The Panelin' Man

Wednesday, April 04, 2007 • 11:44:42 PM EDT

Am buzzing like a bunny; next week I'm off to Colorado for the annual Conference On World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Check out the list of panels I'll be speaking on:

1104 MyFace, YourTube, OurPedia
9:00-10:20 on Monday April 9, 2007
UMC East Ballroom

1806 Drawing on Words: Comic Books and Graphic Novels
4:30-5:50 on Monday April 9, 2007
UMC West Ballroom

2706 Community in a Wildly Wired World
3:30-4:50 on Tuesday April 10, 2007
UMC East Ballroom

3109 Entrepreneurship: No Guts, No Glory
9:00-10;20 on Wednesday April 11, 2007
UMC 415

3806 Reality TV: Can It Get Any Dumber
4:30-5:50 on Wednesday April 11, 2007
Duane Physics G1B30

4603 Digital Disobedience: Bad Things You Can Do Online
2:00-3:20 on Thursday April 12, 2007
Duane Physics G1B20

5107 The Art of Humor: "A Duck Walks into a Bar…"
9:00-10:20 on Friday April 13, 2007
UMC 235

5304 Burning Man: Geeks and Hippies Join Hands
11:00-12:20 on Friday April 13, 2007
UMC 247

5503 Infosnacking and Infobingeing: A Guide to Being Well-Informed
1:00-2:20 on Friday April 13, 2007
UMC West Ballroom

You can see this list in a slightly prettier fashion on the conference site. You can also check out the folks I'll be paneling with.

The World Affairs conference is an interesting beastie in that these one-phrase titles are all I've got to go on. And they're only posted a few weeks in advance, so there really isn't any time to throw together some nice, distracting PowerPoint slides to divert the audience's attention away from my own ignorance with a few gallons of Flash and a rude Photoshopped picture swiped from Fark.

I don't want to give anything away in advance, but (as usual for this event) the list seems to break down into four or five different categories:

A Report On The Metric System. A topic that I feel has been done to death, in which nothing new can possibly be added at this level. The Challenge: Come up with something that I and the audience will find interesting regardless.

Head Trip. A topic that's frustratigly vague and which seems to invite me to maliciously twist re-interpret it, like a Fundamentalist who's determined to find some sound theological backing for his decision to screw his best friend in a real-estate deal. The Challenge: Not to go so far with this that I wind up running down the clock by talking about how awesome the season premiere of "The Shield" was.

Pennies From Heaven. A protein-packed topic that forces me to wire up a countdown timer to a stun-gun and tape it to my ankle. It's the only way to shut up at the end of my alotted ten minutes instead of blathering on for the panel's full 80. The Challenge: To find the fortitude to keep right on talking even as the smell of burning hair and skin fills the hall.

The Do-Over. I've been speaking at this Conference for nearly ten years now, doing anything from seven to twelve panels per. Naturally, there are plenty of panels where The Perfect Approach didn't hit me until weeks later. So when you seem to have a second chance, you jump on it. The Challenge: Make sure I don't let on how hard I'm trying to manipulate this one guy into setting himself up for my killer "Jerk Store" zinger.

Shrödinger's Topic. I've no clue what this panel is supposed to be about or what the hell I can possibly say. Its state cannot be determined until I observe it happening. I will sit quietly, let the other panelists talk, and then pick up and run with whatever topic they seem to have been speaking about. The Challenge: Listen very carefully to what the other panelists are saying to make sure I don't wind up blindly supporting the point that Canadians all smell funny and if the USA had any balls we'd do something about them once and for all.

I'll leave it to you to determine which categories apply to which topics. Though I will point out that I've no idea what's going to happen on the "Comic Books and Graphic Novels" panel. I've checked out the bios of the other folks I'll be speaking with and I'm not 100% certain that any of them are regular readers. I mean, if you flip to my bio, you'll note that I write about technology and that there's no mention of any sort of wife or girlfriend. This makes you think "Aha! Here's a man who would definitely have a strong opinion about the creative success or failure of the recent 'Civil War' mega-event and the death of Captain America!"

Whereas the others seem to have, you know, jobs and lives. So, fingers crossed.

There's also a minor disappointment: I'm not on any panels with any of my good pals, many of whom are speaking on truly to-die-for topics. Oh, well. We'll have plenty of time to hang out during the week. At least I ought to be able to enjoy those panels from the other side of the microphones.

If you live in the Boulder area, feel free to drop on by. There are hundreds of panels going on that week and they're all open to the public. And natcherly, I'll be making my regular visit to the Colorado Macintosh Users Group's monthly meeting.

If you don't live in the Boulder area (or if you do but you don't think me or any of the 100 other speakers are worth leaving the house for) (come on…Harry Belafonte? Seth Shostak? Rusty Schweickart?!? Don't be such an idiot) I'll be bringing an array of pocket-sized recording equipment and I expect to be podcasting my sessions as the week goes by. URL is to be determined.

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Nnnnnext!

Friday, April 06, 2007 • 03:08:12 AM EDT

My official statement on Drupal as a content-management system: it's a fine, fine piece of machinery. Like a $1200 mountain bike purchased at the very start of spring. I had the very best of intentions and the very highest level of commitment going in, but now it's just something I'm going to hang my laundry on until I give it away to a cousin or something because my friends, my ass is now way too sore for me to continue.

This only serves to underscore the brilliance of open software. Because it's free, I was able to download and install the full package for testing on a whim, and can spit-can it just as readily.

And because it was built by a community of developers, there's no one name attached to it. So there's really no point to my dropping a generous fistful of AA batteries into an old sock and beating any sort of well-deserved retribution out of anyone. Which is a damned shame, given my experiences with Drupal, but I admit that it will save me a lot of mopping up.

So the hunt moves on. Joomla! seems like a fine CMS. After a couple of quick tours, it strikes me as a Drupal that's had its rabies shots. Plus, I'm encouraged by the presence of that exclamation point. Tell me, would you honestly go to see a musical merely named "Oklahoma"? Of course you wouldn't. The exclamation point makes a promise that "Oklahoma!" delivers.

Nonetheless, the current CMS on my test bench is Wordpress. In recent months, (according to what I've read) this blogging tool has received enough additional gumption to be credible considered "a blogging tool that can also be used as a CMS." Given that I've spent the past couple of weeks using "A CMS that can also be used as an alternative to a trepanning tool" I'm ready to splash around in the shallow end of the pool.

So far it's been damned encouraging. I've set up a blog and made a bunch of posts, each with pictures and fancy formatting. I've downloaded and installed plugins. And (good God) its documentation and support forums are all substantially more useful than a Size 6 hockey skate filled with olive pits. It's almost as though these Wordpress people actually want me to succeed or something.

I'm going to move to Step Two of the eval, in which I try to bash this sample blog into the blog I actually need. If that works, then I'll proceed to the final phase, in which I figure out if Wordpress can manage not just Yellowtext, but all of the various bits and sections of CWOB.com as I envision 'em.

Because Plans are Afoot. There are ideas that I've developed in-house that need to be nurtured. There are ideas I've seen on other sites that need to be shamelessly ripped off. What it comes down to is that the best way to judge a tool is to see if it gets you excited about possibilities and starts things crackling. With Drupal, I foresaw a future in which most of my time spent working on this site was spent bashing code and performing terminal-monkey tasks just to keep the infrastructure running. With Wordpress, it seems like I'd be spending most of my time actually creating content and features.

One thing's for sure: no matter which CMS I choose, I'm going to have to win me some additional PHP cred. Currently, I can spell it. Good boy, well done, but you must indeed meet a certain PHP height requirement before you're allowed on any of the CMS rides.

It's actually a bit distressing: having set myself the goal of not having to continue to write AppleScripts to support my blog, I learn that I'll have to learn to write PHP scripts to support the CMS that supports my blog. I look inside index.php files to see what makes them tick…and well, I'll be damned: I'm looking at CWOBber scripts. It's in Spanish instead of Latin, but the methodology is the same: they define recipes for generating webpages from pre-canned runs of HTML code mixed in with nuggets of data.

The sole difference is that my AppleScripts build a static HTML page that gets uploaded onto a server. A PHP script on a webserver builds a fresh copy of the page every time it's accessed.

And here…the sickness begins.

"So if I'm going to have to learn me some more PHP anyway, why should I bother to learn a CMS?" I ask myself. "I bet I could write my own server-based content-management system in about the same amount of time it'd take me to figure out how to make an existing one do what I want. Instead of replacing my 100% client-side app with something else, I could just write a server-based edition."

Clearly, if I'm thinking these things it can only be a sign that I need to eat a cookie or something and raise my blood sugar.

It's not a dopey idea. Truly, I'd have the new site up and running a lot faster if I wrote this thing myself, for the same reasons why I can often take better pictures with the $399 Kodak point-and-shoot I bought two years ago than I can with the SLR I bought a few months ago. Better to be the absolute master of a tool with limitations than a toenail-chewing ignoramus with the most sophisticated and up-to-date thing available.

But then I pop a jellybean in my mouth and chew thoughtfully. Yeah, it'd work, but I'd be back at square one. I don't want to code up support for comments, or a message board, or figure out how to support the MetaWeblog so I can post from Flickr, or a desktop app, or my phone, or (or or or).

And so it goes. Welp, it all just reminds me why I got into show business in the first place: screwing around with technology is just as fun and fulfilling as actually using it (provided that you're not on deadline and not screwing with it is an open option). And if you get into something new without learning anything new, then clearly you missed an important step along the way.

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New Podcast is up, live (-ish) from Boulder

Monday, April 09, 2007 • 01:25:28 AM MDT

Greetings from Colorado, whose official state slogan is "You brought the wrong kind of jacket."

No kidding. I've come here nine or ten times and you just can't make a correct call. Either you bring the heavy coat and you wind up sweating and swimming in it for two days, or you bring a light spring jacket and at least six times over the course of the week, you're seeing a vision of Ben Kenobi and croaking "Dagoba…system?" through cracked, frostbitten lips.

It was the last decision I had to make this morning before leaving the house. I finally resigned myself to defeat and headed out in the lush New England springtime wearing my heavy leather jacket, which was a good call because it's 32 degrees in Boulder. Fresh snow conspired to elevate the real-estate values of everything I surveyed from the balcony of my room after I ditched my bags and went out for a look-see.

Well, no matter. I'm here. I didn't get any sleep last night and therefore the time I intended to spend at a welcoming reception was instead spent in bed, very much unconscious in bed. But hey, no laws were broken.

I did find time tonight to record a quick podcast intro. iTunes people can subscribe to my limited-edition Conference On World Affairs podcast at yonder url:

itpc://www.cwob.com/cowacast/cowacast.xml

Non-iTunes people are welcome, too. I ain't particular.

http://www.cwob.com/cowacast/cowacast.xml

I don't intend to do much editing on this thing. I'm actually enjoying the low-techness, compared to the nit-picky effort I put into the Little Red Envelope podcasts (which, I insist and assure will be returning). I'm just speaking into an iPod with a Belkin microphone doohickey attached to it, connecting the iPod to my PowerBook to automatically copy the .WAV file into iTunes, converting it to an MP3 with an option-click, and then dragging the resulting file into Potion Factory's quite awesome Podcast Maker. Done and done.

Well, onward. I got two hours of sleep on the plane plus four hours between 4 and 9, so I'm going to mark that as "a full night's sleep" on the official scorecard and stay up all night.

No, it isn't a stupid idea. I have a 9 AM panel tomorrow that I don't want to oversleep for, plus I'll desperately need to be on a more human-like sleep schedule this week for all of my morning events. So shortchanging myself a little today will help me to zonk right out on Monday night and get a full eight hours before Tuesday cranks up again.

One final tidbit before I push the button: I think The Amazing Race passed through Denver International today.

As I and my pal Barbara threaded our way through the concourse to get our bags, I saw a bunch of scruffy camera and sound people. "Aw, crap," I thought. "Don't tell me that they're still filming 'The Real World' here." Because while I certainly don't dress like someone with a sense of dignity, I promise you that I don't want to wind up on TV.

But I was distracted by the crewpeople's gear. Each one had a small laminated tag about two or three inches square with a letter (or was it a number?) on it, attached via a spring clip. It jogged my memory. I'd seen those things before…but where?

And then I remembered: in certain shots of the racers in TAR you can see a tag just like this one dangling off of a backpack. I knew that each team is assigned a two-man crew (sound plus camera), and that they keep rotating the crews on a daily basis. Is this a system to make sure there's no question of who "belongs" to whom?

If I were alone, I would surely have hung around to see if I could spot a couple of panicky (or resigned to failure) people wearing a fanny-pack with a subtle red-and-yellow ribbon. People from the Conference had been at the airport all day long waiting to pick up speakers, and I quizzed one of them. Turns out she did see a couple in backpacks running like maniacs, now that she thought of it.

"I don't suppose one of them was a little person?" I asked, but no such luck. But still, it's fodder for thought.

If you watched "The Amazing Race" tonight, don't tell me who got eliminated. It'll be waiting for me on the TiVO on Saturday night.

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CoWA - Day Two.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007 • 01:19:36 PM MDT

Just enough time for a quick post…I don't have a panel until 3:30 today so I'm spending a half a day in my virtual office.

After a slight sleep-in. It was sort of a late night last night. There was a big party at the Alumni Center which was probably that most satisfying of social thingies. I met a dashed cool individual who (a) scores films, and (b) lives in the same Boston community as two aunts and my late grandparents and had a v.nice chat that I hope to follow up with some dinner back home in the Land of the Cod. I was pleased to alert them to the presence of a kick-ass cemetery right in their own town, recalling many afternoons spent strolling through its landscaped paths and century-old monuments. "It's routinely rated as one of the prettiest and best cemeteries to hang out in," I said, "though, er, I don't know what criteria they use to rank these things."

And in addition to meeting new folks I spent a couple of hours hanging out with old friends. There was a buffet dinner and seats were at a premium, but so long as there were some empty chairs arranged here and there and the big table where dessert for 120 had been laid out seemed to have lots of unused space, it wasn't a problem that we had to suffer with for very long.

"Did you hear that [name redacted] is moving here to Boulder?" I said to one such BFF in between bites of mini-key lime pies and stamp-sized brownies dusted with sugar, and I summarized an email that I'd just received from a mutual pal. "That miserable bastard!" she said, reading the message off my smartphone and then punching the buttons to get his number from the address book so she could berate him personally. It wasn't the "moving to Boulder" part that had irked her (Boulder is a very pleasant town, if you can get past their Puritanical ban on having as much oxygen in the air as those heathens raving it up at sea level) so much as the Not Hearing About It First, of course.

And for the record, among her many, many positive traits is her ability to move you from Miserable Bastard Status back into the Close Personal Friend column with a minimum of paperwork. All was right after a ten-minute conversation. Still, mental note: keep this woman in the loop. She's already a Double-Diamond Platinum Onyx Rewards-Club Cardholder in the Close Personal Friends of Andy Ihnatko organization but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to create a new designation slightly above that one.

Yesterday's panels went pretty well. I had a 9 AM talk about YouTube and Wikipedia and MySpace, which was a bit like one of those Iron Chef contests where they spring a cut of Kobe Beef, forty pounds of sea salt, and a Hostess Sno-Ball on you and you're given forty minutes to make a four-course meal from it. I got through it OK and nobody died.

The Comics and Graphic Novels panel went really well. It's a subject I'm very familiar with and one that I've really never talked about, which it pretty much an optimal situation that left the pump well-primed for success.

Only one problem: between the moderator and four panelists, I was really the only person who had any sort of practical familiarity with the stuff. Hell, I even have a couple of writing credits. Profoundly lame ones, but stil. By contrast, one member of the panel (the aforementioned composer) wrote and produced a minicomic as an insert for one of his concept albums, and the other two worked in media-related fields. Suffice to say that we weren't about to get into any fistfights over whether or not Marvel is squandering creative capital that had taken forty years to build in their pursuit of flashy "event" comics and astronomic sales.

In general, we're each given eight to ten minutes to speak. I started my iPod recording everything the moment this thing began and by the time the mic was handed to me, the final speaker…the screen read nine minutes and some seconds…including the moderator's introductions. So when things were opened up to Q&A, it's not unfair to say that I sort of dominated the conversation. Were I more clever, I probably could have come up with ways to get the others more involved. Dangit. I spoke to some of my fellow panelists at the party and they told me that they were actually quite relieved, so I suppose I don't have to feel guilty.

Anyway. I opened my remarks by asking "Who here knows the significance of Wednesday?" and was cheered to see about a third of the audience raise their hands. Cool; serious comix readers (who pick up the week's new comics the day they arrive in the shops) were well-represented. So there was some terrific discussion and when the thing ended, a half-d0zen of us lingered to talk some more about funnybooks.

And what a score: one older gent asked a question that began "I worked with Wil Eisner in the Army as he wrote and drew training comics…" which of course immediately made him the star of the show. Wil freaking Eisner, man! It's as if we were doing a panel on films and we have someone out there who had pitched in on "Citizen Kane" alongside Orson Welles.

I was damned eager to just hand him the microphone and have him tell stories about working with one of the five most important figures in the history of comics, but our moderator interrupted him at some point and asked (not angrily, but he said it) "But do you have a question?" I did take a moment to explain how cool it was to have this gent here but I think the moment sort of died there. A far as I was concerned, just hand the guy a mic and let him go on…!

Well, no matter. It was a fun day. Check out the podcast for the Comics panel. I'll throw together the first panel when I get some more time.

I'm sharing a house with my pal Bill Nack, a fairly awesome sportswriter now enjoying retirement. He's giving a talk on the modern evolution of language, and hit me up for info about words that have their basis in tech. In the course of explaining IM acronyms, I gave him his first demo of text-messaging. Soon he was texting his wife back and forth. "Remarkable!" he declared, his mind soundly boggled.

Nifty. I keep forgetting that there are plenty of folks out there for whom this is all very new and nearly miraculous. It actually made me feel a little bit guilty. I'm a minor curmudgeon when it comes to texting. It's fine for firing off quick messages that deliver specific information that requires immediate attention ("I'm running late; meet you at the restaurant in 20 minutes," "Is there a fire extinguisher anywhere in your guest cottage?" — that sort of thing). But my eyes roll when I think of these kids today texting each other like demons. On phones. That they could be using to just have this conversation for real.

Yet when I demo this to somebody with at least a quarter-century on me, he can immediately see how keen this stuff is. There's a message there, I'd say.

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One for you, nineteen for me

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 • 07:35:22 PM EDT

"IRS Grants NE Taxpayers Special Reprieve For Nor'Easter"

This was a page-one headline in yesterday's paper. It is also a new reason why some people hate the media.

I hate Tax Day more than most. (a) Because I have the same relationship with doing taxes as Indiana Jones has with snakes, and (b) Because I'm always out of town the week before they're due. April is always a blur; I spend the first week desperately trying to get ahead on work so that I can afford to close down my office for a week, and then I spend the second week in Colorado at the Conference on World Affairs. All I can say is thank God for those brave men who ducked behind fences and trees and shot the hell out of the accursed lobsterbacks at Lexington and Concord. They helped to win freedom for all Americans (well, the white ones; close enough) but they also bought me an extra day to get my 1040 in, which was awfully decent of them.

(Patriots Day is a holiday in New England, which means that the IRS processing center is closed and thus we get a 24-hour mulligan, y'see.)

Typically, I get all my tax stuff in order before I leave for Colorado. I do all of the spreadsheet stuff the day after I get home, and by Tax Day I just have an hour or so of form-filling left to do. But still, it's real toothpick-in-the-eyeball stuff, every moment of it. So when I saw the headline in the Globe, it was like getting a snow day from school.

Aha. But then I went ahead and took the time to actually read the article, which explained that the extension was only available to people who could prove that their basements were flooded or that their power was off or that they'd caught some other similar lucky break. Oh, well.

I wonder how many taxophobes saw the headline and then were so busy dancing that they didn't realize that they were desperately clinging to a lie?

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CoWA Blackbird (Free Music!)

Thursday, April 19, 2007 • 11:36:24 PM EDT

Here's a little musical gift to you, from me, via two people way more talented than I:

That's Derek Nash on saxophone and Henry Butler on piano. Click on the photo if you want the full background story on this recording; it's a fairly typical scene from the Conference on World Affairs.

Every year, lots of jazz musicians participate in the Conference On World Affairs and there's a huge concert on Tuesday night. But there are also nightly parties…and when there's a piano somewhere in the house there's always the possibility that someone will start noodling around on the thing. Which will inspire somebody else to dash back into the coatroom to retrieve an instrument, and before you know it, there's genius splattering all over the place, just like the bits of brain and bone on the walls of a lonely Arizona motel room in the third reel of any good low-budget movie.

I'm posting this MP3 with the kind permission of the artists. You're welcome to enjoy and share it under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. You may not sell it, you may not include it in any other works, nor may you create derivative works based on it; you must also ensure that the attributions remain intact. It's all in the metadata.

(Which only seems fair, right?)

If you can stop being impressed by the music for just a moment (But how? Remember, Derek and Henry were just fooling around, unrehearsed), be impressed with Belkin's TuneTalk Stereo recording accessory for the iPod. The two guys had been playing for ten minutes before I belatedly realized that hey, I had the TuneTalk and my iPod in my jacket pocket loafing around the whole time. I'd been using this system to record my panels for the CoWA CWoBCast, y'see. Cursing myself slightly (certainly not loudly enough to interfere with the music; that would have been embarrassing), I snapped it together, started a recording going, and then I just sort of propped it up on a little end table next to the piano and left it there. I had missed a tune with some sweet, sweet vocals by Lillian Boute (dammit), but at least I managed to get this.

I was pretty floored by the results. I don't think anyone would believe that it's a studio recording (you'll find that it has the rich, immersive sound separation that only two microphones situated a half an inch apart can deliver) but hell, I've bought plenty of live recordings from the iTunes Store that didn't sound this good. Good work, Belkin!

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The High-Wire Act

Friday, April 20, 2007 • 04:47:58 PM EDT

I'm in serious trouble.

I can't have cable TV in my office. I musn't. I mustn't!

And yet, apparently, I do. As of yesterday.

See, I used to get my broadband from Comcast. They won the contract with their compelling argument "We're the only ones offering high-speed Internet in your community…so lick us." Then Verizon brought FiOS service into my street, promising (and whaddya know…actually delivering) at least twice the speed at the same price as Comcast.

The other Big Win was that they hooked it up so that I get copper right into my office. With Comcast, they had to tie the modem into the TV cable down in the living room, which meant that I was getting two bars of AirPort here on the other side of the house.

Verizon screwed Comcast yet again a few weeks ago by offering a competing service with better content at a better price. "Sure, you betcha," I said to the nice man with the clipboard, and I set an appointment for the installer to come on by in a few days.

He came on by. "Now I'm just going to have to do some work on your router," he said, with the cheer of someone who has no idea that this means they'd going to have to wade through the recently-demilitarized zone known as My Office. Worse than that: My Office, when I'm On Deadline and Trying To Get Ahead On Work Before Leaving For A Weeklong Conference. It's where lost souls go when they learn they've been shunned by both Heaven and Hell. It is not a happy place.

I had no idea that switching the living room cable connection to a new provider would require access to my router. He took me completely by surprise. I thought it was a big deal that I had to make sure I was awake at 8 AM with my teeth brushed and my pants on to meet him. I certainly wasn't prepared for this.

I blinked hard a few times and asked if he could come back after I'd had a chance to tidy things up. He said that this wouldn't be a problem and asked when he should return. I checked my watch, glanced up the stairs, glanced back at my watch and then said "Three and a half weeks?"

Yesterday was the big day. I'd spent all day Wednesday cleaning, and rediscovering probably about $5000 worth of hardware and software that I had forgotten I owned. Plus, a cat that fortunately had learned to hunt and kill the mice and snakes that had been attracted by all the half-eaten sandwiches scattered around the place. He showed up on time and I settled into the sofa with my PowerBook.

I still had no idea why he needed to spend any time at all in my office, honestly. It seemed like one of those acupuncture deals where they cure a headache by jabbing a needle in your big toe. I mean, I'd imagined that the whole reason why the Mysterious Gray Blinking Cabinet went into my power closet in the basement was so that additional services could be added with little muss and fuss. Just string a new cable from the MGBC into the living room, right?

Nope; a new cable had to go from the pole into my office and I also needed a new router.

He was a nice, hardworking chap and in the midst of a lively discussion about "Reservoir Dogs," "Jackie Brown" and the titanic ego of Quentin Tarentino (I was listening to a podcast interview on my AppleTV while he worked) he said the worst thing he could have possibly said:

"So, do you want a cable box up here, too?"

Bastard!

I can't have cable here in the office. It'd be way too big a distraction. I do have the TV, but that's actually a productivity-enhancer: I watch movies and recorded TV while I slog through email and stuff. It also helps to keep my butt in the office when I have an urge to flee the scene.

My office has traditionally had a wonderful defense system against cable TV infiltration: walls and floors. Would I like cable in here? Well, sure. Do I want it badly enough to have workmen run cable all the way across the hypotenuse of the house? Well, not if it's that much trouble. To say nothing of the cost of having it done. The idea dies on the vine.

But — now, see if you can follow this — in order for the Verizon cable box down in the living room to talk to Verizon Intergalactic HQ, it has to be able to talk to the router. And it can't do so so via WiFi; it has to be over copper. And the most sensible way for these two devices to have a chat is for there to be copper Cable TV cable between the two.

The upshot is that the installer had to — had to — run Cable TV into my office.

The above is what I learned after I said that no, it really wasn't worth the trouble. "I can just put a splitter on this coax going into the router," he said. "Done and done."

(That postscript is actually more like what I would have said if I were him, but I'm the one telling the story.)

I was desperate for a good reason not to have a cable box in my office. Fortunately, he gave me one.

"So how much will the additional box cost me?"

"$4.95 a month."

Well, there you go. I'm an independent freelance journalist. Do I look like I have that kind of money to throw around?

(Er…yes, I did buy that SLR just a few months ago. But shut up; this line of thought is working and I don't need people like you messing with it.)

The cherry on top was the information that I could call Verizon at any time and order a second box and install it myself. So why rush it?

Today, I did my email and made some phone calls. It was the end of the morning shift and I was goofing around before starting the next session.

The splitter was right there, three feet away from the Sony VCR I've got next to my desk. I keep it nearby for when I need to turn videocassettes into QuickTimes.

It has a cable TV tuner.

I fished a coax cable out of the Analog Box, hooked one to the other, told the VCR to auto-program…and gorblimey: I win.

Victory snatched from defeat. See, the Verizon cable downstaurs had sort of screwed me up. My TiVO in the living room is a Series 1 (when I learned that my "lifetime pass" couldn't be transferred to a new one, I lost all interest in upgrading to a Series 2 or 3). It can only tune the bottom 100 channels of any cable system. Comcast, for all its faults (including the baby farms in Chile; we must never let them off the hook for the baby farms in Chile, people), put all of the good stuff in the bottom 100. Every regular TV show I would ever want to record was down there. Verizon is just the opposite. TiVO can grab the broadcast networks, but that's about it. That's why I got the Verizon box with the built-in PVR; otherwise, I couldn't record stuff while I'm away or working. I'd decided to move the TiVO up into the office and hook it up to an antenna so my Lifetime Pass wouldn't go to waste.

Ah! But this free Verizon feed gives me all of the broadcast stations — and here in Radiation Village, half of them come in all herringbone-ey over the rabbit ears. Plus, I get a third PBS station and the WGN Superstation. (And two Telemundos and some religious hairshirt channel, but we can just delete those from the TiVO lineup, right?)

(On second thought: I'll keep the Telemundos. If the religious channel ever starts putting curvy bikini models to good use on their game shows, I'll reconsider.)

On top of that, I can give the Slingbox a copper network connection to my network, because (unlike the previous state of affairs in the living room) it's within spitting difference of all the wires it needs. Which is a Big Win because I'd never gotten around to putting it on my main network. Instead, it had its own dedicated AirPort network. Connecting to the Slingbox at home meant disconnecting from the data network Accessing it from outside the house was impossible.

(Yes, there was a way around that. But that would have involved, you know, work.)

Verizon had also put the Slingbox out of the picture for much the same reasons. So: win-win-win. I can split the signal to both the Slingbox/TiVO and to the EyeTV so that it's constantly recording cool stuff for the AppleTV and the iPod. I'm getting crisp, clear channels up and down for the first time since I moved in here, and at last, I can have the TiVO always record Letterman and the Late Late Show…before, those shows just took up too much of the TiVO's space.

I'm still adamant: I can't have cable in the office. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not breaking any Prime Directives here. I'm still only getting free, broadcast TV.

It's just arriving in a cable wrapper.

But God help me if I ever start making so much money that I feel I can afford the $5 a month for that extra cable box. It'd be curtains, trust me. Because I Can't Have (etc. etc.)

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What's Andy Watching?

Tuesday, April 24, 2007 • 02:35:24 AM EDT

I think I've pretty much finished restoring peace and stability to the region after the tremendous upheavals wrought by the arrival of a new cable TV provider to the house. But then, I had a workable plan before I went in, and a clear definition of goals and all the assets I needed to achieve them within a reasonable timetable.

TiVO is now here in the office, hooked up to the Free Cable that Verizon — for reasons passing understanding — needed to put into my office. Yes, it's just the broadcast channels, but many of the networks and independent stations have been herringboney and snowy at best. Plus, again, when I take a spin up and down the dial I now have two opportunities to catch Sabado Gigante Internacional.

TiVO's job is now to grab all of those shows that fall into the category of the "I'll watch it if there's a good guest on" variety. I like Craig Ferguson and think he's a woefully unappreciated monologuist and interviewer…but I just didn't have the hard-drive capacity to record it every night. Not when there was such an awfully high chance that I'd choose his show from the menu and discover that he was interviewing not one, but two teenagers with shows on the CW.

As soon as everything was hooked up, and TiVO's trademarked "BLING! blk-blk-blk-BLORK!" sound effects were reverberating through my office for the very first time, I sat TiVO down for its exit interview. It had worked in the living room for many years and it was time for it to tell me how it all went. Normally, the only point of this kind of exit interview is to start up the paper trail that will ultimately allow you to terminate the employee's dental plan, but here, my selfish motive was to jot down a list of all the cable shows that TiVO was set to auto-record, so I could reproduce it as best I could on the Verizon DVR downstairs.

It was a neat little list. I wasn't very diligent about keeping TiVO's list of Season Passes tidy, so at least half of its entries were programs that haven't aired for years. I'd left myself a clear paper trail of the sort of shows that I — at one point or another — had regarded as good enough not to miss.

Here's the first ten, embroidered with some color commentary.

The Amazing Race: All-Stars

TAR is the only competitive reality show worth a damn. Yes, you may quote me. The format does away with the three most annoying aspects of those kinds of shows: "alliances" that let a group of contestants pick off others at will, "immunities" that give folks a free pass to the next round, and the tightly-controlled scenarios and environments in which nothing happens that the producers didn't orchestrate, or at least foresee. In each leg of the race, you get to the mat last and you're out. Probably. The show's producers laid out the route and the challenges, but could they have predicted things like a cabbie who takes the first-place team on a 40-minute detour so he can drive his cousin to work? And who can't relate to the scenario of knowing that you're either just going to make your flight or you're just going to miss it...and your success hinges on whether you wait for the airport tram or just run like hell for the gate? Terrific stuff.

The Red Green Show

I got hooked on this in the early seasons; back then, it featured a winning combination of both fantastically clever and desperately cheap laughs. Also, you know, all of the Handyman segments could almost work. Like using a garage-door opener to put gullwing doors on an old K-Car. The show got pretty stale in the past X years, though.

Cover Wars (VH1)

I liked the whole premise behind this show: instead of a competition featuring bands who wanted to be the next U2, this show featured cover bands. The true working-class musicians, who'd drive a van all over Creation just to get a chance to play in front of an audience and maybe make enough money to cover the cost of gas. And Paul Shaffer should host more shows.

The Office

What needs to be said? What an amazing achievement. It's hysterically funny on its own, but when you think about the challenges of Americanizing a BBC megahit, it's clear that there were a million ways to screw it up and only two or three ways to get it right. And this is probably the best ensemble cast on TV right now.

INQUELING

I missed this episode of "Batman Beyond" and was hoping to catch it again. I think I finally got it off of Netflix.

BANDS ON THE RUN

So close to being a Really Quite Awesome reality show. Four bands have to drive from city to city, playing gigs, selling their CDs and merch at the shows. They're booked into one show per city, but they can hustle as many side gigs on their own as they want. Every few cities, they play together in one venue in a Battle of the Bands. The audience's chosen favorite is immune. The band that's made the least money up to that point is out. It actually would have been better as a straight documentary without the competition aspect, a show that answers a simple question: exactly how hard does an unsigned band have to work to have a productive tour?

Junkyard Wars (TLC)

SO much to love about this reality competition. Teams of nerds show up at a scrapyard and are given an assignment: build a steam-powered car; a drag racer; a harvesting machine; etc. With the aid of one expert each (an engineer who designs farm equipment, for instance), they have one day to build it, using only the junk materials they can scavenge in the scrapyard. On Day Two, their machines go head-to-head. The prize: just bragging rights, and the right to move on to the semi-finals and maybe be crowned champion. Granted, the scrapyard was seeded to ensure that it was possible to build a successful machine, but they were still junky parts, and the producers had no way to ensure that the teams would choose the "right" things. Any fan of the show spent a large amount of the first twenty minutes muttering "test the engine before you install it; test the engine before you install it; test the engine..." after a team finally wrenched and torched a grimy V8 free from a bashed-up old Cadillac. Also: producer/co-host Kathy Rogers is deee-lectable.

SCTV

'Nuff Said. Still one of the gold standards of comedy. In my old age, I think there are some sketches that should have been cut, ones which only seemed funny to the folks writing and performing the stuff in isolation, but it was still a real Camelot of TV comedy. The circumstances under which it happened will never be repeated.

Project Greenlight

It's the kind of reality show I like: the sort where the producers really can't meddle in what's happening and the only control they really have is in how the series is edited. The winner of a pre-show screenplay competition gets a million bucks or so to make their movie, with the results being filmed for TV and released in theaters by Miramax. I so wanted to slap the first-season director. I've never made a movie in my life, and even I knew that if you've only got a million bucks, you don't shoot a period piece and you don't try to shoot underneath elevated subway tracks and you don't put a million different indoor and outdoor locations in the script. Some of my favorite shows are about smart people who are good at doing something doing that thing they're good at. But when idiots stumble inexorably towards catastrophic failure, well, that works, too.

The Monastery

I LOVED this show. A handful of men in periods of transition (just home from Iraq, undergoing treatment for substance abuse, just released from prison, etc.) spend a month together in a monastery. Not to become monks, but just to experience a quiet month of guided contemplation. It was quite wonderful, and not nearly as churchy as you'd assume. The Abbot seemed to have no desire or need to press the Bible onto anybody (much to the frustration of one of the men, who was seriously considering becoming a priest). Instead, he focused on fairly universal ideas that encouraged the men to find their own peace. The purpose of spending an entire day alone and not speaking wasn't "Because God will smite you if you don't" but "if you eliminate all outside distractions, you might find yourself thinking about stuff that you kept pushing aside." No mumbo-jumbo, no feel-good moments, no challenges and no winners and losers. Just a chance to follow these people -- including the monks -- for thirty days. It was also a great peek into a the monastic life. As part of the business of the day, the Abbot reviewed a monk's listed inventory. "What does a monk need with two suitcases?" he wondered. I wondered about the three CDs the monk had. One of them would obviously be Elvis Costello's "My Aim Is True"...but what were the other two? I still haven't seen the final episode; TiVO screwed up!!!

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Don't make me over...

Wednesday, April 25, 2007 • 02:55:17 AM EDT

Honestly, I feel as though I've had a really low-budget unambitious Queer Eye/What Not To Wear makeover. I've felt just a bit discombobulated all day long.

Firstly, I'm not wearing glasses. Screw 'em. No glasses. That's the rule. I have been empowered and emboldened by my first eye exam in five years. "Well, I can write you a prescription if you want," the doctor said, after the ritual humiliation with the slides and the Thomas Dolby adjustable eyeglasses. "But honestly, you're right on that borderline between needing glasses and not needing them."

Which, frankly, made me want to double-check his degree. But I could read it plainly from six feet away, so I suppose I had proved his point.

I actually had imagined that my eyesight had gotten worse, if anything. A while back, I had a fairly horrendous eye infection. "The pressure inside the eye had been above sixty," I proudly related, and the doc was duly impressed. As in, he repeated the number back to me to make sure that I hadn't quoted a far lower and more sensible number. It never fails. I remember that even during my emergency appointment with a different eye doctor, it had caused a bit of excitement. The kid who does the routine exams was quickly replaced by the man who owned the practice, who just as quickly made a phone call and then asked how quickly I could get to a special clinic downtown, viz:

I had plenty of opportunities to get this picture, because I would wind up making that trip and waiting in that examination room once or twice a week for quite a little run there. Brows were furrowed, situations were monitored, drugs were administered and dosages were adjusted. It all ended happily; the Worst-Case Scenario that had been outlined to me on that First Day of Excitement had failed to pass. IE, every year on "Talk Like A Pirate Day," friends do not stop in mid-sentence and suddenly say "Oh, God…I'm sorry Andy…that was so stupid and insensitive of me…"

Still, it left my vision a little bit weaker on that side. Plus, I acquired this sexy duelling scar on the bridge of my nose. It may look like the sort of thing that a virus leaves behind when it scabs badly, but in truth I was defending a Countess' honor. Let's just say that you encounter all kinds of people at a university medical facility.

But I digress. The glasses that I wear every day mostly out of habit had accumulated a heroic collection of scratches. And a week ago, one of its silicone nosepads broke off. Clearly, my glasses were eager to go home to Jesus, so it was time to head down to Lenscrafters, prescription in hand, for a replacement pair.

The swine refused to refill it. Something about the fact that the prescription had been written in 2002 or something. The bastards.

Naturally, they were more than happy to send me to their in-house optometrist. Double-bastards. Instead, I drove two or three towns away and made an appointment with a doctor I'd last seen twenty years ago…no, probably earlier. He's the doc that I used to go to when I was a kid, and the school system wouldn't allow me to pick up a hockey stick and kill on behalf of my country unless I could furnish a note certifying that I could visually segregate friend from foe.

Shockingly, he remembered me (my Dad still goes to him) and we had a fine old time. "You have some of your Dad's astigmatism," the Doctor noted, and I could only reply that he was only too happy to get rid of it. This is how we passed a steady thirty minutes.

If I'd taken my business to Lenscrafters, their doc would have surely recommended contact lenses and trifocals, with an outpatient radial keratotomy just to drop a plump rd cherry on the top of my ophthalmological sundae. Instead, I left the optometrist's office with a new, slightly weaker prescription in my wallet and no need to come back In About An Hour. Or at all, really, unless after a week or so I feel that I want to return to a world in which things twenty feet away have crisp edges. I don't need glasses for driving — he said so and everything — so it's really a free choice.

I'm going to give the "no glasses" thing a try. In preparation for the eye exam, I hadn't worn my glasses all morning, just to make sure that my eye muscles had taken a nice couple of laps around the track before I was forced to try to tell the difference between a Z and an E from across a dimly-lit room. It's now the end of the day and I'm realizing how nice it is not to have to keep cleaning them. So there's a certain intangible attraction to keeping this "no glasses" thing going.

Oh, and last night, I fell asleep with my old glasses on, and I broke one of the sidepieces off while turning over. So there's that as well.

On this same day, my daily-wear wristwatch was — with regret — moved from the Missing In Action list to the rolls of the Missing, Presumed Dead. The search and rescue helicopters have been recalled to base. A short but tasteful service will be held, and then the family will start figuring out how to spend all that insurance money.

Yeah. Hell if I know what happened to it. I strap the damned thing on every morning, so it would have to be within some reasonable radius of the little tray where I deposit it every night, wouldn't you think? It's a fine theory but like the concept of painting a black circle on the ground and then diving down into this new hole to avoid getting hit by an oncoming truck, empirical testing tends to reveal fundamental flaws in the underlying logic.

As it happened, I was headed to Coolidge Corner tonight for dinner. So rather than keep on looking for a Timex I'd paid $20 for, I just shrugged and planned to return to the very same store where I'd originally bought it.

Buying that watch six or seven years ago was a proud act of defiance. In 2001, I felt that the digital wristwatch industry had let me down. I hadn't really shopped for one in several years, having fallen desperately in love with a watch shaped like the Millennium Falcon. True, the dial was covered by the top half of the starfreighter and the watch could only tell you the time if you had your other hand free to pop the cover open, but it was a hell of a timepiece and I was very sad when one of the lugs holding the band in place broke clean off.

Yes, I still had another copy mint-in-box. I'd bought three, some years earlier. But if I broke this last one…well, then I wouldn't have any, right? So I was now in the market for a new watch, and I was thrilled to imagine the exciting miracles in digital watch technology that the world's engineers had surely managed to tease from the aether during my long absence from this market.

Hey. Cool. The databank watch now holds a hundred names and phone numbers instead of just fifty.

Huh.

Seriously. That was it? That was the best that Timex and Casio and Seiko could do in six or seven years' time? Really?

I was pretty pissed. My heart had a cavernous hole that only sweet, sweet revenge could pave over.

"Oh, dear God," Mr. Casio's spineless personal assistant breathed, reading and re-reading the printout. "Ihnatko is so angry that he's decided that his next wristwatch will be an analog one."

Not even one that shows the date in a little window, said a handwritten postscript. The assistant threw himself out a seventeenth-story window, not bothering to open it first. This death was both faster and less painful than the one awaiting the man who delivered news such as this.

If you want to get an old-timey wristwatch and you're in the Boston area, the only place to go is Brookline News & Gift on Harvard Street in Brookline. I have a theory about this shop: I think the proprietor just enjoys ordering stuff out of wholesale catalogues. Then the merchandise arrives and he just has to sort of stick it someplace in order to make room for whatever's coming next. Because Lord knows, making an aggressive attempt to sell any of it never really becomes a priority.

And this sort of thing has been happening since 1970. It's a fascinating shop; from floor to ceiling, every available nook and cranny is packed with a mixture of brand new stuff and vintage items that were by no means vintage when they first arrived. You can see board games as current as this year's biggest hits, stacked on top of ones featuring a toothy Henry Winkler grinning on the side of the box and sticking his thumbs up in the air. You'll find novelty items that were at the height of humor when originally manufactured, which after ten or fifteen years suddenly started to seem maybe just a little bit racist, and which have now become merely kitschy and harmless.

Here I marched. I spent a few minutes peering into a wall-mounted glass case, marveling at black plastic Casio watches that had been on every kid's wrist back when I was in high school, before I saw two dusty plastic spinner cases on top of a case of pipes and cigars. "TIMEX," the spinners beckoned.

Just the thing. But they were both well-defended by a phalanx of books and pipe stands, dusty soldiers that angrily defied anybody to browse or (worst of all) actually purchase anything within.

"Would you like me to spin these for you?" the owner offered. Thank God. And, with a combination of hand signals and spoken commands that would have impressed the crane operator who had lifted the Eiffel Tower up off its shipping barge and deposited it upright on its pedestal, the two of us successfully isolated a Timex Expedition from its encasement without causing the game board to buzz and the nose to light up.

It was actually a new-ish watch. In a nod to modern times and my increasinly less-radical attitude, it does indeed tell the date as well as the time. Price: $35, just two or three bucks more than the Amazon.com price. Sold.

I'm probably over-selling the age of this store's stock. But I'm certainly not exagerrating the level of clutter. You can stand in one spot and slowly turn your head in ten-degree increments, and in the space of five minutes you will see more merchandise (and a greater variety of same) than you can during a whole hour of tramping around a Best Buy. It's a very special shop, and the fact that it's just two doors down from a premium ice-cream place only underscores your need to stop by.

More than anything else, I knew that the sort of watch I wanted to buy would be available at this shop. We need stores like this. It's rare that you can come across exactly the sort of thing you were looking for.

And I wasn't wearing my usual hat.

Let me explain that my hat isn't a trademark and it isn't an affectation. Sadly, this wide-brimmed rancher's hat is indeed my idea of style, fashion, and function. I only ask that you react to it the same way you'd react to a middle-schooler's science fair diorama of the Solar System. Yes, the object doesn't show a tremendous amount of facility or knowledge, but it's the best that they could do and it's a completely sincere undertaking. One should keep this in mind before any firing off any rude comments.

I couldn't wear it today because I was a colossal dunderhead.

I have a standing dinner date that falls on the last Tuesday of every month. My personal ROM has been re-flashed with this appointment and I don't even bother to formally log it into iCal. So imagine my surprise to learn that April 24 was in fact the last Tuesday of the month.

Most of the world was ahead of me with this. I have no explanation. It simply caught me by surprise. I'd been testing an iChat connection between my office and the site of the Louisville Computer Society Macintosh User Group's regular meeting, when the member I was chatting with let it slip that the 24th was indeed the night that I'd agreed to a month or so earlier. I mean, as if he had no idea.

A cleverer species or gender than I would have seen this coming.

But alas, I'm stuck with the chromosomes and DNA that I was issued at the factory and there was nothing for it but find a way. Fortunately, there was a Starbucks near the restaurant, and I was scheduled to appear just a half an hour before dinner. So I'd camp out at the Starbucks, throwing elbows into the midsections of budding failed novelists as necessary to secure a comfortable chair, do the chat via the T-Mobile WiFi, and show up late for dinner.

My hat has its strengths and its weaknesses. But it's incompatible with chat headsets, thus necessitating the wearing of the cap I bought at the U of Colorado bookstore a couple of weeks ago. I'd purchased it chiefly as something I can wear around the office when my hair isn't behaving. Also, I bought a flash head for my SLR a month or two ago and it proved to be wholly incompatible with a big hat like mine.

In any event, those Louisville folks had been very kind to invite me to speak to their group, and to subject them to my Geek Hair without benefit of some sort of shield seemed to be the height of ingratitude.

To summarize: I wasn't wearing glasses, and I've worn 'em nearly every day since I was twenty. I was wearing a watch different from the one that had been parked on my wrist since the Clinton administration. And I was wearing a baseball cap instead of my usual. Not even a Red Sox cap, but one proudly promoting a Western university.

It's not like I didn't feel like me, you understand. But when I caught a glimpse of myself in a store window — it was sunny so I was wearing my Ray-Bans — it wasn't hard to imagine that this is how I'd look if I ever appeared on security-camera footage broadcast on the local evening news accompanied by some sort of 1-800 tipline. There was something about my appearance that certainly said loud and clear "This individual is trying not to be recognized." It's the sort of appearance that would provoke a dramatic and unfortunate consequence inside a bank or casino.

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CoWACast Show 7 - The Art Of The Joke

Thursday, April 26, 2007 • 04:09:18 AM EDT

I've just uploaded Show Seven of the CoWACast - "The Art Of The Joke." For those of you coming in late, I recorded all of my opening comments and some of the panel commentary during the nine panels I did at the Conference On World Affairs a couple of weeks ago. One by one, these recordings are making their way towards the podcast, embroidered with an intro and a post-panel wrapup.

Incidentally, there's a new piece of music that leads the show in and tails it off. It's my own composition but it has a bit of trivia about it that I think one or two avid podcast listeners will figure out without too much trouble.

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Not quite Abbey Road, but still...

Monday, April 30, 2007 • 04:35:55 AM EDT

A new PanelCast episode from my Conference On World Affairs blatherings is now up on the server and fresh from the microwave. "Burning Man: Geeks And Hippies Join Hands" was a pleasant little outing which I walked into with a certain reasonable degree of itchiness — it's like that nightmare where you're sitting for an exam on a subject you never studied — but it turned out to be one of my favorite panels of the whole week.

I'm also offering the Special Expanded Limited Edition Director's Cut Platinum Edition of the "Art Of The Joke" panel. I had the absolutely horrifying experience of having the first version of this panel come up on Shuffle Play while I was out running some errands the other day. There was a certain lack of energy in my intro and wrapup that would make any reasonable listener thing "Good God…it almost sounds as if Andy was lying in bed under a snuggly warm comforter while he recorded that!"

Hah! Shows what you know, Reasonable Listener: I was was lying under a snuggly warm comforter on my sofa.

Well, lesson learned: it's important that you expend at least a certain minimum number of calories during any bout of public speaking, lest you wind up duplicating the breakneck pace and fascinating content of a patient whose anesthesiologist has just told him to count backwards slowly from 100.

So I've established Duncecap Recording Studio "A." A corner of my office is now dedicated to the recording of interviews and podcasts, which tend to happen rather often, these days. Note the uncomfortable steel stool: I assure you that what appears to be padding is merely a cruel tease. This hard chair forces the performer to keep fidgeting and shifting, thus keeping the energy level up, and it also doles out enough punishment that he is also motivated to wrap things up quickly…which is another a good thing for a podcast.

It bears mentioning that nearly of Duncecap Studios' fixtures and furniture is salvage. The stool is a recent MIT Flea find ($15), the mic stand was an unboxed clearance item from Daddy's Junky Music ($10) and the typing table is a marvelous item that I rescued from a shortsighted stranger's trash a few years ago.

Sure, it's a distinctly humble setup…but as of a couple of weeks ago, it's better than the studio Don Imus has, isn't it?

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You Must Believe In Spring

Monday, April 30, 2007 • 06:27:32 PM EDT

Spring has officially begun: today, I logged the first sighting of a woman in short-shorts. And it was the kind of sighting that mattered, too. There was absolutely no need to pull her over and ask to see her paperwork. As she climbed the stairs in front of the post office I was immediately and absolutely certain that she'd passed the certification process and been cleared by county, state, and federal authorities to wear short-shorts, hot pants, and related styles of highly exciting and revealing Spring and Summertime trousers out in public.

Were that this was always the case! Some Internet-based retailers will sell these controlled tailorings to just about anybody, without asking to see a license or an ID. And the results are utterly horrifying. Here we are, honest, hardworking straight men and gay women, slogging through month after month of gray, icy weather, enduring weeks of early sunsets and deepening depression with only one light of hope drawing us forward towards the horizon: Spring is coming…women in hot pants will soon be here.

It's not much, but it's enough to keep us away from the Stoli bottle for yet another 17-hour night. And then Spring arrives, we bound out the door to claim our just reward for simple survival. And what do we see? Women who clearly don't understand why these simple rules benefit us all. All of us!

It's just bloody selfish. That's what it is.

You know what? There are days when it's really hot and humid and I'd certainly like to go out in public without a shirt on. But do I? No, I do not. Not even the year when I was on the swim team and I looked pretty good and I actually passed the first round of certification and was invited to drive out to the regional Torso Office in Springfield for closer scrutiny by a panel of elected officials. I came damned close, yes…but I didn't get that coveted blue wallet card.

I could have taken my shirt off and gotten away with it for a while, sure. But I didn't want to inflict an even marginally unfortunate bare male torso on the general populace. I sure didn't want to experience the humiliation that ensues when you're called out and discovered, and forced to wear that big radio-tagged Polarfleece for the duration of your sentence.

We're all in this together, people. Sometimes I think there are folks who simply don't understand the concept of "community."

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