Get well soon, Steve.

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Gosh, I haven't posted in a while. What causes the average blogger to desperately post something, anything, after a long absence is the thought "They're going to think I'm dead or something." With me, it's "They're going to think that I did something stupid to my code, and the blogging app I wrote doesn't work any more."

So here's a post to prove you shade-throwers and punker-outers wrong. ThoughI'm having my own little moment of Destiny re: my blogger, I confess:

MovableType is just so damned good.

Yes, I know. It's a troubling sign that my once-impenetrable arrogance — composed of rich, dense soil mined from a planet much, much closer to the sun — is faltering, even just a little bit. Imagine! The very thought that the industry-standard blogging app, crafted and perfected and extended by the greatest minds of the Industry, might possibly be a viable alternative to the app I've been slapping together with AppleScript Studio. But there it is. I dunno. I'm pretty sure that as a responsible journalist, I ought to install a "secret" MovableType blog here on the Colossal Waste Of Bandwidth, just so I can learn what it's like to set up a MT blog without paying for installation or just getting a TypePad account. And even if I do switch, hey, I can just modify my blogger so that it becomes a MT front-end. It's called "Synergy," people. Also "Wussing out," but if we mess around with the typography people won't see that text under the headline.

Why no blogging? Busy, busy, busy. I haven't told you the details of May's trip to London, but I'll have another chance in November. The very first Macworld UK Conference this Spring went well enough that they're doing another one in November, and (from my own selfish perspective) my keynote and seminars therein went well enough that they're bringing me back. Indeed, I will be spending my birthday in London and if May was any indication, I will spend much of my time answering questions like "So: Bush. He really is an idiot, isn't he?" and "What's the story with Michael Moore?" Like a good, humble patriot I will of course insist that my views are representative of the citizenry as a whole.

I'll have lots of chances to talk about travel, actually. Tomorrow I head off to Long Beach, California to give a bunch of talks at the very first DLExpo. This is a series of consumer-oriented technology conferences and it means I'll also be travelling to New York in September and Atlanta in November. Off to Santa Clara in October to keynote again at the O'Reilly O'Mac O'Conference, then back to the Apple Store in New York for a big kickoff party for my new series of Mac books...

Did I mention the New Series Of Mac Books? They ought to start appearing in finer bookstores (and even the dumpier ones) at the end of the month. I just got my first case of the first title (a way-hey-hey tome on Panther) and it's a beaut. More on this later.

No, let's talk about it now. By the end of the year, the Panther book will be joined by books on iLife, GarageBand, and iPhoto, and at the moment we're talking about the books that'll go into the second series. The covers are metallic foil and they can be used to signal passing ships if you ever get yourself into a "Gilligan's Island" sort of situation, so I really think you ought to buy extra copies for your car, boat, and RV. You'll be helping yourself and you'll be helping me out insomuch that I will receive royalties on your purchases and will be ninety cents closer to being able to afford a mail-order bride or maybe one of those cool Vespa scooters.

But I'm putting a lot of love into these things, which translates to a great many nights spent doing actual work instead of trying to make some headway on that 1/24th-scale Death Star I'm trying to build out of Legos. At the moment, I'm at the end of the Author Review process on the iLife book. This is the last step before this title leaves my hands and it goes off to the printer: the chapters I and (my co-author) Tony Bove wrote have been edited, and now I have to go through all 22 of the buggers. I read the editors' notes and comments, and by way of reply I alternate between insisting that none shall question the sanity of the Universe's Beloved and meekly saying that well, that paragraph made sense in my head three months ago. It's not my fault if I failed to translate those neurological impulses into sentences with actual nouns. And then I rewrite it.

Let's see. Amid all of this, I finished writing a novella a couple of weeks ago. That's good. From the first draft, though, it's obvious that it should be a short story instead. So I'm going to have to do to 5,000 words of this story what Michael Corleone did to Fredo at the end of "Godfather II." And for much the same reasons, too: this subplot has a good heart...but it's weak, and it's stupid. But that's OK. In fiction, the first draft is hard work and then everything after that is a lot of fun.

I'm looking forward to Long Beach. Locals have informed me that the city's clean and efficient monorail system that famously whisked people throughout the L.A. metroplex for decades was torn down during the shooting of "L.A. Confidential" so that it wouldn't mess up the exterior shots of period Los Angeles. Also, one of the user comments on TripAdvisor.com describes the area as "homeless friendly," and thus if I want to have fun with my L.A. pals I'll need a rental car. Hertz has set me up with Reasonable, Reliable Transportation, so I'm looking forward to being spat upon by a series of red-vested valets over the weekend. This will be only my second visit to L.A. I made my first one in June, when a pal and I went to Mojave for the SpaceShip One launch. We were in the desert for three days and then we spent a couple of hours driving around LA to kill some time before our flighs back to America's Left Bank. But we really drove all over the place so I'm pretty sure that I know everything there is to know about the city. The two pals I'm visiting with have lived in LA their whole lives and I'm looking forward to showing them all the things and places that they've never seen before. It's up to us, who have a necessary emotional distance and sense of perspective, to help out the more ignorant, you understand.

I'm actually looking forward to trying In-N-Out Burger and Fatburger while I'm in LA. Yes, yes, they're common fast-food places, but in the Land of the Cod, they're completely unheard of. Rolling into the drive-through and trying to order a burger without saying "Big Mac" will be a delight. It'll be sort of like visiting a foreign country and spending twenty minutes looking at the pretty pictures on the money. Only with the added draw of salt and cholesterol.

But if I told you that I'm looking forward to visiting a fast-food joint I'd sound pretty stupid. So I'll just keep that to myself.

Postscript: I've already received a few emails from people recommending diners and other sights to see that don't have the prefix "Disney-" or the suffix "-gang turf." Keep 'em coming!

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Greetings from Long Beach, California. Am pleased to report that the user comments about this hotel (the Renaissance) on tripadvisor.com were less than accurate. I was put off by the phrase "Homeless-friendly neighborhood" — which is not to say that I advocate open hostility towards the less-fortunate of our society, but one likes to be able to stroll the environs without fear of getting shivved by an individual who spied your fancy new shoelaces. It's a swell, borderline swanky hotel and only a block away from the ocean.

The very first day of the very first city of the very first DLExpo was a very good one. Naturally I have to judge these things from my own selfish perspective as a speaker. I've spoken to an audience of 1,000 and an audience of two but when I come someplace to give a talk all I'm hoping for are people whose ears have been set to the "in" position. On one or two occasions I've had to speak to people who had no idea who I was or what I was going to talk about, but who either (a) wanted to get a good seat for whatever was coming up after me, or (b) valued my keen insights on the industry less than they valued a place to sit down and get their email. That's death, a singularly deathly form of death in which you die in the deathiest way possible.

I gave three talks today and the audiences were reliably great even if the attendance was somewhat variable. I'm convinced that it was more due to scheduling than any other factor. My first talk was about Bluetooth and my tee time was at 8:30. AM. 8:30 AM, which is in the morning. More than that, actually: it is way the hell in the morning. To me, 8:30 AM is like the concept of a TV show that stars Heather Locklear. I'm willing to take your word for it that it exists and feel no need to experience it firsthand.

I was there in Long Beach Convention Center Room 103A at 8:30 AM (did I mention that this was in the morning?). I had Lilith and a projector and a bottle of water and was raring to go but the room was slightly — that is to day, completely — uncontaminated by an audience. I looked under the tables in case everyone was just taking a nap (something that I myself had considered ten minutes earlier, after setting up my PowerBook) but nope. Apparently when the audience feedback cards were processed on this one I could look forward to a 100% positive response.

Five minutes later, I had a customer, and five minutes after that, I had another. I fired up a couple of cartoons on Lilith to give them something to watch while I waited in hope for more stragglers and remembered the greatest piece of advice on public speaking I'd ever heard: "Before you enter the room, make sure you've got a twenty-dollar bill in your wallet. And if it turns out that you're speaking to so few people that you can take them all to the nearest bar and buy them a beer, then that's what you should do instead."

I blame the time of day, not myself or the show. People continued to filter in as I continued to talk and by 9 AM I had a respectable group of people to blather at. My second talk was at 10:30 and the large auditorium was about half-full.

What's fairly unique about this conference is that I'm delivering two of these presentations again tomorrow. I'm actually looking forward to it. I feel like I'm previewing a new play in Boston or Chicago. Each of these presentations is brand-new and it's a chance to keep fine-tuning the material and the delivery. There'll be another DLExpo in New York next month and a third in Atlanta in November, and I expect that by my third or fourth "performance" these shows will be ready for Broadway.

My last talk was at 3:45 and had a final attendance of two. Again, bad scheduling: DLExpo attendees had a choice of five presentations happening at the same time, and one of these was David Pogue's great iMovie tutorial. And the great thing about having a small group is that you can dispense with the formal presentation. In the auditorium I couldn't really take questions, and the dynamics of speaking to a large group means that you don't have the freedom of going way off-script. Speaking to two people is an opportunity, not a hardship. When I say something like "I don't think photo printers are worth the time and hassle, now that Kodak has PictureMaker kiosks in every drugstore" I can follow that with "...what do you think?" instead having to plow onward and simply trust that I've made my point.

So it was a very good day, which is pretty remarkable considering that I was only able to get about an hour's sleep last night. A Project That Couldn't Be Delayed forced me to work late, and then I foolishly stayed up to watch the Olympics opening ceremonies, and by the time I realized how late it was I was forced to invoke the McKenzie Protocol, familiar to anybody who's seen Bob & Doug McKenzie's feature film:

Bob: I can't believe we actually got jobs at a brewery!

Doug: Yeah, but let's not blow it by comin' in late on our first day, eh?

Bob: Then let's just stay up all night.

Doug: Beauty idea!

So I made it to the convention center at 8 AM and I got through the day just fine. The only casualty was a 7:30 dinner that DLExpo's organizers set up for the speakers. I got back to my hotel at around 5:30 and thought a 90-minute nap would put me in good shape for an evening of socializing but naturally I didn't wake up until 8:30. Everybody would have been long-gone by the time I showered and changed and got to the restaurant, so I opted instead for another two hours of sleep.

When I awoke I found that my Good Cable Movie Karma was holding steady. When the Olympic opening ceremonies ended last night I flipped to HBO Family just in time for the start of a Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis movie. This afternoon I returned to my room to check my email and tuned into HBO just in time for the second half of "Attack Of The Clones." And two hours ago I groggily groped in the bed for the remote and soon found myself watching River Phoenix being chased through the desert in a 1918-vintage Boy Scout uniform. So I got to see "Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade" for the first time in a couple of years.

Good Cable Movie karma is balanced by Bad Internet Access karma, I'm sorry to say. The Rennaisance has reasonably-priced broadband but it refuses to validate my PowerBook. Nothing wrong with my network adapter...I have to fill out an online form to approve the room charge and the secure site won't go any further than Step Three of Five. No prob, I switched to Dialup, knowing that I'll have wireless access at the show. But in the Speaker's Lounge I discovered that my Airport card is turned off and I can't get it started again. Damn, blast and damn again. For now I choose to enjoy the nostalgia of navigating through the Web at 33K, and hope that when I get home I can invest more time and hostility in the diagnosis of this problem.

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A little blogging from the DLExpo show floor. My AirPort still isn't working — blast it; diagnostics can find the card but it just plain can't turn it on — so into the cache this goes.

My 8:30 AM Bluetooth talk was a repeat of yesterday's, in every sense of the word. It was the same material and I had the same initial audience: 1 person.

(Actually, even I almost didn't turn up for it. I overslept a bit this morning and dashed into the the lecture room still trailing the cables that I'd desperately grabbed from the desk in my hotel room. I woke up so late that I had to choose between either brushing my teeth or showering; upon reflection brushing one's teeth in a convention-hall bathroom is a much simpler trick than stripping down and bathing in one, and I tossed my toothbrush in my PowerBook bag.)

But — also a repeat of yesterday morning's talk — people started drifting in as the talk progressed and I had a healthy half-dozen. A moment ago someone else asked me about the turnout and was surprised that I'd call this a "healthy" number. Well, it is. All I'm hoping for is that the X people who come to hear me talk go away convinced that they hadn't wasted their time. The great thing about giving a Bluetooth talk to 6 people instead of 60 is that I can turn it into a way for these six people, specifically, to use Bluetooth. One guy was about to spend a month travelling and wanted to know the best way to keep up with his email. Bluetooth is a fine solution but not a cheap or fast one, and I spent five minutes talking about various services that give you access to thousands of secure WiFi access points.

"A true pro puts as much excitement into a six-person audience as they do for a huge group," one of the six said to me after I finished, which was (a) absolutely the point, and (b) a very nice thing for him to say.

Off to the User Group Pavilion to do a "signing" — which is will be interesting, as my Panther book won't be shipping for another week or so, but I'm willing to talk to the attendees so long as they agree not to punch me any more than necessary.

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I'm back in my hotel room after a night's entertainment and am experiencing more Good Movie Karma. After watching CNBC's coverage of Olympic Ear Wiggling and then flipping over to MSNBC to watch the quarterfinals of the Walking Off A Charlie Horse event, I took a look at HBO just to see what was on and found myself tuning in just in time for the very start of "Seabiscuit."

The "signing" at the User Group Pavilion went very well. I didn't have any books to sign because the first title in my new book series won't be arriving in stores for a little while yet, but I had a steady stream of people to talk to. I had a great idea, though: back in my hotel room, I had a few copies to give away. I should have brought one with me to the "signing," just to make it official. The guy at the head of the line would give it to me to sign, I'd slap my autograph in there, we'd have a nice chat...and then he'd hand it to the next guy and we'd repeat the cycle. By the end of the half-hour, I would have signed it about nine times, and I suspect that what with all that ink on the title page and all the fingerprints on that nice metal foil cover, I would have had to knock five bucks off the cover price for the last person.

I'd hate to let go of half a sawbuck like that, but given that I would have sold that same copy to the previous eight people at full cover price, I'd still be well in profit.

Lunch in the Speakers' Lounge featured my favorite style of cuisine — "Complimentary" — and after socializing with my fellow luminaries I found myself with three hours to kill before my next and final seminar and my first opportunity to take a walk around Long Beach.

I keep trying to put a handy label on Long Beach. I think I'm going to call it the Portsmouth, New Hampshire of the LA area. If you're not from New England (or if you're from New England but have never been to Portsmouth) Portsmouth is a Perfectly Pleasant town right on the coast. A day in Portsmouth is definitely worth an hour's drive each way. But it's really not a Destination. If we Bostonians could go to San Francisco early in the afternoon, take a two hour walk, browse through some secondhand bookshops, have a really nice dinner, and then be home in plenty of time to return a few videos to Blockbuster, we'd go to San Francisco, no question, but we've been shafted by the fickle nature of plate tectonics so we have to go to Portsmouth.

I expect that Long Beach is the same sort of thing. It's a Perfectly Pleasant City. The Pacific Ocean is one of your better oceans and LB is right there next to it. If it were any closer, it'd be under it, and that's a fact. The area I'm staying and working in has received a huge facelift that transformed it from a place where sailors came to pick up fascinating diseases through needles (tattoo), needles (intravenous), and Needles (Nita Needles, feature dancer at the Roxy Barnacle Club) into a place that can host an annual Jazz festival that attracts families trailing children and coolers, as well as some sort of convention that requires its attendees to wear name badges reading "Walk With God." I was happy to spend a couple of hours walking around the area, and I had myself a jim-dandy time, but that reaction is probably conditional upon (a) having another reason for being there in the first place, or (b) not having a huge amount of time and money invested in the trip.

Re: the "Walk With God" conventioneers, they would have had their work cut out for them if they'd attempted to steer my feet upon The Path, for my reaction to this slogan was to ask "Why? Is He headed for that Hooters on Pine Avenue, too?" I'm sure the paramedics would have laughed at that one, after I'd been beaten half to death with an assortment of Bibles and Authentic Oak Timbers Recovered From Noah's Ark. Re: the Jazz festival attendees, it sounded like a lot of fun and my interest was keep up until the point where I stepped up to the ticket window just before the barricade and learned that it was $40 to get in. I turned around. True Art comes only through suffering and sacrifice, and Jazz has enough problems on its hands these days without my worsening the situation by putting these itinerant jazzmen $40 closer towards making their monthly rent.

So instead, I did a lap around the artificial lagoon and then headed back towards the City, per se. I actually only did a mile or two, owing to the fact that I was wearing shoes and not sneakers. It's one thing when a pair of sneakers is so skanky that you can't contemplate wearing them in an enclosed airplane. It's quite another thing when you fish them out of your wastebasket thirty minutes later and throw them under the porch. Lesson for the kids out there: during a two-week period of punishing humidity, wearing socks is just part of the social contract.

Pickings — defined as "unexpected and delightful sights" — were a bit slim, but I had my fun. And educational, too, viz:

"Le estoy dando una citacion. Cuando firma, no esta admitiendo su culpabilidad. Pueda pagar la multa, por correo, a esta direccion."

This means "I am issuing you a citation. When you sign, you are not admitting guilt. You may pay the fine by mail at this address" and comes courtesy of a fascinating little pocket translator I picked up in a bookstore, entitled "Speedy Spanish for Police Personnel." It contains 11 handy, tabbed sections and I the phrases under the last tab ("Booking/Body Search") contain words and idioms that I definitely didn't come across during my two years of high-school Spanish.

It was such an interesting artifact that I had to buy the thing. You could make the case that its publication is a positive sign of acceptance of non-English speaking residents, or you could go the other way. IE, it's a sign that law enforcement wants to communicate with non-English speakers as clearly as they can with everybody else. On the other hand, I've just flipped through the whole thing and there's no translation for "We were able to get your kitty out of the tree, Ma'am; be sure to call us if Mr. Friskers gets in any more trouble."

"Este es el departamento de policia. [Name] he sido arrestado por sospecha de trafico de drogas. El/ella esta detenido(a) sin fianza." This is the police department. [Name] has been arrested on suspicion of selling drugs. He/she is being held without bail."

In a nearby antiques store I found two prizes. I found an instance of That Thing I Have To Buy One Of Every Time I travel. It's actually one of my favorites: made in Germany in the Forties or Fifties, it's definitely within the loose parameters of That Thing while being quite off the beaten path.

The other object was really quite remarkable. It was a banjolele (a pleasant, "you got chocolate on my peanut butter" fusion between a banjo and a ukulele) that seemed to have a hand-turned wooden salad bowl bolted to the underside. I've browsed banjoleles frequently enough to recognize the core of the instrument and wonder if the salad bowl was just someone's bad idea of an aftermarket improvement, but if it was added on later it was done exceptionally well. I suppose the point was to give it better projection.

If they had wanted a stupidly low amount of money for it I might have walked off with this mutant cross-breed of annoying instrument and server of limp vegetables. But alas, the asking price was a fair one. I was hoping that it'd be close enough to my per diem that I could just shrug and make an impulse by, but this would have required an elaborate stretch of the imagination.

(a Per Diem is a daily amount of money you get to cover incidental expenses. It's cheap and low-class to insist that you get reimbursed for the three bucks you spent buying a pair of replacement shoelaces and the twelve bucks you spent on cab far to the convention center when you were running later and other piffling expenses. But a true high-class operation will give you X dollars a day, anticipating that little things are apt to crop up.

So yes, I incur lots of little expenses during any business trip but my internal accountant never takes that money out of the Per Diem pile. That money is put to much better use when I see a combination banjolele/salad bowl in some store window. Ordinarily I would never waste that kind of money on such a silly impulse buy but look, I have this per diem money. It's not part of my salary, so it's not like I'm wasting money I worked for, is it?

My Internal Accountant is easily pushed around this way. It's important that you also retain an supervisory internal accountant who threatens to let both your bladder and your sphincter go if you don't step away from the $5000 museum-replica Darth Vader costume right freaking now, but with the proper firewalls in place, the per diem is there to help you struggle through four days in a three-star hotel in an exotic seacoast city with as little hardship as possible.

There was one more bookshop to visit on the way back to the hotel — holy cats, it was was 3:00 and I had a class to teach at 3:45 — and this store would provide a critical piece of equipment, absolutely essential for my well-being: a copy of Adam Clymer's biography of Ted Kennedy and contemporary history of the Democratic Party.

The actual title itself wasn't important. But my need for a book to read on the flight home was a rather desperate one. See, I'd screwed up. I tossed Volume Four of my multi-volume copy of "Truman" (David McCullogh's incredibly engrossing biography) into my laptop bag, after carefully checking to see how many pages I had left.

(Actually, it's only sold as one volume. But it's 1100 freaking pages, which is why it sat on my shelf for a year before I got the bright idea of attacking it with an X-Acto and re-binding the resulting subdivisions with duct tape, just so I'd have chunks that actually be carried aboard airplanes without having to be checked as separate pieces of luggage.)

I was on page 887, which was perfect. 100 or so pages for the flight to California, 100 for the flight back. But I got to page 980 or so and I noticed that, um...Truman is now 86 years old and not in the best of health. Did McCullogh spend 100 pages discussing the Truman legacy? Or am I the idiot?

Safe money is always on the latter. Yup, I failed to consider the possibility that the last 100 pages might consist entirely of acknowledgements, bibliography, and index. This was hell; this was my worst nightmare, even worse than he one where everybody in the world smells exactly like this guy I used to know who worked full-time at Burger King. There is nothing more terrifying to me than being on a six-hour flight and having nothing to read. The previous bookstore was what might be termed a Progressive one and given that I feel I hardly need to give Michael Moore $24.95 to open my mind to the possibility that government and big business doesn't always operate entirely in the interests of the individual citizen, the pickings were slim.

But this Kennedy bio — I'd heard about it and remembered that it was fairly highly-regarded — was just the ticket. I've always admired my state's senior Senator. I wasn't really around for Chappaquiddick so I only think of him as a superb, populist-minded politician whose poor personal choices are perhaps illunminated by the fact that one by one, his three older brothers were groomed to be great politicians and, one by one, each one was killed in highly dramatic fashion.

I've never gotten around to reading a formal biography of Teddy and I'm really keen to find out how this one will influence my opinion. The more distance I put between myself and the best version of myself I was able to slap together at age 17, the more I appreciate the importance of asking yourself why you believe what you believe, and being prepared not to like the answer.

I made a quick stop to get some postcards and a snowglobe and then I returned to the convention center for my final class. Lowest attendance of any of my sessions this weekend: one person. But again, that's perfectly OK. My talk was on software and accessories for digital cameras but instead of running through my slides I just asked him what he hoped to learn from this session and then I gave him 40 minutes of personalized consulting. He was mostly interested in hearing about content-management software — those apps help you to locate the one picture in your 10,000-photo library that contains a cat and a tree branch and would be suitable for use as the background of a "Hang In There, Baby" poster — and I happened to have several on my hard drive. So the guy went home happy, which to me is the only thing that matters. To be sure, the organizers of DLExpo are taking a great many lessons from this first show, and they won't make the same mistakes when it comes time to do the New York show next month. But I didn't meet a single attendee who didn't think they got their money's worth.

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I seem to have lost some of my blogging mojo!

And by "blogging mojo" I refer to that jenny-say-what that allows one to offload a few quick paragraphs that center on something interesting, and then get back to work. Over the past few weeks I've been regularly sitting down to create new posts, only to have to abandon them after they spiral upwards into thousands of words and I've put so much time into it that can now hear the quickening hoofbeats of editors who expected me to file a column sometime five weeks ago. It's one thing when an editor gets so mad that they come over to your house with the intent of doing you an injury. But when they decide that they really can't put the point across unless they pull into your driveway atop a horse and start waving a broadsword around, well, it's time to get back to paying work.

Here's an example. The other day, I started writing this selfsame blog post. "Things have a way of spiraling out of control," I wrote, and then I continued to say

Lately, my blog posts have become like Congressional legislation. They start off short, on-purpose, and easily understood. "Gojira and Mothra battled in downtown Montpelier, Vermont, and the Mayor is requesting federal disaster-relief funds. Specifically, he wants $1800 so they can un-bend a flagpole and compensate the Knights of Columbus for the pancake breakfast that had to be cancelled when the radioactive behemoths reached the city limits." But by the time the legislation gets to the floor for a vote, it includes $180,000,000 in new tariffs on foreign-made leather furniture, and it'll also make it illegal to use any word that has more than three consecuitive vowels in it.

...And it sort of got worse from there. So: back to basics. I'm hereby declaring September to be my official Thirty Days of Blog. At least one post per day between now and September 30. And when I print tee shirts commemorating this event, it'll feature the phrase "Quality, Schmality!" in suitably-haphazard script. In my desire to craft polished, professional essays and commentary, I've lost sight of the whole point of blogging: to lend legitimacy to the most trivial observations and opinions, no matter how dijointed, self-serving, arrogant, closed-minded, or wooly-headed they are, by simply plastering it onto a webpage.

One should never think before one posts. That's been my big blunder. And one should never ever ever rewrite, fine-tune, or God forbid edit the post, either. As a blogger, you should form a picture in your mind of a man drinking a cup of coffee. Then imagine that he suddenly feels a dead fly on his tongue and here you'll see your role model. Let your words spew forth with speed and velocity, out of reflex and not reflection. Let them fly without any possibility of ever taking them back. And when challenged, insist that the challenger is lucky that you don't sue somebody, and if he or she thinks you're going to help clean that up, they're crazy.

I have taken these words to my heart, where it started tickling my chest hairs and then, thanks to this Gawd-awful humidity, the paper stuck to my chest entirely. In light of this I have now peeled these words off of my heart, only to discover that ink has sort of bled onto my skin. So now these words have been taken to my heart but they're in reverse, which is the complete opposite of what I intended.

Honestly. There's just no sense in even getting out of bed some mornings. Why do I even bother?

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Random comments on the Olympics:

I'm confused: the male swimmers — traditionally the athletes with the skimpiest outfits — now compete wearing neck-to-ankle bodysuits, while the default uniform for most of the female runners now appears to include some sort of thong. Well, maybe not a thong, at least not one recognized by the International Union Of Thong, G-String, Dance Belts and Related Trades. Still, every time an athlete flopped over the high bar or burst across a finish line, I found myself un-wedging my underwear out of sympathy. I can understand how athletes performing at this level might not want to wear the same flappy shorts that were so in fashion during the 1956 Melbourne Games...but wouldn't the simple realities of their sport urge them to select bottoms that, you know, can adequately shroud both cheeks without the need for constant human intervention?

Speaking of Melbourne, that was the first Olympics in which all the athletes just thronged into the stadium for the closing ceremonies. If you're the guy who came up with that idea and you're reading this, take twenty bucks out of petty cash and treat yourself to something nice. You deserve it; that's my favorite bit of the ceremony. I can't get myself worked out about so many big sporting events because these days, even the Spontaneous Outbursts of Joy are carefully considered and are executed with the precision of a new product launch. Which it is. What you do after you score a touchdown will affect your shoe deal, or your cellphone deal, or will give you (or deny you) leverage during your next contract talks. So drop to your knees and praise Jesus for granting you the strength and skills to succeed, but only if it focus-grouped well and if you know the cameras are on you.

So what did we see during the closing ceremonies of the Olympics? Thousands of athletes who were all just humbled and delighted to be there, without any pressure to do anything but to truly savor the moment...because they know they might not ever get another chance to see an Olympic closing ceremony from The Good Seats. Televised sporting events are terrified of scenes like that. "Shouldn't we be cutting away to a pre-taped biography of that wrestler, showing him strolling wistfully through a cornfield and reflecting upon the possibility that He May Never Wrestle At This Level Again? We're really going to just show him jumping up and down and hugging other athletes — many of whom we have no, repeat no, biographical profiles for — and taking pictures like some sort of bloody tourist?"

Yes. Yes, sir, you are, and yes, you should. I almost couldn't even watch the last Olympics; the network was obviously trying to turn it into Reality Television. Every event had The Good Guy and The Bad Guy, the Conflict and the Dramatic Twist. Which I found bewildering; as near as I could tell, the show was all about people jumping into sleds and skidding downhill on their butts, with prizes handed out to the folks who got to the bottom of the hill first. Hard to wrest Macbeth-style drama out of that sort of thing.

Well, the Olympics are all over now, and I already miss it. To be more specific, I miss ABC's Wide World of Sports. When it comes to network sports coverage, we live in a world where the only restaurants are McDonalds, TGI Friday's and the Olive Garden. Here in America teenagers watch the NBA, NFL, and NASCAR instead of undergoing the compulsory military service that our grandparents had to serve. And it has the same results: it hardens us and it teaches us important lessons and after two or three years of it, most people never feel the need to ever go through that ever again. What's the point?

(Yes, I omit Major League Baseball from that list. Baseball is good, baseball is pure, baseball is blameless and serene, like cows in India. Major league baseball cannot be collapsed into a quick acronym and its games Don't Make For Good TV. Answer the question "Name a major sport in which it's possible for the player to enter the playing area without the aid of laser beams, fog machines, or a trademarked catch-phrase" and after you say "bowling" and "golf" and I tell you to knock it off and play along with me here, you'll get to the reason why Baseball stands alone.)

It's great to turn on the TV in time for a game and have no idea what I'm going to see, or even what the rules are. You don't get to see televised archery. Admittedly, it turns out that two hours every four years is exactly the right dosage for the average American viewer, but folks, I have seen a man loft an arrow dead into a bullseye from three miles away — on a humid afternoon, mind you — and while the Synchronized Diving was an impressive accomplishment, I don't think anything short of a Red Sox World Series win will beat that for sheer awesome-tude.

("Impressive" in the sense that not only did these contestants arrange to have this accepted as a medal event, but by its definition they bamboozled the IOC into awarding twice as many medals to this category as they did to any sensible activity.)

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Hey, cool...I'm a pornographer!

I didn't actually realize it until a reader emailed me the following, which is what he got when he attempted to visit this filthy, depraved, corrosive bag of smutmongery that many of you perverts and maniacs have been hitting on a regular basis.

Of course, it all made sense. I do spend most of the day in my pajamas. I do use my bed as an office. And while it isn't round and rotating it must be done manually, I do have a range of pushbuttons within reach that allow me to control the stereo, TV, and lights. I'm Hugh freakin-Hefner. I can only assume that the quartet of lingerie babes are somewhere in transit.

(That's a lesson for you kids: yes, Amazon's free shipping is a wonderful bargain, but you have no idea when things are going to arrive. If whoever-it-was who placed the order for the aforementioned lingerie babes had spent a mere $17.90 for second-day air, I'd be playing air hockey with them this very moment, instead of keeping an expectant eye out for the UPS guy.)

(Though there's a silver lining here in that I only became aware that I was a pornographer earlier today and the house is nowhere near ready. I need to vacuum, make up the sofabed, stock the fridge with an assortment of spritzers and such, somehow stop giggling...the list is endless. To say nothing of the fact that I'll need to have a demeaning name for them. It's all the rage with stables of nubile blondes, I understand. "Andy's Angels," perhaps? Possible trademark problems, there. We'll keep working on it.)

Among the many advantages of being so beloved by the proletariat and so feared by the hated industrial bourgeoisie is that when such problems crop up, the solution is never much more complicated than emailing the company in question and suggesting that this would make a smashing topic for a column. Sent the email out at around 2 and whaddya know...it was fixed (in the company's distributed database, anyway) within ninety minutes. If and when I write about this incident, I'll actually turn a profit from the incident.

So come to think of it, I am getting paid from pornography, albeit indirectly. If I get an equally indirect hookup with any subset of those four babes, you'll hear no complaints from me.

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

This page and its contents copyright © 2003 Andy Ihnatko.