Little Red Envelope podcast update

Thursday, June 01, 2006 • 02:09:30 AM EDT

A new edition of my Little Red Envelope podcast is now online. It comes with the usual Little Red Envelope guarantee of excellence: "This AAC-encoded audio file conforms to the MP4 standard and will play on all compatible software and devices, including Apple's popular iPod digital music players."

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Troubled Boot-Camp Deformed Kid Makeover Video Special

Friday, June 02, 2006 • 01:09:44 PM EDT

Dear Maury:

When the day comes that you're standing behind the curtains waiting to step on the stage and you know full well that you're holding a stack of blue cards for a show entitled "I Lost My Memory When I Was Shot…Am I The Father?" but you go on anyway, it's time to cash out.

It really, really is. A month ago, "Help Me…My Young Teen Daughter Is Getting Paid For Sex" merely cleared its throat and tapped you on the shoulder. But "I Lost My Memory When I Was Shot…Am I The Father?" puts you in a headlock and refuses to release you until you dictate a press release announcing that although you're proud of the body of work you and the "Maury" staff have created, you're now looking forward to spending more time with Connie and the kids.

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An Inconvenient Evacuation

Friday, June 02, 2006 • 11:10:29 PM EDT

Today's Moment of Irony:

Tonight, Al Gore's cautionary documentary about global warming premiered here in Boston. The audience of "An Inconvenient Truth" had to file out of the Coolidge Corner Theater partway through, however.

An air conditioner overheated and started a fire.

Remember, folks: Cheap Irony Remains Your Greatest Irony Value.

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An Inconvenient Correction

Sunday, June 04, 2006 • 02:16:21 PM EDT

This morning's email brought a message from the Executive Director of the Coolidge Corner Theater, correcting a post I made last night about the interruption to their screening of "An Inconvenient Truth":

Sorry about that…I wrote the original post almost immediately after I received a phone call from a friend mine who was there at the screening. He reported the events to me just as I related them on the blog.

I'm glad to learn that the incident was about as minor as anything involving a smoke alarm can get. But I'm disappointed right down to my insoles to learn that it wasn't nearly as Ironic as I was originally led to believe. Irony is one of our most precious national recources and we desperately need more of it. America squanders Irony so irresponsibly that we're forced to import it from Canada and Britain, in quantities that increase year after year after year.

What will we tell our children in 2053, if projections prove to be accurate? We'll be forced to subsist on the whatever limited quantities of meta-humor and post-Letterman wry detachment that remain in the federal strategic comedy reserve system. And need I remind you that the potency of these rations diminish each time they're recycled. Will your grandchildren march on Washington one day holding banners reading "No Blood For Comedy!" or will they be the ones who are killed in the inevitable assault on the offices of the BBC's Light Entertainment Division?

There's still time to abort this dark future. I'd love to create a cautionary documentary with the same impact as "An Inconvenient Truth" but I don't have the resources. I can bankroll a public service announcement, however:

FADE UP on the parking lot of a huge multiplex. Its marquee advertises 8 Adam Sandler movies and feature-length remakes of 70's and 80's TV shows, each on three screens.

A carload of kids peels out of the parking lot in a Camaro buried under tacky aftermarket options. They're celebrating a birthday. One kid opens a birthday present from a faraway parent or uncle. It's a DVD of some sort, but we can't see the title. But the kids make gagging motions and then throw it out the open window as the theme song from "Family Guy" blares from the car's speakers and ultimately fades away in the distance.

The DVD smashes to the side of the road and tumbles to a stop.

We can now see that it's a copy of "The Bob Newhart Show Volume 1." The cover lands at the feet of an old man, who stoops down and picks it up.

The camera slowly MOVES UP his legs and stops on a dramatic tight single of the man's face. It is BOB ELLIOTT. As he turns towards the camera, away from the rest of the highway (littered with Loews and other chain cinemas whose marquees all advertise the exact same movies as the first theater), a single tear rolls down his creased and lined cheek.

He says something devastatingly witty. We can't hear it though; irony and comedy are both dead. Also, if he speaks, I'll have to pay him SAG scale for an acting role, instead of putting him in the production budget as a non-speaking extra. Plus, I'm not certain that I can afford an on-location sound guy.

This problem is solvable. All we need is the will to solve it. Plus about $12,000 for a completion bond, and some idea of how to go about booking Bob Elliott, I suppose. If you can provide either, and aren't one of those nit-picky "Hey, You Took My Twelve Grand And Never Shot The PSA" types, my email address is at the bottom of this post.

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It's HOT as HELL! In PHIL-a-DEL! Phi-AAAA!!!

Thursday, June 08, 2006 • 01:31:55 PM EDT

Hey, whaddya say we talk about me for a change?

First, a new Little Red Envelope podcast is online and immediately available for your…can I say "your entertainment"?

Well, this is the Internet, which means that the word "entertainment" has been cheerfully downgraded. If judged by the standard set back in the late Fifties -- a time when both Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando were at their fighting weights; when Sinatra had transitioned from pop to Jazz; nay, a time when you could still walk into a movie theater and see Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse dancing side-by-side -- well, my humble movie podcast sort of sucks. I admit it. But I'll stack the Little Red Envelope show against online Scooby-Doo fanfic/slashfic any day of the week.

And this is a very special show: the whole thing was recorded on location at my local Red Cross donation center. While I was hooked up to A MACHINE.

Yeah, man: they plunged a needle into me and just let me lie there for ninety minutes, hooked up to a vampiritic device that stripped my blood of life-giving platelets and plasma with remorseless efficiency, begrudgingly returning a watery, laughable mockery of this irreplaceable fluid to my body after it had made its circuit of the vile cabinet's dark and mysterious innards.

It was all very "Pulp Fiction"/"The Matrix (the good one, before it went all smug pop-psychobabbley)"

All told, I recorded for ninety minutes and I wound up discussing a dozen or so Netflix movies. This episode contains just the first half hour; more chapters in this thrilling bloody saga are to come.

If you live in the Philadelphia area (or if you live pretty much anywhere in the world and you have a truly terrifying obsession with me), the Andy Ihnatko Pan-Philly Goodwill Tour is happening this weekend. Tomorrow, I'll be at MacOutfitters in Doylestown, where I'll be giving a talk and hanging around for a while afterward. I'm confident that everyone will have a good time, myself included. I'm also pretty confident that the high-profile technology columnist is the very last person that the management would suspect of stealing a $3000 video projector. Fingers crossed on both of those things.

On Saturday, I'll be speaking at the Main Line Macintosh Users Group's big summer picnic at Valley Forge State Park. It's a festival-style venue, so I'm sorry to say that the band and I will not be performing "Jazz Odyssey." But you can look forward to a collection of all of your old favorites, the hits off the new CD, and a trip through some of the lesser-known pages of the catalogue.

Or, I'll just spend the hour talking about Apple. Depends on what the acoustics are like during sound check.

There's just one piece of sad business to conduct while I'm in Philadelphia. The beekeeper that I pretended to hire a month or so ago just isn't working out and I've been forced to fire her. She's been taking good care of the beehives that I don't have, but the thing is, I haven't been able to find the keys to my storage lockers and my PO box in the past couple of weeks. And while I'm new to this business of having an extensive household staff, I don't need to be told twice that one of the big thrills of hiring these people is firing them for arbitrary reasons largely fueled by your own lack of self-esteem. The moment I pretended to accuse her of stealing the keys, I knew precisely why the whole Social Darwinism concept caught on so quickly. Without it, I'd be searching the whole house and cursing myself for having lost the keys.

As-is, I'm on the phone yelling at people at the Postal Service and area locksmiths, berating them for not appreciating how important my time is and accusing them of wretched incompetence for not having any of the locks re-keyed already. I mean, how awesome is that?

Plus, as a fake beekeeper, she wasn't living up to her full potential. "A personal staff beekeeper," a blind date said to me last weekend at the Miracle of Science Bar in Cambridge, the moment I tried to play that card. "You."

She seemed skeptical, possibly because we'd barely finished exchanging names before I nervously insisted that the date be dutch, and that the gentlemanly thing for me to do would be to allow her to cover 100% of the tip.

She then told me that if I really had a staff beekeeper then surely I kept a picture of her right in my wallet. Well, I don't know how that idea got started. I smoothly replied that I simply didn't have room for one, what with all the hundred-dollar-bills I had in there already, and that's when I found myself wearing most of an apple martini.

I wryly shot back that this was a pretty hip drink back in 2001. But she was already headed out the door so I'm not sure if the insult really had any impact.

So: a change in personnel is definitely called for. Fortunately, Philadelphia includes my friend Joachin among its many attractions. Joachin is a for-real beekeeper. I'm convinced that I can impose upon him to give me both (a) a photo and (b) a signed contract putting him on retainer as my formal staff beekeeper.

Then, I'll just keep coming back to the Miracle of Science night after night. I want to stick the photo and the document right in her overly-Lancome'd face. And maybe see if I can get back the $5.20 she still owes me for her half of the bar bill.

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Testing...

Thursday, June 08, 2006 • 05:21:55 PM EDT

Just doing a little debugging, folks…nothing to see here…

…Except a delicious stack of chocolate-chip pancakes.

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Damn. How's this?

Thursday, June 08, 2006 • 05:37:56 PM EDT

Yeah, it seems as though I've found a subtle problem with CWOBber. Let's see if this fixes it:

Push the button, Frank…

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Test test test

Thursday, June 08, 2006 • 05:42:10 PM EDT

Yeah, it seems as though I've found a subtle problem with CWOBber. Let's see if this fixes it:

Push the button, Frank…

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Demo! Nothing can stop it!!!

Friday, June 09, 2006 • 07:16:49 PM EDT

Hello, everybody!

I'm here in Doylestown, Pennsylvania at MacOutfitters, giving a talk about AppleScript and demonstrating the incredible power of CWOBber.

Did I mention that recently I added a way to insert pauses?

…When I move from one topic to the other.

Well, I think I'm boring the heck out of everybody with this typing, so I'll just publish now.

Push the button, Frank…

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Put that coffee down...the free coffee's for people who can sell.

Saturday, June 10, 2006 • 11:08:04 AM EDT

Greetings from a hotel room in…I don't know where I am, precisely. It's close enough to Philadelphia that you can call it "the Philadelphia area," but far enough away that if you fly into Philadelphia International on just two or three hours' sleep and someone picks you up from the airport, you can get in a good nap before you arrive.

I have just realized that waking up in a hotel room not knowing what city you're in is extremely rock and roll. I am filled with immense pride.

It's a perfectly swell place, fortuitously sited within walking distance of the venue for my next talk (in three hours' time). It is, in fact, one of those Extended Stay hotels that cater to unexpectedly-minted single men and to traveling salespeople. I have chosen to pretend to be the latter. If you were to open a terminal window on my cerebral cortex and execute a top command to bring up a list of active processes, you would note that wl is drawing lots of CPU cycles even though it's in the background. This is the program that continuously generates a stream of what I would be thinking right now, if I were a traveling salesman. Viz:

So I say to Les, I say, "Les, you're squeezin' my lemons here when all I'm trying to do is make sure that your stores don't wind up yellow-listing almost a whole third of their inventory. And that's what's gonna happen three months after we make the ship date. I mean, I can write this order. I can write this order, no problem. But the one thing I want more than this order is to preserve this great relationship we've got with you guys. For God's sake, my uncle made deals with your father, right in this same building. And I don't know if you'll be happy with us if I allow you to put the JJ-12 into your marketing cycle without trying to convince you to give the JJ-10 a couple more months to prove itself with your customers.

Mostly, my head is filled with false memories of being in a conference room with Alec Baldwin and being told that if he had his way, he'd have given my territory to someone who actually gives a #&@% about customer conversion and actualizing the greater margin. It's not a happy thing, truly.

Last night's talk at MacOutfitters went well. I was liked and I was well-liked, as Mr. Loman would say, and that's always immensely helpful. Also helpful was the presence of cookies, which (along with the beer) left the audience suitably softened-up for what turned into nearly two hours of tips and advice.

I was also pleased to learn that apparently, I am indeed one of God's beloved. During the Q&A I wound up talking about Handbrake. On the spur of the moment, I wanted to show off the superb, nigh-original quality of the movie files that this DVD converter creates, so I spun to a random spot in the middle of "Sideways," which I thought was an audience-safe choice.

What I'm saying here is that if God hated me, then surely He would have caused the playback head to randomly land on one of the movie's two fleeting shots of comically-graphic sex. Which I'd totally forgotten about.

Oh, an ordinary man would have come away from this episode thinking "Man, I was an idiot to just click on a random section of a movie that I haven't watched in a couple of months." But then, I am no ordinary man.

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Little Red Envelope is Back Open

Saturday, June 10, 2006 • 10:47:39 PM EDT

When it comes to citing delusional benchmarks of one's own popularity, the gold medalist is clearly Amanda from The Glass Menagerie. She wowed the judges at the 1944 Head Games in Stockholm when, during the Freestyle Super-Id event, she wistfully recollected that once, back in the day, she had so many gentlemen callers that her parents had to borrow some chairs from next door.

10.0's, all across the board. Who can forget the famous photo of the "0.00" on the mechanical scoreboard, a display that never even remotely considered the possibility that five international judges would agree that a someone had achieved utter perfection in the art of deconstructive self-flattery?

It's in a similar spirit that I report that my Little Red Envelope podcast has already exceeded its monthly bandwith limit and gone offline.

Tennessee Williams would have approved of that sort of statement. It's a real plum-pudding of a boast: it's factually-accurate and absolutely concrete, and yet utterly meaningless due to lack of context. You send your audience away feeling impressed, but with absolutely no idea on earth why they should be. If "I've busted my bandwidth limits" were a movie, it'd be "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Nonetheless, I've bought additional bandwidth and the show's back online. Do let me know if your subscription doesn't work. But first, try re-subscribing.

A nice event at MLMUG this afternoon. They throw an annual picnic for their members, and while on the surface this seems like a sneaky way to make sure that dozens of avid computer users get some sun at least once a year, hey…it worked. I happily note that my skin tone has warmed all the way from "Discorporeal" to "Pallid."

I'm now enjoying a quiet night alone. My hotel is right next to the park but it's nowhere near anything else, so a bracing constitutional followed by a call at the Ministry of Nightlife isn't nearly as practical as watching "Old School" on TBS while eating a takeout cheesesteak and half a pint of Cherry Garcia.

I'll make it all back tomorrow. I'm meeting up with my prospective beekeper in the morning, and then I'll wage a steely-determined touristic assault upon Independence Mall and the Constitution Museum. I've got a notebook full of addresses and highlights, a street-level GPS finder, and a set of insoles with only about 700 miles on 'em.

If, by the time I settle into my seat on the plane, I am not so exhausted that I resolve then and there to spend the rest of my life being carried around from place to place in an upholstered sedan chair, then I will feel that I failed to take full advantage of my afternoon in the cradle of American independence.

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Five Cents, Please

Tuesday, June 13, 2006 • 04:31:11 PM EDT

There's a series of "Peanuts" strips in which Lucy (in her role as roadstand psychiatrist) puts all of Charlie Brown's faults on slides and projects them onto a big screen for him to see, adding her comments as she goes along.

I finished writing the first half of my next book a while ago, but now it's all been edited and reviewed and my next deadline involves (a) reviewing any changes the editors might have made, (b) responding to any questions they left in the margins, and most importantly (c) taking advantage of my last chance to make big changes before these chapters go off to the printers.

And I should stress that (a) and (b) are both smooth sailing. This book's editors have the vastly annoying habit of being right all the time. Optimally, the only comments they would make is "Andy, to tamper with your perfect gems of Truth, Beauty and Wisdom would be as offensive and unthinkable as reaching out and plucking a hair from the eyebrow of God himself."

I do have to settle for the second-best sort of comments. The kind where they point out that I've used the word "this" to refer to two different things in the same sentence and that there's a discouragingly-high chance that nobody will know what the hell I'm talking about.

No, in this case, I'm the analyst in the blue dress and the bafflingly lumpy hairdo. I read something I wrote a couple of months ago, I frown, I click on Word's "Add Comment…" command, and then when an orange bubble appears in the margin I type

Wow…that line must have really cracked you up when it was in your head. Now how about if you let me and the reader in on the joke?

Which seems both unprofessional and counter-productive. I've got enough on my hands as it is, without Captain Negative over there punching holes in my boat. If he's such a creative genius, why doesn't he just write his own damned book?

It's been like this all day. All. Day. But the end (and the deadline for these edits) is near, and soon, I Shall Be At Peace.

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You are the first team to arrive.

Saturday, June 17, 2006 • 05:33:52 PM EDT

The events of my Thursday afternoon featured one of those moments in which Phil Keoghan makes an unexpected and unwanted appearance on your personal TV show.

"A 'Road Block' is a task that must be performed before the team can receive their next clue," he said, abruptly cutting in as I entered the Boston Convention Center. His hair was extra-spiky in the June weather. He paced underneath a dramatic crane shot of the BCC, speaking with an affable intensity. From the angle of the sun, you could tell that this was shot earlier in the day.

"In this Road Block, the teams must enter this packed convention center and purchase [swooping fast-forward handheld video that whips through the convention floor and ends at a display of phones] this hot, soon-to-be-released Windows Mobile 5.0 flip phone.

"The task is simple…but to make the purchase, they must collect a flier in a remote meeting room to find the booth number, locate the phone in a poorly-bannered corner of the convention floor to examine its fit and function, and then make their way to an Internet lounge in a third area entirely, where they must place their order at one of these public terminals.

"But before they can even begin, they must first somehow locate this man [another exciting zoom-up, this time ending on a friendly man in a blue embroidered Microsoft shirt] to receive the media credentials required to enter this national annual conference for developers, managers, and administrators of Microsoft software and networks."

Back to Phil. "Only those teams who are both fast on their feet and who can decipher the confusing layout of the East Coast's largest convention center will complete their task quickly and proceed to the Pit Stop for this leg of the Race."

An Amazing Race Moment is defined as a challenge in one's day-to-day life that seems needlessly complicated. It's as though an unseen outside force were intentionally adding random steps and requirements to a straightforward errand, solely to heighten your distress and an unseen audience's amusement. But what can you do about it? You want that million dollars, and part of you takes pride in meeting adversity with grit and determination. As opposed to meeting it with fits of weeping that alternate with the launching of furniture through windows.

Yes? There's a question at the back?

Andy, would you ever really want to be on "The Amazing Race"?

Indeed I would. I would become a contestant on "The Amazing Race" if I had the chance. But the big trouble is finding a proper partner. You need somebody who you can have fun with even after weeks of stress and adversity. Someone whom you talk into eating a traditional Syrian delicacy of Spicy Rat Noses And Gravel, so you won't have to. Someone who, after you've miraculously made it to the Final Four, doesn't pout and storm off, announcing that this Road Block is way too hard and that she's quitting the Race.

Most importantly, you need a partner who Completes You. And not in the sappy, romantic way. That might have gotten you on the show in Season 2, but come on. No, you and your partner have to be a package that the producers are going to want to buy. Something that they can boil down to three or four words and slap under your names every time you turn up onscreen.

I envision sending out emails to a lot of cosmetic surgeons. "How much would it cost to get a couple of surgical scars for my friend and me? I need to get a 'I bravely donated a kidney to my lifelong friend' scar and he needs a 'My friend saved my life by bravely donating a kidney' one."

I would conclude by offering a $100 bonus for a letter certifying that my friend's recovery was truly miraculous, and that it's the doctor's considered opinion that he only pulled through because I promised him that we'd try out for "The Amazing Race" together.

You don't want to leave this to the last moment and then just blurt something out during the casting interview. That's what a team did a few seasons ago. And so, every week, at multiple points during a popular national TV show, millions of people read the following caption:

If the producers of the show had a real sense of humor, they would have changed this caption midway through the race and then waited to see if anybody caught on.

Well, I've got plenty of time to work on it. I need to get in shape before I can even think of such window dressing.

But even if I and my teammate fell apart before the very first Pit Stop, I'd be pleased to have done it. You got a free trip to the laundry district of Quito, Ecuador, for God's sake, and I bet you they let you keep the backpack. They'd probably give you a meal voucher before putting you back on the plane, too. It's nothing but upside, as far as I can tell.

In fact, I think "The Amazing Race" is the only reality-game show where there are truly no losers. You spend a variable number of weeks hopping from city to city, visiting nooks and crannies of the world that would never turn up in a travel guide, collecting experiences and stories that you could dine out on for years afterward.

"The thing you would never imagine about trying to navigate through a Mutluti crab market is…hang on, are we ordering a wine with this meal or no?"

"What's the difference?"

"If I can order wine, I'll tell you about this seafood-broker's cute 20-year-old daughter and how eager she was to help a couple of exotic American men. No wine, and I cut straight to the difficulty of carrying six huge, smelly fish pots to a boat a quarter-mile away without breaking anything."

"Order the wine."

"...I knew then and there that this was the day we were going to get Philiminated from the Race. But then, this bell-like voice rang out: 'Americans? I speak American! Hello!' The intense humidity was causing her cotton dress to cling to her lithe form, and I immediately thought that maybe losing the Fast-Forward to the Soccer Moms wasn't such a stroke of bad luck after all…"

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Glorious Television

Tuesday, June 20, 2006 • 03:44:54 PM EDT

I sit in the lotus position on a small carpet in a quiet part of the house. I contemplate not the simplicity and interconnectedness of the ineffable universe, but the four or five mobile phones that surround me in a semicircle.

It's like spraying for bugs. It really is. Last week, I tracked down and gathered every last loaner phone together, boxed them up, and put them in the hands of the fine men and women of our nation's uniformed deliverycorps. And naturally, I got an email from New England Cable News on Friday: could I come in on Tuesday night's newscast and talk about wireless Web?

I would have given them the usual speech about how I'm not the star here, it's my music that should get all the attention. But I have no music. The first half of that speech was absolutely correct, however, and I can probably start to adjust that if I do more TV stuff. So I spent a couple of hours making phone calls and sending off emails, and now I'm right back at Square One, with about a half a dozen (really keen) phones.

I enjoy doing these tech segments. They don't come so frequently that I'm constantly in the weeds and desperate to put some thoughts and some hardware together, but they come often enough that I can try to steadily and methodically develop some sort of knack for Not Looking Like A Complete Ass. Which is a far more subtle problem than you'd think. It's not just about remembering not to tell the joke about the Anglican bishop and the dairymaid (boy, there's a mistake you don't make twice!). There's a lot to this Becoming A Beloved TV Personality business. I am armed with new perspective. Larry King's unfolding insanity, now at gravel-snorkeling levels and trending upward, is less of a mystery now.

My priorities, in order:

1. Put across many subtle but important points, so that the segment is of value to the viewer despite its brevity.
2. Be charming, witty, and entertaining, so that the aforementioned viewer will stick with me even when I'm trying to explain the differences between EDGE and EvD0.
3. Not see that panicky but professionally-restrained look on the interviewer's face that says "The director is desperately telling me to wrap this up, but you just won't stop talking!"

Usually I go two-for-three.

It is indeed a challenge. Today's segment will go about three or four minutes, which means that it's important that I try to speak in the form of Ideas rather than facts. IE, "There are two different types of phone hardware (GSM and CDMA) and two different sorts of high-speed data networks (EDGE and EvD0)" = bad. "Your carrier usually locks you into one specific sort of phone and data network" = good.

The only thing I know for certain is that when I sit down at the desk, I will think of that line from "Broadcast News" when Albert Brooks is (forcefully) told to sit on the tail of his jacket to improve the appearance of the shoulderline. "Nice tip!" he beams, as he admires himself in the monitor. Every time. Every. Time.

I'll be on at about 6:30, if you're in New England and have allowed the infernal devil-box into your homes. As my personal secret signal to you, the readers of my blog, I shall be wearing a wide-brimmed brown Aussie hat. Shhhh.

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Happy...Thanks...GIVING! From...W...K...

Thursday, June 22, 2006 • 11:20:37 AM EDT

10 AM:

"Gosh," I thought. "The creaking of the trees outside my office window almost sounds like a turkey gobble."

4 PM:

I heard a muffled, undignified crash and looked up quickly enough to see a few leaves and twigs drifting down to the ground. I guessed that a squirrel or something mis-timed a leap and plummeted, so I diverted my attention from the awesome responsibilities of my job, and looked more closely. I saw a dark, hunched oval moving in an upper branch about thirty feet up.

It was a turkey.

No, clearly it was a raccoon, or something.

No, it was indeed a turkey:

But that's not possible. Turkeys can't fly. It's a fact. It was the basis of an episode of "WKRP" and everything.

Only two possible explanations:

1. One of the neighbors bought a pet turkey online. but FedEx screwed up the order and didn't deliver the turkey hutch and the turkey bed and the little turkey leash and collar. "I'll just carry it up into that tree," he thought, after considering his situation. "It'll be safe from theft and predators, and because turkeys can't fly, it won't be able to run away on me."
2. It's possible that you can't learn everything you need to know about the world from a beloved childhood sitcom.

The next time I see Chuck, I'll congratulate him on his purchase. I wonder if he was able to Froogle himself a deal on it? I should ask.

Speaking of pictures, I went to the MIT Flea Market on Sunday and as usual, was compelled to document my progress. Enjoy.

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