Plus, All Year Long, You Never Need To Pay For Apricots

Monday, January 01, 2007 • 12:03:54 PM EST

I have two important mandates for you, on this New Year's Day:

Comicraft is a producer of high-quality, hand-drawn-ish typefaces; if you've read more than seventeen comic books in the past three years (I totally researched those numbers and everything) I guarantee you that you've seen their fonts. In addition to comic-looking fonts, they have a whole bunch of smart graphic faces, to suit all times and temperments.

Today and only today, Comicraft is having their Never To Be Repeated Font Sale, in which everything in their entire ample catalogue is $20.07. Some of these fonts go for forty bucks. With others, you're getting an 80% discount. The fonts and the deals are so terrific that I set an iCal alarm to make sure I wouldn't forget. I'm designing new business cards soon, and two of their faces will be frabjously perfect for that project.

And (for God's sake) it's about (damned) time you spiced up your Fonts folder. Particularly if you give lots of presentations. The mere fact that you're using a professional, unique font that your audience has never seen before wins you an immediate windfall of fifty Rapt Attention Points.

Remember, a sudden drop of just ten RAPs causes your carefully-prepared speech to become nothing more than background noise to the Blackberrying of email and the MySpacing of petty grievances; at that point, you could start speaking in one of those Mel Gibson Movie languages for all they'll care. So you can't afford to throw away the advantage of a nifty, unique font. Not if you can afford $20.07, anyway.

This deal will indeed never be repeated. Because next New Year's, the price will go up (one can only presume) to $20.08.

I've already made my purchases: "Spills" (the thick, brush-script lettering in "Happy New Year"), "Monologous" (the comicbook-looking text) and "Digital Delivery," which is a very draftsmanlike hand-lettered font. My standard Keynote font is "Hedge Backwards," aka "Wow! I think you're using Comic Sans, but somehow…it doesn't suck. How'd you do that?" I bought it two or three years ago and never looked back.

Do check the font samples carefully before buying: not all of these come with both upper and lower case letters. But the all-caps fonts usually come with a bonus: when you hit the "Shift" key, you get a slightly different version of that letter. Remember, many of these fonts are supposed to look like hand-lettering…this way, you can write a word like "google" without the double-letters looking so mechanical.

This is indeed one of those "Go…now!" sort of mandates.

Your second mandate: watch the Tournament of Roses Parade. Usually, people like you and me never need to be reminded, because folks like you and me would rather hand-polish all of the needles on an artificial Christmas tree than watch a televised parade.

But this year, George Lucas…

All right…who booed? Which one of you booed?!? I will not continue until you fess up.

(…)

(……)

Mister Beyers. Well, you've just earned yourself eight dictionary words after school today. Sit down.

Class? Let's all say this together: "Yes, the Prequel Trilogy/May not have been nearly as awesome/as we all expected and hoped that it would be/But that's almost to be expected/Because some of us have been thinking about Episode 1/Since before some others among us were born./Plus, Lucas is still the guy who produced/And co-created./'Indiana Jones' and the Sacred Middle Trilogy/From which we all gain so much strength and moral nourishment.

"This we solemnly swear, upon the sacred fishnet body stocking of Oola, the TwiÕLek dancer at Jabba's palace…amen."

Excellent. Continuing: George Lucas is the grand marshal. The good news is that 200 members of the 501st Legion (a national club of Star Wars costume hobbyists) will be in the parade, dressed as stormtroopers. They've even been training under a bona-fide drill sergeant since Thursday.

There will be Naboo and Endor floats, so bewarned: Ewok and Jar-Jar Binks sightings are worrisome possibilities. But the prospect of Lord Vader leaving a garrison behind in Pasadena to maintain the Emperor's peace clearly makes this a TiVo Moment.

(Because it's not like anybody within the Star Wars demographic is going to post the video on YouTube.)

I know you're interested in the final results of the big 2006 "Beloved Of God" Shootout.

Well, I won't lie to you: the spectators got a great show yesterday, as twists and turns brought this one right down to the wire. It sure caught me by surprise. By Christmas, I was pretty sure that I was going to squeak by with a victory. I was so confident that even when I received a terrific sweater that was way too big on me, and the receipt had gone missing so I won't be able to exchange it, I shook it off. That's not something that happens to one of God's Beloved but I thought that even with this reversal, I still had enough Signs Of God's Favor up on the scoreboard to ensure that on January 1, I'd be slapping that purple and gold "This Driver Stands Among God's Beloved (2006)" sticker on my car, entitlig me to park in handicapped spaces all year long.

But it ain't over until it's over. It was true when Sun Tzu wrote it, it was true when Yogi Berra said it, and it was even true when Sylvester Stallone used it in the trailer for the "Rocky" movie that I'm not at all sure I want to see.

It was especially true last night, when the clock ticked to 6 PM…and I still had no plans for New Year's Eve.

No parties, no parades, no house-thingies, no drop-by-if-you-cans, not even a "Hey, I'm having a big thing at the house…can I borrow your LCD projector? And you're welcome to stick around after you drop it off. Er…for a while, anyway." No, nothing.

Mind you, I wasn't feeling all lonely and depressed about this. Nonetheless, when your Big Plans for the night turn out to consist of sorting and editing hundreds of two-month-old vacation photos, you know that somewhere, the official scorer is administering a Tarantino-scale bloodletting.

But just when I was preparing my concession speech, there came a miraculous last-minute reversal: I learned that the Turner Classic Movies channel was airing an all-night Marx Brothers marathon, commencing in thirty minutes' time.

Better than that, they were airing the films in chronological order, starting with Duck Soup (the first one that everyone loves) and moving on through Horse Feathers, Monkey Business, A Night At The Opera, A Day At The Races…

And honestly, who cares what aired after that? Because At The Circus and A Night In Casablanca are only funny as a batch of highlights, and my DVD recorder only has room for the first five. All of the good ones.

To summarize: God (personally, I imagine) made certain that I wouldn't have any other plans on the night when five of my favorite movies were airing back to back to back to back to back, with no commercial interruptions. And he (personally!) made sure that TCM didn't do anything slimy, like sneak "Circus" in between Duck Soup and A Day At The Races, where I'd be forced to stop the DVD recorder and find something else to do for 87 minutes.

So when the giant ball dropped in Times Square at midnight (I'm guessing; I was somewhere near the middle of "Monkey Business" when 2007 happened), I breathed a sigh of relief mixed with orange Cheetos dust and Coke burps: yes, this year, I could indeed check the "One Of God's Beloved" box on my 1040 form and claim the $750 credit. Clearly, I'm beloved by God.

(If not by my friends and family.)

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Another demo

Wednesday, January 10, 2007 • 02:19:06 PM EST

Hi, blog readers!

I'm doing another demo.

The crowd (Macworld expo show attendees) are all well-mannered and well-groomed. I am proud to be of the same species.

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Testing, Testing, Will Robison. Yes, I misspelled it.

Thursday, January 11, 2007 • 04:41:43 PM EST

Hello, world. This is another demo of CWOBber, presented at Macworld Expo.

The audience, as always, seems well-groomed and attentive. If they are contemplating dark thoughts of revenge against me for slights imagined or real, they are hiding their intentions — and their weapons — well.

Onward we go. Wait, let's insert some stuff:

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Slackish Boy

Wednesday, January 17, 2007 • 06:15:29 PM EST

"Awesome," I thought, as I settled onto the sofa and picked up my TiVO remote early Monday morning. "I got a good four hours' sleep on the redeye flight and can look forward to something akin to a full day back home."

And of course, 90 minutes later I was in bed, turning ambient air into carbon dioxide and the sound of old, thick canvas being torn.

Oh, well. But flying home from Macworld Expo on the redeye is usually the right move. Hell, for the cost of a Saturday night's stay in the hotel I ought win more than a morning of frenzied packing and an early trip to the airport. A redeye flight means being able to tell a good pair of friends "Yes, of course; I have to check out of my hotel, but after that I can BART across the bay for lunch and whatnot."

Let's see. I did watch (and record to DVD) last week's "Mythbusters" before heading to bed. The last thing I did before heading for the bedroom was start the new MSNBC ultimate fighting documentary recording. I caught most of it in my hotel room last week, so there was no need to sit through it again.

I also happened to catch most of Peter O'Toole's "Letterman" appearance as well, but I wanna watch that one from the beginning, so I won't move it from the TiVO to the DVD recorder until tonight, when I can sit back and enjoy it.

Back in San Francisco, I didn't catch the show until halfway through. And therein lies the tale of how most of my week at Macworld Expo went.

I was a very, very good boy the day before I left Boston. Closing down my office for a week is a bit like cranking down a mid-sized steel smelting plant…full of a million little details and lots of stink and bother. Every moment is saturated with the concrete realization of how much simpler my life would be at that point if I were staying put.

It's the grumbling that does me in, you see. I sigh and shake my head with every pair of socks that I roll together, and then sigh again while sticking them in the big Ziplock bag. That's not an effective workflow. Why not save all of the moaning and sighing for the flight, when the socks and underpants and whatnot are all safely stowed? That's a wonderful idea and it's worthy of a focus-group's attention.

As it is, but the time by the time all of my laundry's been packed, all of my cables and chargers have been assembled and bagged, my files have been copied and synced to a half a dozen devices that are making the trip with me, and all of the desktops and hardware that are staying behind have been put to bed, it's so close to the time when I need to start the trek to the airport that there's really no point in going to bed at all.

But this time, things would be different. "If you want to do something that proudly states 'I am a functioning adult,' you know what you should do?" I suggested to myself. "You should start your packing early on Sunday, so that you can actually get a full night's sleep before catching the 6AM shuttle to Logan International."

My internal voice is an optimist. I love that about him, but this is precisely the sort of attitude that leads to sending troops to the Middle East to create peace and stability in the region.

By midnight, a Tech-Show Certified Smaller Version Of My Stuff was all safely encased in a backpack and a rollaway. I went to bed at about 1, which left me a not-inconsequential 4 hours to sleep.

4 hours is quite credible. I remember back in high school when my computer science teacher started the class by complaining that she'd only gotten that much sleep. Clearly, she was a piker: I now know that you can get through a whole day on four hours' sleep just fine. I dunno…maybe she was just hung over. In any event, four hour of sleep was going to be a huge improvement over the half-hour nap that I usually get the night before a big trip.

It was a fine plan and my brain was the only member of Team Ihnatko that wasn't on board with it. Which was a damned shame, as all of this was meant to be for the brain's benefit, you know?

I turned off the TV. No go. Read a book. Turned on a podcast and allowed it to lull me to sleep. Finally, I removed all stimuli of any kind, and made it into sort of a contest of wills. Surely my brain would rather just go into low-power mode rather than continue to keep processing darkness and silence?

At 4:20 AM, a white guy with a crewcut and a skinny tie and a Plantronics headset scrubbed the mission. And that was that.

I made it through Monday on just the ninety minutes of shuteye I got on the plane. Luckily, I had just one meeting late in the afternoon, then I needed to pick up my media credentials for the show. Dinner with my Close Personal Friend Chris Breen followed, and then it was drinks with CPF CB and CPF Joe Holmes and his son. No problem.

I had to work on a Project X sort of thing all night, and needed to be at the Moscone Center by 7:30 in order to get into the keynote. So figure that I got about an hour's worth of sleep Monday night. Tuesday was a full day at the show, which was followed by an extensive tour of duty at the Ministry of Nightlife (three parties followed by drinks with friends).

Then I went back to my hotel room to write two columns and finish polishing my Keynote files for two presentations. But fear not, I quaffed lustily from the keg of dreams as soon as all that work was done. Three luxurious hours after sinking into my pillow, I sprang out of bed looking and feeling my very, very best.

I should mention that I knew I wouldn't be getting behind the wheel of a car. Driving while exhausted wins you a ride home in the back of a police vehicle at best and 7 to 12 years for vehicular homicide at worst. Whereas hailing a taxi while sleepy is actually sort of encouraged, particularly if the cabbie spots you wearing a $1000 SLR around your neck that you might leave behind on the seat. No, under the circumstances I was in perfectly OK shape to speak to 200-500 people, so long as nobody asked me to shoot an apple from off of their heads. Even if it were a 30" Cinema Display, it would have ended in horrors.

Even so, I was slightly amazed when I did the math and realized that I'd had barely one full night's worth of sleep since the week started. The punchline to all of this was that at the end of the day, I had to do a photo shoot for a new column.

I'm fairly confident that I looked like the "Before" picture in an ad for trucker amphetamines.

Back in the hotel again by 5:30. There was another big party at 9, and I'd agreed to sing a number with the band. Clearly, taking a nap would have been a terrible risk so I settled for a couple of low-key hours sprawled on my bed, reading email while watching the afternoon news.

I looked up from my nth Consumer Electronics Show-related message and was puzzled. Why was David Letterman interviewing Peter O'Toole at 5:45 PM?

Answer: Because it was 12:10 AM. Yes: I'd fallen asleep in mid-read and I missed the whole party.

It was all for the best, I suppose. In retrospect, I was destined to oversleep for either the party or the MacBrainiac Challenge, scheduled for 9 AM the next morning. Missing a scheduled conference event would have done little to endear me to the event's organizers. Missing my bit chance at stumbling through Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" at a downtown club, on the other hand, was the one course of events certain to leave the crowd clamoring for more.

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You can spray it all day with the Vitamin A...

Saturday, January 20, 2007 • 04:40:44 AM EST

The Post-Macworld Headcold Clock has ticked into Day Three.

Let me just state that there comes a time in any person's life — regardless of his commitment to the ideals of maturity and dignity — when they must resort to wadding up a couple of tissues and jamming them up the nostrils, replacing them as necessary.

There is no shame in this.

I hope that this tale gives you, dear reader, the courage to do what needs to be done at a moment of personal crisis, despite the abuse that shall surely ensue. Remember, they mocked Gandhi, too. Also, that guy who took to the skies in a lawn chair strung with, like, a million helium balloons. But both of those dudes are in the Wikipedia. And where are the doubters and nay-sayers? They're pointing at you and laughing because you've got two bits of soggy, snotty Kleenex sticking out of your nose, I'm guessing.

Still, it'll stop the dripping, that's for damned sure. And after you've been sniffling and wiping for two or three hours, that's really all that matters.

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The Painter Of Red Ink

Thursday, January 25, 2007 • 03:55:23 PM EST

When you get to Heaven, try to get a table at the Augustine Club on a Tuesday night. That's "open bandstand" night. The music's always top-notch but last week's show was the sort of concert that made one of the Wednesday arrivals wish that she'd eaten those tainted clams a day sooner.

(Which is a foolish wish to make. Life is precious, even a single, solitary day of it. Plus, if those clams were a day fresher, then they would just have caused a week's worth of tectonic duodenal distress.)

Last Tuesday, Hendrix was on rhythm guitar, backing Django Reinhardt on lead. John Entwistle and the original Paul McCartney traded off on bass. Bill Evans played keyboard, with J.S. Bach on the key-taur. Mozart suprised all of the newcomers with his prowess with, and obsessive love for, the accordian.

The vocalists were a pair of Dutch sisters who died in a mill fire in 1893. At the time of the disaster, neither they nor the rest of the world realized that they had the sort of profoundly beautiful alto and soprano voices that could have altered the course of human history.

The band finished a two-hour set. As the crowd started stubbing out cigars and polishing off the last of their wine and making sure they didn't leave their iPhones behind on the table, emcee Johnny Cash urged everyone to stay.

"As you know, we normally close down the club at midnight so y'all won't miss out on this week's All-Time All-Star Red Sox/Yankees game," he drawled. "But we've just received word that another Thomas Kinkade gallery has gone out of business. And 'round here, that means it's time for a 20-minute encore."

The band launched straight into an extended improvisation on Kool & The Gang's "Celebration," one that crossed into and through nine different musical genres and made certan members of the audience feel ashamed that they'd ever work a "Death Before Disco" pin on a denim jacket.

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How To Make Friends And Influence People

Saturday, January 27, 2007 • 08:02:22 PM EST

It's time once again to update the canonical list of Groups That Hold Andy Ihnatko In Utter Contempt. In no particular order:

ROSIE O'DONNELL FANS. This one goes pretty far back, and it really wasn't my fault.

When her daytime talk show was six months old, I wrote a piece that could best be summarized thusly: "It's a terrific show and you can't help but like Rosie, but there are a few things about it that are starting to get annoying." Like the hyper-aggressive product placement and embedded advertising. For a donation to one of Rosie's charities, Rosie would put a company's enormous logo on her desk, right between Rosie and her guests. You could hardly pay attention to what Susan St. James was saying about her upcoming made-for-TV movie; you were too busy playing defense, making sure that the thought "You know what I should go out and buy? Snackwells cookies" never got any traction.

Frankly, I'd forgotten all about that article by the time I started getting hate mail from some of RO'D fans. Some fans, I stress; I'm certain that the vast majority of Ms. O'Donnell's fan base doesn't write and behave as though they've been working with carpet adhesives.

A typical email:

You know, it's sad — truly, sad; I've cried about this, you know — when small-minded men (yes, I said MEN!) like you, the people who start all of the wars and all of the hatred and all of the evil in this world, see a source of light and hope and peace, and you can't stand it. You have to snuff it out, lest Rosie's message of love and hope and peace (did I say peace, already?) shine on across the planet, healing all those who thirst and hunger for…

…And it'd go on like that for several paragraphs. I'm honestly not doing justice to the raw, Ellen Jamesian vibe of these diatribes, but I can't really help that. After all, I spend most of my day writing professionally, whereas these correspondents…I don't know. I'm guessing that most of their time is spent Bedazzling sweatshirts or somesuch.

The hate mail made its first appearance up months after I wrote the thing, and it'd return once or twice a year thereafter. It was a huge mystery; why the outrage? Why now? Why again? It always came in bunches, which made me think that someone new had found it and had linked to it on a fansite or something. Every new wave would make me re-read the piece and ask myself "Does it really come across as hostile?"

Then I finally cracked it. Rosie has attracted a lot of wingnut fans, sure, but her wingnut critics outnumber them by at least ten to one, both in numbers and (inversely) in IQ. It turned out that every now and then, one of these pinheads would write the most awful, hateful screed against the woman (which inevitably broke the news that Rosie is overweight, supports gun control, and apparently likes to kiss girls) and they'd end it by saying "But it's not just me! Here are a dozen other people on the 'Net who agree with everything I've just said!"

And then they'd link to my article. Thanks, man.

Since discovering this cycle, I've been more patient with the Ellen Jamesians. They might be clueless and misguided, but their biggest mistake is letting their emotions get hold of their keyboards before the brain has even had a chance to finish its first cup of coffee.

EROTIC HYPNOTISTS. I had no idea that erotic hypnotists were such a profound force in the job market that they had their own trade group and message board. I discovered this soon after I blogged that if I ever had a son, and one day he summoned up the courage to say "Dad, I've decided what I want to do with my life. I want to put together a lounge act in which I hypnotize women into thinking that their boobies are the size of watermelons, and the men into thinking that they suddenly have eleven thingies," well, then the boy would find me absolutely stuck for a proper response.

"Follow your bliss" is generally terrific advice. But still, you know full well that this career path would make writing next year's Christmas letter a tricky project. You'd almost feel the need to passionately pick up model railroading as a hobby, just to have something else to write about.

Holy cats: I heard from the International Guild of Erotic Hypnotists, or whatever they call themselves.

To tell you the truth, it was a patient and indulgent email. He admitted that Erotic Hypnotism might not be up there with Pediatric Cancer Ward Nursing in terms of social respectability, but he was right to point out that it's all harmless fun and that Erotic Hypotists are decent people who simply enjoy entertaining people. It was probably a cheap shot and I wouldn't have made it if I were a more perfect vessel for the Universe's perfection.

I did visit their message board. Some of the comments were a bit harsh, but I was relieved to find that overall, folks were quite aware that my piffling little broadside could do nothing to shift the great ship of Erotic Hypnotism from its steady course.

Today, I'm — well, "pleased to be announcing" certainly isn't the right way to put it — duly reporting to you that another demographic has been inscribed onto the Great Scroll of Impatience:

(Drumroll…)

CLAY AIKEN FANS.

By all means, meditate on that one for a moment.

Unlike the Rosie O'Donnell thing, I knew what they were on about straight away: it was Thursday's review of Windows Vista, which has been making its way through the fansites.

(Clay's, not mine, I mean.)

Here's the lede graf:

Okay. Yeah, I said it. But I feel as though I have no reason to apologize. Read onward:

Here's the point I was making: people sometimes pick on something for cheap, unfounded reasons. I wasn't making any aspersions against Mr. Aiken. I was merely pointing out that you can often spot the trouble coming. The level of hostility of these emails would tend to indicate that Mr. Aiken's fans are already very, very (very) familiar with this peculiar phenomenon.

I know that this is one of those statements that I have to preface with "And I'm not trying to be sarcastic, here" but I'll say it anyway: truly, I respect what Mr. Aiken does. I'm old enough (and more importantly, mature enough) to know that a singer doesn't sell four million albums because of marketing. He sure hasn't become that successful by producing records that people don't like, you know? Just because his music isn't your cuppa tea is no justification for denying the man his due; that's pure arrogance.

Still, I wish the Clay's fans could have followed the fine example set by the Erotic Hypnotists. My respect for the latter grows with each passing year, though I suppose there could have been some sort of hocus-pocus in their email.

The Claymates' emails are duly being handed over to my newspaper, so that they can adjust their demographic picture of my readership; Aiken fans buy lots of snow tires, and the ad people need to know that. Some are being forwarded to county and state law-enforcement agencies, so that if I ever get a package that looks like it's been addressed with a glitter-pen, they can send over that robot with the bomb-dispersing water cannon. I'm replying to some, hoping that a little courtesy on my part will make 'em feel a little better.

In my business, you spins the wheel and you takes your chances. I never had this problem when I made fun of Neil Diamond. Sure, two or three of is fans were pretty upset when I said something (truly) mean about their guy twice within the span of a month and a half. But as soon as I explained that the only reason I was picking on him was because my sister had recently told me specifically not to, they were completely on my side.

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Darken Not My Door With Your Gorilla-Clad Feet

Sunday, January 28, 2007 • 02:45:18 PM EST

Mark Evanier has been encouraging folks to post banners on their sites promoting National Gorilla Suit Day. Mark is a longtime pal, and I'm pleased by his evangelism of what I'm certain is, within his own narrow perspective, a positive cause.

But…no. I can't support him in this particular venture. It just brings up far too many painful memories for me and my family.

The days after World War I, and a small village known as Montesilvano socketed within the mountainous Abruzzi region of central Italy, were a harsh time and a harsh place for a young boy named Crescenzo Antonioni to live. Life was split between the land and his family. He would spend five days in the hills shepherding goats, and this taught him both self-reliance and the importance of the strong looking out for the weak. And then he would spend a week with his family in the village, which taught him of the importance of love and community. It was a hard-won existence, but though hard work and relentless good cheer, the men, women, and children of the town were surviving.

And so the months passed into years. Crescenzo grew into a hearty, chestnut-skinned twelve-year-old, known throughout Abruzzi for his mastery of the tortuous network of surrounding rilles and valleys of the Apennines.

Natural geography had insulated the village somewhat from the upheaveals that were disrupting the stability of the rest of the country. In 1923, Italy was wrenched by a struggle for the nation's political future. The Fascists had begun to win the upper hand, and squads of loosely-formed but heavily-armed militia were slowly fanning out throughout the countryside, methodically tightening their control of the nation and its peoples wherever and however they could.

But they lacked both the intimate knowledge and the strong legs and backs that were needed to operate effectively in Montesilvano and its surrounding regions. Somehow, they learned of Crescenzo's skills. Word found its way to his parents: the Fascists were coming for Crescenzo.

This could not be allowed to happen. The Fascists treated so-called "ignorant peasants" like beasts of burden. If they allowed their son to be taken, he would be worked like a mule and then disposed of once he was no longer needed.

The Antonionis had very little by way of wealth. All they really had were their friends. But in Montesilvano, that was enough. Community resources were pooled and a plan was hatched: a merchant who traveled through the villages of the region agreed (for a considerable fee) to smuggle little Crescenzo away, hidden amongst his wares.

They trusted the boy's safety, and the hopes of the entire community, to the humble donkey-drawn cart of Carlo, the Gorilla Suit Man.

After all, why would the Fascists give his cart, its axle sagging under the weight of hundreds of gorilla costumes, a second look? In Italy, the Gorilla Suit Man was as much a fixture of the community as the village fountain, or the church. In many areas, the village set its timetable by the familiar and piercing morning song of il scimmiatore:

Monkey suits for mending! Gorilla suits for altering!
Real skins, false skins! It doesn't matter which!
The suit I put onto you is so fine and goodly-made
That even its original simian owner would tell you
"Signore, surely it looks better on you than it ever did on me!
Monkey suits for mending! Gorilla suits for altering!…

Upon hearing his lilting tones, the women of the village would leave their doorways and pile their dirty and torn monkey suits on the cart. There was a special bin in the back for those costumes that were nearly beyond repair. These suits were to be donated to those poor families that couldn't afford a gorilla suit of any kind, and who thus couldn't attend the special Gorilla Suit Mass For The Blessed Virgin, a feast day held every January 31.

It was here that Crescenzo was concealed on a frosty December morning, along with a few crusts of bread and a jug of water, his sole provisions until he reached the coastline.

His parents kissed him goodbye. The scimmiatore promised them that he would care for Crescenzo as if he were his own son. And with that, a pile of torn and filthy Gibbon masks were packed over and around the boy. The lid was closed and made fast with a bit of salvaged wire, and the cart lurched on.

The Antonionis were simple, trusting people. They couldn't have known that seizing control of all of the Gorilla Suit Men in the region had been the Fascists' very first move...or that Carlo was the one who had brought Crescenzo's mountaineering skills to their attention in the first place. As the most respected and community-integrated tradesmen in all of Italy, The scimmiatore were the main reason why Italy would toil under the yoke of dictatorship for the next five decades. Ironically, the Fascists had reached the same conclusion as the villagers: nobody suspects the gorilla suit man.

Carlo, ever a careful businessman, didn't betray Crescenzo until after he'd completed his daily rounds. The boy had remained folded in the basket for twelve excruciating hours, gagging on the smell of wet fur but desperate to remain silent and undetected, before the cart stubbed to a halt and he was released into the night air. And before Crescenzo could even register his immediate surroundings, he was handed over to four armed men and led into the leaping foothills of a mountain range that would have intimidated even Crescenzo's goats. He began a six-day forced march before he even regained the feeling in his legs.

Crescenzo would not see his family again for three years, when (solely by the grace of God) he escaped. And he would not know the kiss of true freedom for another twelve, when my grandfather sponsored his emigration to the United States.

Yes, that boy was my uncle. When I was a kid, The Banana Splits show was banned from the house. I never understood the anger with which my grandfather had forbidden what seemed to be harmless Saturday-morning fun. Not until the day when I was deemed old enough to finally learn the full truth of the gorilla-suit man's treachery. To this very day, the now-thriving city of Montesilvano is the only community in all of Italy that doesn't observe The Feast Day of the Gorilla Suit. The schools remain open, the priest officiates an ordinary Mass dressed in his customary robes of cotton instead of seventy pounds of purple gorilla fur, and those outsiders who ask why receive only a filthy look for an explanation.

So Mark, I cannot in all conscience support your movement. In my household, a rubber mask trimmed with tufted black acrylic and a set of floppy black latex gloves will always represent baseless human evil, and the triumph of greed over compassion.

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Prise on the Eyes

Tuesday, January 30, 2007 • 05:54:13 PM EST

Congratulate me, sensation-seekers: I'm in the running to receive a Highly Prestigious Journalism Award.

But do congratulate me soon, because I'm guessing that you're clever enough to eventually figure out that actually, all that's happened is that I've filled out an entry form and mailed it to the correct address, along with five of my 2006 Sun-Times columns, a cover letter, and a small check to cover the entrance fee.

Well, what the hell. A while back, somebody suggested to me that I Really Ought To Give It A Go, and they pointed me towards the website with all of the rules and forms. And just like clockwork, my brain interrupted the composition of a routine email yesterday to remind me that the deadline was January 29 and that the post office closes in a few hours.

This was a smart on my brain's part and serves to underscore why I trust it to handle all of my breathing and stuff. If I hadn't mostly forgotten about the deadline, I'd have spent the past two or three months daydreaming about how I'll spend the award money. I would have bought myself a Playstation 3 and a Wii and, like, a million games, and maybe even that awesome chair with the racing pedals and the flightsticks built in. Then I would have spent all of my time playing games instead of working. I'd have lost my job with the Sun-Times, and then I'd have really needed that award money, to cover basic living expenses. But of course I wouldn't win, and I'd have to take a job loading trucks over at the UPS depot just for the health coverage.

Come to think of it, I don't have health coverage now. Maybe I should have just bought all of the gaming gear. I've got this soreness in my right elbow that I'd like to have checked out.

Anyway. The good news was that I already had all of my clippings assembled, so honestly, all I really had to do was complete a big arts and crafts project and get it postmarked.

True, it's one of journalism's most prestigious awards, but it nonetheless requires that you call upon the same skills you needed back in fifth grade, when you had to produce a diorama entitled "Our Friend, The Sun" for science class. If you're confused, then join the club. The judging committee trusts you when you say "…therefore, more than 11,000 cancer deaths in the greater metro area can be directly attributed to the cost-cutting measures instituted at the LexCorp waste-treatment plant in 1979." But when you say "I published this article in 2006," they won't believe you unless you've enclosed the actual newsprint, artfully pasted down onto sheets of letter-sized paper and assembled into some sort of presentation.

In my case, this was a stack of papers neatly stapled at the upper corner. I wondered if the Trends In Emerging Economies columnist of The New York Times prepared his or her entry in quite the same way.

As I rocketed down Route 1 towards Kinkos, I was indeed worried about the first impressions that my entry would create. I had no doubt that I would get everything pasted together and photocopied and mailed by the end of the day…but would I have any chance with the judges, really? I'm dashed proud of my newspaper column, but I'm not 100% confident that this is precisely the sort of Excellence that they'll be seeking to honor.

Plus, again, there was a whole section in the rules about the presentation, explaining how these columns should be prepared and pasted down, and specifically forbidding the use of binding. The overall implication as I saw it was that before this rule was put into place, entrants would send their work out to an elderly Italian man to have the pages sewn by hand between leather covers cut from the hide of a cow that had once produced morning milk for a particularly favored Catholic saint (but only if he hide of the saint himself wasn't available in sufficient quantity).

For my part, I brought a couple of Badtz Maru stickers to put on my cover letter. But then I thought better of it.

At one point, I'd actually talked myself out of it entirely. "We'll do it next year, for sure," I determined. "We'll research this properly, ask for examples of a typical submission format, and try to goose our chances. What say we abort the mission, and plot a speed course to Starbucks for a hot chocolate with real whipped cream?"

But as soon as I came to that decision, it felt as though I'd triple-dogged-dared myself to go ahead and submit my columns anyway. And no matter how far removed you are from the playground in both distance and years, you simply do not back down from a triple-dog-dare.

It's like this: everything I needed to qualify for a 2007 prize was right there on the passenger seat of the car. The time required to assemble these components and ship it off was an intangible, but I had that too, along with the cash for the entry fee. So in the end, the only reason not to enter would be the fear that I couldn't possibly win.

Which, honestly, is a rubbish reason not to do something. Hence, the triple-dog-dare. I could wake up in the morning with a shot at winning a Prestigious Journalism Prize, or I could wake up with no shot at all. It was totally up to me.

Well. All right, then.

I've entered the competition for much the same reason why I occasionally buy a lottery ticket. I'm good enough at math that I don't honestly believe that I'm going to win a quarter-billion dollars, but for the whole month that passes from the time I buy the ticket to the day I remember that it's there in my wallet and I actually check the numbers, I get to live with the possibility.

And don't discount the positive power of Possibly Being A Multi-Millionaire. You might find yourself in a situation where somebody's being truly and needlessly difficult. "If that Powerball ticket is a winner," you swear to yourself, "then this guy can just flat-out kiss my ass, starting from the very moment the first check clears."

Somehow, this unlocks untapped reserves of patience. There is a one in 281,299,617 chance that at this time next month, this person will be chased through his house by a dozen Roomba robots, each specially modified so that its motor powers a small circular saw instead of a vacuum. He'll flee in terror, not knowing that I've only programmed them to take two inches off of the legs of all of his furniture. Which is probably the worst that a circular-saw-armed Roomba could actually do, truthfully. But it'll still be pretty damned annoying when he bumps his knees on the underside of his kitchen table every morning as he sits down to breakfast. "I know it's the restaurant's policy not to honor a reservation until the entire party has arrived," he'll think, rubbing his sore leg, "but I wish I'd seated Mr. Ihnatko's friends immediately, regardless."

So: for the next couple of months at least, I have a lottery ticket in my wallet. If it pays off, I probably can't tell people to kiss my ass but at least it increases the chances that readers and editors will start to regard my synaptic misfirings as Fresh and Iconoclastic instead of merely Exasperating and Unpublishable.

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