Two seconds ago. Phone call from an editor who's desperately trying to edit the column I sent him an hour ago, so he can boogie out of the office for the long 4th of July Weekend. He was stuck on a line in the second paragraph.

"I don't understand the sentence. This word you've got here: it's a noun, but it looks like you're using it as a verb. Was that a typo, or did you skip a word somewhere?"

"I know I've seen it used as a verb," I said. "If it isn't a verb, then with this column I'm officially declaring it to be one. It'll be in print and then the issue will have been settled for future generations. When you think about it, you'll actually be giving English literature a little push forward by leaving it as-is."

The editor suggested a better way of phrasing it and I readily agreed. After I hung up the phone I finally really heard what I had said and I burst out laughing.

There are times that I'm amazed that I get as much repeat business as I do.

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Remember folks: on the July 4th holiday weekend more mannikins, wig stands, and crude plywood cutouts dressed in children's clothing lose hands, arms, and suffer serious facial burns than during any other weekend of the year. So if you own a mannikin, a wig stand, or a crude plywood cutout dressed in children's clothing, don't allow them to participate in Independence Day celebrations without appropriate adult supervision.

This warning comes courtesy of nearly every local newscast I've caught since Thursday.

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An Extremely Well-Known Company sent me a new mouse that was designed by a big-name designer. I'm putting "big-name designer" in lowercase because I'm not hiding his identity; I just don't know who he is. So how do I know he's a big-name designer?

Umm...well, because the press release in the box kept going on and on about how famous the guy is and what a major coup it was for the Extremely Well-Known Company to retain his services for something so prosaic as a mere mouse. Look, that's not the point.

The point is that it's a very unique and stylish mouse. Definitely not the sort of dull thingamabob that comes with a new Dell Dimension. Not so stylish that it'd be milled out of a block of platinum and get full-page ads in magazines like Pompous Lower-Upper-Class Bastard Who Actually Thinks He Can Tell The Difference Between An $800 Bottle Of Wine And Two-Buck Chuck From Trader Joe's. But it's definitely stylish enough that you may one day spot it in a really low-budget movie made for the Sci-Fi Channel, on the desk of the Cernan Lunar Colony's chief of police. You know, just to show you how gol-darned futuristic things are over here. It'll be connected to a Dell Dimension.

It wasn't until I looked at it again later this afternoon that I noticed that it sort of looks like a [CENSORED].

In an iconographic sort of way, I mean. You know how a fat oval bisected by a wide rounded rectangle looks nothing like a hamburger, and yet it contains just enough of visual language that when you slap it on a highway exit sign, people take one 70 MPH glance at it and immediately think "Hey, cool...burgers! Boy, could I go for one of those right about now!"

Only in this case the drivers would be thinking "Hey, cool...[CENSORED]! Boy, could I go for one of those right about now!"

Not exactly an unlikely thought, given the raw power that the thing in question often has on the human psyche. If I owned an IHOP near an offramp and I was getting a little desperate for business, I'd hammer one of those signs up in the dead of night. Hundreds of lonely people would turn up at my franchise and while I wouldn't be able to provide them with any [CENSORED] (not in New England, anyway) I'd tell them that we do have a wide selection of waffles and pancakes. Waffles are a pretty solid #2 choice in nearly any situation, particularly if it comes with a complimentary side of bacon.

I'm not going to tell you who makes this mouse or what it looks like. I don't want to ruin this device for anyone who already owns one. My initial thought was just a cursory and idle one, but within the hour, it had built in intensity until now, I don't really even want to take the mouse out of the package...let alone...

Um...

You know.

Let alone...wrap my hand around it and manipulate it and stuff.

If you own this mouse and it never occurs to you that it looks a litle like a [CENSORED], you're safe. You can use the thing. You live in a magical realm in which this thing is just a stylish mouse that nicely dresses up your desktop.

I have no idea what to do with it, either. If I give it to Goodwill, will they have me arrested as some sort of pervo?

Oh, good God...now I'm thinking "I'm just glad this isn't a force-feedback mouse." That does it. I'm going to have to go off now and read about a year's worth of "Family Circus" strips as a form of mental sorbet to wipe this image from my brain...

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This post will all be about the science and the art of writing, and I'll begin by talking an awful lot about Krispy Kreme Donuts.

If you have the sort of career that's going so well or so poorly that you're watching TV at either 2 PM or 3 AM, you've probably seen all those public service announcements for UN famine relief funds. A typical one starts with shots of a barren wasteland where the only currencies are despair and suffering but then, lo! Here comes a truckful of white people! And seconds later the entire village is crowded around a brand-new working well, delightedly sticking their hands into the first flow of clean, safe water this region has seen in three generations. How they marvel at this miracle. They've never seen its like within their lifetimes. Their better natures are aware that this is all nothing terribly special and they could have had clean water fifty years ago if their nation's budget for sewage and sanitation hadn't been entirely earmarked towards sliding a progressively more expensive and exotic series of toilet fixtures under the progressively more expansive bottoms of their leaders. Yet some fractional remnant of an outdated dogma -- the same one which flickered into my forebrain the first time I used a Macintosh -- wonders if it's even possible that God would appear before them with knobby white knees peering out from under Abercrombie & Fitch safari shorts.

When the first Krispy Kreme opened in New England, it was a lot like that.

We are a generation of Dunkin' Donuts consumers. We also have Honey Dew Donuts and I've heard of something called Dough Boy Donuts — but all I know is the radio slogan "Oh, boy! It's Dough Boy donuts!" but we cling to our morning trifecta of an Old Fashioned or Chocolate Honey Glazed, a cup of coffee, and a Boston Herald the same way that Canadians cling to modesty and politeness. A new donut franchise? Don't let the Czar's men hear you speak such nonsense, lad; 'round these parts, citizens even younger and more innocent than you have a way of disappearing.

We openly doubted that this new facility under construction on Route One in Dedham was anything more than a sham for an FBI undercover sting operation, or perhaps a film set. We all liked the latter idea. It made the most sense. Filming in New York City costs a fortune so if Sony Pictures is shooting a romantic comedy and the two leads are supposed to have a Meet Cute inside a lower Manhattan Krispy Kreme, it's just cheaper to build a 1:1 scale model in the Boston suburbs and then greenscreen a few skyscrapers around it in post-production. Imagine our shock when the store opened and they actually started cranking out real — not prop — donuts.

Real donuts? Well, no. It was a nice try but...no. Krispy Kreme donuts are what you'd get if a Dunkin' Donut got one a bad TV makeover. It's had a manicure and a pedicure, it's got Product in its hair, and its shoes match its belt. Doesn't the Krispy Kreme organization understand that part of what we like about a Dunkin' Donut is that it's so genuinely itself? You can easily drive while eating a Dunkin' Donut. Its surface is a deep-fried exoskeleton that penetrates more than five millimeters into the cakey interior and thus a Dunkin' Donut will maintain its structural integrity even when dunked in milk. But a Krispy Kreme is a delicate, dare I say Poofy, confection. When you hold it between your thumb and index fingers it sags and collapses underneath its own weight, as though it was engineered solely for use in lunar gravity. It's a dessert donut, a wholly unsuitable candidate for the anchor of a commuter's breakfast.

Finally, there's the sugar problem. I'm not sure who owns the company that manufacturers pharmaceutical insulin and diabetes-related testing supplies, but I bet Krispy Kreme appears somewhere in the corporate org chart. A Krispy Kreme donut has the same sugary impact as nine hundred Snickers bars. In a crate. Dropped on top of you from a height of, say, thirty feet. It's a quantity of sugar best described as Punitive. I mean, this is America; we're not supposed to support these kinds of ideas unless they're being directed against rioting neo-hippies.

The only good thing that comes out of this quantity of sugar is that it presents you with an ideal way to explain the concept of Irony to a small child. Just take him to Krispy Kreme when the neon "HOT NOW" light is on. You place your order for a donut (a highly sissified but still damned tasty Key Lime Donut, for example) and as soon as you've committed to the sale, a staffmember offers you a complimentary Original Glazed hot off the assembly line. Okay. So obviously you're going to eat the Fresh and Hot one first, not the one that might have been languishing in the display case for upwards of seventy minutes. But as soon as you finish it, you're instinctually aware of the importance of not having another Krispy Kreme for at least seventeen hours. It's the same instinct that says "Just so we're clear: we're going to plug appliances into this electrical socket, but under no cirumstances are we going to stick our tongue into it." It's a wise impulse and it should be heeded.

Result? You have a surplus donut on your hands (as well as a sticky coating of sugar glazing that yields only after you scrub your fingers with drain opener). You bring it home and stick it in the fridge, and after a week, you've got something like nine donuts of varying age and hardness, and you're forced to eat all the fruit in your produce drawer to make room for more.

There's a critical inefficiency at work here. They ought to offer you the free donut before you place your order. Either that, or they should allow me to swap six old donuts for a single new one. I'd still be left with the original problem — while waiting for them to bag the new one, they'd offer me another hot Original Glazed and I'd wind up taking the replacement donut home with me — but at least I'd be able to implement a 6:1 force reduction with just a handful of trips.

The Krispy Kreme franchise in Dedham is doing really well, although the organization has reportedly begun to rethink their original plans to tear through the Northeast like a pastry-driven version of Sherman's march through Georgia. I was there tonight and between 10 PM and 11:30 fresh, hot, (poindexter-like) donuts (the sort of donuts that get beaten up by Dunkin' Donuts donuts for their lunch money) were constantly being produced, bagged, boxed, and sold. Route One features...let me think...six Dunkin' Donuts over its ten-kilometer run from Walpole through Dedham, if you include the one down by the Burger King that's a combination Dunkin' Donuts/Baskin Robbins. While one or two of them bother to stay open past 10 PM, they're mostly slinging coffee and trying to get rid of their last batch of fried product. Krispy Kreme is still serving the needs of donut-driven consumers and the 24-hour party people who need to pit-stop for some solid food before they set off on the third leg of their Ironman Nightlife Triathalon.

In fact, the Krispy Kreme offers table seating until 2 AM on Friday and Saturday nights, and 1 AM all other evenings. Which is how all of this relates to the aforementioned Science and Art of Writing, which I now think is a topic that I'm going to have to return to tomorrow. Cheers!

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San Diego Comic-Con International is the largest and most intense comic book/sci-fi/film/animation/nerdopia convention on the planet. If you want to get a sense of its scale within the general category, think of a local 10K charity walk and then compare it to the Ironman Triathalon. I admit that the comparison is an imperfect one. The only way to get 300 of these people to complete a 1.5 mile ocean swim is to spread a rumor that Colm Meaney's lighting stand-in will be signing autographs at a Days Inn across the bay from the convention center. If unsatisfied with this analogy, you may obtain a full refund by returning the unused portion in its original packaging to General Mills, P.O. Box 9452, Minneapolis, MN 55440. Offer not valid in New Mexico. I once dated a girl from there and I'm still sort of bitter about the way she ended it.

I've only attended Comic-Con (or any other big convention) once, back in 1999. Chiefly it was a reaction to a hellacious amount of travel I had to do in the preceding three months. I was sick of flying and sick of hotel rooms and sick of running from meeting to meeting and sick and given that I had an extra 20,000 air miles in my account I figured that a little hair of the dog was precisely what the doctor ordered. It was bliss. I was in a convention center, as usual, surrounded by tens of thousands of people, as usual...but I had absolutely no responsibilities. Usually when I'm in a convention center of that size I'm constantly unpocketing my cellphone or my iPod to find out where I was meant to be twenty minutes ago, or trying to get through as many aisles of exhibitors as possible in a desperate search to find That One Incredibly Cool Thing that I simply must write a column about.

But not this time. It was actually a little disorienting...sort of like when you return a circus animal to the wild. He's sort of grown accustomed to the crack of the whip and the steel bowl of bland food that appears from behind a sliding panel at two specific times during the day. When present him with the infinite options associated with total freedom, he doesn't really know what to do with it. Still, I quickly got into the swing of things. I bumped into a surprisingy large number of friends and (even more surprisingly) a large number of people who knew who I was and holy cats...I engaged these people in lush and satisfying conversations. ATI wasn't waiting for me somewhere behind an unmarked door to show me next year's graphics card. I didn't need to start every chance conversation with "I wish I had time to stop and chat." I could actually stop. And then I could, you know, chat.

The experience quickly made me appreciate why at any given NASCAR event there are some 120,000 people in the stands and only about seventy people driving. Given the choice, we'd all like to enjoy an environment of intense action and excitement without committing to any activities that would require us to wear anything fireproof.

Yet I've never gone back. Comic-Con was huge when I went and lexicographers cite its growth since then as the root cause for the creation of the word "Gi-normous." It's very much out of hand at this point. They should just dome it over and call it an experimental utopian society and be done with it. Too many people, too much to see, too far to walk, and area hotels, sensing that people who are eager to spend $2000 for an old copy of Uncanny X-Men must have a fragile grasp on the value of a dollar, charge nearly ten times their normal rack rate. I had a great time at Comic-Con but I'd rather have eight days and seven nights in London — meals and entertainment included — than four and three at Comic-Con. The exchange rate between dollars and pounds really stinks but at least in London I won't be tempted to drop two grand on books, DVDs, original artwork, and assorted collectibles. Just send me home with a packet of chocolate-covered digestive biscuits and some of those really keen notepads and I'm good.

So I'm staying home this week. Still, I have about a half a dozen friends who will be either attending the Con or exhibiting there, and I feel like I'm shirking my responsibilities by sticking to my office and working. "How can I be with my friends in spirit during this, their time of struggle and sorrow?" I was wondering.

As a self-employed writer, when I get dressed in the morning I don't reach into the closet for a suit. I reach into a dresser drawer for a technology-industry tee shirt. Today, it happened to be one commemorating the CD-ROM release of "Comic Book Confidential." And I instantly knew how I would honor my comrades-in-arms: in the spirit of attendees of comic book conventions everywhere, I will wear this comic-related shirt every day for the duration of the Con. I will not take it off, even when I go to bed. I will not launder it. I will remain oblivious to its expanding zone of impenetrable funk and I will be utterly insensitive to just how much the aforementioned funk is inconveniencing passers-by. I will intentionally dribble an assortment of fast-food condiments and donut fillings on it, allowing the stains to mount up until the shirt resembles something you might buy in a museum gift shop right after seeing a Jackson Pollock retrospective.

This shirt is more than ten years old, so in that sense it's perfect for this sort of thing. Strikes against its authenticity are its total lack of any rips of holes and the fact that I haven't gained sixty pounds since the time when it actually fit me. So it won't be a perfect tribute to conventionwear. But it's the thought that counts.

And I have to do something. One of my pals is actually going far above and beyond the call of friendship. He's staffing one of the Con's Guests of Honor but in a stirring display of brotherhood that wouldn't have been out of place in the closing scenes of "Saving Private Ryan," he up and offered to spend his limited free time approaching artists to do sketches for my art collection.

(This is one of the more entertaining aspects of comic conventions. Artists like to draw. They also like money. The intersection of these two facts lies in a large area invariably known as "Artists' Alley," where professionals will draw nearly anything you want for a fairly nominal fee. One art collector is famous for asking convention artists to draw him "anything or anyone, so long as it involves a cliff." The breathtaking results are available for perusal in his online gallery.)

I FedExed him some sheets of character reference and a list of artists that I'm particularly interested in. And Lord, I feel as though I've send a freckle-faced farm kid into war. One or two of those artists are so popular and sketch so infrequently that the only people who walk away with a coveted sketch are those who walked in with a cheerful disregard for the Golden Rule. And should I have told him that the most popular artist of them all might recognize my name if it were dropped, given that one of the vice-presidents of his company is allegedly an avid reader of mine? Would that get me a sketch? Or would it instead get my friend a blank, uncomprehending stare and the lesson that if you're going to drop a name, it's generally best to use someone who's actually famous?

I'll be happy if he brings me just one sketch. But on the whole I echo the sentiment of expectant parents everywhere: I just want my pal to come home with ten fingers and ten toes. That's not by any means guaranteed when one dives into the general scrum for an Art Adams sketch.

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

This page and its contents copyright © 2004 Andy Ihnatko.