clampett whip up some vittles.

Sunday in Monday, No Fun Day: Hey, look at me! Maximin thinks this whole blog thing is a bit "masturbatory," and I suppose it is a bit much for those who actually get to meet my meat-self on a regular basis. I hope my far-flung friends and family enjoy it, though, and think of me more often because of it. Got to run out and finish that training this afternoon before the seminar at Media Bistro tonight. I may actually have a live, cool story to pitch. Juano put me in touch with a manager at Enron Energy Services (a risk management manager, in fact) willing to talk straight talk about the other side of the issue: if their business plan had worked, it might have done more for energy efficiency than government regulation ever would. Hey, I'm no knee-jerk liberal. Edify me. Anyhow, I'm off, but I am climbing back on. Off to visit my friend Victor at OBE to print out the handouts for tonight's seminar. Don't forget to check Kulchur Vulchur. I am inviting some writers I like and admire to participate. You can too! It would be cool to have a submission from the veteran homilectician JAFCJR, for example.

Saturday in the Dark: Friday was more or less a wasted day, sitting through perfunctory training at the Graybar Building that sits atop Grand Central Station for that graphics job at Banc America Securities. Oh, well, what ya gonna do? Pucker up and make sure they know where to send the freaking checks. I have a new editing client, a psychology doctoral candidate who needs six 30-page items prepared for publication according to the APA style book, at $2.00 per page: one day's work, I hope, perhaps a long day. Supposed to write a pitch to a business section for a thoroughly reported business-trend article for Monday. I am drawing a blank. I did some research on human resources automation that might make a good story. I guess I could retool my current instructional design piece, slanting it towards "professions you've never heard of." Whatever. Sufficient unto the day is the shit that needs doing, including catching up on and faxing out my invoices.

JL was a little alarmed that I called her my "fiercest critic" in a recent post, but was soon reassured—she's someone who lets you know how things are as she sees them, a very bad quality in a postmodern academic but a valuable one in a friend who is an actual human being. So we patrol the aisles at the CVS pharmacy near 14th and First, after pot au feu and mussels at Léon, discussing all the weaknesses the flesh are heir to and choosing me a more satisfactory wrist-bondage thingie. The following gets spewed out of the Cybernetic Poet Creator on my desktop, in the style of John Donne:

Love might make us like a woman, true, and so

Drown'd the bishop

Discuss. Monkey Woman and I are in a furious dispute about whether it is physically possible to eat the outsides of an Oreo first, saving the cream for last. People and their theories. Maximum Minnie maintains that the natural progression of a Beatles crush in women of our generation goes Paul-Ringo-John. I protest the exclusion of George, but to no avail. At least one other woman I know reports going straight for Ringo, "but only because I felt sorry for him."

Our friend CM got the ax from Internet World. Doubly awful because of the promises with which they wooed her there from a much more reputable outfit. Would it be contrary to my nondisparagement clause to opine that those people are scum? If so, I will forebear from saying it.

Division of Labor: I have started a new moderated Web log and mailing list called Kulchur Vulchur. Subscribe if you like. The idea is to post short essaylets on topics consistent with the so-called theme. This should provide 50% less blather to Blind Tangerine list members and keep the head-fat content at a steady 2% or so. For example: I am doing a short Latin translation today, followed by a visit to the doc and a din-din with Jolielaide, my fiercest critic. After that, eh, who knows? I have orientation all day tomorrow for a new corporate graphics gig designed to dig me out of my hole, so I should have less time on my hands anyway.

Like human counterparts, female pigs love a swine

Les Perreaux
National Post

WINNIPEG — Sows are most sexually aroused by the nastiest boar in the pen, researchers in Australia and England have discovered, noting there could be parallels to human behaviour.

But that same rakishness that makes the boars sexy declines when they are kept in pens in large numbers, a Saskatchewan researcher says.

"The more aggressive, noisy, angry and smelly the boar, the more effective it is. It's a pheromone effect. There's no substitute for it," said Keith Thornton, a breeding expert who recently presented a paper on the topic in Winnipeg.

Hog farmers commonly walk a boar through the pens of adolescent females to induce them into heat. Farmers have tended to use docile boars as they are easier to handle.

Chega de Saudade e o Sair do Porco-Menino: I hereby declare myself intellectually and occupationally bankrupt. My 401(k) cash-out check arrived, however, so I can afford to stare at the ceiling until Friday morning—after mailing the rent check, that is. I am going to spend more time catching up with work-related blogs for a few days, filing loose papers, and nursing this sinister limb of mine that seems to want to secede from the rest of me. I am also at work on The Obscene Mme. D and a memoir started some months ago about my experiences with a religous sect called Nichiren Shoshu.

A Guide to the Enron Collapse — A Few Points for a Clearer Understanding: "You know what the difference is between the State of California and the Titanic? This is being webcast, and I know I'm going to regret this, but at least the lights were on when the Titanic went down," —then Enron CEO Jeffery Skillingat an industry strategy conference in 2001

Tuesday Do-Your-Own-Transcription Blues: This arrives in the inbox just as I am thinking I should head out to the minimart for more cancer sticks. Yes, well, I do have a Nicoderm in the medicine cabinet to slap on my ass. Maybe I should do that. Excited to have found at least some of Esther Lamandier's passionated, unorthodox recordings of the Cantigas de Santa Maria on Audiogalaxy. These beatiful songs in praise of the Virgin blend hagiography with the troubadour tradition of love lyric, arguing that Maria is the most worthy domna of them all. Entr'Ave e Eva, for example, concerns the theological doctrine of Maria's (as in Ave, Maria, gratia plena) erasure of the original sin [allegedly] perpetrated by Little Eva in getting Adam interested in doing the Locomotion of the knowledge of the evil hippy-hippy shake. Plus it’s one of those anagrams, and a palindrome, too, get it? It also rocks! I used to know all about this kind of thing.

Not just futzing around, though. Finished transcribing the Findley interview, and sent it off in another round of queries to the groovy alternative pubs, including Z. Might have a stab at the Times, too, since Findley was once a frequent editorialist there. Maybe the Guardian would be interested, too. Up to 60 KudoZ and 504 BrownieZ points on ProZ, but I think they forgot to award me those two French ones I got. Maybe do another little Latin job this afternoon. I ain’t no bum. I coulda been a contenda. Back to work.

The Early (Flip of the) Bird: I can only look on and wonder as WinAmp and RealPlayer fight it out for control of the MP3 file type on my computer, like Godzilla and MechaGodzilla. I get back to work on the Findley thing with renewed energy, thanks be to Chock Full o' Nuts. Downloading "Hedda Gabler" by John Cale carries me back once more to college days with KC, who appeared as little Thea in same with that senior theater major everybody secretly called "Cadillac T-ts." Wonder what she's up to? Little Thea, I mean? The same artist's version of "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" reminds me of my stepfather, Frazer, who likes poets with Thomas as one of their names, such as Dylan , Merton, and D.M., who is also a noted translator.

Reporter from Lerner: Werewolf sends over a bunch of clips from that job of his, including the following item of interest to snack-snarflers everywhere:

Haarman & Reimer (H&R) have released four brands of new flavors: potato, egg, lard and chipotle chili. The new potato flavors include natural and artificial type flavor 823235 and natural potato type flavor 832480. In baked breads, the starting usage level for both ranges from 0.1 to 0.3 percent ... The company's new egg flavors include natural egg yolk WONF 263488 and natural egg paste flavor WONF 230681 ... the new lard flavors include entrapped natural lard type flavor 823477 and entrapped natural lard flavor 823478 ...

"Entrapped natural lard type flavor," mmmm. The subtle allusion to the number 47 should attract the attention of former Sagehens. For the uninitiated ... aw, never mind, it's just arcane alma mater mumbo-jumbo. Back to work.

Yes, Pombo-Enig-Merm, Yahoo Groups is FUBAR due to "maintenance." This makes no never mind to me, although I could have used a good PT>EN glossary of sailor's knots the other day. I wound up comparing animated diagrams on different Web sites. My dream:

This dream made me happy. I was in this huge orchestra, playing the tuba. The orchestra was so huge that it filled the whole concert hall and spilled over into the offices and workrooms. Me and the bassoons and trombones were in this grungy dressing room and could not even see the conductor. We were smoking and playing cards. One of us would get up every few minutes to see what the conductor was doing. The conductor was insane, he had this frozen, sad expression on his face, which was daubed with clown makeup, and would not tell anyone what his plan was, even though the violins were really mad and yelling at him. John Cage was sitting by the side of the stage, grinning, like at this concert we went to once at Davies Symphony Hall. I started talking to this bassoon player who had brought along an electric guitar to play sotto voce on the side so as not to get bored. I had a bass guitar. We came up with a great song, so we decided to bag this orchestra thing and go back to his studio to make a record. At the studio, I made a lot of friends.

That dream did make me very happy. Do you think it portends a successful mid-career transition? I am suddenly filled with optimism again. Today requires a serious swabbing of the decks and pumping of the scuppers, however, lest we drown in refuse. Iggy is dragging socks into the kitty litter again, so that has got to get hosed out too. Just thought you would want to know.

This Is Only a Test of the Emergency Broadcast System: This station is currently off the air during routine maintenance.

One Thing After Another: Okay, by popular demand I have obtained the carpal brace, which rides my left wrist like a horny weasel and provides a certain stimulating aggravation in the form of a mild case of Velcro burn. But warmth returns, and soon maybe even full sensation. It's good. Thanks. Slow, disorganized writing day so far, with tonight's workshop deadline abandoned some where mid–morning stroll between BAM and the Myrtle Avenue projects, toting my $10 spindle-mounted stack of CD-Rs in my ergonomically assisted left hand and making that obsessive-compulse hand-to-mouth gesture of the smoker with my right. Stop in at Tilie's to read the papers and suck down a capuccino.

The Findley story just can't be done as a Talk of the Town item. It needs more research, an even tone, and a little more personal reflection, though the narrative treatment is a good way to organize it. I have to admit that the events of the past few days have reminded me of a queasiness I have always felt about taking part in politics, in this case the incomprehensible religious and ethnic politics of Mideast strife, but even in my days with UAW local at Berkeley, seeing how little the world works really has to do with reason and negotiation and pragmatic compromise, as in mathematical game theory, always gave me pause. On the other hand, I felt a certain amount of self-loathing at my own fears about commitment, political and other wise. The thing is, if I can just type mindlessly on the subject for a moment, people have the capacity to act with a suicidal lack of regard for their own rational self-interest simply in order to fuck with the object of their hatred. In terms of the news from the Middle East, that seems to go for both sides, though the Hamas suicide bombers execute this approach in a more literal-minded way. (I don't know why no one writes about the 1998 movie called The Siege, with Bruce Willis, Annette Bening and Denzel Washington. The CIA agent's relationship to an informant and lover who turns out to be one of "them" has a really emotionally authentic feel to it. Actually, some Muslims really object to that film, as I read recently doing some translation). That totally baffles me, and those not baffled by it kind of intimidate me. I suspect them of being insane or lacking self-knowledge. Paranoia is an appropriate response to a world getting too small too fast, especially if you don't take the time to learn some other languages, but even then ...—that's my provisional conclusion at this hour. Maybe I just need some lunch.

I have also to do some revisions and resubmission of other stuff I have been writing. I keep coming up with long lists of things to do. The making of these lists is comforting: It reduces the problem to a series of steps. The problem then shifts to execution. I liked Lisa Belkin's "How To Jump-Start a Napping Muse" in yesterday's Times, one of those filler items they put on the front page as the job listings section gets less and less fat and prosperous. Belkin writes about keeping a one-inch-square frame by her computer to remind her that she was to write only one column inch at a time. The other problem is that creditors keep phoning up and breaking my concentration. Need some of that easy money, like Maximum Minnie says. Need to grit my teeth and learn to excel in writing breathlessly about celebrity sex lives and the e-transformation initiatives of the pointy-headed MBA boys and girls. Yeah, that's what I'll do!

The Week Ahead: Late Sunday, the Monk Wo has gotten over her existential crisis and chows down on ersters and Geman chocolate cake at the Chew with me. MM reports starting to feel the pinch herself in the metaphorical carpal tunnel of her cash flow. Grim thoughts for a Sunday. I give JP a buzz out in California, but get the machine. I am listening to some Mingus and Ellington mixed together like walnuts and roquefort cheese on a bed of wild greens. "Mama's little baby don't love no shortnin' bread / Mama's little baby don't love no shortnin' bread / Mama's little baby loves caviar ..." It is taking me forever to figure out the proper technique for nesting blockquote tags, not to mention the proper way to mention a tag, as opposed to using it!

Here, at any right, is the stupid column I send off to John at Abraxas. He likes it! hey, John! It was fun to write, though self-indulgent.

Alt.Energy.Random.Notes

by Colin Brayton
March 3, 2002

This week, your intrepid reporter tries to get the "E" word out of his system for good, while chasing down rumors about the imminent collapse of the energy management sector—and the violent, fiery end of the world!

Belaboring the obvious. The last word on the Enron affair—the political equivalent of the Winter Olympics, if you happen to feel the way I do about figure skating and luge—is a recent item in the Onion: A new study shows that Americans would be outraged by the Enron affair ... if they understood it. I remember feeling the same way about the Teapot Dome affair we studied in high school American history class, an energy scandal from the Harding administration. In that case, government-held energy reserves were sold off to private interests in secret, and a cabinet secretary wound up doing time. In this case, of course, public utilities were sold off with the informed consent of the governed, more or less.

Major action on E-Bay and HotJobs. Reuters reported late last week that the Smithsonian Institution intends to enshrine the ethics manual of the doomed energy giant—no doubt in mint condition. Still shrink-wrapped. Both pages of it. Insert your cheap witticism here. Everybody else has. Meanwhile, the Village Voice spotlights a company that will sell you Enron shares as a handsomely framed collectible item at $18 per certificate. That's some mark-up, since the stock was not worth the paper it was printed on when the NYSE de-listed it at the end of the year. Forty blocks uptown, meanwhile, Arthur Andersen, the doomed energy juggernaut's outside auditor, lost another lucrative client relationship late last week with the defection of Merck. That pillar of the pharmaceutical industry simultaneously announced encouraging test results from a clinical trial of HIV-1 vaccine candidates. D'oh! The inside poop from the Avenue of Americas is that a lot of the bean counters over there at Andersen are spending most of their day on Resume Zapper. On a positive note, the Houston Astros will have to find another corporate sponsor to "3-Com" their new ballpark after, according to the latest Enron press release. Northern Californians with fond memories of good old, plain old Candlestick Park will know what I mean.

Hurry up and wait. On the governmental front, as the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., reports, "the Enron collapse has made North Carolina's electric deregulation advisory group even less eager to begin allowing customers to choose their power supplier." That lead paragraph is pretty damned wimpy, for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that the most significant factor cited by state officials in the body of the story is, in fact, the demise of the California experiment. "Allowing customers to choose" is a pretty loaded phrase, too, come to think of it. Eight of 24 states with existing deregulation plans have either delayed or suspended such plans since January of 2001, observes the News and Observer. The amazing thing is that only a third of them have.

Dubya Dubya, too. Did you see our president introducing hybrid fuel-cell automobiles at a press conference carried on CNN and CSPAN the other day? The president's remarks included the following analysis: "Well, we already have plenty of water, so if the only emission is water, we're in great shape!" Hey, we already have plenty of hydrocarbon emissions, so if the car emits hydrocarbons as well, we're still in great shape!

Science fiction double feature. Speaking of new technology and the people who pretend to understand it in order to get you to invest in it—think "dot-bomb"—here's a hot investment opportunity I find filed under "Unproven Concepts: Cold Fusion" at the Open Directory Project.

One of the most promising technologies in the energy field is called "New Hydrogen Energy"—a method of unlocking the enormous energy stored in molecules of heavy metals and water. "There's a lot of energy around us," Mr. Cavicchio points out. "If you could free up all the energy stored in a simple glass of water, you could heat your home for months."

"Mr. Cavicchio has met some surprising supporters in his business development efforts," the press release goes on to say. "The most intriguing was Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and other books," Cavicchio gushes. "He's a big supporter of this new energy field. In fact, he spoke highly of new energy developments in a recent Discover magazine article." Yeah, look at how many of his predictions for the past year came true.

Not with a bang but with a whimper. And speaking of science fiction, isn't this how the world always ends in a good sci-fi novel? Erik Nylund's wickedly funny Signal to Noise comes to mind. An enterprising scientist meets up with a wheeling, dealing alien free-marketeer in a chat room on the integalactic Internet. His public funding running low, he's become a version of those "internal entrepreneurs" at Enron who are leading the New Economy to glory, according to Joel Kurtzmann and Glenn Rifkin in their gloriously ill-timed book Radical E: From GE to Enron—Lessons on How to Rule the Web (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2001). In exchange for copies of the world's religious and cultural heritage and a few other strands of wampum beads—Kurtzmann and Rifkin's book among them, I bet—the alien provides a technology that converts the earth's orbital spin into energy that can be used for instantaneous quantum transport anywhere in the universe. Guess how long it takes to exhaust that non-renewable resource?

Correção from my coração. A friend in São Paulo writes in with a correction to my last column, concerning life outside the power grid in the favelas of that city and elsewhere in Brazil. Illegal power hook-ups known as gatos—as in the phrase puxar um gato ("yanking a cat")—have sustained makeshift underclass communities for years. Last summer, Numero magazine interviewed a middle-aged electrician by day and black-market cable guy by night who saw the illicit side of his business grow exponentially in the years of "the big turn-off." The man says he now regularly upscale neighborhoods to yank a cat or two for residents and local businesses. Viva Favela, a lively Brazilian online magazine about life outside the grid, regularly confirms the man's account with reports of ongoing black-market energy busts in affluent boroughs of Rio de Janeiro:

Yesterday afternoon, agents of the Public Utilities Defense Squad (DDSD) discovered three commercial establishments with illegal electrical hook-ups in Mister Witking Street, in the Mesquita district of Lower Fluminense. The "cats" were discovered in a bakery, a bazaar, and a shop selling religious articles.

Good lord, not the nice lady at the religious store? What is the world coming to? The Taquara aquatic park in Rio's Duque de Caixas district, with eight pools covering 380,000 square meters, was shut down for the same crime last week by the same flying squad of energy Untouchables.

Walking on water. Heck, those Brazilians have plenty of water already, right? Wrong. The government was so high on the Bolivian natural gas futures it acquired as part of its natural gas pipeline boondoggle—think Alaska—that it decided simply to drain the five-year hydroelectric reserves of an Amazonian watershed containing 25 percent of the world's fresh water. Bolivian natural gas prices subsequently soared. The charges of government corruption flying around Brasilia make the Whitewater scandal look like, well, a dinky little tributary in Arkansas.

The architect proposes, the engineer disposes. I want you know that as a journalist, I like to consider myself more of an information engineer than an information architect. Here's one more reason why. A recent design contest for structures to replace the World Trade Center included Das Oosterhuis's proposal for a structure that would function as a kind of giant mood ring, reflecting the aggregate emotional state of those inside, reports Scripps-Howard's Deroy Murdock in the National Review. "This e-building not only reacts to different circumstances but actively proposes new configurations," the architect explains.

In January, for instance, it would present itself as a conference space with support facilities. Then, on rainy days in May, the building would gyrate at dramatic angles to provide shelter for passersby. And every September 11, Oosterhuis's creation would morph into two large, identical towers to remember the late, great World Trade Center.

Of course, "this proposal cannot be built until someone invents steel Play-Doh," Murdock deadpans. Even so, how would you like to have to crunch the energy numbers on that baby? No worries: It will be built with nanotechnology and powered by the New Hydrogen Energy. You energy management folks will be looking for a new job, making that glass of water at the corner diner last as long as you possibly can and considering my offer to sell you a very nice bridge I happen to have listed this week.

Disclaimer. Not really. I'm just yanking your cat—I mean, chain.

Somehow, I have lost all the links in converting this from Microsoft Word. Will have to restore them later. Back to the grind.

It's No Joke, Hoss: Serious wave of very useful advice on the whole carpal tunnel topic, including this from JL:

Hmm I'm finding the direct marketing from your blog almost eliminates the need for two-way conversation. Or empties the desire. But I've roused myself out of my receptive torpor to tell you that you must purchase a rigid plastic wrist brace from your local Duane Reade, Rite-Aid, or CVS. They are marketed for about $20, indicated specifically for carpal tunnel. You immobilize the affected limb while you sleep and when you wake in the morning, it is fine. Just immobilizing the limb will not do the trick—you must wear this specific kind of brace to relax the complex of muscles and nerves or whatever in the carpal tunnel region. I'm probably making this up but anyway, it works. Also take Vitamin B6—no joke. Don't neglect.

Worked all day, the place is a mess, napped in the afternoon. Got to go off and meet the Monkey Woman at Chat 'n' Chew to pay her back the money I borrowed.

S, A, T-U-R, D-A-Y, Night: Anyone remember the Bay City Rollers? My first gfriend in junior high was a Bay City Rollers fan, a skinny Chinese girl named Denise Hum, all dressed up in plaid with buttons of all the boys: Nobby, plus somebody, plus that other guy with the Rod Stewart haircut ... so cute, Denise, I mean, with her bracefaced grin and giggle.. I ran into her years later at the University of Utah, she was undecided whether to major in sociology or go to cosmetology school, to become Todd Gitlin or Madge, the "you're soaking in it" lady ... Anyhow, I am updating my Media Bistro profile and getting ready to hit the hay after spending a pleasant day with Maximin and the krazy kats, 96 steps above Mulberry Street.

Carpal Diem: This carpal thing is becoming unfunny, and just when I was planning to spend the entire day pounding the old Underwood in the interest of truth and justice. Here are 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 exercises to do

Hugger Mugger: Speaking of which, I sent off the following to Mugger at the New York Press earlier this evening, with a cc: to CAIR:

I expect that your ears are burning already on the subject of the front-page illustration of your issue for the week ending March 5. If not, we are in deeper trouble than I thought.

There's no way around it that I can see, not even given the customarily irreverent tone of your publication: your depiction of a hooked-nose, beturbaned Islamic terrorist smuggling an atomic bomb aboard a New York City subway train belongs in the permanent collection of the Museum of Bigotry in Art, next to watermelon-eating minstrel-show blacks, Nazi caricatures of Jews, the Frito Bandito, and the like. (That corpulent, lazy, donut-snarfling cop is not going to win you any points with the law-and-order crowd, either). It's worth pointing out that the young men who carried out the attacks on New York looked like any of hundreds of thousands of ordinary, thoroughly assimilated Americans of foreign descent, just as Timothy McVeigh looked just like the guy your sister went to the prom with, and just as the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks on Congress is probably going to turn out to be your community college organic chemistry professor.

Your advertisers should discontinue their accounts with you until you print a prominent apology, and their customers should refuse to patronize their establishments until they do.

You might also want to dedicate some coverage to the Muslim community's struggle against this kind of brutal, ignorant stereotyping, starting with Paul Findley's highly-regarded recent book, Silent No More: Confronting America's False Images of Islam (Amana Publications, 2001).

Go ahead, print this letter with a smart-ass headline.

Regards,

Colin Brayton
Fort Greene-Clinton Hill
colin.brayton@earthlink.net

Hapax Legomena: Frazer sends an interesting Times article on new scholarship about the origins of Islam and the Qu'ran, a subject I read something about once upon a time. Will have to respond tomorrow when my left arm is no longer, I hope, so freaking numb, or else I will have to start writing Oulipo prose using only the right-hand side of the keyboard.

Twilight Notes: Those Krispy Kremes have sustained me throughout the day—just so JB won't take offense at my last posting on the subject—though it will soon be time to wander off in search of cheap cuisine and a place to buy 700-MB CD-RWs to replenish my diminishing supply. God, I remember thinking that an 8-gig hard drive was just unthinkably huge, large enough to hold the contents of the local branch library a thousand times over. Insert Text Here (that's what it's called) is the blog of the day, for lack of time to find a better: unsexy but useful to the news junkie I am remaking myself into for want of anything better to do until Werewolf rocks the turntables at SWIM later on. Here's another item for the dead magazine topic at the Well, from Crain's New York Business:

Teen magazine to close

by Valerie Block

Primedia Inc. has decided to fold Teen magazine, saying the title's last issue will come out in May.

The company acquired the Teen when it purchased Emap USA last year. The struggling magazine's rate base was reduced to 1.5 million from 2 million last year. Despite a recent redesign, the title could not compete with such popular magazine spinoffs as Teen People and CosmoGirl.

Primedia's Seventeen will absorb the title's subscriber list. Primedia blamed the difficult advertising market for the closure.

Jane Pratt got out of Sassy at just the right time, it seems. You have to grow up with your demographic to get that generational bonding mojo working, plus not all teens are alike, you know. Who wants to be identified with thirteen at fifteen, for example? Ew! Seventeen is the benchmark to which every teen aspires. These teen versions of adult mags are troubling, however, the death of childhood, all that sort of thing. Did I ever tell you about that time the grrrls at Jane made me edit the staff reviews of, um, sex toys? I probably did, I only have about four different anecdotes. Have I always been this boring? Then I always make the joke about all the red-faced fact-checking queries I had to make. Bunny ears? For the television? To watch The Honeymooners, right? Like I used to with my grandmother in that apartment in the Wilshire District, Raymond Chandler-land, back during the early stages of Project Apollo? Okay, so here is where I have gotten with Findley, aside from having plucked all the good quotes off my tape to build the narrative around:

Paul Findley Soldiers On

Citizen Paul Findley of TK, Illinois just looks so incredibly ... “iconic” is the word ... as he pokes his head uncertainly into the dual-purpose prayer hall and banquet room of a Muslim community center in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, clutching a leather valise under one stubby arm.

Short, sturdy, and central-casting silver-haired, the octogenarian 11-term congressman from “the land of Lincoln,” though voted out of office by a slim margin in 198TK, still wears the impeccably tailored pale gray suit and still presses the flesh with all the stage presence of a veteran political warhorse. The kid-glove leather of his round face—slack for the briefest of moments with the weary disorientation of an elderly out-of-towner who has just navigated La Guardia, check-in at an airport Comfort Inn, and a frenetic outer-boroughs rush hour —busts out into an infectious grin as he accepts the warm greetings of Pakistani colleagues from the Islamic Circle of North America, hosts of the evening’s event—a panel discussion called “United We Stand?” That ominous question mark hangs over the room, but ...

A little more scene-setting and then we start to provide information about Mr. Findley's junket to New York to promote his book, which has a weird mix of professionalism and haphazard do-it-yourselferism about it that convinces me (and you, dear reader) that the man is the genuine article. Yes, Virginia, Mr. Smith did go to Washington. I really admire this guy, if you can't tell already. The evening goes on to find him sharing the dais with this amazing African American imam, and then indulging in old-boy bonhomie with the national coordinator of the NCCC, an old colleague from the other side of the aisle, back-slapping, corny Presbyterian jokes, the whole lollapalooza, there amid the power-lunching clergy-lobbyist crowd, all that halls-of-power hushed conversation. So tell me, where do I go with this? Want to focus on the book, which maybe suffers from the virtue of trying to address two distinct audiences that don't yet understand one another well enough to be reading the same book. That's just prairie optimism from the Land of Lincoln! When I tell Mr. Findley I am pitching this to Mother Jones, he says, "Hey, the real Mother Jones was born in my hometown!"

Anyhow, that's the proof that I did not slack off today too much. I also found a way to juxtapose Bush's remarks today on CNN (Monica speaks, did you see that? What a hotty!) about hydrogen-fuel-cell cars with this weird investment prospectus I found under "cold fusion" at the Open Directory Project:

One of the most promising technologies in this field is called "New Hydrogen Energy" – a method of unlocking the enormous energy stored in molecules of heavy metals and water. "There's a lot of energy around us," Mr. Cavicchio points out. "If you could free up all the energy stored in a simple glass of water, you could heat your home for months."

Getting the new hydrogen energy reaction to work requires precise conditions and special materials. Several companies in the United States and Europe have successfully developed prototype energy cells based on this approach. New hydrogen energy should not be confused with chemical reactions such as burning hydrogen or hydrogen fuel cells.

Mr. Cavicchio explains the process: "The reaction that produces excessive amounts of energy appears to occur when hydrogen comes in close contact with certain types of metals. Water, which consists of hydrogen and oxygen, is often the source of the hydrogen. The reaction is typically initiated by an outside energy source, such as electricity, heat, ultrasound or infrared radiation. Once the reaction gets going, the devices generate much more heat output, sometimes many multiples of the energy put in."

"What our portfolio companies are trying to do," says Mr. Cavicchio, "is to find a way to produce a controlled amount of energy in a safe, clean way. Soon these energy cells will be used to run a car or heat a home or charge batteries in a non-polluting, inexpensive way."

Mr. Cavicchio has met some surprising supporters in his business development efforts. "The most intriguing was Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: Space Odyssey and other books. He's a big supporter of this new energy field. In fact, he spoke highly of new energy developments in a recent Discover Magazine article."

Mr. Clarke, he crazy. Everybody knows that. Bush, meanwhile: "We have plenty of water already, so if the only emission is water, why, we're doing great!" Parse this statement logically, please, until your head starts to spin.

Back, Jack. Well, JB seems to be prospering, if maybe missing his maverick days as a cubicle-monkey-at-large and guerilla public-relations commando as he gets assimilated by the Borg over there on the Avenue of the Hulking Polygonal Boxes. I was too polite to say so, but I actually have terrible childhood donut-trauma: my first job was working Saturdays at Tate O' Nut in Alhambra, California—last in a failed franchise operation featuring both donuts and homemade potato chips, probably fried in the same vat of lard, how awful is that?—where I was forced to eat all the day-olds I could handle because they were closed Sunday and could not sell them anyway. Aversion by surfeit. I choked down a couple of chocolate numbers, though, because after all, JB is a prime candidate for lower-dorsal osculation these days, being a nominal mucky-muck with freelance contracts to write and all. Heh heh. Hoo.

Well, some of the Louima convictions got sent back for retrial today. Does not worry me too much, how about you? Technicalities. Retrial. Probably do some good to keep the case in the news cycle, lest we forget. Nothing from the Reverend Al that I could find in the Times or Post, from whom the headline of the day: BUSH FLACK BACKS OFF SMACK AT CLINTON. My dream job (I am writing a profile for Media Bistro that asks that question)? One where I can write rhyming, alliterative groaner headlines and take lots of junkets. Another globalization firm wants to invite on one of the latter. Cool. Peeve of the day: People who have registered common misspellings of Google as their URLs.

Off. This is odd. I am having morning coffee and going off to a workplace. Someone else's, mind you, but a workplace nevertheless. In passing, it's funny to note that a story than ran yesterday under the headline "Microsoft Changes Antitrust Settlement" is reposted today under the headline "Microsoft, U.S. Refine Antitrust Settlement."

By Peter Kaplan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O and the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday they had agreed to modify their antitrust settlement in response to criticism that it contained loopholes that could be exploited by the company.

The changes filed with U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly were described as "refinements," although Microsoft and the government deleted an entire provision that had been attacked for harming computer makers' efforts to protect patents on their hardware.

"The modifications announced today simply make this effective settlement even better," said Charles James, the department's antitrust chief.

The changes drew a cool response from the nine state attorneys general who have opposed the settlement and are seeking stiffer sanctions against Microsoft for violating antitrust law.

Flackdom never sleeps. Where did Redmond's soft money go in the last election? Well, into the shower, I actually have to be clean and wear underwear for this morning's social occasion.