Media Blackout: "If you want to use our abominably slow, unwieldy and useless automated trouble reporting system, press or say one now. Otherwise, stay on the line and we will transfer you to ... our abominably slow, unwieldy and useless automated trouble reporting system." Hot. Too hot.

Reader’s Digest, a global publishing leader headquartered in Westchester County, New York, has a challenging opportunity for an editor on the copy desk of our flagship magazine.

Or how about this?

Stuff Magazine is seeking a Picture Researcher with at least 3 years of experience. Responsibilities include securing the best, the most interesting, fantastic and weird pictures in the world! If you are constantly on the lookout for stunning images of anything anywhere, and you are willing to do anything to get the right picture, then this job could be for you!

Anything? Anything? My nerves are shot. Agnes, break out the bathtub gin! We're on for Monday at the downtown hotel, me schmoozing the managing editor. Read lots of Tennessee Williams over the weekend, no, wait ... Reread To Kill a Mockingbird, yes, that's it, Scout. Or whatever.

Lost Verizon: Weird telecommunications FUBARs are ruining my life for good. Thinking how clever I would be to blog remotely and then hook my laptop into my home phone line to upload my pearls of wisdom, I find a terrifying buzzing noise. The phone rings in a strangled, gargled way all afternoon. I miss a call from my contact for my new job, and then, of course, I get dropped by Earthlink and miss e-mail from the same Southern peach. Grrr. Must schlep to the corner, I suppose, and dial 611. Much work. Want to know something embarrassing? I make up insane songs and sing them to my cat. I e-mailed one to the Monkey Woman the other day, to the tune of "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain":

There are monkeys from Nebraska in my mind
There are monkeys from Nebraska in my mind
There are monkeys from Nebraska
Who got kicked out of Alaska
There are monkeys from Nebraska in my miiiiiiiind

I received this reply by e-mail through channels of the Evil Empire:

If you move to Alabama I will then be forced to move to Nebraska. I will wear cozy sweaters and gradually become a conservative. I'll get a hairdo, I'll follow sitcoms and marry an insurance salesman. I'll have a dinning room set and a living room set. i'm not really looking forward to any of this, actually maybe I am, my search and wondering would be over. That's besides the point I'm doing all this because you're going to move to Alabama. You'll start to wear shortsleeved white shirts under plaid jackets, you'll know everyone in town's name or you'll cover by calling them sugar or pal. Remember the heat, you don't do well in heat. You get the picture . Maybe you'll have a great time if you go and maybe it'll be a great opportunity maybe you should go but I will miss you. A. Simian

Writing some executive bios for some dot-commers this weekend for a buck or two extra. Sizzling, scintillating copy! Some pig!

Merm fine.

I'm feeling just a little better today even though my head feels like it's going to explode. I was really quite ill, yesterday all I wanted was for someone to take me to a hospital after I finished my Netscape file. Of course, I didn't manage to finish the file nor went to hospital since I woke up feeling 10% better. The little mermie is way healthier than me by the way! She's got color on her cheeks again and she now has a Ken doll which she won't let anybody touch by the name Papai. It's the first time I ever saw her take a doll to bed!

All I want to do is sit in front of the tv and watch HBO.

Maybe I got the dengue? ("you're not going to die from it, but you're going to wish you could")

Are you done yet? Gorilla madness, Health concerns, and the Maronites to consume my day. Gorilla will be written up in Time Out New York! Waiting for logos from Tzvi (pronounced "Steve") at the printer. Worried about the Merm: the Merchild very sick last we heard. ET, phone home! Back to work: "What they called al-aunat ["acts of assistance"], among individuals of a given clan as well as between clans as a whole, meant that on Sundays and feast days the people of the village would work together with no distinction between clan and clan, with no distinction between man and man ..." Should I get this job?

Fun, fast paced trendy "Downtown" magazine publisher seeks Assistant Managing Editor with dynamic communication and leadership skills to promote teamwork amongst the writers, editors and production staff. Must have the ability to work well under pressure, meet production schedules and deadlines, development and manage budgets related to editorial production. International publisher of hip, trendy magazines for an audience with discriminating taste that enjoys the latest in fashion and entertainment news. Must have business savvy, have perfectionist tendencies and exudes confidence.

Mind = GMT +1, Body = GMT –5: I have napped and begun reading the book on Birmingham, which is a real brawling, sprawling hootenany of a tale, about which more in other forums, time permitting. I am initiated in the secret society of Mooh, but the instruction manual is in some foreign lingo. Why do my Moveable Type archive templates not work, and why can't the Riddler post comments, he says? He probably uses some weird open-source browser. I figure now to work from 9 to 2 to stay on schedule here. Insomniac last night, so my circadians are a bit shifted and twisted. Blog less, labor more, be happy, be free, prosper, lose all in a financial panic, retire to Florida, live on government cheese.

Gel, not Shred: We have our feces mostly coagulated and it will not be impacting the ventilation device just yet. Landed the medical translation gig, the Russian negotiates an adjusted deadline. Thanks to Suzanne, ex-fellow IW slave and Risk-Waters ace reporter, for sending along some good freelance tips from Craig's List. The copy editor may not be an extinct species quite yet, or if she is, we can clone her. Them? Gender-neutrality can be a real ... bitch? Bill Walsh: "This sentence makes no sense, but 99 44/100 percent of copy editors would let it go through." That's the spirit! Invited by the Fleur Obscure to attend a Handel opera on Thursday. In the meantime must work work work. Please feel free to crash the following, I have no time. I registered as Billy Bob "Red" Actor. Get it?

Thank you for registering for Internet World's Web Seminar, "The Business Advantages of Data Mining and Predictive Analytics, Part 2", sponsored by SPSS. The presentation will begin at 2:00pm EST, Wednesday May 29.

The web seminar will be conducted via the Internet and over the telephone. Please start to log on twenty minutes early, since it can take extra time to access the online portion. Basic instructions for each are below.

To access the ONLINE PORTION:

1. Exit out of all other applications except for your Internet browser.

2. Twenty minutes prior to the start time, go to http://www.placeware.com/cc/penton

3. Enter the following information, and click "Enter":
Your Name: _______________ (please use full name)

Meeting ID: iw0529

Meeting Key: 385345

4. click "Enter."

5. On the following page, click on "Open Audience Console." At this point, the system will launch a virtual conference room where you will view and participate in the presentation. This step can take up to ten minutes depending on your connection speed, so please be patient.

6. Once you are in the conference, please wait and the presentation will begin at 2:00pm EST. Please make sure your display setting is at 1024 x 768 pixels to prevent scrolling to see the entire presentation slides.

PLEASE NOTE: The web seminar software requires either Netscape 4.0 or Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher. If you have any problems connecting to the web seminar, call the Placeware Help Desk at 1-888-526-6170 (press 2 to skip the greeting and go directly to customer support).

To access the AUDIO PORTION:

A one-way conference call is available for the audio portion of the conference. To listen to the live panel discussion while viewing the online presentation:

1. Dial 888-293-6047 (accessible from the US & Canada)

2. All International Listen Participants will dial 972-512-0694 and enter Passcode 01230

Mood Swing-Dancing: We began the day with gloom from Yehuda, and now we feel like Capt. Beefheart, as follows:

My smile is stuck
I cannot go back t' yer Frownland
My spirit's made up of the ocean
And the sky 'n the sun 'n the moon
'n all my eye can see
I cannot go back to yer land of gloom
Where black jagged shadows
Remind me of the comin' of yer doom
I want my own land
Take my hand 'n come with me
It's not too late for you
It's not too late for me
To find my homeland
Where uh man can stand by another man
Without an ego flyin'
With no man lyin'
'n no one dyin' by an earthly hand
Let the devil burn 'n the beggar learn
'n the little girls that live in those old worlds
Take my kind hand
My smile is stuck
I cannot go back t' yer Frownland
I cannot go back t' yer Frownland

Try us again in about four hours.

Digital Cardiovascular Collapse: Oh, my God, there was a FUBAR in my DSLAM and I actually had to work offline for several—very productive, yes—hours. I actually had to dial up for my e-mail. It was like having your heart stop. Terrifying. I zipped off the test to Italy, made progress on an eloquent letter from an al-Bsh'elani exiled to Brazil, visited my friend Victor Odesanya at OBE to print the Health material, and did other stuff, too, Gorilla stuff. And now so much more to do. I am going to retire to Tillie's for a few hours to enjoy what's left of a fine day. Remind me, please, to pick up kitty litter on the way home. Two large bags. Extra-antitoxic waste. Phew!

Wide Work Load: My Russian client clamors for the first installment on the book. I have 40 pages to send, with pending queries included. For the amount of money I bid, the amount of research on the obscure names of obscure historical personages in a small town in Lebanon in the late 19th century expected is a little much. Encouraging word from the odd God of the Moohists, at right, is courtesy the Fleur Obscure, who gives me the hairy eyeball for my lost weekend of "work" in preference to play, much of which was, to be honest, obsessive puttering. I am skeptical even in the face of this patent kindness. I am not you. Are they us? Yehuda Amichai again:

And don't ever show weakness.
Sometimes I come crashing down inside myself
without anyone noticing. I'm like an ambulance
on two legs, hauling the patient
inside me to Last Aid
with the wailing of cry of a siren,
and people think it's ordinary speech.

But not to worry. These misanthropic moods they come and go again, they evanesce [more at vanish]. Coffee time and then monitoring the inbox for news of my schedule for the next week and weeks, and a fax from Italy expected.

Fooooood: It's part of a recommended daily diet. Going bonkers, working like a dog, smelling the BBQ fired up next door—smells like Dad used a little too much of the old lighter fuel as is the custom of Dads everywhere. I am just hoping Zaytoons is delivering today. Gimme a hunka hunka burning shawarma, I think I'm turning Lebanese, I really think so: A ways to go to finish my 10 pages of the Arabic book for the day, but food and a nap and a few pages of a cheapo Grisham novel are called for to decompress. Random Plagiarist poem of the day is from Yehuda Amichai:

God-Full-of-Mercy, the prayer for the dead.
If God was not full of mercy,
Mercy would have been in the world,
Not just in Him.
I, who plucked flowers in the hills
And looked down into all the valleys,
I, who brought corpses down from the hills,
Can tell you that the world is empty of mercy.
I, who was King of Salt at the seashore,
Who stood without a decision at my window,
Who counted the steps of angels,
Whose heart lifted weights of anguish
In the horrible contests.

I, who use only a small part
Of the words in the dictionary.

I, who must decipher riddles
I don't want to decipher,
Know that if not for the God-full-of-mercy
There would be mercy in the world,
Not just in Him.

Pilgrim's Progress: Look what Kinky Minky did to my magnetic-alphabet refrigerator. A $3,000 translation job coming closer and closer to the closing of the deal with an exchange of e-mails and faxes today. Between that and the PwC gig and possibly some insurance editing after that through Aquent, I may survive the summer. Opening the windows and blowing out some of the atmosphere of melancholy in preparation for the next thing to do. The Hairy Eyeball is fully functional now, though it needs a flashier splash page. It's XML-RPC ready to be syndicated all over the network! Perhaps when I find the time I will gink around in Flash a bit, I have some old funky projects I could adapt. But I digress. Saturday's posts still all in the draft folder. Stop me before I blog again! Not to mention Ryze. Just ask the Fleur Obscure how addictive that can be.

Early Morning In Memoriam Hash: Sleepless night and a long day ahead of ceaseless labor ahead, most of it beside the point. The joint where Iggy and I sleep and eat is really a disaster zone, for one thing. Bureaucratic nonsense to comply with, always makes me frown. My vow to put in 30 hours of translation? Down the toilet. My column? Unwritten. I have before me the editing test for Health, however, which I view through a clould of ambivalence. Upload it to XDrive and print it out down at the local graphics shop. There's a stack of things to write about and do when that's all out of the way, prepping for the week ahead and making some money, I hope, before I come down with the chronic wasting disease that's affecting deer in the West, according to the first item that catches my eye in the morning Wall Street Journal:

Much about the illness remains a mystery. A little-understood protein known as a "prion," a form of which is behind mad-cow disease, causes chronic wasting disease. In ways scientists don't yet fully grasp, prions enter the brain and set off a chain reaction, causing some of the brain's own proteins to assume an aberrant form. In humans, such rogue prion proteins are blamed for a rare, naturally occurring human illness called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and a related disease linked to eating contaminated beef from "mad cows."

I believe that my proteins may have always been aberrant in form. Gamine pops up in my buddy list and I don't know how she got there, but we have a nice chat, Brooklyn to Seattle. Moveable Type is a nightmare to install, I must say. The enigmatic one provides an excellent plan for better living through cannibalism, which I, for one, will hasten to adopt. A reminder of former days with AGSE-UAW District 65, from the Times this morning:

Two powerful labor unions — the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of Teachers — are battling to represent the adjunct professors at New York University, a corps of nearly 3,000 part-time teachers at the low end of the academic totem pole.

The contest over a group of instructors who have largely been ignored at N.Y.U., and elsewhere, reflects both the increased role adjuncts are playing in universities and the growing efforts to unionize higher education.

If the organizing drive is successful — ballots were mailed to N.Y.U.'s adjuncts in mid-May — other prestigious universities are likely to face similar organizing drives, labor experts said, and their labor costs are likely to climb

Sorry to see the stewards roster so undersubscribed at the old alma mater. No longer my matter. And now to work. I write, as ever, in haste.

Tweet Tweet Tweet: Coltrane's "Don't Take Your Love From Me" on the streaming audio contraption. Pizza en route. Hoidays derive from "holy days" but are not intrinscially holy, so why should I BBQ with the rest of the tribes and nuclear families? Reuters, Reuters, Reuters: The usual rhetorical sloth:

The restroom may be the most private place in the cubicle-land of today's open-plan offices, but, unlike the characters of Ally McBeal, few workers use it for emotional breakdowns or to escape a busy day.

In fact, 92 percent of U.S. office workers say they use the bathroom only for the plumbing -- and then they hightail it back to their desks.

Still, a lot of office grunts wouldn't mind a back rub in the lav, or maybe some tunes. A warm seat wouldn't be so bad either, according to a survey conducted for U.S. paper giant Kimberly-Clark Corp.

The survey found that just 2 percent of office workers go to the restroom to "hide or get away."

Many employees are simply too preoccupied with work. Of the 257 adults surveyed, one-third said they think about work assignments while in the restroom.

Yes, it is vital that we should compare television to reality constantly, in a scientific manner. Okay, so what if I raided the Scotch? It's a holy day, best time to indulge in the unholy. Can somebody shut up those fucking birds? Iggy? Iggy is afraid of birds, slovenly bourgeois cat that he is.

What Is So Chinese About a Chinese Fire Drill? Some business about Frank's curator friend putting the moves on some Brit on the QEII and finally wangling an invite to his suite at the Waldorf Astoria—What am I, in a lost F. Scott Fitzgerald novel?—means no Hamptons for Frank but an invite to tea on the rooftop terrace of the Met and sympathy from the Nocturnal Nasturtium, and a recalculation of flexible occupancy configurations. It was too complicated for my poor brain to scan, as was the installation of Moveable Type, over which I got into one of those states of blind doggedness, losing a lot of sleep and a lot of quarters to the old swear jar. Gonna sleep until noon. "I ought to work more and you ought to live more," says the Moose.

Day is Dunne-Dun-Donne-Done: Just goofing off until I have to meet the Black Lotus, Miss Convivianality, at the moldy-smelling Strand later on, where rumor has it they hire and fire new crews every 89 days to avoid having their employees qualify to vote in a union recognition election. Could be a scabrous lie: It was told to me by a poet and sheet metal worker with two girlfriends at the same time who claims to have spent a lot of time in a bar in Mexico where bets are laid on how long a guy can hold onto a lit-up cattle prod. I am awed to meet one of the developers of Moveable Type on Ryze, how cool. I am going to figure out how to use it on my new domain. Any excuse to putter instead of labor. Here's a guy who wrote music reviews for the Alternative Press for umpteen years, and what he has to say about a band called the Brian Jonestown Massacre, are they somebody?

The Brian Jonestown Massacre are an acid-addled neo-psychedelic dream team of sonic soulmates to leader Anton Newcombe. The band is his vision of great gleaming wheels of cosmic grease dripping into long, loping, unwinding musical carpets. One can, in fact, play a track from the incredibly appropriately named Methodrone and just watch it slowly quiver.

See, I am obviously just wasting your time and mine at this point. Supposed to have brunch Memorial Day with Rick and wife, along with the Fleur Obscure and our Hungarian senior systems engineer friend, if the Brooklyn Bridge does not explode because of scuba divers, or whatever the hell kind of nonsense we are reportedly on alert about. I wish the press and media would distinguish between threats that people actually make and, you know, worries and concerns that people might do something because, you know, they certainly have shown signs of wanting to, when they report the fact that there is a "terrorist threat" to this or that. Plan for the holiday weekend: 30 hours of translation in 3 days.

Inspired by Actual Events! Sim City Sam promises to send me H&H Bagels via FedEx if I do catch a freight train south to take this new job. Every time I think of it, I keep thinking of Mojo Nixon's teary-eyed, affectionate tribute to gracious Southern living:

Me and your mama and some other whore
Floatin' down the river on a shithouse door
Gonna tie my pecker to my leg, to my leg
Gonna tie my pecker to my leg

I need to get that tune out of my head. It's the New South now, and I want to be a part of it. I do, don't I? Eating a breakfast of a feta cheese omelet, kosher corned beef, and grits at the Gourmet Diner this morning after walking down from Pacific Street, the crossroads of the five boroughs, I find myself entertaining the fantasy that Fort Greene-Clinton Hill is the Birmingham of New York City. Churches, diners, funky community soup-pot coffee joints, jam sessions in the back rooms of BBQ shacks ... I have no evidence for this yet from my online researches, just a lot of yuppie real estate listings and pictures of so-called "skyscrapers" and glassed-in cubicle farms on landscaped faux-rural corporate fiefdoms. It's just as well that I live in a world of words and discourse processes—Dijkstra et al (2002): My recaller is on vacation: Discourse analysis of nursing home residents with dementia. DP, 33(1), 47-69. I do require a Tillie's to hang out at, at a minimum, however, and it's always nice to have someone around who can play the Hammond organ in a funky manner. I think I could really do some interesting cultural-community Web projects there, too, in my copious spare time.. Community webs, hmmm. Facilitating online communities, hmmm. The Internet will save me from the racoons and possums: I'll just hide out in the Well.

Got to get some work done, I guess—critique the June issue of Health—and even bathe. Nice evening with the Fleur Obscure, starting with a cheap piece of meat in a fancy sauce at the good old French Roast, but the Queen Elizabeth II sailed in early this morning from Blighty, bearing the pseudogod Mooh into the New World, which means my ass was tossed unceremoniously out to make room for Frank's friend Iris. The comedy tonight. We close with a readling from the Epistle of Mojo—Celebrant: The word of Mojo. Congregation: Thanks be to Mojo!

America was founded by people who were run out of Europe for being religious zealots or criminals or they were drug over here against their will from Africa. We're the land of the nutjobs. We take religion about ten times more seriously than anybody, except the cats in Afghanistan who won't let you use toilet paper because it might be made out of a reprocessed Koran.

The Midday Melée y Melao: Bed by 5, up at 11:15. Invited to bid on a 200-page Portuguese medical text. Emma Bovary the jazz chanteuse, who shares the same name as our fictional secretary, the one with the weakness for sailors, pops up with reports of an inamorato:

m[xxx]i000: after kissing me he would say...

m[xxx]i000: "Oh Agnes, it's so good to be alive"

m[xxx]i000: I'm reeling

*** You have been disconnected. Thu May 23 13:15:37 2002.

Has Emma resolved her dilemma? Or is it mere spring fever? Stay tuned. I snag tix through Media Bistro [one thing they're good for] to Room at the Classic Stage Company for tomorrow night, $15, not bad. The copy test arrives from the land of the Crimson Tide, and phrases like "relocation expenses" start getting bandied about. Phew. Doubts. Have a look at the cityscape. I am just assuming that the author of this site does not potray any of the places where the real human beings live, except for a few historic Baptist sanctuaries. And so it goes. The managing editor is coming up to Yankeeland in a couple of weeks and we will meet. Fodder for the transparent eyeball from the Washington Post:

Terrorism, threats against the Brooklyn Bridge, Middle East violence, the president's trip to Europe —all were blown off the television screen at noon yesterday by the story that became the media's leading soap opera last summer.

The Chandra Levy tragedy burst back into the news with the discovery of skeletal remains in Rock Creek Park. No matter that it wasn't clear for hours whether this was the Washington intern who has been missing for more than a year, or that the man romantically linked to her, Rep. Gary Condit, has long since been defeated. The media were in full-blown, this-just-in, team-coverage mode.

Threats against the Brooklyn Bridge? Huh?

Finito, Mijito: 3500 ugly French words in 7.5 hours, just like my resume says, starting at 8 p.m. that of course on top of 6 hours of Arabic translation during the day. Actually rather moving, this spot job, a grant proposal to study pedagogical theory as it relates to Jewish religious education. Proposes to develop an open knowledge base for teaching Torah and its exegesis. I like this French dude, he's into good mitzvahs. I should educate him on this stuff. Oh but oy freaking vey am I tired of looking at the freaking Grande Dictionnaire Terminologique all night. A night thought from Plagiarist—not to be confused with Plagiarism, which is another whole story in itself:

Muttered Henry:—Lord of matter, thus:

upon some more unquiet spirit knock,

my madnesses have cease.

All the quarter astonishes a lonely out & back.

They set their clocks by Henry House,

the steadiest man on the block.



And Lucifer:—I smell you for my own,

by smug—What have I tossed you but the least

(tho' hard); fit for your ears.

Your servant, bored with horror, sat alone

with busy teeth while his dislike increased

unto himself, in tears.



And he—O promising despair,

in solitude—End there.

Your avenues are dying: leave me: I dove

under the oaken arms of Brother Martin,

St Simeon the Lesser Theologian,

Bodhidharma, and Baal Shem Tov.



—John Berryman

Tea at Tillie's, Mon Schlepped the laptop up to Tillie's Café for the afternoon and installed myself in a nook by the window on Willoughby Avenue where I could surveil the comings and goings at that weird Exousia Ministries establishment. Missing the instant notification of the death of Chandra Levy from Real Networks was just one of the things that made the stroll patrol worthwhile, productivity-wise. Poor Chandra. I remember her disappearance as a recurring topic of conversation with Slim in our strolls through NoLITA just before the war on terror broke out. Riding in that Stutz Bearcat, Jim, those were different times. 69 e-mails to sort through, including the news that several thousand words of French are to be translated by "tomorrow morning GMT max." Let's see: the sun rise in the east, lover, and it set deeply in the west ..." which makes morning GMT ... holy time zone, Batman! ... like six in the morning here. I can do this job in 7 hours, starting ... now. 3,500 words, my advertised output for an 8-hour day, for ?250. Fire up the coffeepot, Iggy.

They Call Alabama the Crimson Tide: From the Birmingham News:

SOUTHWEST 1437 Pearson Ave SW, 1BR, 1BA,
stove, refrig, dishwasher, blinds, CA&H, carpet.
$375 mo. 251-1267 WATTS

They forgot to tack that numeral on the front of the rent, with the comma, right? The Southern Progress group where I would work sits on "a 28-acre wooded campus" outside the Magic City of Bham. Weekends in Mobile eating shrimp or hanging with them Nashville cats. Why not? Carol, with a gig lined up at Martha Stewart Omnimedia [ew!] but angling for a plum spot at NPR, gets cc'd on all the correspondence and advises me that all signs indicate that I being recruited hot and heavy, and points out that the Pulitzer for nonfiction this year went to Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. Birmingham: Birmingham. Hmmmmm. But much work to do today.

Travail-Travaille-Trabajo-Trabalho-Carajo-Caralho: Must decline an invite from the Fleur Obscure to attend a concert at the Goethe Institute tonight, where last week we saw a very messed up late 60s German film called Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos [Artists in the Ring: Perplexed], directed by Alexander Kluge. Arbeit macht dumm, and I am that. Ganz benommen vor lauter Müdigkeit bin ich. I land a French translation job from ProZ. How do you say deadline in French? Just ate a pastrami on a hero the size of a young capybara and am good to go for the evening's übersetzenarbeit, planning to reward myself later with a nice Australian shiraz and blessed unconsciousness. JACFJR, a veteran homilectician, says he might contribute to the Hairy Eyeball! Now if we can just get Pynchon on board, and Roy Edroso. Werewolf writes in babbling something about Tom's foxy niece, but my brain is drained and I wind up reading a review of Ron Hansen's Hitler's Niece. Back on the track, Jack.

Breaking News, or, Restructuring Today: This just in: PricewaterhouseCoopers gig is a go, and not a moment too soon. Ich bin drin, as the Germans say. Some edits to do for the client, the Gorilla layout is a go, with the PDFs to do, and 12+ pages of Maronite Arabic to do before I sleep, inter alia. The Hairy Eyeball domain is live and ready soon to receive your contributions. In the meantime, have a look at its Blogspot version for submission guidelines and the address of the editorial board. Would love to have a contribution from the likes of JAFCJR and the Werewolf.

Going Possum: I am going to have to go the way of didelphis marsupialis for an indefinite period, I must report. "Opossums create such a convincing portrayal of death, including a putrid odor, that dogs and other predators will abandon them for livelier prey, as most predators will not eat carrion" .The diurnal world, as is well known, blinds the third eye, which I need to see a few things with in order to see my way clear going forward. Time for a bit of innerwertliche askese:

While the methodical self-control and rationalisation practiced by the Protestant increases his success in worldly life, as measured principally by success in business, rational asceticism demands that the profits therefrom are not to be enjoyed, but rather are to be reinvested for the sake of (as we now say) "building up the business" and achieving further success. Gradually, by rational means, "market share" is increased, with the aim that eventually a level of control over the outer world will be reached which mirrors the control over the inner world. This obsession with control is one of the characteristics of modern capitalist society, the leaders of which attempt to control both people and natural resources, and to exploit both "efficiently".

See also the theory of the objective correlative. In other notes, a propos of evolution, RIP, Steven Jay Gould, the walrus-like evolutionary theorist and expert on snails, a commencement speaker at the old alma mater once upon a time and occupier of a prominent niche in my personal bestiary and memory theater:

Mr. Gould was a best-selling author who called human evolution "a fortuitous cosmic afterthought." He was known for his engaging, often witty style evident in his two collections of essays, "Ever Since Darwin" and "The Panda's Thumb," and "The Mismeasure of Man," a study of intelligence testing, which won the National Book Critics Award in 1982.

One of America's best-known scientists, Mr. Gould wrote books that attempted to make the debates of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology accessible to the public. He analyzed evolutionary theory—criticizing elements of it at points—with comparisons to a range of disciplines, including popular culture and sports.

Much of Mr. Gould's work focused on the land snails of the West Indies, which he occasionally used to support a point in his articles for general readers.

The Full-Court Working Press, or, the Figures of Summary: That's a journalist pal of mine at right—call him Vic Potel—auditioning for a bit part in a Preston Sturges movie reset in the fast-paced, hatless, nanotechnological world of now. He's saying, "Hang a right here into the alley behind the Laotian disco and leave the briefcase with the cash behind the dumpster." Porches of my shell-like ear filled for an hour with the dulcet-toned Southern voice of the managing editor at the aforementioned magazine. This begins to seem serious. I am beginning to get serious about it. Now, however, I have to get serious about getting back to work. Number One Taste of China, bicycle to my door, if you please. The poem of the day is "Less Time" by André Breton:

Less time than it takes to say it, less tears than it takes to die; I've taken account of everything, there you have it. I've made a census of the stones, they are as numerous as my fingers and then some; I've distributed some pamphlets to the plants, but not all were willing to accept them. I've kept company with music for a second only and now I no longer know what to think of suicide, for if I ever want to part from myself, the exit is on this side and, I add mischievously, the entrance, the re-entrance is on the other. You see what you still have to do. Hours, grief, I don't keep a reasonable account of them; I'm alone, I look out of the window; there is no passerby, or rather no one passes (underline passes). You don't know this man? It's Mr. Same.

May I introduce Madame Madame? And their children. Then I turn back on my steps, my steps turn back too, but I don't know exactly what they turn back on. I consult a schedule; the names of the towns have been replaced by the names of people who have been quite close to me. Shall I go to A, return to B, change at X? Yes, of course I'll change at X. Provided I don't miss the connection with Boredom! There we are: Boredom, beautiful parallels, ah! how beautiful are the parallels under God's perpendicular.

Comedown: Coming down geographically, spiritually, and socioeconomically from the Upper East, I have forgotten that the G no longer runs from Queens Plaza during the week, so I wind up schlepping all the way back down the island of Manahatta on the R and having a nice stroll on a spring day through Fort Greene Park, where the Brooklyn Tech boys are lined up in their gym shorts, grabassing around and waiting to circumambulate the Ka'aba of the tennis courts at a dead run upon the sharp blast of the coach's whistle. Greeted at the door by Iggy, I find that a virus hoax has been making the rounds, in this case passed along by Sim City Sam, who can't be faulted, however: It sounds legit. Someone wanted you to murder your Java Debugger Manager. Dinner last night with simian and ungulate friends, after the previous evening's festivities in Bburg found PUIFWAP in a merry mood and a delightful Sally Cruikshank festival from Jon the Revelator-Prestidigitator and Gorilla spouse. A hard day's night lies ahead, with edits to do for my APA client, my column to write, 12 pages of source material to translate and submit to my Russian Orthodox client in Moscow, Gorilla pre-press to accomplish, and my Aquent profile to update momentarily for submission to a client. Here is my "some pig" blurb á la Charlotte's Web:

Colin is a versatile wordsmith with an eclectic background and a broad set of professional experiences to draw upon. A skilled copy editor and line editor with expert-level knowledge of print and Web production, Colin is also a whizbang researcher and indefatigable reporter with excellent interview skills and a knack for making contacts. He produces lively, timely, audience-appropriate content in forms ranging from headlines, captions, and catalog copy to speeches, white papers, reports, hard news stories, and feature articles. Add to that a sharp eye for the most subtle nuances of proofreading and copy editing and you have, as one employer called him, "the consummate old pro."

Gag me with a spoon, right? I must also run off to the newstand to pick up a copy of the Alabama mag to prep for the phone interview at 4. CR, the true old pro who is up for gigs at Martha Stewart Omnimedia and NPR right now, says if the job is offered, I should grab it and never look back. I see myself tumbling into bed at about 2 this morning and getting up at 8 for more of the same tomorrow. Saving my critical comments on the world at large now for the Hairy Eyeball, an ongoing project. Okay, enough.

Despair and Pork Chops: A lukewarm to hot-water-bottle-temperature reco for w.bloggar , a blogging front end that can be configured for use with different blogging servers. Waiting for the un-Teutonically unpunctual Darkbloom and wishing I had some smothered pork chops with Idhao fries. Ah, she arrives, looking dapper and statuesque. I depart

Temporary Saturday Uptick in Index of Affective Positivity (Dead Cat Bounce?): After a successful application of the neat Scotch whiskey and trashy-paperback-read-at-one-sitting cure—an old home remedy to be applied in the absence of fricking health insurance— am feeling a bit more chipper, thank you very much, with the rent paid through June and a couple of gigs in the promises, promises stage, along with a 40-page-per-week translation schedule for my book on the Maronites. Time to perfect that monastic lifestyle. Negotiating with the Tenebrific Trout Lily about the evening's social calendar via Trillian. We plan to go ape with the folks from Gorilla, for whom I still have design and pre-press work to do. Freaking Blogger is going haywire when I try to create a new blog, my Hairy Eyeball enterprise (a nom de blog already hit upon by Volatile Blue, but what the hell what the heck). Nor can I delete unused blogs. A definite topic for the Eyeball, though trivial in comparison with the hot topic of Standard Energy Market Design, of course, a topic that is engrossing me. Can I come back from losing the Steves and still sell that editor on a story along these lines? Ah, here the Eyeball is, at last, with the following message:

Sorry, your template was not found on the server. If you just created this blog, click the "choose a new template" link above and select your template again. If you continue to recieve this message (or this is not a new blog), please try back later and/or contact support@blogger.com.

This is really pissing me off. I may have to kipe a template from the source code of somebody else and do the freaking labor of customizing it. Like I don't have a hundred other things to do. Latests from Dreamcatcher:

This dream is going to be out of order. One of the Olsen twins were in my dream and she was dancing around with a boy wearing fake breasts to impress him. There was a giant beastly figure in the house. I was no one in the dream; I was merely watching these people try to get away from this beast. There was a mother, and a father, the Olsen girl and the boy who was off of Jumanji (Robin Williams as a child). The beast wasn't very intelligent and it's eyesite was terrible, because there was wooden stairs and the mother and father started walking up the stairs and then they faked the beast out by jumping under the stairs, leaving their scent on the stairs. The beast followed it and I never got a good look at this creature. The mother knew the Olsen girl wasn't in trouble, but then she panicked and said, "Jack!" I guess she was meaning her son. She got up and started running. She ran behind the stairs and it lead outside. She saw her son laying on the ground, picked him up, and someone called her a "hero". I really don't get this stupid dream at all.

And so back to work. The Eclipsed Everlasting Pea arrives at eight.

Tie my pecker to my leg: On a nostalgia trip recently with MP3s of Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper doing "Elvis is Everywhere" and "Tie My Pecker to My Leg," not to mention "Disney is the Enemy." News update: The Blind Tangerine is indeed interviewing for a position of responsibility within the Time Inc. fold that would require him to move to Birmingham, Alabama, home of the church-bombing trial and the Blazers.

The eccentricities of the South and Southerners have been widely noted in literature and on film ... Unlike some larger Southern cities that have chosen to trade soul for growth and development, Birmingham has retained its true Southern character; it has been said that Birmingham is the last major Southern city in America. That is because it is impossible for us to become like every place else ... Birmingham is a distinctive and comfortable place to visit and to live. While we continue to grow more sophisticated, we also treasure many of the ways of the small-town South. One can enjoy asparagus salad with roasted pecan dressing at an elegant salon for lunch, and look forward to supper at a cafe serving country-fried steak and butter beans. The audience at the symphony concert will discuss college football games coming up the next day. And the highbrow patrons of the Charity Ball will be elbow-to-elbow the next morning with workers on a Habitat for Humanity home.

Mmmm, butter beans. Time to order up some Chinese from Number One Taste of China (driving directions if you happen to be coming from the old Brayton homestead in South Pasadena, California. Travel time: 54 hours). For rush-hour driving time from the Upper East Side, subtract about three hours and purchase additional insurance against acts of God.

The Merm is now the No. 1 search result on Google for the word "enigmatic." Kudos! I am still getting buried by those gosh darn blind people and that bad German proto-Techno synthesizer band. Up late the other night watching the Senate commerce committee grill Enron lawyers in chipotle butter with onions and a red-wine reduction. Senator Barbara Boxer: "Do the right thing," she says to a stone-faced suit from FERC. She kicked some ass, I have to say.

Alabama, Here I Come? Should the Blindtangerine move to Birmingham, Alabama to take a job as copy chief with an award-winning multimillion-circulation consumer magazine in the AOL-Time Warner fold, with 23% ad-page growth year-on-year in the middle of the current downturn? Bonded bourbon Flannery O'Connor Southern Gothic wilting summer heat and goodbye to all this colorful poverty for a more comfortable brand of despair? I am quite serious. A prominent enemy of postmodernism is appointed education minster in France, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The new minister of youth, education, and research is Luc Ferry, 51, a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Mr. Ferry is best known for his criticism of several French thinkers who have exercised considerable influence on scholarship in the United States.

A prolific author, Mr. Ferry might be called a "public intellectual"—if that expression were not redundant in a country where paperbacks on philosophy can be found in drugstores. He has debated the legacy of Martin Heidegger, argued against the philosophical underpinnings of the radical ecology movement, and written for mass-circulation journals such as Le Point and L'Express ... He also has some experience of politics in practice, having served under both Mr. Chirac and Lionel Jospin as president of the national council overseeing revision of the standard curriculum in higher education.

In 1986, in a collaboration with Alain Renaut, Mr. Ferry published an influential critique of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Lacan, treating them as manifestations of what the book's title called "68 thought." (The reference to the mass protests by students and workers in May 1968 is unfortunately lost in the volume's English translation as French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, published by the University of Massachusetts in 1990.)

At least part of the book's provocative effect came from treating four iconoclastic—and presumably subversive—thinkers as embodying a new intellectual orthodoxy. For each, according to Mr. Ferry and Mr. Renaut, the entire Western philosophical tradition from Plato to Hegel was "exhausted of possibilities ... and must be done away with." Earlier concepts had been more or less subtle disguises for domination—even (or perhaps especially) when philosophers spoke of freedom, universal reason, or human rights. Against this, radicals conforming to "68" principles treated language or power as forces that created human beings (rather than vice versa).

While offering a thoroughgoing critique of society, "antihumanist" theoreticians left it unclear on what grounds one could protest any given instance of domination. Foucault himself was an activist in the prisoners'-rights movement and a militant supporter of dissidents in the Eastern bloc. But given his understanding of all societies as essentially totalitarian, it was difficult to know how he recognized an injustice when he saw one, or why he should care.

Against such radical criticism, Mr. Ferry and other thinkers argued that the Western philosophical tradition, far from being exhausted, remains essential to the task of developing a notion of human rights adequate for modern society. (Nor, implicitly, had there been some great leap forward, hurtling mankind into "postmodernism.").

Yes, modernity kind of trumped the whole game of era-naming, since it comes, of course, from the Latin word for "now." What comes after now? The next thing, of course. Or that Mexican "mañana" that means "hold your horses, gringo, you're not in gringoland anymore." Or reverting to Latin, cras, as in procrastination, the tale of my day, sunk down into the Iggy layer of my brain, snoozing. Still, that paragraph on Foucacault pretty much raises the question. Off now to bathe and avail myself of public transportation, with Quarkspiese at the end of the journey.

Dictionaraoke: Kudos to Pimp Daddy Supreme for this riff on Merriam-Webster's speaking dictionary, as heard on NPR. I laughed until I nearly plotzed. Recommend AC-DC's "Highway to Hell." Kudos to me from my psychologist client on my editorial work. Still have an APA work sample to produce for an agency, on the back burner for several weeks now, like everything else.

In the News: The Supreme Court expresses skepticism about whether COPPA can survive a constitutional test. A note on the death of irony:

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP/The Wall Street Journal)—The Defense Ministry on Tuesday stood behind threatening comments made to local newspapers, but said journalists had failed to understand the humor in the statement.

George Cristian Maior, a state secretary in the Defense Ministry, told journalists the statement was sent to newspapers because the military believed its activity was being unfairly reflected in the local media.

Last week, some local newspapers reprinted a Wall Street Journal article that said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was suspicious of the country's secret police. The article said the NATO alliance, which Romania hopes to join this fall, was reluctant to entrust its secrets to members of the country's former communist secret police who remain in sensitive intelligence positions.

The Defense Ministry sent a statement to newspapers last Thursday warning journalists that "life is short, and your health has too high a price to be endangered by debating highly emotional subjects." Mr. Maior said the comments were meant to be "satirical." He said the statement had been approved by top-level officials in the ministry.

The statement provoked outrage from journalists, human rights groups, and politicians, but key members of the ruling party refused to condemn the comments. President Ion Iliescu said Tuesday the statement contained no threats. Prime Minister Adrian Nastase said the "ironic connotations" had been exaggerated in the media.

Life is short, and my financial well-being is too precious to waste much time straining my wounded wing writing words that no one is going to pay me for. A note on the police action against worry, however, from the Aftermath of Terror section of the WSJ—is terror officially over, then, by the way? Happy days are here again? Then what is the 10th Mountain Division doing, exactly, as shown today on al-Jazeera, which I glimpse when I visit my pals at the Heaven bodega?

A defense raised by lawyers for John Walker Lindh, the American captured alongside the Taliban, could force a ruling with ramifications for the Bush administration's stance that detainees from the Afghan conflict aren't entitled to prisoner-of-war status.

Defense lawyers said in court papers that Mr. Lindh should enjoy "combat immunity" for his service with a Taliban unit fighting the Northern Alliance. That doctrine holds that soldiers can't be prosecuted simply for making war, which necessarily involves destroying property and killing enemy troops, but only for defined war crimes such as targeting civilians.

While the indictment "alleges a nebulous and far flung conspiracy to 'kill American citizens around the world,' " the defense wrote, it describes actions that "support only an intent to be a foot soldier in the ongoing conflict with the Northern Alliance." The defense noted that, according to the indictment, in 2000 Mr. Lindh chose to go to the front lines against the Northern Alliance rather than travel outside Afghanistan to participate in terrorist operations against Americans and Israelis.

Aquent says the PwC gig is imminent, at long last. On the agenda: three hours of writing, four of translation, and a visit to the Shadowy Sumac on the uptown side of life. Item: the going rate for buying a cigarette is now up to 50 cents, I discover on the street. When I let the lady have two for $0.50 (essentially giving them to her at cost), her eyes light up. I thought I was going to get beat up the other night standing outside 1251 when some drunk punkers asked me if I had a spare cigarette as they spotted me pulling one from the pack. I had to explain to them that, yes, I had cigarettes, but no, I could not spare them. They were outraged and truculent. I looked to the octogenarian security guard and gulped. When did the universal bum-a-cigarette principle shift, anyway? I bum to folks in my neighborhood but not to able-bodied Manhattanites or tourists in any way shape or form, those are my current policy guidelines. And now to the work at hand.

Bestiary: At left, a Merm-linked demonstration of some sort of affinity between lobsters and mermaids, for as you know, the Monkey Woman calls me the Lobster Boy. Add to that the fact that Mooh, the hermaphroditic bovine supreme being of a certain cult of Teutonic friends, is now on his-her way across the Atlantic aboard the Queen Elizabeth II and it appears that totemic paganism is on the rise in response to the collapse of messiance monotheism. Yes, I know it is two in the morning. Pain from the civil war in my right arm wakes me up for a glass of red wine and a bowl of Cap'n Crunch. The Fleur Obscure, a Moohist herself, believe that the Cap'n is a frightening symbol of American militarism. She may be right, but oh, the joy of a bowl of that asbestos-like, ossified extruded corn goo to settle one's roiling guts at this hour. Miracle of miracles, a complete stranger writes me out of the blue, having found my e-learning jot book Web log and some remarks about SCORM compliance in LCMS implementations. I have been sought out as an expert. Small consolation. Got to be awake and functioning in 4 hours. In hoc signo vincebo:

The Hairy Eyeball: Translation for our growing international readership: To look askance at something, or regard it with skepticism, ironic amusement, or out-and-out disbelief, is to "give it the hairy eyeball." I am going to abandon Vulchur altogether and start a new avatar blog by this name, with the same mission statement: Short essays on the War on Terror and the Death of Irony. I have recently been reading Richard Wolin of CUNY's Heidegger's Children on that general theme, and finding my mental furniture being rearranged thereby. Wittgenstein being dismissed out of hand as a "quietist"? And you mean to say that evil is not banal, as Hannah Arendt famously said? Hmmm. Telling point: 2 million Jews liquidated by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied territories "in a manner that could hardly be called banal"—i.e., lined up, shot in the back of the head, and tumbled into a pit of lime. Am I a quietist? Note, re: the foregoing, that the Wikipedia needs an encyclopedia entry on the term. It seems appropriate, somehow: an entry on quietism left unwritten. Wolin was a noted participant in L'Affaire Derrida, you may recall. I did not, not with any specificity, but then, I have been too busy doing for being all these years. My robot arm, aka carpal tunnel and tennis-elbow brace, arrives, and it is disappointingly not as robotic-metallic as it was pictured on the Web site. Must I now go to the trouble of reviewing order confirmations and comparing model numbers? I have no time for this! Aquent writes in with more no news on PwC. I note from my montly blog review that the project has been in limbo since late March. Theme for the day: the significance of the unuttered. Go to our dicussion forums to put in your two cents' worth. And now I really have to bugger off and get some things done. Items a propos of the banality thesis from the newspaper of record:

Bye-Bye Love: Israel's Likud Party voted Sunday in favor of a resolution never to allow the creation of a Palestinian state, defying its leader, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Arbeit Macht Frei: President Bush, on a trip to raise $2.2 million for Illinois gubernatorial candidate Jim Ryan, touted welfare-to-work proposals Monday that he said will move more recipients off the public rolls while letting states tailor their programs to meet their needs.

Congress is renewing the 1996 welfare law this year, and Bush said a central feature of any new measure must be shifting a greater proportion of recipients to jobs.

Sigh of Relief from the Steves: One of the deepest mysteries in the collapse of Enron has been the role that the power crisis in California played in the company's rise and fall.

This spring, as authorities focused their attention on the off-balance-sheet partnerships that Enron used to inflate its profits, it seemed that the question might be forever buried under more pressing inquiries.

Now, though, newly released documents about Enron's practices during the crisis in 2000 and 2001 are causing regulators and prosecutors to re-examine the connection. Some outside experts say they may find that California played a crucial role in the company's demise.

Dish and ditch, like PUIFWAP says. Total blogging time: 30 minutes. I type fast.

The Ways and Means Justify the Weekend: Or do they? Have I read the newspaper yet, any newspaper? No. Have I translated even a lick? Yes, but only a lick, on my enforced "lunch" hour. Do I feel rested, relaxed, and fulfilled? Surprisingly, I do not feel like a complete wreck. JolieLaide came along at 11:30 and rousted me and we wound up having an excellent double brunch: main plate of grub at Chez Oskar and more caffeine + some kind of insanely good apple torte with homemade cherry ice cream at its sister venue, the more intimate Café Lafayette, pix to come, where we realize that we are talking about fluids bawdily and other piquant topics in close proximity to a Mom's Day brunch party. PUIFWAP lives and thrives and got through the recent writer's block looking relatively sunny, for a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, and elegantly shorn, pix to come. Since arriving here in high hell, I have in the few odd moments available been browsing the pages of the Petroleum Finance Company rather than the New York Times [click there for the smarter version, soi disant: I plan to mine the section on deregulation later]. Teaser for the op-ed page today proclaims:

It's not too late to turn the Office of Homeland Security into a powerhouse, but Tom Ridge and his patron, President Bush, will have to break some china.

Poor Tom. No one will talk to him because he's not as bright as the other children. And watch that China-china talk, please. By the way, the threat level for terror is currently Elevated. Could I get instant updates on my cellular phone when that fluctuates, please? It's the national freaking mood ring. Perhaps not accidentally—since all that is, is possible, and not all that is not is not possible, since many instances of that which was not but is can be adduced—today on Entertainment Tonight:

GEORGE LINDSEY talks about playing the part of Goober Pyle on the classic "Andy Griffith Show" series from 1965–68. He explains how he originally won the role of Gomer (which then went to JIM NABORS), but got a second chance when Nabors left for his own series and they brought Lindsey back as his cousin.

Tim, from whom the hyperlink marginalia to the preceding, has researched 518 television programs. Tim is an idiot savant and infoarchaeologist. Term of the day: "Counterfactual definiteness," "the ability to speak meaningfully about the results of measurements that were not performed." I sense another Enron-Andersen joke coming on. The flap of Radical E is produced at right to get me in the mood for some serious Monday writing.

And so on. Let me, before closing, recommend to you an excellent little newsletter called "Restructuring Today." If only one could have (which is definitely a counterfactual, modulated by a wistfulness marker). Left the tenor of the evening be defined by a verse of fellow Brooklynite and Nobelist Joseph Brodsky—did I not tell you about my Nobel in pataphysics?—an instance of something that was but is not, which is also possible:

A loyal subject of these second-rate years,
I proudly admit that my finest ideas
are second-rate, and may the future take them
as trophies of my struggle against suffocation.
I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out
which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Badenough to the Bone: Did I really agree to hang around for a 13-hour shift here at the HQ of the worldwide conspiracy to corner the market in boredom? I did. Do I have better things to do on a Saturday night? I do. Do I really need the money that badly? I do. Will there be hell to pay tomorrow? There will. Does Iggy miss me? His bowl is topped off with Meow Mix and water, his shitbox is clean and dry, and the bed is all his: He does not. The Murky Marigold is kind enough to IM me through the evening. Poor Caliginous Chrysanthemum: The cat has got her tongue, work-wise. I know the feeling, and ameliorate it by overbooking. Necessity is the mother of sublimation-autogratification. I actually get a nice Nerve response: I guess my profile got updated when I was walking the Queen of the Apes through her self-advertisement and changed my portrait to the floating eyeball managing director. Says someone anonymous electronically:

you/your words both attract & repel equally. it is a leap towards passionate people, coupled by a weary-eyed damage control watching from the bird's eye view of my heart...cluck, cluck

ah, but i am a silly/crazy/mushy chick who is hacking the weeds with great force towards something—if i could only figure out exactly what it is.

i can't help but send a credit/wave your way and tell you that you are lovely.

Which is nice, não é? Random votes of confidence [if attraction-repulsion is a vote of confidence—I am not sure whether she means that is how she interprets, hermeneutically, my phenomenological stance, what the Germans call one's Dasein-stance-policy-judgement-faculty-projection-presentation-self-simulacrum, or rather her own visceral reaction to it] from random network nodes. One of the dudes I am working with is amazed that I know where Azerbaijan is off the top of my head and perplexed to learn that the map of Indonesia is anachronistic: Newly independent, Portugoosaphone East Timor is still colored in Donesian. You say Suharno, I say Suharto ... I get JL (PUIFWAP) to agree to G train it over at 11 for our civilized brunch. Luxie the Superior Being IMs up and recoms a band a friend of her plays in called The Bootleg Remedy. Much buzz, insinuate the rumors that are being bruited about, including a New Yorker On the Town item:

The Bootleg Remedy. The ethnomusicologist, composer, and banjo player David Gould [he's the community director at Media Bistro, but we won't hold that against him, yet—Ed.] leads this Brooklyn-based band through a rousing set of bluegrass, Dixieland, and Western-swing songs in honor of its sophomore album, "Cutting Time." Tubas, trombones, violins, and kazoos are promised. Good times are assured. Lending support are a few fellow-travellers in the old-time-music world, including Waldo's Novelty Syncopators, led by the ragtime specialist Terry Waldo.

And that's that. All I can possibly take. Over and out.

Infernal Machinery: I subscribed to some publishing house mailing lists with an eye to wangling some book reviewing work, which leads through the usual absurd train of associations to a man with a secret. Enjoy this episode of vintage television: Audrey Meadows never looked lovelier or livelier. I mention all this a propos of infernal machines, our allegory of the day. At right, for example, infernal machinery obscures our view of the Fleur Obscure at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. To those green-eyed monsters who deride the Midnight Sunflower as lacking in verve, I say: pfui. Did you know the Ultraviolet Violet used to organize avant garde improvised musical events in the weirder precincts of East Berlin? She knows Phil Minton for crying out loud: Check out 11 Minutes of the Sound of Mucus.

Digression: Life in postmodern Amerika offers a variety of experiences at every turn: one man's maximized sensory input is another's data smog, but the subway system suffers from an inadequate signage program and train conductors are not well trained in the art of elocution. I want to write about the new automated voices that are replacing them on the Lexington line, weird statistical parody-amalgams of the comprehensible all-American accent. The best subway car announcers, I think, are young guy wannabe rappers. To these cats, it's just another open mic, and the tedium of the job is eased by the opportunity to imbue the tired words with life, drama, musicality, variety, human presence. Those guys you can always understand, because their mission in life is the message. And you hear them, too, because the monotone just blends into the background noise of a million engines that New Yorkers miss so much when they find themselves in the countryside. These guys change it up, improvise, find new nuances in "Stand clear of the closing doors, please."

Also, workfare for unemployed actors. Me for mayor.

BFD: I think CAIR might object to the Times teaser to a gripping story in the magazine by Scott Anderson about an Israeli combat patrol "behind enemy lines." "Brush-back" sniping at civilians to drive them out of tactically important areas reminds you of the gunslinger—Jack Palance, perhaps—who shoots at his hapless victim's feet in old Westerns, saying, "Dance! Dance! Dance!" But it isn't exactly the heroic commando missions of World War II movies. Not even The Dirty Dozen. Lots to do, more to say, no time to write. Marianne Moore in what could be a commentary on the art of the blog:

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all 

   this fiddle.

  Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one 

     discovers in

  it after all, a place for the genuine.

   Hands that can grasp, eyes

   that can dilate, hair that can rise

     if it must, these things are important not because a



high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

   they are

  useful.  When they become so derivative as to become 

     unintelligible,  

  the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

   do not admire what

   we cannot understand: the bat

     holding on upside down or in quest of something to



eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf

   under

  a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that

     feels a

   flea, the base-

  ball fan, the statistician--

  nor is it valid

     to discriminate against 'business documents and



school-books'; all these phenomena are important.  One must

   make a distinction

  however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the

     result is not poetry,

  nor till the poets among us can be

   'literalists of 

   the imagination'--above

     insolence and triviality and can present



for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall

   we have

  it.  In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

  the raw material of poetry in

   all its rawness and

   that which is on the other hand

     genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Sleepwalk: I apparently still do this, something I thought was a phenomenon of my early development, like asthma and those enormous boils I used to get. Iggy never informed me, but the FO is utterly perturbed by it, naturally: "Characterized by the patient sitting up in bed and making repetitive and purposeless movements," which also characterizes recent days. Adult sleepwalking can disqualify you for military service:

If a patient begins sleepwalking later in life, he is more likely to have the disorder for the rest of his life (3). Stress and alcohol abuse, among other things, have been shown to contribute to sleepwalking among adults (3). Fatigue also increases the chances of a person sleepwalking because it forces the body to go into deeper sleep, allowing the dysfunctional transition into deep sleep to occur more readily, leading to somnambulism. Far fewer adults sleepwalk than do children, only about only about 1 in 200 (3). Adult sleepwalking is more serious in that it is often more aggressive, and so has more potential for self-injury. Sleepwalkers are not allowed in the armed services of the United States, at least partly because of the threat they pose to themselves and others when they have access to dangerous equipment (such as weapons) and are unaware of what they are doing when they sleep (2). Treatments for adult sleepwalkers often includes psychological treatment as well as relaxation techniques and sometimes requires anti-depressants to regulate the behavior (7). The difference in effective treatment from children to adult implies a different source for the disturbance. A more psychological or substance abuse-related set of causes seem to exist for adults.

At least partly? I did have a couple of belts of Frank's Laphroaig, I admit, which at the time I thought of as a relaxation technique. But let me speak of something pertinent and useful now. Nothing comes to mind. Government censorship, as reported by Publisher's Weekly, is an old standby when a hot topic is needed:

The publicity staff of San Francisco's Encounter Books was all set at to distribute BEA galleys of its spring title from Wen Ho Lee whistleblower Notra Trulock when the call came from publisher Peter Collier. Don’t give out the book, Collier said; it would risk putting the author in jeopardy. About 150 galleys were pulled, and the publisher and author continue to wait out a government review that they increasingly feel is unnecessary, unfair and possibly even illegal.

The title, Code Name Kindred Spirit, has gotten caught in a tangle of bureaucracy and intelligence politics, in a scene Collier describes as "virulent."

In February, Trulock, former intelligence and counterintelligence head of the Department of Energy's nuclear facilities, sent a galley to the agency, under the impression that the government had thirty days to review a published manuscript from an intelligence officer, all of whom sign non-disclosure agreements.

But what they assumed would be a quick review has gotten far more complicated. Trulock and Collier heard nothing from the DoE for nearly six weeks, then found out the period had been extended by 15 days. Inquiries were met with silence for several more weeks, and last week the two learned that the book had been given a classified designation and had been sent on to the National Security Agency. Collier and Trulock have not yet been able to extract an answer from them. A call to Department of Energy director of intelligence Larry Sanchez had not been returned by press time, but things could soon get messier; Encounter and Trulock have hired D.C. lawyer Mark Zaid, who specializes in intelligence cases.

Long periods of silence and inaction from the government that spoil your plans. Big deal. These guys have obviously never collected Social Security disability insurance. What else? Dimly-Lit Daisy has been monitoring the Webbies for me in lieu of what she knows is her duty, but information from alien intelligences is always welcome when it saves you the trouble of having to think things up yourself, such as Heartless Bitches International. Well, I am not so immediately fond of it, but there are those among our millions of readers who may find it cathartic or figure out what to do with or about it. The Do-It-Yourself Network I had forgotten about: it's collaborative knowledge-management environment serving multiple communities of practice, hey! And it contains a tutorial on building a straw-bale house, a topic I wrote about recently in passing. Which reminds me of a memorable segment on NPR yesterday about "flop homes" designed to house refugees, back to back with an interview of Bill Bennett, author of a new book on the War on Terror called Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the You Know What. Amazon is offering a two-for-one package if you also buy Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West, an especially vile screed. Moral clarity is, of course, a contradiction in terms: Uncertainty is the natural condition of persons seriously concerned with the moral implications of their actions. Anyhow, it reminds me I have been wanting to catch up the doings of Bennett's educational technology venture, K-12. Schools are incubators for intellectual and human capital, you see.

Short Stacks: New Ryze pal Kerima is involved in all kinds of strange European cultural initiatives, including an artier German avatar of Flash Kit called Visual Orgasm. Sundry-day brunch calendared with the legendary PUIFWAP and likewise some friendly joint chowing down with the Monkee Womyn. Ooky unsubscribes, but who can blame her? I decided today this would be the blog of my unemployment daze only, which oxalá Lord soon be over. I like reading Eclogues.

The Day in Review: Sleepiness followed by intake of carbohydrates and hot liquid vegetable alkaloids followed by furious activity to little, but some, avail. A couple of good job leads, though—I have always thought I would enjoy working at a scientific journal—and sporadic moments of Zen fun. Got some good pics with the digicam, the floodlights atop Rockeller Drug Law Center making the fog all capital-R Romantic and eerie-sublime, blurred takes on the founding Rothschild oil on canvas, just goofing. Getting some good idea from Nonsense Verse, another copy-editor-authored blog. The Enig, I swear, is becoming an industry unto her fishy self. Crosstown traffic is an opportunity to get started on Ingo's Simple Stories, which immediately engrosses me. The why will have to wait: I write in haste. A warning, however:

Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O has warned users of its MSN Messenger instant messaging program that the software includes a "critical" security flaw that makes their computers vulnerable to hackers.

The flaw is actually related to MSN Chat, a service found on Web sites run by Microsoft's MSN Internet division that allows groups of online users to type instant messages to each other in virtual rooms, Microsoft said.

Microsoft on slime and crime. Obviously a day of general pissed-offedness, hence John Berryman's Dream Song 74 in this interstitial scraps of moments reserved for contemplating the lyf so shorte the crafte so longe to lerne:

Henry hates the world. What the world to Henry
did will not bear thought.
Feeling no pain,
Henry stabbed his arm and wrote a letter
explaining how bad it had been
in this world.

Old yellow, in a gown
might have made a difference, "these lower beauties,"
and chartreuse could have mattered

"Kyoto, Toledo,
Benares—the holy cities—
and Cambridge shimmering do not make up
for, well, the horror of unlove,
nor south from Paris driving in the Spring
to Siena and on . . ."

Pulling together Henry, somber Henry
woofed at things.
Spry disappointments of men
and vicing adorable children
miserable women, Henry mastered, Henry
tasting all the secret bits of life.

Fear, Greed, Chaos ... and Belly Dancing: My new Ryze buddy Carlos has written a self-published book called Fear, Greed, Chaos and Broken Dreams in the New Economy. You meet a lot of crazy people there. Darkbloom and I showed up fashionably late at the mixer at Zanzibar last night and schmoozed the wonderful Rizzo of Oz, among other, and photographed the belly dancing that suddenly broke out. It was worth doing. I cannot repeat the rumor disseminated by the wonderful wizard about the origins of the business networking site, but believe me, it was scurrilous. The martinis may have contributed. Carrie, a reporter from the New York Sun was circulating with her little notebook. Maybe I can pitch to those guys. In the meantime, I have all this other shite to clear from the stables, such as writing this week's column. Re-reading Kurtzman and Rifkin's Radical E [Note the first item in the Amazon search result] gets me started:

Enron, like other great radicals, has transformed not only itself but also an entire industry. By remaking its business model in cyberspace, Enron has forced its competitors to follow suit and has served notice that the status quo would no longer hold. Jeffrey Skilling, Enron's chief executive officer, says, "We are no longer an energy company. We are a company that makes markets. We create the market, and once it is created, we make the market."

Having quickly discovered how powerful the Internet is in moving and trading its core products, Enron has moved into a raft of new commodity markets, including pulp and paper, coal, metals, plastics, chemicals, and even bandwidth ... Kenneth Lay believes that Enron's business model, layered onto the Internet, will remake countless commodity marketplaces and turn them into fertile businesses. The company has created a new organization called Enron Net Works to incubate and spawn these new business opportunities. If it works, Skilling says, Enron Net Works, of which Enron Online is now a part, will become "the Coca-Cola syrup of our company."

Coca-Cola syrup. A pregnant analogy indeed: highly caffeinated but with little or no nutritional value. Add water and bubbles and retail it at 10,000% of your production and distribution costs, which leaves you with an advertising budget larger than the GDP of the former GDR. Yes, indeed: Dynegy, ACS, and UBS Warburg, among others, followed in the footsteps of the compulsive self-appointed prime mover ... and are all now under investigation by the SEC, as the Wall Street Journal reports today, for putting an unethical spin on the notion of what it means to "make" the market. As in the greedy bastards were really "on the make" and looking to "make out like bandits." The Rolling Stones: "And I'm trying to make some girl, def. 24: "to persuade to consent to sexual intercourse : SEDUCE ."

Darkbloom queries me about Chemdex and other online marketplaces doing the same sort of thing. Chemdex died in December of 2000, my dear Fleur Obscure. Credit Internet Wold's Ruhan Memishi with being one of the first to sound a note of skepticism about the whole thingummy in January, 2001—not long before being downsized, of course. Who needs cogent analysis, solid writing, and scrupulous reporting? "It turns out the savior of the New Economy needs saving itself," Memishi wrote. It would be interesting to get the reactions of cheerleaders like Net Market Makers to recent developments.

Ah, Internet World, Internet World. Maybe I should just take that off my résumé and say I was in a Benedictine monastery under a vow of silence all that year. Here's a recent lead:

Imagine extracting from your Web site all the vital information your company needs from its customers to survive in the enterprise. Coremetrics Marketforce, the newest product release from Coremetrics, a Web services provider of marketing analytics solutions, claims it can do just that.

Wow, really? Stop the presses! Imagine capturing data from your Web site! Why didn't anyone think of that before? This is a serious claim, and merits serious investigation. Let's start with the press release. Leaving the syntactical infelicities aside for a moment, note the following: There are, in fact, 200 other companies listed in the Google index under "marketing analytics" and "sales and marketing productivity." E.Piphany? Sales Force? Dave Carr—now at Baseline?—on Siebel—with that unfortunate headline, "Analyzing the Back End," which sounds like an article on Freudian proctology from Giles, Goat-Boy to go with Pynchon's Dr. Dudley Eigenvalue, the psychoanalytic dentist? A case study in the squandering of intellectual and human capital and institutional memory: Internet World. You know, the Web site does still maintain a couple years worth of archives, you could actually look this shit up. Hey, there are probably even some boxes of old Web Weeks around somewhere!

Oops. I did a tirade, and beat a dead horse, besides. Good thing nobody reads this. Zippy is of course exempted. And me with shit to do. I want to grow up to be Roy Edroso.

The Dudes Who Hang Out on the Corner: You could be hanging out there with them someday. Someday soon. Never forget that. Weaving and ranting and clutching something in a brown paper sack. All the livelong day. I bid on the following translation job [extract] from ProZ:

L’approche retenue par la Régie vise à permettre à l’actionnaire du transporteur d’obtenir un taux de rendement sur l’avoir propre comparable avec celui des entreprises présentant un profil de risque similaire à celui du transporteur. Selon la Régie, le taux de rendement sur l’avoir propre accordé au transporteur devrait lui permettre d’assurer et de maintenir sa capacité d’attirer les fonds à des conditions raisonnables, comme si ce dernier se finançait lui-même sur les marchés financiers, et se comparer à celui qui est offert par les titres comparables en termes de risques.

I don't get the gig, despite a serious low-ball bid and stellar work sample. I have set up my laptop in the kitchen in offline mode so as to be distracted by all these network pings and pongs. The Blogger server eats the rest of my post, as per usual.

Europe, the European America: Mark Steyn, writing in the UK Spectator, "argues that Americans are more compassionate and law-abiding than violent and cynical Europeans." With tongue so deeply socked away in cheek it's protruding from his ear. The following fiery corollary to the theory of the welfare state shriveled the furry fungus that accrued on my own tongue overnight:

In December in this space, I lent my support to Mickey Kaus, the thinking conservative’s thinking liberal, who advanced the theory that welfare causes terrorism. Among the examples I cited was Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker," who became an Islamofascist nutter while living on welfare in London. What else is there to do all day? Go down the pub? Lie on the floor listening to Capital FM? If you’re putting in a ten-hour grease-monkey shift at Fat Dave’s Auto Body, you’re too wiped out to wipe America out. But in the fetid public housing of London, Paris, Frankfurt and Rotterdam the government will pay you to sit around the flat all day plotting world domination.

It’s a scheme worthy of a Bond villain: flood high-unemployment Europe with unassimilated low-skilled young men, whom the state is obliged to put on welfare just to keep them from rioting, and hey presto, your enemies will be funding their own downfall — ON HER MAJESTY’S SOCIAL SERVICE. Say what you like about that so-called "American Taliban", John Yoko Ashram Fonda Country Joe and the Fish Walker Lindh, but at least his loopy Marin County parents put him through terrorist training school on their own nickel and not at the taxpayers’ expense. At the moment, alongside the ranks of Europe’s terrorist welfare queens, Jihad Johnny has the distinction of being the West’s only private-sector Islamabaddy.

On my desk is a novel by Ingo Schulze which includes in its tragicomic panorama of life in the post-Communist DDR—I have not progressed beyond the jacket blurb—"an unsuccessful writer who begs his neighbor to break his leg so he can continue to live on welfare." Perhaps he would be more successful if he could write leads like the following from last week's Crains New York Business:

A young Bangladeshi child has a brain tumor that might be malignant. Doctors in her home country don't have the technology to make a diagnosis, let alone treat the malady. New York University Medical Center doctors read her medical records and accept the case. Her family scrapes together enough cash to pay a deposit on her care at the hospital.

Her visa is denied.

Very effective use of the narrative present tense. But now, now, sadly, sadly, sufficient unto the day is the bullshit to be accomplished therein. Really, in the future I am going to have to reserve all this wit for my public blog, which has languished of late, right in the middle of a personal memoir sparked by the new album from the Donnas. My virtual quit-smoking buddy writes in to give up on me: "See ya, would not want to be ya." And the following piquant proposition:

Hi. I am 30 years. I first time to decide to be registered on a service of acquaintances in the Internet: www.altmatch.com. I first time to try it and to not have before any experience. I to look a lot of structure and to choose from them yours, it is simple you me very much to interest and you to me very much to like. I to hope for success in our further relations, as I too to want to connect the life for a long time with the favourite man and to see, that you to want too most. I to hope, that this attempt will be for me successful and we shall conduct with you the further correspondence and can be more. If you are interested in it, you can learn (find out) about me more, if will write on my e-mail

If the Moose is Nothing More Than a European Elk ...The Fleur Obscure proves to me incontrovertibly that the moose is nothing more than the European elk (Alces alces). At least I was correct in saying that both are ungulates. "Females attract males with their deep calls and a powerful scent." Economic importance for humans—Positive: Moose are hunted for their meat and for sport. They have been domesticated for milk and meat; Negative: Moose may hinder reforestation of pine and spruce, and therefore may have a negative impact on the timber industry. Moose milk? My. [Aside: And if moose really have no knees and sleep against trees, knocking them over, you would think that Weyerhauser would chopper them in by the dozen.] In that case, is the Empire State Building now the European Flatiron Building? Is a Humvee to be known as the European Yugo? Et cetera: All that is larger than life is the European version of that thing, so that Mount Everest is the European Disneyland Matterhorn. World War II is the European Boer War. And with that, this moose obsession has run its course, I hope.

My Links to Terror: Some day, spent "working" on the terrace of the Darkbloom-Fassbinder palazzo in Woody Allen territory on the beginnings of my translation of a book on the Druze and Maronites in Lebanon for a Russian client. Kinky Minky comes over for a Quark tutorial in advance of her tryout at Ladies Home Journal and winds up telling me this remarkable story about how she discovered that she was on a terrorist watch list on a flight to Chicago to break up with her poor bfriend. We slurp a nice Shiraz from the corner liquor store—guy in front of me: "Gimme a short 151 and three plastic cups!"—and a thimbleful or three of Islay scotch. I get sidetracked in an IM discussion too convoluted to summarize and then find it's time for sleep. Weird site of the day: Don't ask.

Consequences of Incapacities; The Antler Dance: "When we think, to what thought does that thought-sign which is ourself address itself? It may, through the medium of outward expression, which it reaches perhaps only after considerable internal development, come to address itself to thought of another person. But whether this happens or not, it is always interpreted by a subsequent thought of our own." This proposition of Peirce's seems important to remember at this moment. Administrative details have crushed the creative spirit once again in the Battle-Bot arena of time management, like bees making honey in the lion's head. Zapping resumes and invoices, paying bills, badgering freaking Citibank about my freaking replacement bank card, filling out reams of paperwork, configuring my laptop for remote dial-up to freaking Earthlink so that I may remotely translate and write in the cafe of my choice tomorrow morning after downloading from my remote storage. There's a remote possibility I may even accomplish something. Still have the antler theme running through my head. Remember how in The Merry Wives of Windsor the wicked ladies get stupid, horny old Falstaff, the miles gloriosus, to dance the antler dance?

There is an old tale goes that Herne the hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor forest,
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;
And there he blasts the tree and takes the cattle
And makes milch-kine yield blood and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner:
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Received and did deliver to our age
This tale of Herne the hunter for a truth

It's a bit of a parody of the ghost of Hamlet's father, this scene in which Falstaff arrives on the stroke of midnight to serve as mock-sacrificial beast:

FALSTAFF
The Windsor bell hath struck twelve; the minute
draws on. Now, the hot-blooded gods assist me!
Remember, Jove, thou wast a bull for thy Europa; love
set on thy horns. O powerful love! that, in some
respects, makes a beast a man, in some other, a man
a beast. You were also, Jupiter, a swan for the love
of Leda. O omnipotent Love! how near the god drew
to the complexion of a goose! A fault done first in
the form of a beast. O Jove, a beastly fault! And
then another fault in the semblance of a fowl; think
on 't, Jove; a foul fault! When gods have hot
backs, what shall poor men do? For me, I am here a
Windsor stag; and the fattest, I think, i' the
forest. Send me a cool rut-time, Jove, or who can
blame me to piss my tallow? Who comes here? my
doe?

Enter MISTRESS FORD and MISTRESS PAGE

MISTRESS FORD
Sir John! art thou there, my deer? my male deer?

FALSTAFF
My doe with the black scut! Let the sky rain
potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of Green
Sleeves, hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes; let
there come a tempest of provocation, I will shelter me here.

MISTRESS FORD
Mistress Page is come with me, sweetheart.

FALSTAFF
Divide me like a bribe buck, each a haunch: I will
keep my sides to myself, my shoulders for the fellow
of this walk, and my horns I bequeath your husbands.
Am I a woodman, ha? Speak I like Herne the hunter?
Why, now is Cupid a child of conscience; he makes
restitution. As I am a true spirit, welcome!

The World and The Brooklyn Whosit: "Who among the angelic orders would hear me if I cried?" [Rilke]. A poll by al-Jazeera shows that 7% of its Web site visitors believe the Saudi peace initiative and the upcoming conference will achieve positive results. I receive an anguished e-mail from a paranoid Russian scientist in Toronto begging me to take up his story and make it a cause célebre: "For fifteen years, I could not stop the war against me: the war is politically motivated. Here, the "gentler and kindlier society" persecutes the victim of the crime committed by one of their own elite. Here, a communist professor was a slave keeper. And she, the female scientist, was a fraud. And she, the Jewish female, brought the holocaust upon a scientist ... Tell Canadian officials that Ellen Larsen, the politically correct substitute of a professor and the prostitute of science, must be dealt with." Yeesh. The site has received a Wild on the Web award, by the way. The Gorilla book goes to press by next week. Abraxas man needs a new column [for previous installments of which I have not invoiced him yet]. The PwC deal is supposedly in the offing. Interesting little item on their site about facilties process reengineering in Hungary. Right up my alley.

The Uber-Ox of the Orient:Dinner with the Germans this evening, as scheduled. I cannot get the question of Caesar's moose out of my mind. Perhaps it represents some fata morgana in my own psyche, some unfulfilled wish for a life of Reilly in which moose simply fall over into one's cooking pot. The moose of prosperity and professional satisifaction is the wily, elusive, and supercilious behemoth of the dark forests of the mind. It is possible that it does not even exist; witness the following item from the Times:

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Nobody is quite sure what it is—cow, goat, antelope, gazelle—a mysterious creature that is said to roam the hidden mountain ranges of Cambodia.

But the shape of its horns is well known: curved and curlicued with a distinctive twining ridge like the stripe on a candy cane. The horns have been diplayed in marketplaces and trophy cases around the country.

For years, tales have emerged from Cambodia's hidden mountain ranges of this strange animal known as the khting vor (commonly pronounced KIT-ting voar). Some mountain people say it eats snakes. Some say it can leap like a mountain goat. Some swear that it is a roaring, savage predator.

Now for the first time, after decades of warfare in Cambodia, the habitat of the khting vor is safe to explore and the hunt for the elusive beast is on. After three years of searching, what people have found is: nothing.

Midnight in the Garden of Moose Lore: The Fleur Obscure has been going on and on again about a story from Caesar's Gallic Wars concerning a method of hunting moose: one waits until they fall asleep leaning up against a tree. When the tree falls over, they are helpless and one can catch them easily. This story certainly deserves to be true, but exhaustive research fails to turn up anything of the kind in Caesar, who does report as follows:

XXVIII. There is a third kind, consisting of those animals which are called uri. These are a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied. These the Germans take with much pains in pits and kill them. The young men harden themselves with this exercise, and practice themselves in this kind of hunting, and those who have slain the greatest number of them, having produced the horns in public, to serve as evidence, receive great praise. But not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed. The size, shape, and appearance of their horns differ much from the horns of our oxen. These they anxiously seek after, and bind at the tips with silver, and use as cups at their most sumptuous entertainments.

The ever plodding and deservedly dead Professor Greenough has this comment on the term "uri":

This name is generally understood to refer to the German Urochs (the primitive or wild ox, probably buffalo ), said still to be found in the forests of Lithuania. Caesar evidently describes a very different animal, with spreading horns like those of a reindeer or moose; but the whole description must have been derived from a confused account.

I hereby dub myself Elvis Urochs for purposes of whimsical e-mail correspondence. No more time for whimsy now, only wine, cat-petting, and blessed sleep. I can now raise my arm to about the two o'clock position without excruciating agony.

Day of Rest for the Rest: "A man without a wife to puncture his pomposity, without children to challenge his authority, in relations carefully structured to make him continuously eminent, easily becomes convinced of his superior wisdom," writes Gary Wills of pedophile priests in the New York Review of Books. The observation could apply equally well to down-at-heel bachelors who spend too much time alone with their cats, as Darkbloom discovers to her chagrin. Back-channel negotiations continue. Determined last evening not to miss a chance of even a token night on the town, Viv and I meet up at Tonic as planned to hear the raucuous bings and bongs of Bloedow and his Triad Fighting Cardinals. I did not realize he had worked with Medeski, Martin, and Wood, the eminent Brooklyn nihilists currently on tour in Texas and Kansas, in whom, of course, I am now interested, 7 years after everybody else. Minutemen meet the Magic Band. How kinky, at any rate, to hear an old Fender Rhodes abused so exquisitely by means of various thrift-store wah-wah pedals and anachronistic fuzz-boxes. Neither of us could discern exactly what it was the turntablist was contributing to the mix: he appeared to function more as a kind of spastic robotic go-go dancer, flipping through his hot-wax shoulder bag, diddling earnestly with his dials and potentiometers to little audible effect, tuning in to his own headphones in search of the proper sample to digitally eviscerate, emitting the finished product every now and then as delicate, suppressed sonic farts. I enjoyed sipping my double Jameson's neat and forgot the throbbing nerves in my right arm for a bit (ameliorated a bit by a night in the wrist-bondage device, though the limb still protests at being hyperextended too quickly, as in the all-too-natural motion of reaching out to embrace someone sleepy). Hell to pay this morning, of course, but hell, I don't even have to bother to wear socks, and my wallet, at least, is fattening itself a bit.

Viva Cuba Libre: The car service dude tries to refuse to give us a lift over to Avenue of the Americas because of the parade. What parade? Cuban flags abound, and pro-Pataki placards in Spanish. Must be Cinco de Mayo, with Fidel standing in as the new Maximillian? I take some Lomographs, but I ruined a roll of film yesterday when the film rewinder doohickey went on the fritz, so I am nervous to reload. Klutzy. Streamload works like a charm for uploading TIF files from my Russian client for translation from Arabic to English. I am going to learn more than I ever wanted to know about the rural villages of Lebanon and the Maronite saints and patriariarchs ("bitrun") who walked those green hills in days of yore. This will be fun, unlike the Latin project, which is hell and which I need to make some progress on today. Luxie is telling me about a Milton Resnick and a Brice Marden show she went to. Fiat Lux is my role model for keeping culturally alive and awake in the midst of adversity. A memorial service for Mercedes Matter at the NY Studio School today as well. And now I must cease blogging. Time on my hands and a dedicated T-1 line to turn to advantage. One thing is to apply for another student loan consolidation, a propos of which the Times editorializes today, pontificating on the self-evident as if they discovered it themselves as a logical axiom via Husserlian bracketed introspection:

The United States set out nearly 30 years ago to ensure that Americans who qualified academically would not be turned away from college for financial reasons. The bedrock of the program was a dual system: state legislatures subsidized public universities to keep tuition low, while the poorest students could get federal Pell Grants that largely covered the remaining costs.

The data in the new reports shows that public colleges, which educate more than three-quarters of America's students, are becoming unaffordable for many American families, that federal and state financial aid to students has failed to keep pace with tuition increases and that low-income families in particular are borrowing larger amounts than ever to pay for college. Both Republicans and Democrats participated in the destructive process of shifting aid that was once dispensed on the basis of need toward more politically powerful middle- and upper-income families.

The dearth of student aid for lower-income families is discouraging the neediest from applying to college at all and driving them toward low-paying jobs that keep them at the very margins of society. These are ominous developments at a time when a college diploma has become the ticket for admission into the new economy and a basic requirement for a middle-class life. The most alarming figures show that the college attendance gap between high-income and low-income Americans has widened and that about a quarter of high-achieving low-income students fail to go to college at all.

A disgrace, not to mention a big fucking personal disappointment, as you will recall. Viv starts another of those "Good Lord, in Europe, we ..." speeches. The damnable thing is that she's always right. Damned Europeans.

Saturday Schmatte-Day: The supervisor, a personable, non-nonsense hip-hop grrrl shows up a full hour late and gets a chewing out from a managing director. I sit around in the Plaza, fuming and fumando (yes, yes, I know) and watch the throngs of goggle-eyed kids queuing up on a gorgeous spring day for Blue's Clues Live at Radio City Music Hall. I heard that Steve was (a) gay and (b) leaving the show, though the two are not necessarily related. I suppose (a) is just because he is kind of elfin, and (b) is only natural: kid show stardom = career death, unless you are Fred Rogers or Captain Kangaroo. Look for Steve to appear on NYPD Blue soon. I find Steve very comforting: encouraging, but not condescending, and with just a hint of anarchist mockery around the eyes. He is teaching how to investigate the world and learn the truth, and not to be deceived by red herrings. I am so, like, down with that. They want me to be the weekend supervisor here. Perhaps if we could talk managerial salary ... My sleep is disturbed last night by that amazing sensation of having your arm and shoulder removed like a wing from a very tender herb-roasted chicken that comes from the hated carpal demon—in the right arm this time. I have done extensive research on robotic limb extensions and have settled on this beauty. Viv and I were just chatting about transhumanism and the technological body last night in the Lincoln Town Car whisking over the Manhattan Bridge and out along the shuffling, aching sidewalks of Flatbush Avenue, though I did not get to my usual spiel about David Cronenberg, mercifully for the very weary Fleur Obscure. Your body goes berserk because it is being asked to conform to the contours of the New Machine, so of course to correct the problem it must be shored up with mechanical means. Not very form following function, but there you have it: the postmodern livelihood. Clack clack clack: you long to slip slivers of lead into a compositor's block to grace a page designed with proportions derived from Leonardo's penis and arcane Babylonian numerology and the Human Form Divine or some such thing, as you will read about in the works of Robert Bringhurst, my hero above all heroes in a world where heroes are not even a sandwich anymore.

Keys to the Kingdom Left alone in the offices of the legendary, paranoid Rothschild empire, with Sir Evelyn's office just around the corner. I have my Lomo loaded up and will make a photographic tour to see what develops. Oil portraits of the walrus-whiskered forebears and such. I have already made the pro forma attempt to equip my workstation for communication with the outside world, but Windows NT does not suck when it comes to thwarting to the likes of non-malovolent me in our efforts to achieve FTPability: I only wanted to upload a brutally truthful portrait of me shot by the Fleur Obscure on the F train this morning, nose-hair, red eyeballs, and all. Been a long time since I hung around the analyst bullpen at a high-powered investment bank: the young turks are twanging a guitar and working on spreadsheets in their bare feet in there now: psychosis usually sets in around 3 a.m., by which time I will be long gone. Actually will make it out of here in time to greet VDB at Tonic in time for the late show. Lousy bar, great music. Have now an hour and a half in which to think, even, if I can muster it. What have I thought today? Sharp, immanent physical pain is a whole school of thought of its own, but that's subsiding thanks to a stop-gap Ace brace on the secessionist limb. I am thinking of Dr. Seuss, however, and trying in vain to access an article from Philosophy & Literature on Horton Hears a Who. I am trying to explain to Viv the female Humbert Humbert what it is about us Americans. I find a wonderful essay from the Southwest Review titled "DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: BY DR. SUESS":

In terms of literary tradition, Dr. Seuss is one of the central inheritors of an Emersonian-Whitmanian poetics. Seuss's proliferations of ever more and different beings pay homage to what Emerson calls (in "Circles") "the sea of beautiful forms." His focus on the endlessly creative self presumes Emerson's vision of life as a "self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end." Additive sequences of invention in Seuss likewise recall Whitman's catalogue technique. His writing, like theirs, intends to celebrate (Whitman's word. "Song of Myself" opens: "I celebrate myself and sing myself") Selfhood in all its potential, all its energies and productions. Emerson, in "Self-Reliance," describes the place of the self as holy: "Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within." Whitman writes in "Song of Myself": "I exist as I am, that is enough" (20). Dr. Seuss writes in Happy Birthday To You!:

Today is your birthday! Today you are you!
So we'll go to the top of the toppest blue
space...Come on! Open your mouth and sound off at the sky!
Shout loud at the top of your voice, "I AM I!"

Like God naming Himself to Moses in Exodus, this self declares its selfhood to be unique, precious, essentially divine. No extravaganza of gift and ceremony can exceed the incalculable value of selfhood.

The treatment of Horton Hears a Who is worth blogging a chunk of, as I prepare to rest from my labors and disappear into the narrow alleys down east. Please read and be prepared to comment at our next meeting. A snap quiz is not out of the question.

In this work, Horton, the faithful elephant-individual, finds himself in the awkward position of having to protect an invisible and almost inaudible whole world of unique creatures. An extremely unpleasant mother-figure (just why mothers are such objects of ambivalence in Dr. Seuss is a question we must eventually ask), the taunting Kangaroo with child in pouch, insists on proof that this world of creatures exists. Horton must convince her. He finally accomplishes this, by calling on every least citizen of the Who world to participate in this urgent public business. Only when the leastmost least of the Whos is called to participate, to add his tiniest voice to the community's total effort: only then can the Whos' world be rescued. Here Dr. Seuss exercises his allegorical talent, creating a concrete figure out of a general pronoun to represent Everywho, in the tradition of the morality play Everyman. Horton, beaten, mauled, and threatened with imprisonment, calls out to the Mayor of the Whos:

Don't give up! I believe in you all!
A person's a person, no matter how small!
And you very small persons will not have to die
If you make yourselves heard! So come on, now, and TRY! ...

They don't hear a thing! Are you sure all your boys ...
Are [all] doing your best? Are they ALL making noise?
Are you sure every Who down in Who-ville is working?
Quick! Look through your town! Is there anyone shirking?

No less than his puritan-elephant forebears, Horton calls the Whos to a town meeting, each and every least one. And indeed, when the smallest Who of all is at last enlisted, his additional tiny cry accomplishes the feat of redemption. The inaudible world is heard; its existence is attested, and hence assured:

Their voices were heard! They rang out clear and clean.
And the elephant smiled. "Do you see what I mean?
They've proved they ARE persons, no matter how small.
And their whole world was saved by the Smallest of ALL!"

With this intervention, the Whos are rescued at last. But so is Horton. Horton the elephant is large, but he is also small in the sense of being one individual only. As an individual, he is also called on to attest his vision with steadfast courage. He too is a Who, a unique creature. His integrity requires that he assert this uniqueness, his individual perception that the Whos do exist. Their survival depends on him; but his also depends on them. He is vindicated, saved from ostracism, imprisonment, even the madness of solitary testimony, by this smallest Who individual who raised his voice, taking personal responsibility.

It is of paramount importance that both Horton and the smallest Who act not only each for himself, but also for the common good. Every individual is uniquely responsible. Without the personal and individual acceptance of responsibility, the very survival of the world is threatened. Dr. Seuss's is thus a vision not only of individuals, but of community. It rests upon a faith that the exercise of individuality will build and strengthen social life. It will not initiate a dispersion into irreconcilable diversities but rather will serve as a common ground for respecting differences and making possible their expression and appreciation. As a social vision, it pledges itself to a community of unique, participating individuals, without which the individuals themselves, with their world, will perish.

And yet something goes bump. Running through this world of liberal values are fault lines that threaten to undermine and destabilize it. Dr. Seuss extols the individual. He does not, however, wish this to mean the abandonment of community. He, rather, wishes to found the community in the integrity and sanctity of the individuals who together make it up. He would like to see these dual impulses as mutually supporting rather than contradictory. Nevertheless, there are dangers. The self-reliant individual may turn out to be uncomfortably close to the selfish one ("Are they my poor?" Emerson asks in "Self-Reliance"). Dr. Seuss, like Emerson and most notably like Whitman, wishes the pursuit of invention to remain individually creative and expressive. Also like Emerson and Whitman, he is anxious. Endless invention may come uncomfortably close to mechanical reproduction. It may involve exploitation that consumes the common world, rather than producing new ones. It may collapse into commercialism, with individual pursuit and conformity difficult to distinguish from one another.

Maundering and Pondering: Roux 42 is on the message jigger now, a woman I dated once maybe a year ago and, frankly, whose real name I can no longer remember. I remember being very drunk and sweating on her freckles on a hot summer evening after eating a very fine tagine at Bar 6. Darkbloom is also swept up in the P2P messaging mania and appears in the guise of a divine moose. In the bovine vein (or is the moose an ungulate?) I spend some time mastering The Flying Cow [thanks to Insert Text Here for the diversion]. I achieve a high score on the third go. Now what? In the New Yorker topic at the Well, Runcible Spoonerism writes, "Did you know that LBJ referred to his penis as 'Jumbo'?" Response from someone called The *Tres Riches Heures* of Tipper Gore: [shudder]. Other denizens include Leisure of the Theory Class, She-Ra the Saber-Toothed Vagina, and Up Against the Wall, Pundit-Fuddler!—Deadheads all, of course. The Internet tonight is like one big all-you-can-eat buffet and nickel-slot public toilet near the Las Vegas Greyhound station at 2 a.m. when it's 102 degrees: You keep the company you find ready to hand—drunken tragic Navahos, paranoid white-trash speed-freak girls with Eraserhead babies, silver-haired Bible-thumping grifter-alkies in threadbare suits. You just nod and throw in an occasional grunt and the soul of America fills your nostrils. I could tell you stories, but Top 40 music is melting my fucking brain. "Let's get closer, closer and closer, oh yeah, closer than most, closer closer closer ..." Trout Mask Replica, over and over at 150 decibels, everybody hogtied under their desks with ear-trumpets duct-taped to their heads. Sorry: a harmless rage-fantasy, I assure you. It is vital to filter the influx of cultural influences, that is all I mean. The New York conference is buzzing about the WTC documentary that aired on CBS last night. I would not have watched it even if Time Warner had gotten around to reconnecting my cable 3 weeks after I paid my account in full, the pundit-fuddlers. Consensus: the French dudes were annoying. Aquent comes through with a contract for the PWC gig: I probably heard about before Sim City Sam did, poor bastard. My Russian client comes through with the book translation project. Stuff to do, anyway. I would rather be writing scurrilous Petrarchan sonnets a la John Berryman. When can we cut the shit, please, I ask you? As, e.g., the following:

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
'You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.—Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.

—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast ... The slob beside her feasts ... What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
—Mr. Bones: there is.

The Daily Doodle: E-Ink, Bob Baker on the subtle art of line editing, Reagan's obituary, fascism and global capitalism, Arabic books, this endless fucking stream of smooth R&B whining and ululating on the box in this airless back-corridor hellhole I'm stuck in until midnight, the political aftermath of Enron from the National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru:

As a political scandal, Enron has fizzled out. Democrats know that the story is not going to dominate the midterm elections and are searching for other clubs with which to hit the Bush administration. So the scandal won't hurt Republicans. It could still, however, damage the economy and Americans' liberties.

That's because Enron has inspired, or is being used to justify, quite a few bills in Congress. The near-universal assumption in Washington has been that the Enron debacle proves that policy changes are necessary.

While some changes might indeed be worthwhile, let's not forget that the system has actually worked pretty well. The market detected that the company was cooking the books and drove it to bankruptcy, and then the media and government came in to administer the requisite public censure and prosecution. Some employees and investors lost their shirts, which is sad, but such things happen all the time.

Could a system be designed that would prevent any company from ever cooking its books for any length of time? It's hard to see how, at least at a reasonable cost. Even under the wisest policies, we are occasionally going to have some Enrons—especially in the late stages of booms, when lenders and investors have grown careless. Getting burned by Enrons will then make everyone more cautious.

Few in Congress think this way, of course. And there has been no interest in policies that might actually improve corporate governance, like ending the tax code's bias against dividends, which has weakened their ability to serve as a signal that a company's earnings are real.

The bills that are being considered have three things in common. First, they are presented as "reforms" that would "prevent future Enrons." Second, they are in fact only tangentially related to Enron's actual abuses. Third, they are, on the merits, bad ideas.

Already, Enron hysteria has led to the passage of one regulatory bill: the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance "reform." Although legislators constantly invoked the alleged "lessons of Enron" during the debate over the bill, it would have done nothing to prevent Enron. It wasn't political favors that made Enron a success. (Anyway, McCain-Feingold would have allowed Enron executives to donate more money to politicians' campaigns, since the law raises the limits on individual contributions.)

Political outrage over Enron has thus inspired a law that, among other things, makes it much harder for angry citizens to run campaign ads complaining about a politician's ties to the company. If that makes sense to you, you will be pleased to learn that Congress is now turning its attention to three other areas that it deems in need of reform: employee pensions, stock options, and the accounting industry.

"It would be a shame if posturing about Enron were to erode our distinctive strengths," the man concludes. He'll have his wish, and he's probably at least partially right about political favoritism, although it does seem that a big part of the gamble there was that the march of deregulation, which it and a lot of industry heavy hitters certainly threw and continue to throw their weight behind, would proceed apace. But what does that have to do with the price of cat food, you ask? Damn little, at the moment. Somebody Groove me or AIM me or ICQ me. Speaking of which:

SAN DIEGO, Apr 25, 2002 (BUSINESS WIRE)—In addition to audio and video files, peer-to-peer Web sites may be sharing the problems of increased legal liabilities and bandwidth drains for businesses allowing employee access to these types of sites from corporate networks.

Websense Inc. (Nasdaq:WBSN), the worldwide leader of employee Internet management (EIM) solutions, reports that the number of peer-to-peer file sharing and file transfer Web sites has spiked more than 535 percent in the last 12 months, now totaling nearly 38,000 Web pages. In fact, 30 percent of products listed on CNET's "Most Popular" software download list are P2P applications.

"Companies are no longer in the position to turn a blind eye toward employees illegally swapping songs using company resources," said Jennifer Kearns, a labor and employment partner at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP, a global law firm with offices in the United States, London, Oxford and Munich. "Companies that look the other way may have copyright violations occurring in the workplace and lawsuits are a potential outcome of such activity. Managing employee access to controversial technology and content -- such as file-sharing applications -- is one way to control legal risk."

According to Nielsen//NetRatings, workplace Web users take advantage of high-speed office connections to access MP3s more frequently than at home. And, at the height of the Napster craze, Napster music swapping software was found on 20 percent of more than 15,000 work PCs examined, according to eMarketer.com. Today, the problem has extended beyond Napster. In fact, the number of users of file sharing applications other than Napster grew 492 percent last October alone, according to Jupiter Media Metrix.

Websense Enterprise EIM enables companies to adaptively manage how employees use the Internet at work. To solve the growing problem of controversial peer-to-peer file sharing on corporate networks, Websense created Premium Group II (PGII). PGII consists of additional database categories—including Internet radio and TV, streaming media, peer-to-peer file sharing, personal network storage/backup and Internet telephony—and can be installed into Websense Enterprise software to conserve more network bandwidth.

According to Websense, it is during the nine-to-five workday that 70% of all Internet porn traffic occurs [SexTracker], 30 to 40% of Internet surfing is not business-related [IDC], and more than 60% of online purchases are made [Nielsen//NetRatings]. (Seems to me I worked with someone last year who was constantly to be found forlornly cruising the J. Crew Web site). The Net is constantly shoring up its superego, but the id, of course, is infernally devious and can infect any network ID.

Jangan Harap: And now I gots to go, but not before acknowledging our person of the day, a paleface in the Antipodes learning the native palaver for love, and not money, as reported by the Jakarta Post: "Harry Aveling put both his legs on the table and, in the style of an intense poet, read a passage from Dewi Lestari's Supernova. Then the 60-year-old Australian put his legs down again and chuckled."

"That's how Sutardji (Calzoum Bachri) would read it," he said in fluent Bahasa Indonesia.

Aveling possesses a deep knowledge of Indonesian literature, and it is not only because he is the director of Asian Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

He has translated over 50 volumes of Indonesian and Malay literature into English. The Malaysian government awarded him the Anugerah Pengembangan Sastra (Literature Development Award) in 1991 for his contributions to the international recognition of the literature of the two countries.

Among his Indonesian translations are Kill The Radio by Dorothea Rosa Herliany, and the anthology of great Indonesian poems, Secret Needs Worlds: Indonesian Poetry 1965-1998.

"I wanted to bring knowledge from Indonesia to Australia, because Indonesian literature in Australia could hardly be found," he said at a press conference.

"We're neighbors. We're supposed to understand each other. I thought literature could bring us closer in heart, soul and emotion. As for money, jangan harap (don't count on it)," Aveling laughed.

Midtown Until Midnight: I feel a soulful post coming on ... Pardon me, it was only acid reflux and the hypotinnitus caused by Top 40 grungoid pop-pap played at a low volume for hours on end. Those twangy susurrations of crash cymbals in the back of your mind will drive you insane, and all the moaning and mooning about mating rituals. I want The Donnas cranked up to 11, or blessed silence. This job sucks. Midtown at this time of day is a vision of hell. Enough said. Enough Sade. From Basex, "the research and consulting company that helps you stay ahead of the curve to solve your business problems before they impact your bottom line," comes a welcome bit of news about the furtherance of surveillance in the name of precise measures of productivity:

Xi Software, a U.S. Technologies associated company, released TimeAgent 2.0, a productivity software solution that automatically tracks, captures and records time spent using Microsoft Office applications. TimeAgent's time-capture functionality automatically switches its internal timers on and off as professionals move between documents and applications, assuring that all potential billable time is captured and recorded, even time spent composing short e-mails or evaluating Web-based information.

I can see myself spoofing the system by typing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over and over and over until the whistle blows and I slide down my dinosaur yelling "Yabba dabba doo ..." Webcasters staged a blackout today to protest a CARP ruling on royalties pursuant to the DMCA:

Hundreds of Web broadcasters went silent on Wednesday in an organized protest against proposed U.S. royalty rates they say would undermine the industry and stifle innovation on the Internet.

The Web radio stations started their protest at dawn to oppose rates recommended in February by a Copyright Royalty Arbitration Panel working for the U.S. Copyright Office.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Librarian of Congress is required to set sound recording performance royalty rates for Web radio stations by May 21.

The arbitration panel recommended Webcasters pay recording companies a rate of 14/100ths of a cent per listener per song. While that appears to be a small fee, Webcasters say it would drive many in the struggling industry out of business.

Kurt Hanson, publisher of Radio and Internet Newsletter, and one of the organizers of the protest, said the proposed fees would amount to about $9,000 a month for any mid-sized Webcaster, about double typical revenues.

Some representatives of the music industry, which had lobbied for the royalty structure, said that while the Webcasters "Day of Silence" was misguided, it was an appropriate reminder that music must carry a price in the market.

The crux of the matter, legally speaking, is a narrow interpretation of the copyright act's provisions regarding the definition of a "broadcast transmission" so that it includes "only over-the-air transmissions made by an FCC-licensed broadcaster under the terms of that license."

Lust is the quest of the flesh for the unknown: Editor and Publisher reports that publishers are finding the American public weary of the deluge of information from Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on terror. Deluge. Right. Michael Sweeney, a journoprof at Utah States, recommends the cod-liver oil of truth: "Part of it is what they want to know. Part of it is what they need to know—and it's not going to taste very good going down." No one's buying, not when puppies are being rescued by firemen in Candy Cane Lane. From Marinetti's "Manifesto of Futurism" [1909]:

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose copper domes, as open-worked as our souls, yet had electric hearts. And while we trod our native sloth into opulent Persian carpets, we carried our discussion to the farthest limits of logic and covered sheets of paper with insane scrawls.

A vast pride swelled in our breasts, to feel ourselves standing alone, like lighthouses or advanced guards, facing the army of enemy stars that camp in heavenly bivouacs. Alone with the greasers in the infernal engine-rooms of great ships, alone with the dark phantoms that rummage in the red bellies of bewitched locomotives, alone with the drunks fluttering, battering their wings against the walls!

And unexpectedly, like festive villages that the Po in flood suddenly unsettles and uproots to sweep them off, over the falls and eddies of a deluge, to the sea, we were disturbed by the rumbling of enormous double-decker trams, passing in fits and starts, streaked with lights.

Then the silence got worse. As we listened to the exhausted prayer of the old canal and heard the grating bones of palaces moribund in their greenery whiskers, all of a sudden hungry cars roared beneath our windows.

"Come," I said, "my friends! Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic Ideal have been surpassed. We shall witness the birth of the Centaur and, soon, we'll see the first Angels fly! We must shake the gates of life to test the hinges and the locks! ... Let us go! This is truly the first sun that dawns above the earth! Nothing equals the splendor of our red sword battling for the first time in the millennial gloom."

We approached the three snuffling machines to stroke their breasts. I stretched out on mine like a corpse in my coffin, but suddenly awoke beneath the steering wheel -- blade of a guillotine -- that threatened my stomach.

The great broom of folly tore us from ourselves and swept us through the streets, precipitous and profound like dry torrent beds. Here and there, unhappy lamps in windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. "The scent," I cried, "the scent suffices for wild beasts!"

And we pursued, alike to young lions, Death of the dark fur spotted with pale crosses that slipped ahead of us in the vast mauve sky, palpable and alive.

Yada yada yada.

Tarred and Feathered, Baby, Thistles and Thorns: This is my brain before coffee. This is my brain after coffee: much more interactive. The first order of business is to apply for a reconsolidation of my student loans over 25 years, which will avoid my having to pay $1000 a month under the current draconian regimen. "Oh, just take another student loan in the meantime: We'll get you that hot-shit fellowship next semester and send you to Egypt." Next comes getting the unemployment benefits turned back on, followed by invoices for all the piddly little contracts, and writing out the rent check. Item (Wall Street Journal)

Enron Corp. plans to reorganize as a small company under a new name, according to a draft copy of the firm's plans—returning to its roots of a decade ago, before the aggressive strategy that led to its spectacular expansion and then collapse.

Under plans scheduled to be presented to creditors Friday, Enron would carve out a small integrated energy company with assets of about $10 billion in North and South America. The new entity would likely take a new name in order to escape the taint of Enron's fall and the baggage of numerous investigations into its finances.

The new plan calls for a small operating company—for now dubbed "OpCO Energy Co."—to own power plants, electric utilities, natural-gas pipelines and liquefied-natural-gas facilities, but little else. The biggest properties would be the Portland General Electric utility in Oregon; Elektro, a São Paulo-based Brazilian utility and about 15,000 miles of pipeline assets on both continents—less than half the amount of pipes that Enron once possessed.

Did I not say so? It was the lust for first-mover advantage that felled the mighty empire. What interests me is the way a lot of these companies were trying to get into telecom and bandwidth in order to apply the same commodity-trading model. ACS, which has apparently taken over a lot of Enron's energy-trading market share, at the expense of UBS Warburg (the Enron Online URL now takes you to UBS Energy LLC) took a bath in Brazilian telecom this year and just sold off their operations to some company in Minas Gerais. Tons of reading to do on the subject. And now for a big bowl of Cap'n Crunch in near-freezing milk, as panegyrized with such deep feeling in Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Sim City Sam sends me a virtual quit-smoking buddy. There's a dude for you, a real mensch. Jonesing something fierce. Tokemonkey e-mails me twice a day for moral support.

About:Blank: My browsings through the Library of Posthumanity yield a link to Entropy8Zuper, an offshoot of the infamous Hell.com. Spending a lot of time following the links from Insert Text Here lately, including an excellent feature on market deregulation from FACSNET. Digital Edge is a handy media site. So little time, so much to know. Making all our nowhere plans for nobody. "Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair": Kafka, Diary, July 21, 1913.

Working for the [Waiting on my] Man: I land a project translating a 400-page Arabic book over the next couple of months. Between that and my Latin project, and working at Rothschild, and some freelance stuff for PwC, and some tutoring, and writing my column, I reckon I should be reasonably well occupied. The 2 p.m. to midnight schedule is going to put a cramp in my Lower East Side lounge-lizardry, however, and is to be abandoned as soon as the cushy sinecure of my dreams comes along. Bummed to have to miss Werewolf's DJ gig in Carroll Gardens tomorrow night, for example. I always get pleasantly schnockered at those dealies. Still vaguely hoping to hear from VNU. Going to make it a late work night tonight to get the decks cleared. The day was hopelessly cool and bright to be locked into one's little monk's cell, but I did get out briefly to take the air at Tillie's, and napped by the open window with Iggy warming my feet. Had to cancel my Upper East evening with Darkbloom [r.], however, with regrets; maybe dinner with Viv, Frank, and the Hungarians early next week. I guess I'm officially outing myself: Me and the Fleur Obscure are a nascent dyad, yes. Hope this doesn't jinx the deal.

Smoke Out: Kicking the vile sotweed? Not great, thanks for asking. I manage stretches during the day of nicotine gum-chewing, but it's the evil nexus between white-hot cerebration, the anxiety of intellectual suspense, and banging the keys, on one hand, and sucking the butts, on the other, that's infernally hard to beat. I need to be exiled to a beach hut in Belize 100 miles from the nearest bodega with a supply of gum and novels for a couple of weeks. I might emerge free of the tobacco demon at the end of it, who knows?

Stephanie Zacharek whinges about the lack of porn in the new Sade movie in the scrolling pages of Salon:

If you're looking for thrills, you should know that you have to wade through a good seven-eighths of the movie before Sade does anything remotely disreputable, and even then it's a rather mechanical bit of business that would have been more effective (and more disturbing) if it had been handled with a bit of humor.

But then, humor would have interfered with Jacquot's obvious goal of making a certified thinking person's movie. If only the director had paid more attention to Sade himself, who says right there in the movie, while educating the eminently innocent Emilie, that he has never made a distinction between the mind and the body. To demonstrate, he points to la tête and then grabs le dick. It's the second part that Jacquot needs to work on.

It was always my understanding that the manic foetor of the divine Marquis' imagination was unmatched by his actual comportment, save for the odd flogging here and there. Says Monkey Woman, "It's a step up from Quills, at least." Verdict: "It's pretty hot." "Life," she pontificates in an irrelevant aside, "is a mesy kitchen full of crazy cats." Tells a story about a sadistic teacher who stuffed a spitball up a studen'ts nose. I'm sure Lux Interior, who teaches art in the public schools, can relate to the impulse, even if she would never succumb to it. And so to work.