So here's what I have to say on the subject of blogs: the only thing worse than a blog about blogging (here I specifically and emphatically exempt Dave Winer's) is a blog about the blog.

("What an oddly-constructed sentence," you're thinking. Those of you who've had your morning drug of choice and whose wetware is now fully online are also thinking that the statement is fundamentally steeped in hypocrisy. "Aha!" you say, eyes widening in accusation. "You claim to hate blogs about blogging. Yet how have you chosen to complain about blogging? In your blog! J'Accuse!"

To which I reply: "". IE, in lieu of a spoken Wilde-an riposte, I opt to say nothing and assume that by whomping you over the head with a garbage-can lid, I'm really expressing everything that needs to be said. End of aside.)

There's an obvious case-in-point in my browser's History menu. Bonfiglio (that isn't the author's name, but play along with me) updates his blog daily. Good for him, but look, the boy needs to go out and join the Merchant Marine. Or ditch his cubicle job and go work for a bus-station tattoo parlor. Maybe eat a bad clam and have a dream in which a man suddenly appears riding a flying geranium and commands him to visit every single McDonalds in Indiana and buy a Cheeseburger Happy Meal, documenting the adventure as he goes.

Something, anything to make this a life worth documenting.

Alas, as it is, he's making life very, very easy for his prospective assassin. A real professional triggerman would start off with a quick Google search, you see (I'm guessing, but I know that's what I'd do). He'd stumble across Bonfiglio's blog and after reading about a week's worth of entries it'd be pretty obvious that he wouldn't be carefully stalking his prey through the unpredictable subways and marketplaces of the city with this one. No, all he has to do is set up a sniper rifle on a tripod across the street from the guy's apartment. He'd take his sweet time fine-aiming it at the empty chair in front of the Playstation, lock it in position, and then spend the rest of the afternoon there on the roof eating Fig Newtons until Bonfiglio comes home. Then you just reach up and pull the trigger, after counting to 200. For the first time since entering the field of Paid Assassinry, he'd actually make it to one of his kids' soccer practices.

(Pointless aside: Martin Short is interviewing Dennis Miller on "Primetime Glick." Jiminy Glick is bent over his chair and Miller compares the sight to Buzz Aldrin looking out over Hadley Rille. "Wrong mission, jerko," I think. "Aldrin was the LMP on Apollo 11, which visited Mare Tranquillitaris. Do you really think they'd have had the very first lunar crew fly straight into a frickin' mountain? The crew of Apollo 15 visited Hadley. Does the name 'Jim Irwin' do anything for you, cha-cha?"

So either Dennis Miller is a big loser or I am: Discuss. End of aside.)

I mean, I'm pleased that Bonfiglio's finding the time to write and publish something every day. Writing is a muscle that responds well to regular exercise. But really, the man has nothing to share. He goes to work, he comes home, he plays video games, he goes to bed, he goes to work again. Which admittedly isn't terribly out of phase with my own life, but he's unwilling to talk about his work. He has an interesting job — he's an assistant to a Famous Person — but he doesn't want to talk about that.

Apart from the updates about his neverending battle with a PS2 controller ("Finished GTA-VC. Don't know if I'm going to buy Tony Hawk 4 next, or wait for the new Tomb Raider") he also talks about how he has nothing to talk about on his blog because nothing really interesting is going on. He's blogging because he has a blog. All told, reading one of Bonfiglio's posts is a lot like that phone call you get from a friend after he gets his first cellphone.

So why haven't I updated this blog in a month and a half? Three reasons, each eating up about two weeks apiece:

I Just Didn't Feel Like It. Sometimes, I'm feeling Quippy. Hey, a funny little thing happened the other day. I've instructed TiVO to alert me whenever Gene Hackman shows up anywhere on my cable dial in any form whatsoever...which is only smart, as Gene Hackman Is Always Good. Even in a bad movie, Gene Hackman can be counted on to be the One Good Thing Therein.

So imagine my shock and delight when TiVO told me that he'd be appearing in a "Charlie's Angels" rerun next week.

I mean, come on..."Charlie's Angels"? I checked the date of the episode. Was Hackman in a major career slump when he did this one? Spent all his "French Connection" dough? Ready to slum a little to make his next mortgage payment?

1976. No way. That was only a year after "French Connection II" and besides, he would have been paid his advance money on "A Bridge Too Far" so the Hackman coffers were resoundingly flush. Still, I told TiVO to record it. I could easily imagine Aaron Spelling bumping into Hackman at the Playboy Club and badgering him into a quick walk-on. You know, one of those deals where the Angels are tracking an international jewel thief masquerading as a director so they go undercover as Universal Studio Tour Guides. Somewhere during Act II there's a shout of "And hey, look! To the left of the bus you can see famous movie star Gene Hackman, star of the smash-hit current release 'Lucky Lady,' co-starring Burt Reynolds and Liza Minnelli!" Then we'd get to see Hackman (wearing a checked blazer on top of a turtleneck pullover) as he exits his convertible, fires off a snappy wave, and disappears into a production office.

I fast-forwarded through the show and it was such a brief cameo that I missed it during the first viewing. I played it again, only not-so-fast-forward this time. Missed him again. One more time, slowing down to normal speed during scenes that seemed ripe with opportunity for a cameo. Maybe he was the bartender in that establishing shot? The guy buying an ice-cream cone from the pushcart Bosley was operating?

It never occurred to me that TiVO could have erred. It just doesn't happen. TiVO spends a lot more time watching TV than I do and obviously if it thinks Gene Hackman is in this episode and I don't, then I've got to watch more carefully.

But I was stymied. I didn't solve the mystery until I step-framed through the scrunched-down end-credits: it was indeed the bartender. Bob Hackman. Not Gene. Bob.

I chalked it up to just another facet of TiVO's genius. I liked Gene Hackman, this it knew. Is it possible that I was responding so some ineffable fundamental Hackman-ness, TiVO wondered? Would I be interested in Hackmen in general?

I pressed the "Thumbs Down" button on this episode so that TiVO would know not to make that mistake again. A worthy experiment, but not a successful one. I'm just glad to see that after more than a year of service, TiVO hasn't stopped trying.

(But why couldn't TiVO have flagged Bob's previous "Angels" appearance instead? It seems like a Charlie's Angels episode entitled "The Sammy Davis Jr. Kidnap Caper" (look for Bob as "Tipsy Diner") would represent a rather dense-pack of 70's pop-culture. I'd have to burn that one onto DVD. When I have a son and he asks me "Daddy, why do you hate [name a kitchy 70's thingie] with such creative enthusiasm?" I'd just slide the disc over to him and let it work its magic.

It wouldn't do to simply show him that the Bible says that hatred of Aaron Spelling is well-justified and approved by two-thirds of the Holy Trinity. This show would go further. It'd lay down a certain fundamental groundwork of taste and skepticism that would one day cause the kid to be the single emphatic voice of reason in a dorm full of young adults that want to go out and see the new "Dukes Of Hazzard" movie. As a parent, I'd want nothing less.)

Well, dash it, that didn't work out as I'd hoped. The point was going to be that my blogging is subject to different moods. Sometimes I just want to fire off a quick observation regarding something trivial that happened during the day. Sometimes, I'm settling in for a longer story that plumbs hitherto unplumbed deeps of the human experience. Alas, I wrecked it by going and telling a long story about something trivial. I could go back and fix it, but that idea definitely smacks of effort, so let's forget I ever suggested it.

What I'm getting at is that sometimes I'm in the mood for short posts, sometimes I'm in the mood for long ones, and sometimes it doesn't occur to me to post at all. I blog the way I drink and gamble. Whenever it occurs to me to have a gin and tonic or buy a lottery ticket or post to my blog, I do so. It's a simple algorithm and it works well: I only happen to want a drink about eight times a year and if I spend 14 bucks on the lottery in the same span of time, that's a lot. Blogging is free, socially acceptible (given that I've never written anything about that latex Flying Nun costume I went and had made last year), and the real beauty of it is that when I'm sitting in my office writing something for my blog, it really really looks like I'm actually working. Mrs. Pocatelli down the street is still convinced that I'm running a meth lab but slowly and surely, the rest of the neighbors who keep me under tense ongoing surveillance have come around to accepting my absurd story about being a successful freelance journalist and commentator.

This "Not Feeling Like Blogging" deal lasted about two weeks, which was when I hit Reason Two,

I Don't Have Time To Blog. The Catch-22 about being busy is that lots of interesting things are happening but I can't write about them. Any time I could spend blogging could be better spent catching up on the process of converting oxygen into carbon dioxide.

That's an important function. But I tend to neglect it when things are happening fast and furiously. My latest trip was chock-full of thrills, spills and adventure. I could tell you about how I tried and failed to trick Molly Ivins into french-kissing me; about hitching a lift with a militant left-wing conspiracist who rather rudely waited until the door was closed before revealing that he was a complete barking looney; how I went and climbed a mountain, or at least a big enough bit of one to make for a smashing picture...et cetera. And hopefully, I one day shall.

Alas, I couldn't report on this stuff during the trip itself because I was a wretched mess throughout. I was hella busy to begin with, and what little free time I had was clobbered by the need to complete a major project during my travels.

All told, I'm Too Busy was good for another couple of weeks, including the week I spent at home, catching up on my work and my sleep.

We are now left with

Spit Happens.

Hospitals are an important part of our society's infrastructure. I don't want to begrudge the basic concept or offend the folks who work there...not even the people who restock the soda machines, except for the guy who's supposed to take care of the one outside the waiting room of the ICU on the sixth floor at the UMass Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. You're fooling nobody, sir: I know full well that while restocking a vending machine takes about twenty minutes, writing "Machine Out Of Order" on a Post-It and sticking it over the bill feeder only takes about thirty seconds. Damn you, sir, for placing your desire to get home in time for "American Idol" above my desire for a Dr. Pepper.

So no offense to the hospital workers of America, but when you find yourself driving to a hospital via the most efficient and direct route, you have a relationship with the building that's substantially more intimate than what you'd like.

I made my first trip to UMass Medical Center at around 11 last Tuesday night. I had never heard of the place and I hadn't the slightest clue how to get there. I got the name of the facility from a phone message, I got its address from the hospital's website after a little Googling, I got its GPS coordinates from MapsOnUs.com, and then after trotting upstairs to my equipment locker for my Garmin receiver and a fresh battery for my cellphone I jumped in the car, trusting to luck and the only good thing that Reagan ever accomplished during his two terms in office.

Worcester is New England's second-largest city. How do you get to a Worcester address from Boston? Get on the Mass. Pike, head West, and when you start seeing signs for Worcester, make a series of lucky guesses. If you have a GPS receiver you rely on the standard method of keeping an eye on the screen's direction pointer and the "Distance To Destination" field. So long as the arrow is pointing at your hood ornament and the number's getting smaller, you'll get there. Yes, I wound up driving through a number of odd back-streets and the occasional backyard, but by midnight I made it to the hospital.

(Where my sister was waiting for news about my brother-in-law. It looks like he's going to be fine...thanks for asking. He'll be in there for a couple of weeks but right as rain when he leaves.)

Such a state of affairs is normally a cause for tension, particularly on a first-date situation. You can't convince women to see the adventurous point of view. "I heard that there's a really nice barbecue joint in Somerville," I told one such specimen after she climbed into the passenger seat. "I figure that if we just drive around a while, we'll eventually spot a giant fiberglass pig or something." We did wind up at a very nice Olive Garden off the interstate and she was so angry that she wound up paying more than her share of the check, so I chalked that one up in the Win column.

But it's a great relationship to have with a hospital. Hospitals, state prisons, loft spaces in the art district that host alternative-dance performances...if you have no idea where they are and how to get there, your life is proceeding on an even keel.

It didn't last, though. Every subsequent trip to the hospital got progressively shorter, with fewer turnarounds. Today I got off the Pike and accidentally got into a Left Turn Only lane just after the exit. Before I found a place to turn around I spotted a big "H" with a directional arrow under it. And thus, instead of serpentining my way through the main drags of Worcester, I found myself teleporting towards the hospital on a back road that was a dead-straight shot with zero stop lights.

See what I mean? People navigate like ants. The line only gets straighter with repetition, and when it comes to hospitals and such you want that line to be as wobbly as damned possible. I'm grateful that my brother-in-law is going to be OK, but unhappy that I've had cause to learn The Best Way To Get To The UMass Medical Center.

So I haven't been blogging, dear readers.

But that's chiefly a matter of philosophy, not sloth or overall ennui. Here we see my three big "No"s of blogging. If I blogged when I didn't feel like blogging, you'd have read lots of bits about how Nothing Particular Happened Today and I Just Couldn't Want To Tell You All About it. If I blogged when I Didn't Have Time To Blog, you'd have read lots of one-liners reading "Can't post today...have a great Thursday!" as though I was trying to win a free dishwasher by maintaining some sort of streak. And if I blogged last week — assuming I even had a lot of time for it, on top of my regular work — you would have read personal stuff that (a) violates other people's privacy and (b) wouldn't be interesting to outide parties.

(Why do so many bloggers seem compelled to share every personal detail of their lives? It's possible to create a compelling blog about dumping your boyfriend but unless you have enough perspective on the process to sit back and explain just what you mean by "Jason and his post-dysfunctional, Midwestern bushel-basket of shame-based codependency, which that stupid, over-henna'ed self-described 'Musician' is now welcome to dissect on her own" I'm probably going to give up and over to Fark.com pretty dashed quickly.)

I did a column about blogging software a couple of weeks ago and while putting together a list of my ten favorites I realized what I like about them all: the authors are comfortable with the concept of the weblog. They feel no obligation to post and it's all motivated by the desire to share thoughts and ideas...nothing else.

I call it the Mr. Ed rule: as in the TV theme song, Mr. Ed Should Never Speak Unless He Has Something To Say. Bonfliglio would do well to hum along. A blog isn't about the blog; it's about what it's about.

So my thanks to everyone who's been emailing and asking what's up with Yellowtext. Nice to know that there are people out there who miss the thing during downtime. But it was nothin' serious and nothin' personal: I was just heeding my own advice.

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I've decided that I have everything I need except for my own Badass Song. You know, one of those things Isaac Hayes used to write, explaining to people that yes, I might indeed be a badass, but you see, I was born on the bad streets, and you should be aware that the hallmark of such an upbringing is that one quickly learns to do what one got to to survive.

I feel as though I could become a major force in whatever industry I choose if I had this song in my back pocket. Like, suppose I'm walking from the MIT Press Bookstore through Kendall Square to get some seafood before attending an open panel on the ghastly implications of Microsoft's upcoming NGSCBY initiative. Maybe I've even unholstered my WiFi PDA and am checking some message boards as I go. Well, obviously it's not the sort of sight that causes men to want to be me and women to want to be with me. But what if we add one of those soundtracks that starts wockachakkawockachakkawockachakka and then a singer comes in with

(Etc.) ?

Now that's pure Tabasco. Particularly if you imagine that I'm being filmed with a telephoto lens and the camera is being slightly overcranked while all of this is going on. Plus, the MIT campus should have a flaming garbage can on every other street corner.

On the subject of music. A musician I'd never heard of before (brand-name hip-hop artist Nas) was just on the Letterman show, dueting with Alicia Keyes on a song that I had never heard before. But I really, really liked it. And because as luck would have it I happened to have a Macintosh nearby at the time, I clicked into iTunes, did a search, found the song in inventory, listened to thirty seconds of it again, and 99 cents later, I owned the whole number.

"Warrior Song" is the first hip-hop tune I've bought in my life. I've heard the song three times now and odds are about 50-50 that I'll buy the full CD later.

I said it in my print review of iTunes Store and I'll say it here, for free: iTunes Store will prove to be just as influential and revolutionary as the original Mac did. Mark me on this. People related to computers one way up until late 1983, and a totally different way from 1984 onward. Now there's a new marker in the timeline of music. Before iTunes Store, you either bought a $15-$20 CD with no idea of how high the crap content was going to be, or you hit Limewire, which is a landmine of dead connections, low-quality rips, and (if you're using Windows) infinite potential for introducing spyware, viruses, and other nastiness into your system.

But today, you can try it for free and buy it a la carte. There is no sturdy reason not to try new things and eagerly challenge every permutation of the phrase "You know what kind of music I just totally can't stand?"

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My ISP (Software Tool & Die) ain't like your ISP. When I get home late at night and I can't get my email, I call them up on the phone and they explain exactly what's wrong and when they expect it to be fixed. At 2:10 in the morning, even.

"Try this," the night guy says, after I explain the problem. The Night Guy is a valuable resource because he doesn't judge me. He accepts that I don't understand the intricacies of sendmail, and that most of the fundamentals are a mystery to me, too, and that I'm not even entirely certain that it's not actually "SendMail" instead. I mean, "sendmail" has a nice, unix-ey scan to it, absolutely, but how would it look on a tee shirt, for instance?

So after I explain what I tried to accomplish with my latest, heroically ill-conceived perl script, he's a pro. He knows that it's quicker to just tell me what I did wrong and how to fix it than to try to work out why the bloody hell anyone would want to do that to an innocent, God-fearing mail folder.

The great thing about an ISP like Software Tool & Die is that when you can't get your email and you phone for help, everything gets fixed but you also learn a thing or two. Last night, for instance, I learned that there was an unscheduled power outage in Brookline owing to a transformer fire.

"Oh. Ah," I said. Sometimes the root of the problem isn't all that subtle.

I didn't learn anything new about networking but all told, it was still a big improvement over Earthlink customer service. If I had a problem with Earthlink, and if Earthlink had a useful customer-service line, I'd have phoned 'em up and an automated voice would have said "An unanticipated grid-related issue has temporarily suspended mail service." But when you call The World they'll tell you point-blank that something 'sploded and will go on to excitedly describe how cool it looked going up.

Well, no harm done. I was out of the house on Monday night, anyway, tucking into a rather nice peppercorn-encrusted tuna steak at Bare Bones Software's tenth-anniversary party. As a freelancer, I was pleased enough to attend just for the free meal but even without the protein factor, it was a worthy excuse for an excursion. You wouldn't think that a tech company could stay in business for a whole decade when their flagship product is a word processor that can't even do boldface. When the app in question is as well-done as BBEdit, though, it makes sense. BBEdit (technically, it's a programmer's text editor) is the official word-processor of YellowText and I've used it to write hundreds of columns and articles. Other word processors have more features, but I find that BBEdit represents the most negligible obstacle between my Art and the mechanical process that converts it into glorious, filthy cash. At no point, for instance, has my Writing Trance been broken by a cartoon character that bounded onto the scene to comment that it looks as though I'm writing an interior monologue scene and would I like to format it as an address label instead?

It also has a tendency not to destroy my manuscripts and I really do find that absolutely charming.

As the party was breaking up, I raised my glass and made a toast. "Here's to ten years of success as a leader in the Macintosh software industry," I offered, "And may Bare Bones remain swaddled in glory for at least three or four weeks more."

(I'm in possession of an alpha of a new text-editor that I'm pretty sure will more or less bury BBEdit when it's released as a public beta next month. I thought it seemed harsh to punch holes in their boat when they've just paid for dinner so I didn't mention it...thus demonstrating the firm and capable interpersonal skills that mark me as a member of the social A-list.)

And what a wonderful surprise: Adam Engst turned up. "That looks like Adam," I said to a friend, "but it clearly can't be Adam, because I'm less than an hour away from my house and I only see him in San Francisco, New York, and Dearborn."

But that was definitely Tonya Engst at his arm. Initially, this wasn't much of a convincer; when she was single and dating, Tonya employed a companion-locating algorithm that had steered her to Adam, after all. So if she wanted to start fooling around and she pulled the handle on that machine a second time, it's only logical to assume that it'd lead her to another Adam Engst-ey sort of dude.

I didn't want to appear like a holier-than-thou fuddy-duddy so I made pleasant small talk with Tonya's date as though I approved of these sort of shenanigans. But while he was talking, my hands were under the tablecloth, sending Adam Engst an SMS message:

Yes, I wasted a lot of keypresses by spelling out "Demijape" but dammit, I was angry. When you wrong a friend of mine, you wrong me as well, dash it.

Imagine my embarrassment when I hit "Send" and Adam's cellphone trilled just two feet away! Boy, did we laugh over that one. I still chuckle every time I pick another bit of green glass out of my scalp where Tonya landed that Heineken bottle.

Oh! And there was chocolate cake for dessert! All in all it was a great night.

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I can't speak for Human biology, but as for my own, my digestive system requires certain enzymes that can only be produced through cynicism and ironic detatchment. So it's actually very important that I continue to have bitchy thoughts about the "Charlie's Angels" sequel and anything that airs on the Lifetime channel fronted by a chyron reading "Based On A True Story," for instance. It's not that I have anything against Connie Seleca or Meredith Baxter or the rest of them, you understand. On a regular basis I must comment that each has made an entire second career out of breaking the lock off of a freezer chest and noting that her daughter's new boyfriend seems to have a lot of meat considering that deer season doesn't start for another two months yet. It's either that or take special dietary supplements.

So it pains me that I'm unable to make wise-assed comments about this season's "American Idol." I realize now how utterly spoiled I was by last season. Yes, I missed all but the last three or four shows; I didn't see the episodes featuring the city-by-city open calls. I missed seeing the largest parade of self-deluded individuals ever assembled, excepting the scene inside the Career Placement Office of a university Philosophy department. I only started tuning in when they were down to the last handful of performers, ostensibly the ones who'd survived a months-long weeding-out process.

And yet they were terrible singers. All of them. The final two (Kelly Clarkson and Sideshow Bob) were unquestionably the acme of the bunch, but even so, they sang about as well as the average wedding singer. Not the folks who get paid $100 to sing "Can You Feel The Love Tonight?", mind you: I'm referring to the bride's cousin who gets pushed in front of the microphone ten minutes before they close the bar. She used to sing in high school and it's not an actively unfortunate performance, but it takes more than Basic Competence, big hair and proximity to a microphone to make somebody a singer.

Needless to say, this was exactly what my stomach needed. It was all such a ghastly spectacle that weeks after the big season finale, I was digesting even the most complex proteins as though they were sugar lumps. At last year's Nathans Famous Hot Dog Eating Competition I was able to eat 21 weiners in 12 minutes, two more than I could manage in 2001; I wholly credit this improvement to Kelly Clarson's weepy victory encore of "A Moment Like This."

But this year's show was a crushing disappointment. It's almost like these people were being judged on their talent, for God's sake. When the field was reduced to the final twelve, lesser talents got knocked off one by one. Chiefly, the question being answered was "Which of these people have a real instrument, and which ones can only do well with the right song in the right style?" The more they sang, the more apparent their individual strengths and weaknesses became.

It finally came down to the two best singers among the finalists (or at least the two best singers who had enough common sense to make sure there weren't any cameras around before they held up a liquor store or got spanked by someone in a leather clown suit). And then — to my ear, at least — the guy who relied a little too much on one or two vocal tricks got beaten out by the one who created an original performance with each song.

(And I was glad to see that it came down to The Co-Captain Of The Chess Club versus The Fat Guy. One of the most annoying aspects of reality TV is that you can't even get on "Fear Factor" unless your abs resemble an aerial photo of volcaniclastic geological uplift. It seems logical that someone who spends so much time worrying about his teeth and his hair would apply their best thinking and conclude that eating a horse's butt on nationwide television is a great idea, but this is hardly a valid first step towards discovering actual singing ability.)

In this day and age, anyone who (a) owns a Macintosh and (b) doesn't own anything recorded by Kelly Clarkson is making a very overt statement. That's one of the big new implications of the iTunes Store. You're saying that even after sampling her whole album for free, even given that you could have just bought the one best track for a piddling ninety-nine cents, you still thought it was such a resounding and consistent sack of knee-varnish that you said "Nothin' doing."

But when Ruben Studdard's recording of "Flying Without Wings" pops up, I'll be all over it, even if it means that the phrase "Best Of 'American Idol' Volume II" will scroll through my iPod's screen every time I play it.

Damn you, iTunes Store. Damn you straight to hell...

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I'm sitting here editing a manuscript and watching a couple of days' worth of TiVO'ed Dick Van Dyke Shows. Yesterday's was the one where Rob Petrie (Van Dyke) comes in and gives a talk to his son Richie's grade-school about being a comedy writer, and it illustrated two things I really, really love about this show...things that I didn't truly appreciate until I added it to my TiVO list a month ago and started watching regularly:

First, Dick Van Dyke is a masterful physical comedian. He's in absolute control of his body and he gives as much consideration to each and every movement as a ballet dancer does. But then, I already knew that. Today I realized that there's something really odd about every Dick Van Dyke Show scene that includes kids:

All of these little kids are hitting their marks and delivering their lines but — and this amazes me — they appear to be having a lot of fun while doing it. Even in the domestic scenes, when Richie is protesting to Mary Tyler Moore that he wasn't the one who smeared the wall with marker ink, he's stifling a smile. I compare and contrast this with the mixture of tension and bewilderment that seems to lurk just under the surface of most child performances. And the kids who aren't scared act like dispassionate, professional, miniature adults, which makes me just as uncomfortable.

I marvel at this environment. The kids were at ease with where they were and what they were being asked to do.

Naturally, this isn't in and of itself part of the Brilliance of the show — a cynical critic would complain that a kid should look sad when he's being cussed out by his mom — but it leaves me even more impressed by the environment that Carl Reiner created around that show.

As I write this, yesterday's show ends and I click into today's show: "The Twizzle." You want a perfect demonstration of the concept of Matter and Anti-Matter? Start a shot with Mary Tyler Moore doing a twisty, hippy, swivelly sort of dance in a clingy, fringed outfit...and then cut to Mel Cooley doing the exact same thing.

Actually, I take it back: the two forces are not in perfect balance. As powerful as MTM's energetic housewifey sexuality is, Mel's dorky white shoes slightly tips the scales. Those of you keeping a logbook should give this scene an overall final score of "chilling."

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Just testing something out, folks. A helpful & alert reader informed me that the RSS feed was hosed. I fixed the feed manually and have just made changes to my blogger app's code to ensure that it won't get hosed again. Or at least, that it won't get hosed the same way again.

It was a subtle problem. The "description" text in an RSS feed can't have an ampersand in it. Since my blogger app simply turns the posting's first paragraph into its item description, an ampersand in graph one brought the feed to its knees.

So I just cracked open the project file, added a couple of new lines of code to the routine that cleans up text for the feed (ampersands out, "and"s in), built a fresh copy of the app, and now here I am performing a live-fire exercise.

May I just say that if HTML is Oscar Madison, XML (the RSS feed's data format) is Felix Unger? If a foppish lord serving in the court of Louis the 14th travelled forward in time and created an HTML file without bothering to even skim through a Dummies book first, every browser on the planet would still make a good, honest effort to display it. But an XML parser (like a RSS newsreader) will have a screaming hissy fit and lock itself in the bathroom if you do so much as clear your throat. My blogger app has to look for and eliminate a long list of hissy-able items before sending the RSS feed to the server.

Well, anyway, Problem Solved. Or perhaps "Problem Solved, In Theory." Push the button, Frank...

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I've finally seen "A Mighty Wind," the latest Christopher Guest/Eugene Levy mockumentary.

It seems like faint praise to begin by saying "Well, the boys seem to be getting better at this," but that was indeed my first reaction. "Best In Show," "Waiting For Guffman" and now "A Mighty Wind" have the same signature traits: they're very, very funny and very, very clumsily made.

Well, when I call them "clumsy" I only mean that they're presented as mock-documentaries when they're clearly not. The conceit worked in "This Is Spinal Tap" because the director (Rob Reiner) was a stickler for following the "rules" of a documentary. He even went so far as to have a documentary filmmaker operating the camera. Shot after shot, Reiner crouched next to him, perhaps nudging him this way or that, but every decision regarding what to shoot and which actor to focus on was informed by documentary instincts.

Not so with the Guest/Levy collaborations. They're funny and the characters are interesting...but I don't buy it for a second. They look like they were shot by people with (a) infinite amounts of money, (b) endless resources, and (c) alien precranial implants that impart psychic abilities. That doesn't describe a real documentary filmmaker. They only have one or two cameras, and they never have the right lens or the right lighting rig with them. The nightclub where their subject is performing won't allow them to film inside the club, so they have to film off a TV screen in the dressing room. And he sure doesn't know where to aim the camera. He'll take a guess, but when someone on the other side of the room says something interesting or anything else unexpected happens, the camera will probably be looking elsewhere.

The Guest/Levy mockumentary I really want to see is one about the documentarian who directs their films. I'd like to see him during the filming of "Best In Show." I imagine him in the van with his crew that morning. "When the Flecks check into their hotel the day before the big dog show, that's going to be the dramatic fulcrum of their whole story arc," he announced. "So when I'm in the editing room I want to be able to cut from a close-up — of anyone in the room — to a wide-shot to a double to a reverse shot to a POV angle to a different wide shot to..."

We flip to the hotel lobby, which is so packed with camera crews that the revolving doors are stuck.

("And Steve?" he says, motioning to the most junior camera operator. "I'm going to need you to wait inside a supply closet on the seventh floor for, like, six or seven hours. I'm worried that the Flecks won't be able to get a room, y'see. And I don't know if the manager is going to let them sleep in a closet or something, but if he does, we're gonna need to have a shot of him unlocking the door and letting them in. It'll just look so much better if we film it from the inside, don't you think?" As the director tosses the guy a magazine and locks him in, he assures him that don't worry, he's got cameramen in the hotel's nine other utility rooms just in case.)

Maybe my problem with these films amounts to technical nit-picking. But Guest and Levy create the rules under which they operate and they ought to stick to 'em: a documentary should look like a documentary. Go see "Trekkies" or "American Movie" or Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedian" (just released on DVD last week). They're all funny, true-to-life documentaries. Hell, go rent "Spinal Tap" again. Then tell me I'm wrong. All I can say is that every time there's a scene that couldn't possibly have been shot in real-time, it yanks me out of the story. I stop believing it.

Of the three flicks, "A Mighty Wind" probably exhibits the greatest amount of self-control. Not just in the overall look but in the storytelling, too. That's another thing that bugged me about "Best In Show." Here was a world in which every man, woman and child once had a drummer who died in a bizarre gardening accident...and they have to tell you about it right away. As a whole, it's exhausting and ultimately boring.

I need to re-iterate that "A Mighty Wind" is a funny, funny movie and that the packed house I saw it with loudly agreed with that assessment. But with their third film, I see Guest and Levy settling into a rut. Here are three movies that follow several groups of people as they simultaneously prepare for The Big Show At The End Of The Film. And then, we learn Where They Are Now.

What disappoints me most about these films is that we never really learn anything about these people. "Spinal Tap"'s major arc is the long relationship that exists between Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins; they have a powerful but fragile relationship that's based on a prolonged adolescence, and when they defend their stunted development, they're defending their friendship. Do we know why Corky St. Clair moved back to NYC? Or what keeps Gerry and Cookie Fleck together? Or why Mitch and Mickey (one of the folk groups in "A Mighty Wind") never got anything going romantically? Nope. Can't say that I really care, either.

Here's why: Guest and Levy have told us that none of these questions are important. If they felt that Corky and Gerry and Mitch were worth exploring, then they'd be the focus of the "documentary," wouldn't they? Instead, the movie's divvied up among as many people as possible.

That fits in with my earlier complaint, of course. A real documentary filmmaker might have started filming a bunch of people, but ultimately he'd decide that one of them was a compelling enough character to carry the story's focus. The others would float in and out of the documentary, but only to provide contrast and amplification. We're meant to invest in the guy who's carrying the ball.

See, ultimately, my beef with Guest/Levy mockumentaries isn't that the documentaries don't look like documentaries. It's that the people don't look like people.

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Testing another new tweak to the app. This time, it's nothing that will benefit you, the reader or me, the writer. It's something that benefits "it," the blogger app's code.

(I eliminated some sloppy redundancy. I have one button that publishes an item immediately when you push it and a second button next to it that means No, Thank You, Just Stick It In The Cache And Publish It Later. But I was in a rush when I built the Cache button, so I merely made a copy of the Publish code and removed the bits that actually sends files to the server.

Now, I've added a few lines of code that actually checks to see which button was pressed. So instead of having two hunks of code of a hundred instructions each, I now have just one hunk of code. It does the first 98 things, then gets the name of the button that was pressed, and based on that info does either two more things (ie, update the server and then open http://www.cwob.com/yellowtext/ in Safari) or just one more thing (open the local file on my hard drive).

Aren't you glad you asked?)

Push the button, Frank...

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One more thing about "A Mighty Wind": Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy finally found not one, but two solutions to the ongoing problem of Fred Willard. First, they gave him a much smaller role. He probably has less screen time here than in either of Guest & Levy's other two mockumentaries, and his role isn't a central one. Secondly, they created a role in which acting like Fred Willard is actually a huge asset. As human accomplishments go, this rates alongside breaking the four-minute mile and figuring out how to get cheese inside a pizza crust; it seems impossible until someone actually goes and does it, and then you wonder why it didn't happen sooner.

If the lead item of my obituary stated "He didn't understand the appeal of Fred Willard at all," I really wouldn't be able to complain. It's true, and besides, I'd be dead. But whereas a great many people see great genius in Fred Willard's comedic acting, I see a smarmy, annoying bastard whose every intonation and expression screams "Hey, everybody! It's me! Fred Willard! Aren't I an absolute hoot?"

I'll make you a deal: I will acknowledge — sincerely — the possibility that he's a brilliant comedian and that he's simply over my head, provided that you'll leave yourselves open to that whole smarmy annoying bastard thing.

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Today's Lesson In Power Storytelling is entitled "Know When To End It."

I believe in teaching by example, so let me just tell you a little story. Because the Babylon 5 Complete Season 2 Boxed Set leads a certain lifestyle and I lead a certain lifestyle, it was inevitable that our paths would intersect at some point. That was my philosophy, having learned my lesson from the Season 1 set. I was so excited to learn that the greatest sci-fi series in television history was finally coming to DVD that the very moment I regained consciousness, I crab-walked across the living-room floor to the sofa and kept hitting keys on my PowerBook at random until Amazon.com confirmed that I had successfully pre-ordered it.

The money was spent and a complex chain of events had been set into motion which would ultimately lead to my sitting in front of The Good TV watching all 22 hour-long episodes over and over again until Domino's got sick of all the phone calls and just began delivering pizzas to me at regular intervals without my even asking.

But I paid for my enthusiasm four months later, when I walked past aisle after aisle and rack after rack and end-cap after end-cap of B5 boxed sets for ten whole days, waiting for my copy to arrive in the mail. He who lives by free shipping, hangs by free shipping.

I will never mix sloe gin and beer again, I will never get another tattoo of Dick Cavett and I will never, never, never pre-order a DVD that I'm truly, madly, deeply looking forward to. Our paths will surely cross, I promised myself, keeping Season 2's release date in mind.

Well, here's what happened. I didn't buy it a few weeks ago when it was released, because (a) I had a lot of work to do and (b) breaking the seal on the Season 1 set was like breaking the seal on a big box of anthrax. It's not a question of whether you want to cancel all of your plans for the immediate future. There are immediate and unswerveable consequences, and once that box is open you're on board the train, and it only stops at the end of the line.

But Best Buy considers me a Preferred Customer and as such, I received a coupon for 10% off any DVD during Memorial Day Weekend. Why do I rate Preferred Customer status? Apparently because I have a fixed address. I don't question their logic. It does, after all, rank me above the typical Wal*Mart demographic.

So Sunday, I motored to my local Best Buy. They were out of stock. Plenty of Season One, but a big, mocking gap where Season Two must have sat. Met a very nice assistant-manager who recognized me, but even one of my infrequent Brushes With Fame did little to spackle that yawning void on the shelf and in my soul.

Monday came. I had dinner plans, yes, absolutely, but look, this was my last day to use the coupon. There was no alternative: I took a small detour on the way to Brookline. Normally, you see, when you drive from a suburb that's slightly south and west of Boston to a town that's slightly west of Boston, you wouldn't spend quite so much time driving southeast towards Cape Cod. It was pissing rain when I arrived in Braintree but I had my boots and my umbrella, so at least I was warm and dry when Best Buy broke my heart for the second time in two days.

Rats.

I really didn't have a backup plan. Why would Best Buy work so hard to keep Babylon 5 and me apart? It was like something out of Shakespeare, honestly, only tragic instead of light and fluffy.

I did have a savior in the form of, um, well, let's call him D'artagnian. I didn't really get his name. He worked there in the DVD department and he put an amazing amount of time and effort into aiding me in my quest. I used to work that hard and that passionately when I worked retail, but only when I knew that I was doing something that would cost the store lots and lots of money, one way or another. Braintree was supposed to have had three copies in stock, but they didn't; D'artagnian scoured the shelves to make sure. He searched the inter-store database and discovered that Framingham and Cambridge had more than a dozen copies each (well above the margin of error you'd expect) and after he looked up the street addresses of the two stores for me, I was back in the parking lot, glad that I hadn't insulted the kid by dropping a double-sawbuck on him for his trouble.

The great thing about driving so damned far out of your way like I had was that all of a sudden nearly any major town or city you could mention was Right On The Way To Brookline. Cambridge is on the way. So is Albany. Canada was a bit of a stretch, but if there was a good diner in Canada next to a Best Buy? Doable. Route 3 became I-93 which became the Big Dig's brand-new Liberty Tunnel (as named by a Republican governor) soon to become the Tip O'Neill Tunnel (as lobbied by the Democratic legislature) and onto the brand-new Zakim Bridge (named by the previous Republican governor) which the local residents rather imagined was going to be named the Bunker Hill Bridge, considering that the previous Republican governor swore up and down that they'd get to name the bridge that was disrupting so much of their real estate.

I've been talking a lot about Boston-area navigation here so I should point out that if you want to get to Cambridge from I-93 you actually want to be going through more of the Tip O'Liberty Tunnel and less of the Bunkim Bridge, which is to say if you wind up going on any of the latter all, it means you missed the exit. Chalk my error up to the ongoing magic show of the Big Dig. You know what everyone went through when Apple released Mac OS X and announced that OS 9 was officially dead? You felt cheated. You felt like you'd spent a lifetime acquiring skills that were now worthless. Do you have any idea how long it takes to grok out Boston's user-interface? There's a reason why you used to see so many crappy, beat-up cars on the road here. Instead of buying a $22,000 car, folks who've been here for only a few years would spend the same amount on ten or eleven beaters. When you're driving a 1985 Reliant, abandoning the car where it is and then walking the rest of the way remains a viable option.

(I should say that the Tipperty Bridge and the Bunzim Tunnel are a wonderful bridge and tunnel, and that you should all give yourselves a big round of applause for having given us $12,000,000,000 to build them. No, go ahead. We really appreciate your moxie. If you find yourselves here in the Commonwealth, you don't even have to ask: go right ahead and use 'em. Think of it as our little way of saying "Thanks." And when we cut you off by crossing a double-solid line without signaling and send you scraping against a Jersey barrier, that'll just be our little way of adding "...suckers!"

A few detours later I was at the Cambridgeside Galeria, where a dozen copies of Babylon 5 Season Two were lined up and eager to come home with me. As though Best Buy was aware of what it'd put me through, it also arranged for a DVD of "The Man Who Came To Dinner" (the 2000 revival starring Nathan Lane as Whiteside) to be available for purchase at attractive rates.

I rushed back to my car, paid only the half-hour minimum rate for parking, and wow, it looked like I wouldn't be late to meet my pal. I saved ten bucks on the DVD and cleared nine after additional expenses; most importantly, I had the boxed set, which I had to had to had to have in my hands before the weekend. I'd actually pulled it off. It'd be tight, but I would make it on time.

I was only fifteen minutes and one town away from Brookline when my cellphone rang and my friend called to say that he was running late and could we do dinner at 6:30 instead of 5 like we'd originally planned?

OK. So what are you feeling right now? Lots of sympathy and pity for me? Good, good.

(Aside: Actually, the change in dinner time worked out to my advantage. My destination was Coolidge Corner, a neighborhood which is an exact duplicate of the enclosure that will be built for me when I'm abducted by aliens and installed in one of their zoos. You've got an absolutely fantastic restaurant (Zaftigs), an absolutely fantastic bookstore (Brookline Booksmith), a Radio Shack, and an absolutely fantastic art-house theater (the Coolidge Corner Cinema). I slid into the lot behind the latter at about 4:55 and thought about how I was going to spend the next couple of hours. "I don't suppose there's a really great movie that starts at 5 PM and lasts exactly 90 minutes," I thought, and five minutes later I was in the Coolidge's huge Main Theater watching the opening credits of "Winged Migration."

If it were bright and sunny outside and I had a million things I needed to do, I might have described this as a Boring Movie. It's an Oscar-nominated documentary about migrating birds, after all, and the subject implies a profound lack of "Matrix"-style bullet-time kung-fu. But it was still raining in ballistic, dumpy quantities and I was under absolutely no pressure to spend the next couple of hours getting the holy crap entertained out of me. My mind was very open and it was a perfect situation under which to watch image after image of floating birds.

There's a narrator, but he barely gets a dozen lines. There are captions, but they only interrupt six or seven times, to tell you just how far this particular species of bird flies during its migration. Specifically: frickin' far.

Overall it's like looking at an Impressionist painting. The whole point of Impressionism was to capture the concept of a thing or a place instead of precisely rendering the subject itself. It's a hack that exploits a weakness in human perception. A photo of a lady eating lunch in a park is an image of this specific lady and that specific park and Subway's Banzai Barbecue Hoagie. As an impressionist painting, though, the lady and the park she's picnicking in are hazy and roughly-rendered. It could be any lady in any park. The brain doesn't like vague concepts, so it subconsciously fills in the blanks, looting your memories to finish the job the artist started. You have no idea why, but you're far more emotionally-involved in this image.

There's no real narrative in "Winged Migration." Birds leave a nesting ground, they fly for a bit, some of 'em get shot, they reach the new nesting ground, they have chicks, some of them get eaten, they start flying again, some more of them get torn apart by crabs, and eventually they wind up back where they started. But it's engaging. It's not about these birds flying to that place. It's about movement, and change, and family. I'm pleased to say that I wasn't able to imprint anything upon the Being Torn Apart By Crabs scene, but your mileage may vary.

So I saw a great movie, had a frabjously fantastic meal with friends, and then I browsed for books. Under such circumstances a walk in the rain is merely Atmosphere (again, assuming you were clever enough to wear the warm, waterproof boots and bring an umbrella). End of aside.)

Here's another example of Knowing When To End The Story:

I had no idea that I needed a passport for next week's trip. None. I wasn't leaving the United States, after all, and I assumed that for all their huff and their intimidating uniforms, the famous Green State Border Guards who stand at the border between Vermont and Massachusetts (for instance) weren't empowered to refuse you entry based on any sort of lack of paperwork. A state is a state is a state, right?

But wrong I was, so off I went. My trip was about six weeks away, which was good luck because it turns out that it takes four weeks to get a passport. Birth certificate, photo, paperwork, lots of money...wheels went into motion.

And I was denied a passport.

I wish I could say that it was an elaborate case of my country becoming clingy and needy. That when my paperwork arrived at the State Department it sent everybody into such an irrational tailspin of despair that they refused to issue me a passport, for much the same reasons why Kathy Bates took a sledgehammer to James Caan's legs in "Misery." If you love something, set it free; but if you're obsessive and have an abandonment complex, don't let it leave the country.

See, that would have made me look real big. But it just turned out that my parents didn't give me my "real" birth certificate. They gave me the paper that the hospital sent me home with, and the State Department was about as impressed with at as they would have been with a puzzle-placemat from Denny's.

Thank God that the international cabal that secretly has this country's populace under its invisible steel bootheel had been monitoring all of my mail and bugged my house. They were able to phone ahead to the Massachusetts Department of Records and tell them I was coming. How else to explain it? I walked in at one o'clock and walked out with an official copy of my birth certificate less than ten minutes later. It'd be hard enough to retrieve such a document so quickly if only 800 people had ever been born inside the Commonwealth of Massachusetts...and I imagine that this guesstimate must be off by at least a factor of ten. No, it was the Illuminati. We might chafe at the yoke of faceless totalitarian repression, but you know, every time you're able to retrieve a "government" document suspiciously quickly or a fast-food chain comes out with a new kind of chicken sandwich or you see a UPS driver wearing shorts, you have to admit that our overlords can really get the job done. Thank them, right now. Just look around for anything orange and then speak into it.

So I finally had the right paperwork and all I had to do was spend a lot more money for some extra-special, two-week express processing. Two weeks minus two days later, it came in the mail. I'm telling you, it was the first time in my life that I've ever truly felt like an American. If you've never seen a passport up close and personal, there are pages and pages of preamble before you get to the bits where you start collecting novelty stamps and stickers from foreign lands. The preambleage is like the long speech your parents gave you before you went off on your first overnight field trip in school. If you get lost, find a policeman. Here's our phone number: call if you need anything. Remember, if you act like a big jerk, it'll reflect badly on us, too. If you get caught with drugs, mister, don't expect us to come bail you out. Keep a handkerchief with you at all times. Don't flash your money, don't cut through alleys, dress in layers.

Only it's your federal government talking. You open it and this is the first thing you read:

The Secretary of State of the United States of America
hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national
of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance
and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.

That's definitely the diplomatic equivalent of the note that your Mom tells you to give to your teacher when you board the bus. Only your Mom doesn't have the world's largest conventional and nuclear arsenals backing up her request that you get a room with a night-light.

(It's printed in three languages, incidentally, so you need to hand it someone who understands English, French or Spanish. In Germany or northern Delaware, you're apparently on your own.)

Well, it all worked out OK in the end. I have my passport: I am now officially a flight risk. That was my second impression, after the crap about Feeling Like An American. You're a different man after you get a passport. Often, I'll be faced with a big mound of work to do and not much time left before my deadline. And all kinds of ideas come. Quit this whole Writing thing and learn how to work a fry machine. Unplug all the phones and quit out of all of my mail clients and see how long it'd take for my editors to figure out how to mail a letter. Move to a different state and claim to be someone else...that sort of thing.

Today, "What if I just left the country?" is a viable option. "Surely there's technology in New Zealand that needs to be written about, right?" Freedom is all about options.

 

Again: waves of sympathy. I hear a diesel engine chugging up the street: no doubt it's the FedEx guy dropping off crate after crate of nonperishable food items and used clothing in good condition, all thanks to your sympathetic nature and my sharing these tales of recent extreme hardship. And what's this? An email from a reader who promises that he's going to break into his local church tonight and go through every Bible in the joint, whiteing-out "Job" wherever it appears and inking in an "Andy Ihnatko" in its place.

Why am I in the Pity Spotlight? Well, because I've learned the Lesson Of The Day: I know when to end the story.

Just imagine what your reaction would have been if I'd ended the second story with "Thank Heavens I got that passport; otherwise, I wouldn't be able to go on my Hawaiian cruise next week."

Or if I ended the first story with "Still, nothing would have stopped me from getting that Babylon 5 boxed set. Next week, I'm flying to Honolulu for a weeklong Hawaiian cruise, and I just don't know how I'd get through a 12-hour first-class flight without my $2500 PowerBook and some DVDs."

Phhhht! No more pity, no more sympathy: "This guy's going to Hawaii, and he's complaining about...well, anything?!?" sums up your reaction.

Again: Know when to end the story, students. I shall again teach by example. Witness: I could easily fan my audience's harmless non-sympathy into active hatred...by continuing the story yet one step further.

But because I want you to take this lesson to heart, I'm not going to. Class dismissed.

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Tuesday, May 27 7:34 AM • Another Test...

Testing another new blogger feature.

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Tuesday, May 27 7:40 AM • And Another Test...

Testing another new blogger feature.

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Thursday, May 29 5:04 AM • Steve Jobs On "60 Minutes II" Wednesday Night

Steve Jobs was on "60 Minutes II" tonight, during a piece on Pixar.

Why am I just commenting on it now? Because I've only just seen it. My pal Shawn King emailed me yesterday to ask if I could do a phone-in segment on his megahypersuperginchy radio show tonight. I didn't actually look at my appointment calendar: I just pinged it. "Is 9:30 PM Wednesday available?" And I got a Yes. Something about the ack I got suggested that there was an asterisk next to it, but my ping server has never failed me so I sent Shawn my standard "...with bells on" response.

And then the asterisk revealed itself: the Pixar thing. Oh, yeah. I really wanted to see that. I started watching "60 Minutes" (which teed off with charming stories about women blowing themselves up for the Cause) and of course, just when the phone rang, the Media Center PC in my office decided to air one of its most popular featurettes. It's a dilly of a show in which the protagonist (Windows XP) dramatically explains that it cannot locate a codec required for the display of live video and that the user should attempt to correct the problem by performing the following sequence of actions: (1) Quit Media Center; (2) Restart PC; (3) Perform a cold reboot; (4) Re-install video drivers; (5) Contact the server for...

Yes, that's what it tells you. It's sort of like that bit in "Titanic" where Leonardo DiCaprio breathlessly repeats everything he learned from his Learning Annex course on North Atlantic Luxury Superliner Disaster Survival.

So although I had stabbed the "Record" button when the show began, whether or not I'd actually get to see the Pixar segment was a cliffhanger that didn't resolve itself until about an hour ago when I completed steps One through Three.

As an unapologetic Mac weenie I was glad to see Steve Jobs get some face-time. Right at the top of the segment, too. It took me aback at first:

(Well, the first thing I actually noticed was that Steve was wearing the same stuff I've seen him wear every time I've seen him: jeans and a black longsleeved mock-turtleneck tee. I imagine that he buys them in 1000-foot rolls, just like paper towels, and tears off a set every time he sees a satellite van pulling into the driveway. End of aside.)

...Why interview the guy who holds the pink slip? I've seen enough segments on Pixar and Dreamworks and the rest to know that it'd follow a more or less standard template. This Place Is Just A Little Different From A Typical Office Building. These Folks Have A Passion For Characters. Computer Animation Is An Exacting And Highly Technical Process... There'd be plenty of shots of a middle-aged man in a Hawaiian shirt pointing at something on a computer screen while a younger person in a tee shirt sits behind a mouse and a keyboard and nods a lot. Et cetera.

The reason for Jobs' earlier appearance finally became clear when Dan Rather started wrapping things up, and mentioned Pixar's partnership with Disney. Relations have become somewhat strained, Dan noted, stating that Steve would like to re-negotiate for more attractive terms.

Which is true, but it doesn't mention the reason for this state of affairs. As it's been explained to me, what threw the Relationship into a sling was Disney's attempt to weasel another movie out of Pixar before their deal expires.

The Disney/Pixar agreement was originally for three movies and later expanded to five; Pixar makes the movies, Disney sells 'em. So after Pixar delivers its fifth film, they're free to seek a new partnership with anyone they want, on whatever terms they can arrange. Since every movie Pixar's ever made has been a certified Three-Buttload Production (making a buttload of cash in the theaters, a buttload more in retail, and earning a buttload of awards and critical acclaim), Pixar can be expected to do very well in the negotiations. Disney might indeed wind up distributing Pixar's sixth feature, but if they do, it's gonna cost 'em.

So let's count to five, shall we? "Toy Story." "A Bug's Life." "Toy Story 2." "Monsters, Inc." Annnd "Finding Nemo" makes four.

Four?

Yes, four. See, Disney insists that "Toy Story 2" doesn't count, because it's a loophole. Sequel, sequel, because it's a sequel. Hence the strained relationship.

Jim Hill has a far greater understanding about Disney and surely can explain its corporate mentality way better than I can. As for me, I can't figure those people out. If Disney isn't capable of counting to five, then surely they're familiar with the concept of a calendar? IE, that whether they get four or five or six films out of Pixar before they have to renegotiate, they will have to eventually renegotiate? And when that day comes, they'll want to keep distributing Pixar films.

As-is, unless Steve Jobs gets hit on the head by a falling coconut and suffers from a Gilligan-esque bout of amnesia, the phrase "You bastards stuck us for six movies instead of five" is apt to shape his negotiating stance. Disney might get a new deal with Pixar after all. Business is business, of course. But if it were me advising Steve, I'd suggest that Pixar should not begin its first exploratory session with Disney until one gold sequined top hat (just like the kind the cast of "A Chorus Line" used to wear) is delivered to each of Pixar's 729 full and part-time employees and has met their individual approval for fit and craftsmanship.

That'd be justice. It's also make for some really keen bonus sections on future DVDs.

 

Oh, and incidentally, a note to those of you using RSS newsreaders: I just added a feature to my blogger app that adds new info to the item's RSS description. Now, you'll have a better idea of what you're in for before you commit to reading one of these things. No need to thank me: Progress Is Our Most Important Product.

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Friday, May 30 6:39 AM • The Old Man And The Sea Level

While I was taking a break from blogging, the legendary rock formation up in New Hampshire's Franconia Notch known as The Old Man Of The Mountain became The New Pile Of Boulders And Assorted Gravel On The Mountain's Lower Slopes. Had I been blogging on May 4, I probably would have said something about it.

As natural rock formations go, the Old Man was pretty unique...chiefly because it actually looked like what the Department of Tourism claimed that it looked like. Any of you who've ever fallen victim to a taxpayer-funded brochure and driven well out of your way to visit Turkey Rock or The Amazing Briefcase Tree or The Rift In The Basalt Flow That Looks Uncannily Like Rose Kennedy's Appendectomy Scar will appreciate the difference. "How do I find the Old Man Of The Mountain?" tourists would ask. Well, you hop onto I-93 and about a half an hour after you pass by Concord, you keep an eye peeled for a mountain that looks like the profile of an old man. That'll be the baby.

I only saw the Old Man once. Spotting The Old Man Of The Mountain wasn't on my original agenda; it was more of a sign that I apparently was not on I-89 headed towards Montpelier, Vermont, and I might as well just stop here and get a sandwich. Which is the best way to see such a feature. New England was one of the Ice Age's liveliest playgrounds for glacial shenanigans, so to be frank, we're really pretty well-set vis a vis big piles of rocks. From anywhere in Eastern Massachusetts you can jump in your car, get a good, hard look at an enormous rock, and then get dinner and go candlepin bowling, all on less than two gallons' worth of gas. You hardly need to drag New Hampshire into the procedure, unless of course it's a Sunday and you also need to buy some booze.

But the Old Man was a welcome sight on that day. It wasn't just another hill, it wasn't just another road sign. It was a definite signal that A Decision Must Now Be Made. I got some food and spent the hour getting a good, hard look at the fellow.

Somewhere amid the eating and the drinking and the looking, I had one of those moments in which I overwhelmingly felt the fundamental interconnectedness of all people across time.

 

Fans of radioastronomy and unmanned missions to other planets are accustomed to clicking over to their favorite imaging website and discovering that the Picture Of The Day is the Great Kermit of Mars or somesuch. There's a formation of Martian canals that looks a lot like Kermit the Frog. There's a nebula that looks a bit like Snoopy. An asteroid in the shape of a steam iron. A cloud formation on Jupiter that looks like Randolph Mantooth? It's waiting to be discovered.

The thing is, spotting those formations requires knowledge and context. Kermit didn't exist before the Sixties; Snoopy in the Fifties. You'd have to be a fan of "Emergency! One" to even know who Randolph Mantooth is, and the only reason why I even know what an old-fashioned steam iron looks like is because I was the youngest of several children and all the cool Monopoly pieces were already taken by the time it was my turn to pick.

But a man is a man. A human profile is immediately recognizable, and I-93 was laid down over a centuries-old north-south route. I was doing precisely what uncountable humans standing in that spot have done since the 1700's: I was looking up at a mountain and thinking "Chee! Looks like an old guy, dunnit?" There were no telephone wires or antennas or lights or anything else to give away the year or even the century. The mountain was what it was. Reflexively, I associated a personality with the face and began filling in his backstory.

It's not the result of creative impulse. It's the result of genetic programming. Taking a pattern of neurochemical telemetry flickering across the visual cortex and identifying it as a human face...that's been a basic function of the human operating system for the past 140,000 years. And because we've been fanciful animals since August of 1861 or even as much as 60,000 years earlier, we tend to fill in the blanks when we're presented with a generic example of anything. Consciously or subconsciously, we recognize something in the profile and we're affected by what we feel. For centuries, people have been looking at the Old Man and seeing the wisdom of their fathers, the stoicism of their religious leaders, the numb rictus of the wino unconscious outside their local drinking establishment, lying in a pool of something that they didn't linger long enough to solidly identify.

We have cellphones and PowerBooks and individually-wrapped slices of processed cheese here in the Push-Button World Of Tomorrow...but in terms of wetware, the difference between the 1740 edition and the brains you can buy today is at best a maintenance upgrade. When you look under the hood, you'll find that the same gears and belts are still spinning around inside.

 

Well, the Old Man was bound to topple over one day. Everybody knew it. Of late, it'd been held together by glue and steel cables and the determination (and tax dollars) of the people of New Hampshire.

Here in New England, you tend to see the Old Man everywhere. When I was a kid, I thought its profile was actually the shape of New Hampshire's western border; all of the state's major road signs use that shape. It's used in businesses and in local government, and its the sole design element of their State Quarter.

So everyone's asking what they're supposed to do with Profile Mountain now. As a symbol, it's too firmly entrenched in the state's cultural memory for them to just let it exist solely in the form of old postcards and the state quarter. The governor has done what governors do best (appoint a Commission and hope that by the time they come up with a recommendation, another Governor will have to figure out how to pay for it) but he's insisted that the Old Man's profile should be restored.

I agree...but how? Some folks want to locate the original rocks and jimmy the face back together. Others favor making an Old Man for the ages: reconstruct it just the way it was, except with new, lightweight composite materials made to look like granite, built atop a properly-sunk foundation.

The goal of both approaches is to duplicate what the Ice Age accomplished 100,000 years ago. Both approaches are therefore wrong-headed. In a way, they're arrogant; by recreating the Old Man rock by rock, layer by layer, are we claiming that we can achieve in a handful of months what the planet worked on for millions of years? Are we also saying that by making an Old Man that's been properly engineered and foundationed, we're actually improving on things? Are we saying that enormous slabs of rock that cling precariously to the side of a mountain aren't meant to topple over eventually?

No, no, no. That won't do at all. We can't duplicate what Nature created, nor should we.

What we ought to do is commission some good tradesmen to spend the summer hauling sheets of scrap iron up there. Drill into the granite and build a solid framework of steel bars, and then begin the task of rebuilding the profile. Let their goal be to duplicate the Old Man's profile in every possible detail. Restore the silhouette of Profile Mountain to what it's been since thousands of years before bipeds started gawking at it.

But let its precise form bend to our calculators and to our artistic impulses. Let anyone with binoculars see that it's something that the humans made. Out of steel, and lots of effort, and their own passion.

What an impressive statement that would be. In a way, introducing hundreds of tons of man-made material into that natural formation would be a fitting and powerful testament to the Humans' love of and gratitude towards the natural world.

It'd be a great sign of respect. "Thanks for coming up with such a fantastic idea, and for designing, building and keeping the Old Man together for its first 100,000 years," we'd be saying. "We'd be honored to take over where you left off."

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Friday, May 30 11:13 PM • And Yet I'm Complaining Anyway

I'm in an immense, jade-colored panic trying to do everything I need to do before I can close the office for the week and leave for the airport on Sunday. But because I'm spending all of next week on a cruise ship circling the Hawaiian Islands and will have unlimited free access to a veritable thesaurus of buffets, it's pointless for me to complain.

How do you transport two Mac SE's from Boston to the middle of the Pacific? At this point, the most attractive solution is well, to not, and then just tell everyone that UPS screwed up and my classic Macs would be arriving dockside a day after the ship sailed.

But this is merely a Plan "B." I'm wishing very, very hard that a Plan "A" presents itself sometime before I leave for the airport.

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Saturday, May 31 5:47 PM • OK, We Have A Plan B

So let's say, for sake of argument, that I've located a Rubbermaid container that (a) is large enough to hold two Mac SE's perfectly yet (b) is small enough to come in under the airline's size restrictions for checked baggage. D'ya think the fact that the lid is taped on will cause it to be rejected by baggage inspectors? I've checked taped-up boxes as baggage before, but not since the New Security Measures. Opinions are welcome. Even welcomer are tales from people who report that they've checked similar taped-up boxes since January 1 with great success.

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Saturday, May 31 11:48 PM • Just Another Bloody Test...

Something that was working fine last night has decided to stop working. Yes, somewhere inside my blogger app, Norma Rae is standing up on her worktable and holding up a crude sign reading "UNION."

I don't know what eating Norma, but it's brought the production line to a halt. Through one of my many middle-management flunkies, I have communicated to Norma that it's always been my position that respect from my workers is not a condition of their employment and that it's my responsibility as her boss to work hard to earn that respect. And if she doesn't get everyone back to work, like, now, that's it for everyone's dental package.

So let's see if my nurtuting style of management has had the desired effect. Push the button, Frank...

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Saturday, May 31 11:53 PM • Another try...

Okay, so much for the dental plan. How about the employee pension plan, Norma? Will it underwrite your entire shift's retirement, or will it go towards that platinum pedestrian-plow I've been eyeing for my Bentley?

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Saturday, May 31 11:59 PM • Test!

I've got strike-breakers on speed-dial, Norma. Eight of them used to play for the Philadelphia Flyers. Don't think I won't use 'em...remember, thanks to deregulation of the communications industry, the newspapers, the TV stations, and the public schools in my district will tell the story the way I want it told...

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Catch up on the many heroic banalities that I posted last month.

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