Introducing! YellowText:1999!

Wednesday, September 1 11:46 PM

Okay. The topic for today's post — oh, welcome to the official start of "Thirty Days Of Blog," by the way; as I announced a few days ago, this is the marathon run in which I shall attempt to match the blogging output of the average teenage girl on LiveJournal — is the bitchin' new site design.

Please...go ahead and bask in the glory of whatever awesomeness you may find within, unless you happen to be in one of two different subgroups of Poor Bastards, viz:

Poor Bastards Group "A": Folks who are accustomed to reading this blog through an RSS newsfeed reader. Oh, how you must envy those who click into their web browsers and click on a "bookmark," just as they did back in the days of iron and steam. I bet you had to scroll up and down to drink in the full initial impact, didn't you?

You didn't?

That's surprising. Most of the newsreaders I've tried will open a blog at the top of the blog item, not at the top of the whole page.

I thought so. Don't you feel even more like a Poor Bastard for having lied to me just now? Well, chin up: at least you're not in

Poor Bastards Group "B," AKA The Really Really Poor Bastards: Folks who are reading this blog on a Windows machine. And no, this isn't an anti-Windows riff. We can take that as read. And no, I'm not a bigot...for I count myself among you. Just today, I was testing out a wicked-keen new Bluetooth gizmo that only works with Windows devices and sure enough...Windows refused to pair with it. Windows can see it and Windows can tell me its name, and Windows can include it in a list of nearby Bluetooth devices, but Windows refuses to get out its little black crayon and color in that grey button marked "Connect." Fortunately, I own a full-service office that can afford to have actual, decent computers, and so I walked to my PowerBook and successfully paired and connected to the device. Can't do nothin' more than that, given that the requisite software is Windows-only, but at least I've managed to confirm two things: (a) that the device is working just fine, and (b) the structural integrity of my arrogance as a Mac user is in no need of any downgrading whatsoever.

But the Poor Bastardom of Windows users within this specific context is the fact that the redesign doesn't look quite as good on a PC as it does on a Mac. This was all built on a Mac, naturally, and it looks like a million dollars in Safari. And not a penny less in Firefox, either. I even tested it out in Mac Internet Explorer. It was the first time I'd launched Explorer in a year or so and the new design remained so kick-butt that I resolved to photograph the screen and send a photo to my Mom so she can stick it on her fridge, taking down as many snapshots of the grandchildren as might be necessary to make room.

But Windows! There is no joy in Redmond, my friends; no joy at all. I changed my alternate fonts to improve things and then I remembered one Web guru's challenge to never ever EVER use Arial or Times or any other generic-oid typefaces. I gave it my best. Honest I did. Spent nearly as much time looking at Windows fonts as I did trying to get that Bluetooth device to work, although I didn't flip the bird at the screen nearly so often. And I ultimately wound up changing nearly every font to different flavors of Arial, which yields a distressingly mundane appearance. On Windows, my blog looks uncomfortably like a free guide to high-altitude cooking that you can order from the Government Printing Office. But hey, at least it's readable.

Why the change? It was time. The previous design was, what, three years old, and it reflected my thinking in 2001. "I've had it with websites that you can't enjoy unless you've got a G4" — G4s were still pretty hot stuff back then — "plugged into the DiamondVision screen at Yankee Stadium!" And so, like Martin Luther nailing his piece of paper to the doors of the cathedral, I designed a site that was just as readable on a 386 as on an Athlon, or a PDA, even.

Which was a good impulse. Very ecumenical. But now it's time to stick the boot in the backs of the computationally-disadvantaged and switch to a peppier appearance.

I also have more stuff to promote now than I did a few years ago, and my travel sked is getting fairly flypapery as well. For instance, in two weeks I travel to New York to do an appearance at the Apple Store in Soho...just to promote another appearance I'll be making a week or two later.

So I need a sidebar where I can toss links to my new books and announcements of upcoming speaking thingamabobs. Plus, hey, cool...now there's Flickr!

Odd how things come full-circle, isn't it? I've been doing this blog since 1994 or 1995 and the previous design was actually only the second time the thing had gone without a sidebar. So don't think I'm suddenly knuckling under to the MovableType junta and their increasingly thuggish demands that I step-to and put a gutter ("sidebar," sorry) on my blog where all the wrappers, beer cups, and used-up college sophomores land after Mardi Gras is over. YellowText may look a little more like a conventional blog...but it's still 100% handmade, created and updated with my own, custom software.

(Indeed, it's even more handmade than it needed to be. Which incredibly expensive and sophisticated and modern tool did I design this page with? Umm...a text editor. A stunningly good text editor (BBEdit, natcherly) but all the same, it was built by typing things into a window and then looking at a preview in a different window. The same way I designed Version 1.0 of this blog, nearly ten years ago.)

The good news is that my blogging app fulfilled one of its major design mandates and it doesn't seem to care that I've redesigned — redesigned the hell out of — the blog. All it cares about is that it can find those special couple of tags that tell the app where it's supposed to stick the text.

No doubt I'll be tweaking things as we go — I still have to add sidebar links for the aforementioned books and appearances, and under the circumstances I really ought to reinstall the Emergency Eject System that I removed three years ago — but for now, I'm just going to enjoy a long-overdue vacation from people emailing me to complain about having to read yellow-on-black text.

Yup, I was sad to see the yellow-on-black go. "How can you call it 'Yellowtext' if the text isn't, you know, yellow?" you ask. And here I cite "Q-Tips," a name that surely made sense to somebody at some point in the product's history. One day, no doubt, you'll bounce your grandchildren on the cybernetic prosthesis that the Red Cross gave you after the alien warrior-drones plasma-lanced both of your legs off during the third invasion wave, and explain to him or her that while YellowText's billions of interplanetary readers don't even give the name a thought, there was a day when the text yellow, the sky was blue, and Humans weren't forced to turn to their viewscreens once an hour and shout "Hail, Bl'Yhg'Hrg!"

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Happy Days Are Here Ag...oh, who the hell cares?

Thursday, September 2 11:42 PM

I suppose I don't have much to say about the Republican convention. I didn't have much to say about the Democratic convention either, but then again, I was too busy to say anything at all at the time. But were I to have had time to hypothetically have posted, that which I would have posted would have been not much, most likely.

But I did write a little something while the DNC convention was here in Boston. It was an op-ed piece about the Damned Dirty Hippies who were flooding my beloved city, and obviously the Ops that I was Edding weren't flattering ones. Still, watching both conventions made me believe that maybe the protesters were doing some good after all. Ditto for the terrorists — foreign and domestic — whose threatened and hypothetical onslaughts have forced law enforcement to gird for battle.

Here's why: maybe they'll make it harder for the parties to hold conventions in 2008.

And I don't mean that they're going to make it impossible to keep holding such high-profile political conventions. I mean that maybe they'll be the final straws that force the party leadership to wonder whether or not these conventions are worth all the trouble.

The days when party factions would bicker and argue and wheel and deal to craft a roster of candidates and a party platform that would stand the best chances of election (and which would, by abstraction, best match the desires of the electorate) are long-gone. Still, we had a cushy couple of decades when the conventions at least served the function of being damned fine pep rallies. Don't knock that: a pep rally can be a good, solid, valuable thing. It gets the troops motivated, reminds them that they're important members of the team, and it gives them the energy they need to go out there and help The Cause. It doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, or if you like the cut of this Lyndon LaRouche gent's jib. When grass-roots supporters of all stripes take to the streets to spread the word about their candidate and try to get people involved in the process, only good things can happen.

But today, these events aren't political conventions. They're product launches. Every speaker steps up to the podium with all of the evening's pre-determined catchphrases and bulletpoints downloaded and ready to go. It's just one glossy brochure after the other. On the final day, The Candidate himself appears...and that's the Super Bowl Commercial. It's the Bud Bowl and "1984" and the chick who catches Doritos in her mouth while doing a split across two benches, all rolled into one.

I watched Cheney's speech last night and it got me angry. For a group that hates Michael Moore so much, the Republicans have sure done a careful job of learning from his example. The speech was full of things that weren't lies per se, but which which were brazenly deceptive and manipulative. Once again he quoted Kerry as wanting to wage a more "sensitive" war on terror. Why? Because it paints the Senator as a candy-ass liberal who wants to battle terrorists with hugs and federal aid, instead of with bullets and wildly-expensive things that can be dropped from a great height by things that are even more wildly-expensive. Did Cheney read Kerry's whole speech? Is he aware that while Kerry did indeed use the word "Sensitive," Cheney's comments are fraudulent mischaracterization and an obvious one to anybody whose seen that word in its original context? Of course he did and of course he is. But the party leaders have polling data and they desperately want that Liberal Wuss tag to stick...and nothing can be allowed to muddy up the marketing.

Kerry's acceptance speech left me just as frustrated. This isn't the 2000 election, you know. George Dubbya isn't the untried term-and-a-half Governor of a state in which the Legislature has most of the power. He's the President. If you're making the argument that he needs to be thrown out of office, then surely the 42 months of his administration have armed you with plenty of evidence that the country will be better off if Bush spends the next four years on golf courses with major RNC contributors instead of in the White House. Citing his specific mistakes clearly and directly would bring home the bacon and give you a jim-dandy opportunity to explain why you and your guys will handle the job better than him and his, right?

Well, apparently not. Kerry's cornermen had their guy well-trained. Don't attack Bush's Iraq policy directly; the RNC could twist that as being soft on terrorism. "But Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror?" Don't even go there. You're right, but it's a subtle point and it can't be compressed into a sound bite. Don't attack his economic policies, either; the easy response is "Kerry wants to raise your taxes." And for Heaven's sake, don't compare the Presidency that Dubbya promised to us in 2000 with the one we all wound up with. Voters can't remember that far back. Just stick to the marketing points that we PowerPointed to you last week, and remember, when you say "Reporting for duty," salute the camera, all right?

The Academy Awards stopped being about "Who's going to win Best Actress?" and the event became a mechanism for the question "So who's she wearing?" In the same vein, national political conventions exist solely as an opportunity for a motley gang of Governors and Senators (as well as the usual gaggle of misguided Congressmen and political activists) to queue up for some Presidential race to be named later. Even much later. Senate candidate Barack Obama delvered a wonderful speech but who could watch him walk up to the podium and not think of Tiger Woods stepping up to the tees in his first tournament as a PGA pro? When the Governor of my beloved Commonwealth delivered his speech the other night, was he motivated by the belief that George Dubbya deserves a second term? Or that Count Chocula would be a more credible and more probable candidate in 2008 than Dick Cheney?

When this convention is over, numbers will be duly crunched and confidential reports will be prepared in great secrecy and at great expense, and and both committees might reach the same conclusion: the convention was a waste of time. That Our Guy's speech didn't change the minds of anyone who was against us to begin with; that among the Undecideds, he probably sent away as many people as he brought in; and that whatever it may have done for our supporters, they still can't vote for Our Guy more than once. And That one of the high-profile speakers muffed his ten-minute prime-time speech so badly that The Other Side now has a weapon that they didn't have before. As for the networks, they'll probably cite the success of NBC's Olympics coverage, in which the majority of the events were spread among cable outlets, and they'll decide to reduce their 2008 network coverage from one hour a night down to one hour, total.

And then both party committees will think about all the news footage of protesters who were waving signs that were definitely not communicating their approved Message Of The Day, and they'll remember all the money and favors they had to spread around to keep the Host City happy as the Convention's costs and the security demands multiplied exponentially. They'll try to remember what their spouses and their kids look like, which will be a tough one because Lord knows they haven't been to a single soccer game since were given the honor of planning and executing a four-day live national infomercial for their candidate.

When these findings are revealed, someone in the conference room will remark "Man alive...for a tenth of what we spent on that convention we could have leased out a whole stadium, filled it with supporters, and filled our hour of network time with Our Guy speaking to 50,000 cheering, flag-waving Americans. No muss, no fuss, and no diluting Our Guy's message with a week of nonsense, either. We could have been in and out in one afternoon!"

Then he'll reach across the table for the last Krispy Kreme in the box. When he leans back in his chair, he'll wonder what it was he said that caused the other eleven people in the meeting to suddenly look so thoughtful.

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Hercules Was a Colossal Wuss

Friday, September 3 11:51 PM

This day was garlanded in glory, my friends. Between waking up at the crack of noon and the moment when I knocked off for the day to watch "Oprah," I solved not one, but two longstanding and highly maddening problems.

First, I took an important action to finally wrest control of my mailbox from my longtime -- but recently ugly and indifferent -- ISP. I'm really very sad about this; I've been at ai@andyi.com for nearly fifteen years, now. I was one of the first people to sign up with one of the very first public internet service providers. It was a mom-and-pop-ish sort of company based in Brookline, located one block away from the best movie theater in the Boston area, across the street from its best independent bookstore, and just three blocks from my favorite restaurant.

There must be something about that neighborhood which breeds excellence because in a decade and a half I never had the need nor the desire to take my Inbox elsewhere. On those (exceedingly rare) occasions when I couldn't download my mail, I'd call a local phone number and a human would answer on the second or third ring, even at 3 AM.

"Hi...my SLIP software keeps getting a timeout every time I try to connect."

"Yeah, our routers are down. A truck crashed into a utility pole three blocks away, and they had to shut off the power so they can fix it. But we have the mailsystem on battery backup, so all your mail will be waiting for you when we come back online."

"When do you think that'll be?"

"Ninety minutes, according to the guy at the power company I talked to fifty minutes ago."

"Are there fire trucks and everything out there in the street?"

"Yeah, it's pretty cool. One of the cables was twitching on the asphalt and sparking like crazy."

Which isn't the sort of customer service you get from AOL. I'm not sure if it's even possible to say "The truck driver kept slapping himself in the head to extinguish his hair" in Farsi.

So what happened this year? I wish I knew. All's I know is, incoming mail occasionally bounces and my ISP doesn't seem interested in figuring out why. If I were to examine my record in their customer dtabase, perhaps I would discover that someone has checked the "Amish" box in error. Instead of the box marked "This gentleman is a technology columnist who runs nearly his entire business through email, and he fears random disruptions to his email service more than he fears global warming and a resumption of Adam Sandler's movie career."

Messages bounce without rhyme or reason. Just today, I got a letter — a letter, of all things — from an acquaintance. We'd been swapping email for a few weeks but all of a sudden, he can't reach me. In "Walker, Texas Ranger" terms, the ISP has just bought the land currently occupied by a community rec center for handicapped inner-city kids who might one day try drygs, and has started setting random fires to encourage the lease holder to vamoose, so it can build a combination casino/strip club/meth lab on the site.

And my moving my main email address from ai@andyi.com to a new address in the andyi.com domain is my equivalent of executing a clumsy series of roundhouse kicks on my ISP's idiot underlings and then driving my enormous pickup truck into the ISP's snooty country club condo in slow-motion. The first step towards doing this was to go to Register.com and make a change to andyi.com's DNS info that it can host both my website and a bunch of mail addresses.

Simple enough. But to prevent people's domains from being hijacked, Register.com requires confirmation of the change. It does so by sending an email to the domain's known Administrative contact...

(If you're now muttering "Oh, no..." and shaking your head in disbelief, award yourself ten points)

...email which, naturally, immediately bounces. So I couldn't confirm the change. So I couldn't add a new DNS entry, so I couldn't wire up andyi.com, so I couldn't point it to my new mail ISP. So: I was screwed. Some ISPs keep their longtime customers through top-notch customer service. Others prevent attrition by providing an unbeatable combination of value and features. Mine seems to have found an entirely different method and it happens to work incredibly well.

But today, I finally had enough time to navigate through Register.com's phone tree and reach the right customer-service person. She reset my admin contact address and offered to walk me through the DNS procedure. I could tell just by the sweetness of her voice that she was one of those mighty Girl Geeks whom no man of taste can resist. "Your secondary DNS server isn't responding to WHOIS," she purred, convincing me that she wore those catseye glasses and had a very good tattoo in a discreet place.

I didn't have the new DNS info at hand so there, the relationship died.

But let's not be greedy, son: this was one for the "Win" column, for sure. AndyI.com's DNS record now contains a new A record and four new MX records and shortly I will be able to engage the first change-of-email-address of my adult life. Quite a heady accomplishment, particularly given that I wasted an hour downloading game trailers.

Oh, yeah...I said that I fixed two longterm problems. Well, later in the day I took a piece of pliers and bent the end of a safety pin into sort of a hook, and then I was finally able to tease the end of the dental floss back out of the dispenser after carrying the useless spool around for months.

(Hey, it was really good floss. POH brand, as chosen by NASA for the Apollo astronauts. 100% silk, useful both as a dentifrice and as indestructible thread for on-the-go repairs or back-alley Mob surgery.)

(OK, look, do I make fun of your accomplishments? "Oooooh, way to stay on top of the weekly consumables report; nobody's going to be squandering toner while you're on the job, I can tell!)

(Not very pretty, is it? I just hope you learned something from this ugly incident.)

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I shall floss. Copiously, and strictly for sport.

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The World of Tomorrow has fountain service

Saturday, September 4 6:41 PM

Boy, do I ever feel like I'm living in the Push-Button World of the Future. I'm sitting in a cafe working on a column, writing the occasional email, and listening to some music via iTunes, when an announcement comes in through the PA:

"Attention, Peter Monoghue: Second baseman Mark Bellhorn has just hit a grand slam."

A man two tables over (whom I took to be an assistant manager working on the books) pumps his fist in the air and then has to go chase after his pencil. Hey, cool...I forgot that the Sox were playing Texas this afternoon. I click into Safari, turn on ESPN.com's GameCast window, and start watching the game live (well, live-ish, anyway). And double-cool...the ticker at the top of the window tells me that the Yankees lost today. If we win, we're now just a game and a half behind. Boston is now down by only two runs at the top of the eighth inning. Meanwhile, I'm writing a paragraph that requires that I pretend to know about T-cell receptor mechanisms, so I consult Phineas J. Whoopee's Three-Dimensional Blackboard and quickly find what I need.

It's one of those moments when I could swear that (a) I've dropped through a temporal pore into 1988, (b) the PowerBook in front of me is actually just a speculative mockup, and (c) I'm being filmed for an Apple promotional video arranged by the Advanced Technology Group. I'm glad that I haven't lost the ability to be impressed by the current state of technology. Here in front of me, there sits a slate that unfolds and acts as my communication device, my information device, my entertainment device, and the keystone of my workspace. More than that, actually; thanks to the fact that I'm in the business of converting synaptic misfirings into cash through the interim of written words, my PowerBook is my sole workspace.

Isn't this exactly what Apple's Knowledge Navigator was supposed to be? If I were to iChat with a guy in a bowtie — surely there must be a parking attendant somewhere with an iSight camera — the picture's pretty dashed complete.

Game ends and the Sox lose, 8-6. Well, I have my PowerBook, a broadband connection, music, and (unless I'm misjudging the weight of the cup) I've still got a couple of good, solid sips of Dr. Pepper left. Hard to find something to complain about, under the circumstances.

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If only Title 9 had a clause mandating THIS!

Sunday, September 5 3:01 PM

Womens' Pro Beach Volleball is on NBC, the first televised match since Misty May and Kerri Walsh raised the profile of the sport with their Olympic win.

There was a spot of controversy during the Games, you'll recall. One faction was offended that the event featured sideline entertainment in the form of bikini-clad fly girls, and then a second faction pointed out that in many cases the girls were actually dressed more modestly than the athletes. Which caused the first faction to say "Oh, yeah!" and then we were off and running.

Do these skimpy bikinis denigrate women? I haven't really thought about it. I'm an American, so my initial focus is on the problems the outfits create for commerce. Professional sports is all about logos, after all. It's a little-known fact that the suits worn by NASCAR drivers are actually no more fireproof than the Korean-made Jeff Gordon tee shirts sold in the stalls just outside the venue. Nope, the drivers clothe every square inch of their bodies because it gives them the maximum square acreage of billboard space. I once clicked into a Nextel Cup race and discovered — swear to God — that there were logos on the fingers of a driver's gloves. When he was on a straightaway, you saw one logo. When he was twisting the wheel for a turn, you saw a different one.

Make no mistake: if the Yankees' logo weren't so valuable in and of itself, you'd see the Krispy Kreme emblem splashed down Derek Jeter's left leg and Starbucks down his right. So the women in Pro Beach Volleyball have a big problem on their hands, given that the league's chosen uniform contains less square acreage than the scrap of paper you have to unfold to get at the mints after you open a tin of Altoids.

Judging from today's NBC broadcast, the women have apparently come up with two solutions:

1) Temporary Tattoos. Each of the gold medal-winners is sporting a Halls Fruit Breezers logo on their right shoulder and a Gatorade lightning bolt on their left. Which shows admirable initiative, but this can't possibly last. If I were a VP of Marketing and I wanted to get the word out about a new low-carb toothpaste, why should I pay $9,000 for a temporary placement when, apparently, Garth Brooks paid absolutely nothing to have this athlete promote "I Got Friends In Low Places" across her belly in perpetuity?

It also would put ad executives in the uncomfortable position of being a far more overt form of bastard. A moment ago, the commentator singled out one of the Olympian's tattoos: a classic "Tempus Fugit" winged hourglass, which she acquired in memory of her recently-deceased mother. The average ad exec would be on his cellphone three seconds into the broadcast. "It competes with our male-impotence logo!" he'll yell. "You know how you could really honor your mother? By not losing every last penny of your inheritance fighting the lawsuit I'll file if I ever see that tattoo on network television again!!!"

But what truly torpedoes the concept of tattoos as advertising are the simple observations that (a) May and Walsh are currently playing against two black athletes, and (b) unless you're Michael Jackson, you can't dye something white into your skin. Could you imagine Michael Jordan or Serena Williams playing without corporate logos on their bodies? And could you imagine what the ACLU will do once they realize that some of the top stars in a high-profile sport are being denied ad revenue?

No, no. Women's Pro Beach Volleyball needs a better solution, and it has one in the form of

2) Butt logos. The largest expanse of billboardable space these women have is, alas, the seat of their bikini bottoms. And the women have taken advantage of this, with their names and a corporate logo seen dancing from cheek to cheek.

Those people who were offended by the skimpiness of the outfits have now screwed themselves into the ground in apoplexy, I'm sure. Consider the upshot of this: not only do these women expect you to look at their butts, not only do they want you to look at their butts...but their livelihoods now depend on your looking at their butts. If you don't take a long, lingering look at their heinies — intensely and frequently, encouraging the other men in the room to do the same, via comments such as "Sweet baby Jesus! Get a load of that ripe little apple!" — the value of the ad placement plummets and the women ultimately lose the source of revenue.

So ultimately, if you tune in specifically to stare at these ladies' backsides, you're not a sexist perv. You're supporting women's athletics.

I would continue on this vein, but I believe in Equality and so, I insist on doing my part.

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"Hero" - See it, or I'll slap you senseless.

Monday, September 6 11:51 PM

Home again after a three-stage evening out. I fled from the office in mid-afternoon for my niece's birthday party,

...and then I was off to the Ihnatko Zoo Enclosure (aka Coolidge Corner) for dinner at Zaftigs with a good pal and the good pal's new girlfriend. New from my personal perspective, at any rate. Sweet girl. The story of how they started dating was somewhat involved and used words like "Orkut" and "Squeezebox server" and "Kibo," and halfway through I felt compelled to push the "Pause" button. I was keeping up just fine, naturally, but I had to comment on how all this must be affecting anyone over the age of, say, 50, who might have been listening in at an adjoining table.

"Remember how we met?" says he to she.

"It was back when we were both at BU. I was in the library and I needed to photocopy something, and I asked you for change."

"...and then, a week later, I went to see '2001' at the Student Union and I saw you in line. We sat together during the movie and got a beer afterward."

"Hunh."

"Yeah."

(silence)

"Well, middle-age was fun." There are shared sighs and nods.

Zaftigs, with the camera mode set to "Arty."

It was a great meal (naturally) and the conversation stretched the consumption of the appetizers, entrees, and desserts to more than two hours. Which was a Big Win because (a) I enjoy socializing with the Humans (it'll make my report that much more complete when my mission here ends in another three-hundred of your solar years) and (b) by the time we said our goodbyes, I was within a nine-iron of the 10:00 PM screening of "Hero" at the Coolidge Corner Theater just a couple of blocks away.

Cinema 2 at the Coolidge Corner Theater.

I was actually hoping to review "Hero" when the time came, but having seen it...I don't dare. The storytelling is just too perfect.

If were trying to encourage you to go see "Casablanca," I could readily tell you that it's a story about this guy, Rick, who runs a casino in North Africa during the Second World War. "And then this dame walks into the club..." without really spoiling the experience. In fact, the filmmakers themselves happily fast-forward the story by loading you up with advance information about the characters. They cast Humphrey Bogart (whom we instantly identify as tough but likeable) and toss all kinds of Nazis around the landscape (whom we instantly don't care for at all), trusting us to grasp the major players and their alignments two seconds after encountering the movie poster. Most movies are like that. If a critic refuses to reveal what happens at the end, it's only due to custom, not necessity. Sad Question #1: When was the last time you walked into a movie theater knowing nothing more about a film than its title? Sad Question #2: When was the last movie you saw where that would have mattered?

With "Hero," it matters. It matters, it matters, it matters. And not because there's any sort of lame, M. Night Shama-hoo twist at the end. The "Hero" experience isn't about twists and surprises. It's about storytelling itself. The filmmakers confidently lay down their cards one by one, in their proper sequence, at their proper time. To flip even one of those cards in advance is to ruin everything.

I insist that you see it. Immediately. Don't wait for video. Go see it in a movie house as fine as the Coolidge Corner, if there's one in your city. It was screening in the converted balcony now known as Cinema Two (instead of the immense Art Deco hall of Cinema 1) but the Coolidge converted the balcony with great care and in many ways, a movie like "Hero" plays better upstairs than down. I chose a seat dead-center in the back of the first tier, which is slightly elevated. I was close enough that the oversized screen nearly filled my peripheral vision, but high up enough that there was no need to crick my neck.

I will say this about the movie: if "Hero" fails to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography, something's wrong with the whole Academy Awards system. One might even begin to suspect that the system is not entirely merit-based or something. Or, that as a foreign film (it's the most expensive film the Chinese movie industry ever made), "Hero" wasn't eligible. I suppose I could download the 2005 AMPAS Rulebook and look it up, but this is Thirty Days of Blog and I have only 14 minutes left to file this and score my sixth consecutive daily posting. I quote another great piece of cinema, "Bull Durham": "Don't **** with a streak."

Let me paint a picture for you, though. Two people in flowing, blood-red robes duel in a forest. It's autumn, and every leaf on the trees and on the ground is a vibrant gold. Each time a sword flails and flashes, its tip elicits a vortex which churns and spins the leaves, alternatively highlighting and obscuring the combatants.

Ultimately, one kills the other...and the leaves slowly change to red.

Now tell me: is this the sort of photography that's best enjoyed at a scale of sixteen by thirty feet, or can you get the full effect through a letterboxed slice of the 25" Emerson TV that your mom bought at Costco six years ago and handed down to you?

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I'm a grown adult and yet I continue to worry about the SATs

Tuesday, September 7 11:08 PM

The latest changes to the SAT exam remind me once again how lucky I am that I'm no longer a high-school student. I'm relieved that there is no longer a man empowered by the government to make me run laps for twelve minutes, and these days, if I want my lunch to consist solely of Tater Tots, I don't have to swing a narrow-visioned, hairnetted functioncrat around to my way of thinking.

But the SAT's new essay section makes me mad. During my adult life I've spent more than one afternoon standing in front of a school assembly talking about being a per-fesshional writer, and the message is always the same: the one skill you'll acquire in school that's absolutely, unquestionably worth honing is your writing ability. It doesn't matter which career you select (or which one you fall into) in life: you'll have a tremendous leg up if you're the best communicator in the room. "The average person just plain flat-out can't write," I tell them, "and if you don't believe me, just wait until you get into college, and you're forced to write a paper as part of a group."

So I'm certainly not anti-literate (I don't care what my editors have been telling you). During junior high, Douglas Adams and Monty Python taught me that writing could be exciting and fun instead of a chore, and when I hit high school, I learned that it was also a rather terrific scam. See, my school had a minor tradition for major exams: you could either take an enormous multiple-choice test that would take you ninety minutes to finish, or you could spend that time answering three essay questions. They'd give you five; you had to pick three.

By ninth grade, I was already writing something nearly every day, and when I heard about this, it was like a card-counter learning that he was standing in a casino in which they dealt blackjack from a one-deck shoe. Why on Earth did only two or three students pick the essay option? It was a piece of cake. Paragraph one: restate the question. Graphs two, three, and four: write the same answer, using three different examples. Final paragraph: re-restate the question. If I didn't know the answer to a question, I didn't have to answer it. And of the remainders, it was easy to take a question on a topic I was merely familiar with, and write an answer on a topic that I knew stone-cold. "The construction of aquaducts throughout the Roman Empire was a major factor to help consolidate its many far-flung territories. Chiefly, the aquaducts reflect the prevailing attitudes of three of Rome's most powerful emperors regarding the role of the Army, the importance of consolidating the populace into cities, and the nature of the relationship between the Emperor and his citizens:" And bango, instead of the essay on Roman society that the teacher ordered, I delivered three 150-worders about my favorite toga-teers.

Plus, like I said, I wasn't intimidated by writing and I could write fast. I was in and out of the exam room in 45 minutes and my Ancient and Medieval History teacher handed my midterm back inscribed with an "A-" and the comment that he was going to install a drive-through window for the final.

If I insist that writing is important, and praise it as an effortless path to good grades, then why do I find the SAT Essay revolting? For the same reason why the Poetry section pissed me off when I took the exam myself. I was supposed to read a poem and then answer multiple-choice questions about what it meant. This is a perfectly reasonable format for a question, so long as the scoring machine was programmed to accept any answer, particularly "none of the above." Otherwise, just who the hell did the scorer think he or she was, telling me that my interpretation was wrong?

Here. I want you to go off and read Robert Frost's Mending Wall. Now riddle me this:

Why does the narrator's neighbor insist on maintaining the wall?

It's a monument to perseverance. It's an unnatural construct that Nature keeps pulling down, but which Man keeps restoring and maintaining. (Good answer; ten points.)

He innately fears and mistrusts others, and therefore believes in maintaining barriers between himself and others just on general principle. What other reason? Like the narrator says, the fence merely marks the line where one kind of trees ends and another kind begins. (Good answer; ten points.)

It's not the wall he's maintaining; it's the tradition. The wall was there before he was born and it'll be there after he's gone. Like the wall itself, he's keeping his father's wisdom alive for the next generation. (Good answer; ten points.)

It's ironic."Good fences make good neighbors" because while the wall separates the two properties, it's also a ready-made excuse to come together and work towards a mutually-beneficial goal. (Ten points to you, too.)

Frost wrote this with one thumb up his ***. He didn't know what the **** he was sayin'. (Okay, not exactly my reaction, but if the thing didn't click with you, the thing didn't click with you. Ten points, chiefly for using asterisks instead of working blue.)

It was nearly twenty years ago — and for all I know, I gave them the "approved" answer and the question didn't cost me anything — but it still gets me steamed. Who writes these questions? Can I see his credentials? I imagine a man with a German accent and a monocle slamming his gloved fist into the table and screaming "NEIN!!!! Vordsvorth's daffodils ist emblematic of the intractibility of loss, not der futility of isolationary humanism! SCHEISSHOUND!!! POINT DEDUCTION!!!"

An essay question on the SAT is even worse. If I understand the system correctly, each essay is scored separately by two teachers. If they disagree, a third teacher scores it as well. The guide posted on the College Board's website paints a positive picture of what the essays are being scored on. Chiefly, the author needs to form a point of view and put it across clearly and effectively.

I applaud the sentiment. But overall, I just don't buy it. I know people. I've met people. I've worked with people. People are good friends of mine. And Senator...people can't be trusted. Essays will be written that are concise, effective, and (holy crap!) are actually entertaining to read. But every writer has an individual style and a certain style isn't going to go over with everybody. I love Tom Clancy's books. He wouldn't appear on my personal list of Ten Favorite Novels, but stretch it to fifty and "Patriot Games" is in there with a solid chance. Make it a hundred, and it's a lock.

He's not for everyone, though. There'll be an entire chapter in which Clancy tells us that a tank moved from A to B, and shot at tank C, which a-sploded and couldn't continue to provide cover for Platoon D, which skirmished with Infantry E. But no one seems to be aware that four Seals are now aiming a laser-finder at Objective F, and bomber G now has a lock on the target and will shortly be dropping weapon H...and afterward, I and J engage in awkward boinking in the back of Colonel K's Humvee.

You have to like that. You also have to be the sort of person who likes to learn what role tritium plays in the construction of a multi-stage nuclear device. That's me. If you're not that sort of person, then it'll cost Tom Clancy his 20% royalty on an $8 paperback. The man might self-consciously wipe away a single manly tear, but I imagine that he'd soldier on. No harm, no foul.

But if an SAT scorer's personal taste isn't compatible with a kid's writing style, it'll cost him or her points. SAT scores aren't the only thing that college admission boards consider, but the fact remains that high scores are still better than lower ones. Which means that many teachers will start "teaching to the test," which also means that the College Board will influence how writing is taught in schools.

I mean, I went through this problem myself. There was a moment in high school when I acquired a certain amount of healthy arrogance about my writing.

"Arrogance" is probably the wrong word. I didn't start thinking I was smarter than my teachers (except for my computer science teacher, but that's an entirely different story). What I was actually thinking was that there was a lot I wanted to know about writing and most of it was the sort of stuff that I could only learn by muddling through on my own. The default position for a student is to accept a teacher's corrections and learn from 'em. That's appropriate. But after that Moment, I started hearing my teachers saying "I think you should cut this sentence," not "You need to cut this sentence." Result: I would hand in my final, "official" draft and, because I incorporated most of those suggestions but not the ones that I disagreed with, I'd give up about half a grade.

It was a fair trade, I thought. They couldn't insist that their way was better, so I certainly couldn't insist that they acknowledge that my way was right, either. I humbly and sincerely accepted the point deduction, as well as the possibility that I was wrong. But there does come a time in your development as a writer when you come to an important realization: in a creative endeavor, there are no rules. Readers don't give you any points for technical perfection. Nor do they give you any credit for being a Bold Tester of Boundaries. Either the thing you wrote works, or it doesn't work. There comes a time when you get serious enough about your writing that you have to start defending it and defending your choices, and in the end, I decided that I'd rather build my own unique style than maintain a shot at becoming class valedictorian.

Before I paint myself as a courageous revolutionary, I should point out that this was a pretty low-risk decision. I only ever got one truly awful grade on a paper, and man, did I deserve it. As I recall, I got a "D" because I thought "Ethan Frome" was a piece of crap. Furthermore, I was impervious to any arguments to the contrary, and I refused to modify my paper even after the teacher pointed out to me that he had asked me a question and I had failed to answer it anywhere in those three sheets of perforated tractor paper. My bad. I still think Edith Wharton is, at best, a mediocre author and is exactly the sort of sapheaded romantic novelist that P.G. Wodehouse used to lampoon with such delight. Nonetheless, I should have answered the question. But the important bit is that I got my paper back. I could see all the comments my teacher made and if I disagreed with any of them, I could talk about it after class. Usually I lost the argument, but sometimes I won. In either case, at least I understood why the teacher graded me the way he or she did.

But these SAT essays? It's a kangaroo court. Your essay sucked. No, we won't tell you why, and no, we don't "think" so...it's a fact. Deal with it, kid.

The ten point (worst-case) difference won't keep a kid out of the college of his or her choice. But these kids are under enough stress as it is without being told that ten points of their final score will be awarded or taken away largely at the discretion of the scorer. And if every college-bound kid is indoctrinated with the idea that their writing has to be efficient and technical and by-the-numbers...then where will the next crop of truly great writers come from?

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I got it I got it I got it...YOURS!!!

Wednesday, September 8 5:03 PM

The post that originally appeared here has been removed, tarted up, and prepared for publication. After it's printed, it'll be pasted back in. Until then, get a load of my pal Peter Cohen.

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Stamp, Index, Brief, Debrief, and Number

Thursday, September 9 8:07 PM

This was one of those days when I had to take off the Tassled Fez of the Sensitive Artiste and put on the Black No-Logo Baseball Cap of Cool Efficiency and Authority. TIme to act like Management instead of Talent. Many office supplies were ordered, and there was much rejoicing. The new mailserver...her DNS records were updated and her software was configured; when three new user accounts were created and proven to be functional at both sending and receiving email, minstrels were dispatched to carry the tale to the remotest villages in the land.

(Which seemed unnecessary, given that I'd just gotten the server up and running and, presumably, could have simply emailed the remotest villages in the land instead. But so long as I keep minstrels on the payroll, I intend to use them.)

Calls and emails were placed to NASA and were returned; calls were placed to Lucasfilm and just sort of hung there, daring me to walk away from my phone. A fax was promised to me but never came; the silver-tongued deceiver will be made to pay (action item 5 on tomorrow's list).

And o, the packages that were signed for that day! Packages of all sizes and shapes and colors! Packages from all carriers! The mind can barely conjure, dear friends. A festival has already been called for, to take place one year from this date, in perpetuity.

I didn't actually write much today. But it's actually sort of OK when you can cite all sorts of administrative crapola that got in the way. There are times when I sort of look forward to a 90 minute product briefing. There's no point in starting any projects a half an hour before the phone call — an hour, if you've got a new game or something — and then for an hour or two afterwards, you're sort of gliding along on a cushion of a fraudulent sense of productivity. See? You've got two whole pages of notes on a new product that Adobe will be shipping in two months' time. Sounds like somebody's earned a trip to the comix shop to find out if anything good's arrived in the past couple of weeks.

Incidentally, my previous post about the Genesis probe will run in the Sun-Times as an op-ed piece, after a bit of tightening up. Until the op-ed runs, a cool photo of my pal Peter Cohen will appear in the post's place.

If you remember the piece, there's one thing I should point out: the numbers I gave at the end were wrong. We're currently spending about $125,000,000 a day in Iraq, so it actually takes us a whopping two days to spend as much money there as was spent (over several years) on Genesis. Say we're spending the Iraq money well or say we're spending it poorly. That's not my point. But before we keep trumpeting about NASA squandering taxpayer money, I urge a sense of proportion.

Phone rings. Aha! It's Lucasfilm. They can help me out in one area, but not in another. OK. No-Yes is better than No-No, as anybody on a third date knows full well.

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Wasting away again

Friday, September 10 9:48 PM

Jimmy Buffett has taken over Fenway Park, the Great Cathedral of Baseball, to sneak in a couple of concerts while the Sox are off on the road this weekend. I assumed that a few months ago, Buffett twigged to the fact that the fake plastic rock near Gate "C" is actually a Hide-A-Key, and he'd been calling all his friends ever since. "They're going to be out of town all weekend," he said to one of the guys who works with him at the lumberyard. "It'll totally be the perfect time to use it for a kick-ass party!" And then about 35,000 people showed up, to the surprise of no one who saw that episode of "The Cosby Show" where Theo invited a couple of friends over while he parents were away.

But it turns out that the concert is taking place with the full knowledge and consent of the Red Sox. I think whoever it was who pitched the idea to Fenway made two compelling points: (1) Bruce Springsteen did a concert there just a year previously, with minimal damage to the playing field, and (2) With Game 6 of the 1986 World Series already in the history books, a Jimmy Buffett concert couldn't possibly go down as the most sickening and disgraceful event ever to have taken place within those verdant palisades.

Why do I dislike Jimmy Buffett so much? I don't, actually. I'm only dimly aware of his two big songs (and only snippets, at that). It's his fans who keep getting to me. Dear Lord, save me from the phenomenon of Parrotheads. It is indeed a horrible weekend to be a teenage boy looking for some action, because God knows every girl of babysitting age is otherwise engaged tonight, keeping an eye on Ashley and Trad so that two more desperately-flailing middle-aged sellouts can pile into a multi-purpose vehicle and head for Kenmore Square.

If you're a middle-aged Cadillac Escalade owner, look, I'm not talking about you. No, I'm speaking to a specific subset of middle-aged people who, in 45 years, have never made the investment of time or money necessary to develop any passions of their own, and so they happily purchase whatever likes and tastes have been issued to them by a vulgar and remorseless Society.

I mean, really: a Jimmy Buffett concert is what rock and roll would be like if the Soviet Union had taken over the US in the Fifties, and they'd done a good enough job running the country that the natives ultimately stopped firebombing their tanks. At Age 40, you're ordered to stop listening to quirky independent-label rock at once. No more jazz, roots music, or other non-approved genres, either: you receive a large cardboard box in the mail, containing five Jimmy Buffett records and an assortment of tropical paraphernalia. You're be expected to open the box, remove the contents, and dump in all of your existing records, plus any concert tee shirts, buttons, or autographed underwear you may have acquired in the past four decades. Once the box is received by a special recycling facility in Greenbelt, Maryland, you'll receive a $50 Olive Garden gift card in the mail.

And when Jimmy Buffett comes to your town, you're welcome to attend! But show your exuberance in the approved manner. Here is a catalogue of appropriate clothing and accessories. See? You can be "whacky," but please, don't be "whacky" in any manner or form that the other concert patrons might find alarming.

There's just something about being wild and cutting loose and expressing your individuality -- but doing it in exactly the same way that 30,000 other people are doing it -- that I find highly suspicious. 30,000 similarly-attired people in a stadium doesn't say "rock concert." It says "cult mass-wedding." There's a hollow, desperate undercurrent to the proceedings. I just don't see these people as deep, abiding fans of Buffett...or of anything, really.

Again, I have no idea whether Jimmy Buffett's music any good or not, and will reserve judgement. But I'm flawlessly qualified to judge the Parrotheads. I have seen them on TV, after all. They're a sorry lot, desperate to preserve any lingering ember of their self-image as youthful, fun-loving people. A Jimmy Buffett concert puts a margarita in their hands and a big straw hat on their heads, and convinces them that no way, no how have they even slightly turned into their parents. Even though they voted to ban skateboarding in their community, and were, demographically, the first people in town to buy one of those special DVD players that lets you watch "Goodfellas" without any of the bad language, violence, or sexual content.

Men covered in an assortment of tattoos and women covered in a constellation of cold sores acquired from anonymous roadies are not, by nature, more interesting than the gent whose idea of an exciting evening is looking for samples of antique barbed wire on eBay. Hey, musically-speaking, I'm totally L7, man. If not for the fact that "The Button-Down Mind Of Bob Newhart" was once the best-selling album in the country, I wouldn't have owned any top-ten music at all when I was a kid. There's nothing wrong with being a square. It might sound as though I dislike Parrotheads but in reality, it simply saddens me that they refuse to acknowledge the crewcuts and the black socks of their inner nature. As they bop their heads and exchange plastic leis with the other Parrotheads in Section 24-L, they see themselves as John Belushi in "Animal House." In truth, Bluto and D-Day would be crashing the Deathmobile through the stage, scattering backup musicians and toppling the speaker tower in a hail of sparks and smoke right in the middle of "Cheeseburger In Paradise".

"Accept, adapt, and improve," I urge. Whatever your personal problems may be, putting on an oversized novelty foam-rubber hat shaped like a toucan is not part of the solution.

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Reclaiming the Date

Saturday, September 11 6:54 PM

I started the day like any other. Drag Lilith off the nightstand and into the bed. Click into Comictastic and read my morning funnies. Click into various sites to catch up on the news. Read and answer overnight email. See what's going on in a few blogs. One eye on the TV, because I'm an American, and it's very important that I know which brand of satellite-radio service John Madden wants me to use.

It wasn't until later in the day, when I caught the start of the Michigan State-Notre Dame game (and spotted an embarrassing, overblown memorial) that I realized that today isn't merely September 11; it's the anniversary of September 11th.

Lord knows, there were plenty of clues. "Zippy the Pinhead" has Griffy wondering why this is the first year he's actually worried about another terrorist attack. Over on FARK, there was a 9/11 remembrance discussion thread. There were plenty of other connections earlier in the week, too. "Frontline" ran a wonderful hour on the personality clashes between the two architects designing the World Trade Center's replacement. Art Spiegelman released a new graphic novel, centering on his ongoing struggles to process the events...as a New Yorker, as a documenter of the Holocaust, and as the parent of a child who was in a school only a few blocks away when the planes hit.

But none of these things made me think of today as anything other then the second Saturday of the month. And that's just fantastic. It'd have been terrible if September 11th turned into an annual holiday of mourning. Even Griffith and Spiegelman had declined to engage in mawkish, awkward displays. The strip and the book are both about the continuum of experiences over the past three years.

There's a reason why Grieving is called a Process: it's supposed to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is all a sign that we're at the end of our collective grieving process. We can all be forgiven for whatever we wrote or said immediately after the attacks. Today, we all seem to agree that 9/11 is a story of 3,000 innocent lives lost. And there's no need to embellish that.

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Answering a few recent FAQs

Sunday, September 12 11:21 PM

Tidying up a few things and answering a few questions:

1) The new email address is up and running. I've changed all of the links on this and all future pages, but because of our deep and abiding friendship I want you to be the first person I tell: my new primary mail address is ai at andyi dought com.

2) "What software did I use for the new site design?" BBEdit 8.0 and nothin' but. Swear to God. I've never gotten very far with graphical site-design apps like Dreamweaver because none of them work the way I think, you know? "Now, look," I want to tell them. "See this item? I just want you to make sure there's always a gap between it and whatever comes before it." In BBEdit, I just type "margin-top: 6pt;" in the stylesheet and a half a second later, the HTML Preview window updates. I highlight the 6 and type a "4" and a second later, I do a command-S because that's exactly how I wanted it to look.

I didn't use any books, either. Cascading Style Sheets are well-documented and I just kept clicking back and forth between BBEdit and the Web Design Group's online CSS reference. Plus, their HTML 4.0 reference, and a 4.0 Tutorial that I checked into every time I needed an HTML refresher. I haven't really sullied my hands with raw HTML markup in a year or two, y'see, and I keep forgetting the finer points.

3) The reason why the previous design was so boring was because at the time, I was on this whole "open access" kick, and felt that a website should be just as readable on a PDA as it does on a desktop or a notebook. I accessed the site from my iPaq just a few days ago and was pleasantly surprised to find that it's still quite readable; Pocket Explorer condenses this righthand bit into one screen width. But apparently AvantGo renders the new blog as black text on a black background. Undoubtedly, when you click any of the black links, a black indicator lights up in black to tell you you've clicked it.

OK. I'm on it. I'm sort of assembling a list of things I want to do that will require minor rewrites to my blogging software. For one, I think it's time to dispense with this longstanding "newest post and monthly archives appear on two separate pages" idea. For another, I ought to be able to update the sidebar content independently of the rest of the blog. Most people would do this with PHP scripts on the server, but naturally I'll do it in AppleScript, solely from the client end.

As part of this big update, I think I'm going to have CWOBber maintain two parallel versions of the blog...the colorful, funderful version you're growing to love, and an HTML 1.0 version that can be read by anything, with any screen, of any size.

I do find it interesting to keep coming up with ways to keep this blog 100% client-side. There's some pretty luscious software out there that can maintain and update a website automatically, but installing it on the server and keeping it running can be a little gnarly, particularly for the average user. The first time I installed Movable Type on a server, I broke open a suitcase of Coke and by the time I had it up and running, I only had three cans left. The other advantage is that a 100% client-side app will run on any Mac, and it can maintain a blog on any host, so long as the app is physically able to copy a few files into a specified directory. Conceptually, CWOBber could be used to simply store notes onto a SecureDigital card or an iPod, for portable access.

4) "If there's no more yellow-on-black text, then why call it YellowText?" You know the answer to this one (because it's the Internet and if you can't stop people from posting sex stories about the cast of "Scooby Doo" gettin' it on with the cast of "Star Trek: Voyager," then you certainly can't stop me from holding on to the name of my blog.")

But it's an interesting shift. It's sort of like when you paint your house a different color. For two days, it no longer even registers as your house. A week later, you can't imagine it any other way.

May I also include a Jerry Lewis-ism? According to "King Of Comedy," a rather great biography of the man, one of the many Napoleon-esque fluorishes that Jerry insisted upon for his new network talk show was that all of the cameramen and stage crew had to wear tuxedoes. "Wearing a tuxedo has a transformative effect," he said. "You put a man in a tuxedo and instantly, his performance reaches a whole new level."

He was slightly nuts, of course, and this was one of dozens of nit-picky, perfectionist details that caused the show to lawn-dart almost immediately. But I'm feeling a bit of that with this new design. When you have an old, beater car, you might wait a day or two before taking those few soda cans out of the cupholders and the backseat and throwing them away. When you have a new car, you don't lift your butt out of the vehicle until you've found the gum wrapper that you know you dropped while pulling out of the parking garage that morning.

This is the first time I've had a blog that looks, you know, nice. I can't comment on how glorious the thing is or isn't, but it's better than it looked before...so I keep looking for gum wrappers, in the form of typos I didn't catch and images that might look a little better if I added a subtle background.

Not to worry, though. I'll settle down soon enough, and then once again you'll see the familiar abundance of misspellings, boneheaded grammatical errors, and drop-offs where I was thinking so fast that my fingers had to omit four whole words just to catch up with

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Ix-nay Ambridge-cay

Monday, September 13 9:26 PM

Alas, I won't be speaking in Cambridge on Wednesday. Apple was throwing an event at the Cambridgeside Galeria Apple Store for writers and editors of campus newspapers, but the thing got cancelled.

Which was OK. I was looking forward to it, but it was an odd assignment. Apple was hoping that as a columnist for a Great Metropolitan Newspaper, I'd have some words of advice for these folks. But given that I work out of my house, most of my firsthand tips were going to be about stuff like what to do when your editor calls you just two hours before deadline and he suddenly asks you why he can hear the sound of batting cages.

But even if I'm not a Real Reporter, I know plenty of people who are, so I was confident that I could fill more than fifteen minutes. All the same, I planned to have fifty dollars in singles in my jacket pocket. It's important to walk into the room well-prepared to educate, inform, and entertain...but nothing guarantees positive feedback like tossing around a few samoleans just before the comment cards are handed out.

Oh, well. That's fifty bucks more for this week's gum budget, I guess.

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"Shoot For A Million": N-B-SEE it!

Tuesday, September 14 11:45 PM

To: Hank Balaban, NBC Productions
Subject: Pitch for reality-based gameshow.

Combining the best aspects of "Survivor," "American Idol" and "The Swan" is the hottest new reality sensation, "SHOOT FOR A MILLION." Each week, we go to a different major city in the continental US and select a hundred contestants. They all enter a not-terribly-large arena ringed by a large overhead catwalk; chiefly, we'll be leasing out NHL arenas, as (a) there's a franchise in most major US cities, and (b) they're not being put to any useful purpose, so they ought to be available fairly cheaply.

After we play the "Shoot For A Million" theme song and roll a brief video montage of pre-show contestant interviews, snipers positioned around the catwalk open fire on the crowd. There are plenty of wide-open exits and the contestants are free to run out at any time, but before the start of the game it was explained to everyone that only the last person in the arena moves on to the next stage of the game. The shooting and fleeing continues until we can crown a single winner.

In the second half of the episode, we give this week's winner any surgery he or she might require. Close any bleeders, remove a perforated spleen, that sort of thing (note: bonus footage from this portion of the show is recycled on the Discovery Channel. Synergy, synergy, synergy). Plus, we throw in a boob job and a butt lift, which Lorenzo Lamas will then evaluate with the aid of a green laser pointer. Poise counts, ladies and gentlemen...a score of more than 90 points out of 100 wins you a trip to sunny Cabo San Lucas!

At the end of our initial run of 14 episodes, we wind up with a dozen regional winners (anticipating that in cities such as Detroit and New York, local contestants won't be intimidated by sniper fire and we might not be able to produce a winner from those episodes). A popular text-message vote selects a "wild card" contestant from the pool of previous, unsucessful contestants who passed the background check and recovered from any wounds they may have suffered during the earlier regional rounds. The regional winners will all be gathered at the base of a cliff. The "wild card" winner then drives a car — make and model to be determined; we're still talking to sponsors — off the cliff, landing on top of the finalists. Inside the trunk of the car is a golden key. Our final winner is the contestant who (a) is not killed in the crash and (b) retrieves this key runs to the Doritos (or possibly Pringles or Jolly Rancher) Gate Of Plenty, unlocks the door, runs inside, and raises the flag with the 7-UP logo.

Except! After the balloons and confetti settle, the host (probably Kathy Griffin, but we might want to save her for "Celebrity Shoot For A Million Down Under") tells the winner that it was all a giant hoax, and that in truth, there is no million-dollar prize. We leave the winner alone inside the Gate Of Plenty with his or her sorrows as clips of his or her previous on-air humiliations dance all around on Sony (Toshiba?) flat-panel displays. Ultimately, a hidden panel opens, revealing a revolver and a cup containing six bullets. Unbeknownst to our finalist, four of these bullets are blanks. One is a live round, and one is actually a plastic dummy cartridge, weighed and painted to look like the real thing.

(The following portion is carried live, with a five-second delay in case there's accidental nudity.)

1) If the finalist picks up the gun, loads it, commends his or her soul to God, and attempts to shoot him or herself, but the hammer falls on the dummy round, s/he's successfully Shot For A Million and will be immediately awarded a million-dollar check, representing a trust fund paying out in annual installments of $17,000.

2) If the hammer falls on a blank round and the final contestant only maims him or herself, s/he wins $100,000, a trip to the Caymans, and their own makeover special where we undo the damage caused by the detonation of three grains of gunpowder inches away from his or her face. Plus, we do another boob job and another butt lift, in preparation for a sidebar-cover followup story for "People" Magazine.

3) If the hammer falls on the live round, the contestant gets to come back to star in Shoot For A Million 2, wherein if their next of kin can convince one of eighteen eligible bachelors/bachelorettes (a) that the contestant is actually alive, and (b) to accept the deceased's marriage proposal, the contestant's estate wins two million dollars. We'll wire up the head with a speaker, a microphone, and a hidden camera, with streaming live video straight from the head available on the Shoot For A Million Website in both Quicktime and Windows Media formats for just $14.95.

Possibility Four is that the contestant will choose not to shoot him or herself at all, but we've developed the contestant selection process with the advice of three independent psychiatrists, and thus we're confident that anyone with basic common sense and a motivation for self-preservation will have been eliminated from the competition at the regional level.

It's got HBO sass, Fox zazz and a Big Three "water cooler TV" vibe. It's a little dark, granted, but the numbers don't lie: nihilists buy cars, beer, and high-end video systems. We've run all of this past some lawyers and they're confident that with only minor adjustments to the standard "Fear Factor" contestant waiver, we can be as kosher as a Hebrew National foot-long and ready to shoot a pilot in time for midseason 2005.

Please contact me at ai@andyi.com at your earliest convenience.

-- Andy Ihnatko

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Aloha Karma

Wednesday, September 15 11:57 PM

An inscrutable and incomparably powerful force permeates the Universe and binds it together. Its name be Chaos, and he who can augur even a fraction of its serene design is, for all intents and purposes, unstoppable.

And I'm getting there, my friends...I'm getting there. I cracked a big part of it a few weeks ago by realizing that Chaos seeks vessels, not volunteers; it smiles upon he who stops to examine a gum wrapper in the street, not he who spends days locked in forbidden libraries, studying volumes of arcane knowledge. Its purposes are only in sharp focus when they appear in your peripheral vision. By definition, Chaos spurns order and planning. Merely allow your self to sense its desires and then engage them.

I begin to know these things. I know, for instance, that if I leave the house wearing just a tee shirt, the Universe will find me a good deal on a casual shirt. I shouldn't ask why; I should simply buy it and allow the goldfish to ask each other "Hey...he wasn't wearing a shirt when he left the house, was he?" when I get back home.

I do not know why the Universe desires for Click and Drag to be confused. Surely galaxies whirl and die based upon this happenstance but I care not. I care only that I do my part, even if leaving the house under-dressed as against my nature.

I'm of an age when I feel like a bum if I leave the house without a shirt on, no matter how trivial the errand. I feel like I ought to put on something that buttons up, even if I have determined that the line between Freespirited Creative Type and Meek Slave to The Man sits somewhere between the third and fourth button from the top, and that therefore, fastening the third button would send entirely the wrong message to the world.

But over the past few weeks, there've been couple of times when I just couldn't be bothered. I ran out in my SpaceShipOne tee to buy some blank CDs, and decided to swing by Building #19 afterwards to see if they had an adjustable stool for the office, or perhaps a prototype fusion reactor that had been rejected by the Patent Office. All things are possible at Building #19; if the Chaos Force had an official credit card, using it at Building #19 would qualify you for a 5% discount plus a free miniature bust of Governor Thomas E. Dewey riding a unicycle, sculpted out of purple marzipan.

And what did I see lurking in a rack of freshly-arrived sportswear? An aloha shirt. But a terrific aloha shirt: blue with white orchid flowers, which (apparently) had been drawn with MacPaint 1.0 and printed out at 1/4 of screen resolution. Price: $5.99. For that money, I bought the red one, too.

Tonight, I had to go to Kinko's to pick up a fax. I had time to either shave or put on a shirt, so I left the house with a smooth chin and my Alferd Packer Grill tee shirt. On the way home, I stopped by Kohl's to look for some walking shoes...a stopgap measure against replacing the runnning shoes I was forced to burn three weeks ago. I failed to score the footwear, but on the way out I spied a rack of shirts discounted to $5. Included therein: another aloha shirt, but this one was a subtle and entirely successful fusion between Aloha and camouflage. The perfect thing to wear if you want to garrote people at a luau. Plus: five bucks!

In both cases, I took the item to a register, peeled off a sequence of ones, and wore the garment home, to inspire worried conversation in the aquarium.

I really do need a new pair of shoes for my trip to New York, but I won't repeat the mistake I made today. Tomorrow, I'm going to go off to the mall and walk around in my socks. Chaos will provide; chaos will provide.

Yeah, see, clearly it was a mistake to try to explain this to you. You're just not ready yet.

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Viva Zapatos!

Thursday, September 16 11:08 PM

Shoes were shopped for and shoes were purchased: I picked up a very natty pair, of the "looks like a pump, feels like a sneaker" variety. Except it's a man's shoe, not a woman's. Nor — and I want to make this crystal-clear — is it the sort of woman's shoe that's typically sold to men who like to dress like girls. These shoes are dead-butch. The insoles are made out of beef jerky and it came with a free gun and everything.

It is also not at all girly of me to devote this entire post to the subject of shoes and cute tops. I'm just being civic-minded. After all, I've received an avalanche of email

from readers who want to see the Cam-aloha shirt that I bought for $5 yesterday, or the MacPaint one I got at Building #19 a couple of weeks ago for a buck more. I am, as always, devoted to the needs of my readers:

Something's missing from this equation, dear readers, and it's just struck me: pants. I wrote about shoes and shirts this week, and earlier this year, I wrote about this new blazer I bought. I have to believe that if I throw a pair of pants into this year's postings, nothing but good can come of it.

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New York City at 2.7 Feet

Friday, September 17 11:44 PM

Okay, I suppose I could have scored better on the practical section of my Nightlife Finals tonight. I normally nail down a solid B to B+ in this subject, but it's possible that I'm just one of those students who tests well.

It's Friday night and I'm in New York City, one of the most zealous and exciting metrops on the planet. The streets are teeming with both nightlife and the obscene husks of the living undead. This afternoon I checked into my hotel, made a careful survey of all available parameters, noted the presence of a helpful three-page layout in the Post detailing all of the shows and performances and happenings that were taking place in Gotham tonight. And still, I chose to spend the evening in my hotel room, eating takeout.

Clearly, this is a show of lateral thinking. It goes like this:

1) I had to finish a column by 6 PM, and even though I got a good, running start at it during the train ride from Boston, I knew I'd be working right up to my deadline. So if I had any Nightlife ambitions, the starting gun wouldn't have gone off until 6:30, anyway.

2) It's miserable and muggy and it looked very much like it might rain. This is just a weekend jaunt and I didn't bring the three steamer trunks full of ball gowns that usually accompany me when I tour. So unless I wanted to smell like seafood bisque during my various appearances and commitments this weekend, I needed to keep some of my clothes fresh.

3) I got only a few hours of sleep last night, and New York City seems like precisely the sort of city where you don't want to fall asleep on the subway after, say, 1 AM. Of course, there was a time when snoozy tourists awoke to find that the City had provided them with a blanket, a travel-sized shaving and toothbrush kit, and a hot towel, but this particular city agency didn't survive the last round of budget cuts. Thank you, Mayor Bloomberg. If just once you commuted to work on the subway like everybody else, instead of being carried in a sedan chair by 16 children in footmen's garb, you'd understand just how deeply these cuts wound.

4) Tonight's the first game in a three-game series against the Yankees. And this hotel is one of those fancy upscale types where they put a television set — color — in all of the rooms.

5) There is a big sign at the end of the block reading, alterately, "Burritos" and "Take-Out or Delivery."

Plus, I'm hoping to be out on the streets bright and early tomorrow morning. The data all seemed to be pointing towards my staying in and enjoying a barbecued chicken burrito and a bowl of black-bean soup.

Instead, I found myself watching "American Casino" on Bravo. The threatening skies I had noted earlier in the afternoon finally decided to stop running their mouths and actually make with the precipitation, leading to an extended rain delay at Yankee Stadium. The game's finally started back up again (Sox down by a run at the top of the 7th) but I think this hotel is stealing its cable service from one of the condos across the street. Because with all the double-ghosting and the flashing images, it looks like the Sox and the Yanks are stuck at a really, really lame rave.

I was sort of hoping to see "THX-1138" tonight (there's a digital screening within walking distance) but hey, I ain't complaining. The burrito was actually very good, and I learned that if someone in their Thirties wants to look like they're in their Forties or Fifties, then they should behave like they're in their twenties (which appears to be the primary motivator for most of the men on the staff at American Casino). During the short walk to pick up my dinner, I smelled urine and marijuana and I heard rats tunneling through a heaping mound of garbage bags, all within five paces of each other. Which, frankly, is as big a New York icon as the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge. If it were possible to lock those smells and sounds into an engraving, "pee, weed, and rats" would have won the theme competition for the official New York State Quarter, hands down.

Red Sox suddenly pull ahead in the top of the Ninth. Hah! Maybe staying in tonight was the right move, after all...!

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The Mean Streets

Saturday, September 18 5:06 PM

Boy, my streak of Good Hotel Movie Karma keeps rolling on. After the game last night I flipped around and the first movie I hit was Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp's "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas," a movie that I didn't know I loved, because at that point I hadn't seen it. And now I'm back in my hotel room to change and freshen up before my appearance at the Apple Store, and after flipping through the news I land on "Jackie Brown."

My knowledge of game shows tells me that I damned-better stop watching TV when I'm in hotels. Because clearly, I have one hell of a Whammy coming to me.

This isn't the best hotel I've ever stayed in, but I can't complain about the alarm clock. I set it for 8:10 in the morning, and at right about that time I was bounced out of bed by the sound of Wagnerian-level thunder roaring just outside my window. This is a GE model 7-4815A and I intend to buy one for my own bedroom as soon as I get home. Heavy sleepers would do well to do the same.

The rain had only started to subside when I strolled out of my hotel at a little before 10, but the damage was already done: the subways were flooded. I was stuck holding a 12-ride card for a mode of transportation that only existed in the hearts and sepia-toned memories of old-time Knickerbockers who, to this very day, can tell unbelievable stories of what things were like up until about 6:20 this morning.

Oh, well. I was headed for 33rd Street, and the subway shutdown gave me an opportunity to make progress toward my goal of walking the entire length of Manhattan. I've been doing it for the past three or four visits, in consecuitive chunks. As yet I've only walked from the Battery to Columbus Circle...so the flood let me paint another 12 blocks onto the big novelty progress thermometer I've erected on my front lawn.

So I found Broadway and started hoofing it. My stroll took me right past a tableau I've seen on PBS a hundred times before as the opening titles of PBS' "Live From Lincoln Center." As I strolled past the plaza, my thumb twitched an invisible remote control, reflexively changing the channel to "Fear Factor."

I crossed 52nd street and found a metal sign propped up against an open door to the Ed Sullivan Theater, reading "BOX OFFICE OPEN." I'd read online about how it's possible to make ticket requests in person, and actually I was planning on stopping by next week when I'll be back in town, in the hopes of scoring standby seats. But hey, waste not, I'm really thirsty and should get some water. As you know, the maxim is actually "Waste Not, Want not" but in truth I had been walking for about twenty minutes and was sort of itching for a Poland Spring or something.

So here's the ticket procedure: you walk in, somebody hands you a form to fill out in which you mention specific dates you'll be in town, and then you take it inside to a table where a staffer (an intern, I'm guessing) asks you a couple of questions. I was back on the streets inside of fifteen minutes. There's definitely a possibility that maybe I might, if circumstances work out and they call me the day of the show and I return the message in time, see the show next week.

I, for one, have never been so serenely confident about the inevitability of a desired outcome in my life.

It was a swell walk. The rain had taken the city's baseline odor of fear and body fluids and replaced it with fresh, sweet-smelling ozone. I was surprised and delighted to find that the shoes I'd bought just 36 hours earlier felt like I'd been wearing 'em for years. In fact, the only discomfort I experienced throughout those whole forty blocks was the regular sight of joggers with numbers pinned to their singlets. They were moving at all sort of different speeds, in all sorts of different directions which sort of threw me as my life experience has taught me that runners with numbers tend to share a common purpose. The torrential rain must have cancelled a 10K scheduled for that morning. The other possibility is that this was simply the most poorly-organized marathon in all of amateur running. "Look," the race manager said, addressing the 9000 people massed at the starting line. "I think we all know who's here and who isn't here. So why don't we just start the clock, and you folks can all take off? When you think you've done 13.1 miles, turn around and come on back. When everyone's returned, we'll sit down and work out who came in first, second, third, and what have you. I think it's about time we dispensed with all those chip timers and course umpires and just relied on the good old Honor System. Why over-complicate things?"

There's more to say about today, including the reason why I was headed for 33rd Street, but it'll have to wait. It's time to shower, change into fresh clothes, and get ready for my Soho talk.

monkey-rider

my mutual-fundin' money

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Mr. 18

Tuesday, September 21 3:51 PM

I actually had a piece all ready to go, on the subject of "Who bears the responsibility for being a hopeless nit-picker?" It needed to be discussed. It was Sunday, and I had mere minutes before I was to leave my hotel and enjoy what would be an absolutely spectacular day in NYC. So: I could either (a) post something short and lame, or (b) write a more substantial piece later in the day and save it to CWOBber's cache, where it'd be posted as soon as I found myself with an Internet connection. Which might been after midnight.

Either one would, technically, maintain my streak of thirty unbroken days of blogging, but only if someone does a bit of nitpicking. But upon whose shoulders does that responsibility rest? You, the reader of this blog? "Yes, you posted, technically, but it was a sentence-and-a-half in which you mused that you thought for a moment that there was a mosquito in the room, but it turned out to be a single strand of hair flicking against the tip of your nose, how weird, the end. What of the solid, ready-for-print 1800-word wonders you've been writing every day so far?" Or is it the responsibility of me, the writer? "Look, I posted it. Sure, I didn't upload it, but I technically, I did indeed write a piece that was converted into a blog item. I'll say it one last time: I did. Not. Have. Sexual. Relations. With. That. Woman."

"Either way," I said, "my success or failure in maintaining a thirty-day blogging streak would rely on somebody defending a thoroughly annoying point of view." I had the aforementioned piece pretty much finished. But this was the point where I realized that Good God, I was getting just a little bit silly. I decided not to post it. Lilith agreed with me, by the way, for it chose this as one of those thrice-monthly times when I put her to Sleep and she'll refuse to wake up without a hard-restart, and I hadn't bothered to save the piece to an interim file.

To those of you who have been thinking hard about my Thirty Days of Blog and who are predisposed to thinking that I'm going to succeed, I call your attention to the fact that I started blogging consecutively a couple of days before September 1, and thus have been posting two days ahead for all this time. And now, I'm simply caught up.

To those of you who feel compelled to point at me and yell "Deceiver!" I say that you have a solid point there. There was also this time when I was in a museum gift shop and the clerk forgot to ring up this $50 jacket and by the time I realized what had happened, I didn't go back in and correct the error...even though my bus wasn't leaving for another twenty minutes and I probably could have straightened it out without being late for my dinner date. At least when I deceived you, sir, it didn't cause you to experience ungodly problems Z-ing out your register at the end of your shift.

I will clear up one little mystery regarding my previous post, at the request of many, many readers who emailed me to ask if I was sending them coded messages, or if perhaps I had some sort of minor stroke just before updating the blog. The last two paragraphs were "monkey-rider" and "my mutual-fundin' money." These were actually notes to myself about other examples of how Bravo had edited out "Pulp Fiction"'s naughty language. Readers with a good sense of cadence will be able to parse those terms quite readily. Those who misinterpreted them as my coded command to raise the red banner of revolution and sieze the banks and post offices, well, what can I tell you. The next time your dog tells you that you're about to do something incredibly stupid, listen to him. He is the Grand Pontiff of Blue and Soup, after all.

Check out my Flickr photosite for snaps from my weekend. It'll have to do until I find a little time to speak of my adventures. The Apple Store appearance went great and I had one of the best weekends I've ever had in NYC.

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Here in my car...

Thursday, September 23 6:03 PM

I spent much of last night in the car, flaunting the fact that I wasn't actually using it as a transportation device. Surely, this spiteful act was completely wasted, considering that it wasn't directed at anybody in particular. But sometimes you just have to have faith. I had to believe that somehow, somewhere, somebody was walking along a state highway in the pouring rain, scowling and carrying a gas can. He's walked about four miles back the way he came, and has finally reached the "Gas This Exit" sign that he remembered passing. Except it actually says "Next Gas: Five Miles." He feels like crud, of course, but then he suddenly feels an additional pang of worthlessness...and he doesn't even know why.

This is known as "Paying It Forward" Except, again, you're sending spite into the universe instead of kindness. I suppose that "Paying It Downward" would be a better way of putting it: the ultimate goal is to make people feel just a little bit worse instead of better. This has the exact same net effect as the original scheme to make sad people feel happy, and with a far greater probability of success. I ask you: which movement is more likely to attract supporters? One which encourages folks to carry other people's groceries way the hell out to their cars? Or one that advises them to stand by and simply watch as that bag of party ice soaks through the bottom of that old woman's bag and drops straight to the pavement, with a cascade of vegetables and canned goods following right behind and scurring irretrievably across the parking lot?

So to you, dear reader, I say: your shoelace is untied. Ha! Made you look! And now, the world is a better place.

Anyway, I spent over an hour climbing around inside my car, stringing cables and testing signals as if it were an Apollo command module, except without the benefit of zero gravity. I had agreed to do a radio interview on Your Mac Life at 9:30. They have an iChat AV feed, y'see, and if you have both broadband and a chat camera available they like it when you can throw your smiling face into their video feed. It's a good abuse of networking infrastructure, but naturally it can give me fits if the interview is taking place during a hectic time like this when I have just three days I have off between business trips. I'm really not sure that I want anybody to see what the inside of my office looks like right now. A TV crew from the Oprah show, shooting a segment for a show entitled "Help! My Spouse Is A Slob!"? Maybe. Provided that it's one of those deals where they clean my office for me while I'm away and replace the old TV with a 60" plasma. They'll also have to come through with a spouse, for the purposes of filming. I'm willing to leave a deposit for the latter, but the TV stays here or the deal's off.

But Oprah's too busy giving out free cars to people who, apparently, couldn't have been that hard up for wheels because otherwise, how did they get to the studio? So I came up with the solution of doing the interview from the backseat of my car. It was actually sheer, accidental brilliance: the car is upholstered, so it was perfectly soundproofed. One lamp mounted in the floor well of the front seat bounced light off the ceiling, dousing me in warm, diffuse, flattering light. There was a cupholder for my drink, the WiFi penetrated through the house and the roof of the car like a champ, and (I like to think) anyone viewing the interview got to see something different for a change.

Honest, I'm going to do all of my video interviews this way from now on. There was only one drawback, and it's the same inconvenience that I've suffered on every single film and video set I've ever worked on: you have to switch off the A/C while the show's running so that the noise doesn't ruin the audio. As a result, the longer you go, the sweatier you get. That's actually OK. If you save your most passionate statements for the end of the interview, you can look like Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington," at the end of his three-day filibuster.

It was a good interview. I like doing these things; they're a real challenge. When I give my talks, I prefer not to work off of a script but I do have a roadmap in my mind, and I take to the stage with the intention of spending the next X minutes connecting the dots from point to point to point. When you're on TV or on radio, though, the host controls the map.

I think I sounded acceptably intelligent. I plugged what I wanted to plug: my new book, plus my appearance at DLExpo this Sunday in NYC, yes, Digital Lifestyle Expo at the Marriott Marquis in historic Times Square, where the only illegal activities now going on are the scores and scores of top-quality DVD bootlegs of first-run movies, all being sold openly for fantastically low prices.

Afterward, I pulled apart the Mobile Broadcast Booth, unreeled the extension cord that I'd snaked through various car and home windows, and settled into the sofa to cool down. Were I making the income that I deserve, an assistant would have thrown a towel around my neck and slapped a cold Poland Spring into my hand the minute I left the stage area (ie, my mid-priced sedan) but as it happened, I bore the full responsibility of coming down after the "performance."

When my head feels like it's full of bees I like to go out for a drive. It's the one place on this planet — bathroom included — when it's impossible for me to write, so it's a nice little break from the day. I had my keys and my iPod in my hand and I turned off the TV, just when the news channel flashed an update to the Sox/Orioles game:

6-6. Ninth inning.

Good God. How perfect.

You've never seen me move so fast. I tossed the iPod back onto the sofa and dashed into the driveway, fumbling for the keys and leaping into the front seat as though pursued by zombies. I turned on the radio for the first time in months, found WEEI on the AM band, and was pulling out of the driveway as a happier, more centered, more perfect being. I was listening to a veteran color man call a tied ballgame in the ninth inning, in the waning days of an honest-to-god pennant race, just a day or two before a weekend home series against the Sox' sole rival for the AL East championship.

As if to underscore the holy rightness of my choice, The Lord saw fit to send the game into three extra innings, and for the Sox to win it with a clutch homer. There's nothing better than that. There can't be anything better than that. "Actually being there at the game?" You make a good point. Well struck...but if I had been at the ballpark, I wouldn't have had the horn of a fine American automobile underneath my thumbs, and I wouldn't have been able to blow it so obnoxiously when the Sox finally won it in the bottom of the 12th.

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Clickety-clack...

Friday, September 24 11:45 PM

I'm sick and tired of writing "...but let's just take my 'Amtrak r00lz!!!' screed as read and move on." I'm actually itching to screed on about this again.

So: welcome to the Acela Express train 2159. Once again I'm on my way to New York and as always, the only discomfort I'm feeling during the journey is a slight sprain to the shoulder and elbow as I strain to pat myself on the back. Surely: What Fools, These Air Commuters Be. I'm installed in a cushy club-style chair, and there's so much room between it and the seat in front of me that I've got my legs crossed and Lilith is sitting a comfortable typing distance away. It's also plugged into a standard AC power outlet, so I am greatly inclined to shout "Shmattery!", having preceded that exclamation with the requisite "Battery-".

But I can't, because this is the Quiet Car. You wanna talk on your cellphone or testify to your ability to watch movies all the way to Washington DC, you gotta take it outside. Troubling, as the outside is currently whipping past my window at about 50-70 MPH. But I can still make out the New England coastline — we've crossed the Rhode Island border into Connecticut, I think. I'm a veteran of this route and as usual, I'll be craning my neck when we pass by the ballpark and the marina.

Riding Amtrak isn't all about the comfortable seat and the keen scenery, o'course. I revel in the freedom like Scrooge McDuck wallowing through his money crib. No lines to get into (currently travelling through wetlands; many cranes and herons are spotted). No scanners to walk through. No need to leave your Leatherman tool at home or wear your good underwear. If I want to get out of my seat and walk around, I'm free to do so. If I want a soda or a cookie or a burger, I walk to the diner car and get one when I'm good and bloody ready for it.

The difference this time is that I'm riding in the First Class car. When I pay my own way, I usually go coach. When others are footing the bill, I'll happily take Business Class accomodations. DLExpo's organizers were so delighted at the money I was saving them by taking the train that they happily bumped me to the top whack of service. A commuter flight to New York is only slightly more expensive than a first-class Acela seat...but factor in a $38 cab fare each way, and Amtrak is a clear Win.

Yeah, y'see, a cab is unnecessary. Amtrak will drop me off right on 33rd Street. I don't even necessarily need to bother hailing a cab; I'm just about ten blocks away, my bag has wheels, and my legs are as yet fully functional, thank you very much.

So good; we've had the Amtrak talk again. I'm glad we did this; I think I'll go and create a new recurring appointment in iCal, to remind me to repeat the talk every four months. If I were a middle-manager, every few months I'd declare an all-staff in the conference room, lay in a supply f Krispy Kremes, and remind everyone that the printer paper and the copier paper are tracked separately so please, folks, don't load your printer with consumables from the copier closet just because it's closer. Also, people, if you insist on photocopying your ass, please sanitize the glass afterward. That's what the box of Clorox Wipes is there for, after all. And the Amtrak Talk is just an extension of that same basic wisdom: keeps the troops in line, reminds them why we have procedures in place, plus it's an excuse to use some of the petty cash to buy everybody donuts. That leaves less to blow at the dog track, but hey, the mark of a great leader is his facility for lateral thinking.

Back I go to New York, just a few days after the last trip. Last time, I invested my complete faith in a brand-new and utterly-untested pair of shoes. Well, that worked out OK. But this current situation's a little bit itchier: I have left my iPod at home. No iTunes library. No playlists. No Breakout or Solitaire. I have invested all of my faith in Microsoft's new Portable Media Center.

You've never heard of it? Think "iPod, with video." It's a new platform specification and licensees just started shipping product a few weeks ago. Microsoft sent me a Creative Labs Zen unit a few days ago. You plug it into a PC and it syncs all your music and photos. Cool. But! If you have a Media Center PC — one with a TV tuner and digital video-recording software — it can also sync up all of the TV shows you've recorded. Apparently, part of the device's video compression algorithm incorporates a public-key system that relies upon a constant feed of aerobic, Old Testament-style cursing. I set it up yesterday and after Windows Media Player 10 spent half the day transcoding video into the PMC's size and format, it reported that none of the files could be copied "Because they might be in an unplayable format." But as soon as I started yelling at the thing and swearing to God that I was just going to leave the damned thing there hooked up to the PC — long train trip or no — it Saw the Light and began munching through my videos. Have just finished watching last night's "The Apprentice" and have started in on Tuesday's season finale of "The Amazing Race."

If this Zen player doesn't work out, I'm pretty much stuck. I'll have to, you know, read and think and stuff, instead of medicating myself with third-party media as usual. But I'll be writing a review of this in a week or two and there's just no other way to do it: you have to eat the dog food. There's so much that you can only learn through determined, day-to-day real-world use. For example, man, I can only wonder about all of the modern tech that went into this device. But it'd be a better product if someone had come up with the idea of installing a rubberized strip at the bottom. As it is, the Zen is all smooth plastic on the bottom, which means you can't prop it up against something without it sliding flat against the table again. The tray table here has a little bit of a lip inside it, so I can lean it against the PowerBook between my wrists. Otherwise...you can't stand it up at a comfortable viewing angle without invoking some sort of Doohickey.

I'm keynoting at a conference in Nassachusetts in a couple of weeks and this is actually part of what I'll be speaking about. When Creative designed this player, they thought about everything...except for how the user might be able to watch videos on it without holding the thing up with one hand. If this platform fails to make a dent in the marketplace, plenty of MBAs in Redmond will prepare plenty of PowerPoint slides and graphs illustrating the softness of the market for on-demand video, the strength of the iPod as a recognized market leader, or the difficulties in integrating thie PMC standards and functions into Windows Media Player. When in truth...all it needed was a little rubber thingamabob under the screen.

Still, my hopes are high. Look how well the shoes worked out!

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New York City: Where all the fests are Slayfests

Saturday, September 25 11:30 AM

My eyes opened, and I waited for enough of my cognitive faculties to come back online that I could reasonably and accurately ascertain that I was indeed in a wakeful state. Next, I determined that those fading memories about my more or less mundane life in the "2001: A Space Odyssey" universe (in which I had to form an opinion about the recent massive update to the HAL Labs' 9000-series OS, and write a column about it my 4 PM) were, in fact, merely the fantasies of a brain that had grown so desperate for sensory input during the past eight or nine hours that it started making stuff up. Finally, I concluded that it was 7:30 in the morning and that if I got out of bed and started my day right now, I could take pride in not being a colossal lame-o.

So I yawned, retrieved various articles of clothing from where I left them last night, slipped on my shoes, and slouched off to buy a quick bite of breakfast that I could take back into bed with me. I took one step out of my building and found myself right into the heart of Times Square.

Man. I'm a grown adult and I still think that's pretty cool. All my life, "Going to New York City" was a huge, overt act that involved planes, trains and automobiles. Today — actually, for much of the next week — it just requires that I think "Isn't there anything to drink in the house?" and then press an elevator button.

Better than that: here in the Marriott Marquis, the bottom button on the express elevator doesn't say "Lobby." The lobby is on the 8th floor, so the oversized ground-floor button actually says "BROADWAY." I left my room with a friend last night and I couldn't resist. I punched the button with a flourish and declared "With my brains and your looks, we're headed straight to BROAD-WAAAAY!" adding "Stick with me, kid...I'll take you straight to the bottom!" before I realized that I had an audience of about 7 or 8 tourists there in the elevator.

But was I embarrassed? No, ladies and gentlemen, I was not. I think it's a sin to come to New York City and not enjoy some live theater. I'd just saved these people the $100 and the three hours they'd have spent seeing "42nd Street." If I have any regrets, it's only that I lacked the presence of mind to pass the hat afterward.

Travelling can be quite disorienting for me. I spend most of my day alone in my office without any co-workers, and when I'm in supreme deadline crunch mode I can actually go several days without having any interaction at all with another human being, apart from the sort of conversations that begin with somebody saying "Sign here" and handing me a clipboard and a package. But I've been exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide long enough to have made plenty of friends all over the place. So when I arrived in New York, I wound up walking straight from Penn Station to the 53rd-street offices of Pal 1 for lunch, and then shortly after settling in here at my hotel I had to get ready for dinner with Pal 2. I'm working on Sunday, but I'll be lunching with Pal 3 on Monday, and I've arranged lunches and dinners TBD with Pals 4 and 5.

Is there such a thing as social anorexia? I'm not sure if this system of binges followed by starvation can be any good for my cardiovascular.

Well, all this New York dining is no good for anything. Lunch was spaghetti with an ambitiously flavorful putanesca sauce. Dinner was barbecue. Me and my pal John passed on dessert in favor of a ten-block walk to Columbus Circle and then back down 7th Avenue, where we encountered a window with a big display of cartoonish-looking cheesecakes. Being sensible people, we ankled in and got a table. We wound up testing the establishment in both the Compulsory and Freestyle categories of the competition. I ordered a classic cherry-topped slice, while John went for the sort of thing where the recipe reads

1) Prepare a round, greased pan.
2) Fill it with Snickers bars and sticks of whole butter.
3) Set the pan out in the sun until its contents have melted enough to conform to the shape and dimensions of the pan.
4) Refrigerate and serve.

I made a decision a long time ago and this only underscored how perfect the world will be when the occupation force arrives and our new alien overlords leave all of the planet's day-to-day operations up to me. Food, I determined, is to be enjoyed. Why bother, otherwise? But if you make things like cheesecake and ice cream a regular part of your diet, well, you won't be able to pursue this concept for very long, one way or another. So I only order cheesecake two or three times a year and I pick moments like these, when I have an opportunity to enjoy the sort of cheesecake that provokes you to insert an obscene gerund between the syllables: cheese-f******-cake.

It was so good that I had to stop two-thirds of the way through. I actually needed to take a breather. "I will have one more forkful, just before I leave the table," I determined, and when the moment came I raised the fork to my mouth I instantly thought better of it. When you're juggling chainsaws, there comes a moment when you just sort of realize that while this has been a great experience, it's probably a good idea for you to stop now. I returned the loaded fork back to the plate with similar sentiments.

But the memory will linger with me for months. Every time I'm in a chain restaurant and I see it on the menu and know instantly that no restaurant that screws a rusted car door to a wall and calls it Atmosphere can possibly have a handle on such a subtle and wonderful word as "Cheesecake," and every time I'm in the supermarket and encounter a freezer case full of Sara Lees, I'll think back to the slice I couldn't finish on 7th Avenue — which shouldn't be hard; my liver and kidneys will probably still be processing the sugars and fats — and I'll take a pass.

So now I have my yogurt and my Breakfast Coke and my newspaper. Any trip to New York can't be complete until you spot a front-page item which incorporates phrases like "crushed to death" and "jeering crowd of onlookers" and today's New York Post didn't disappoint. Will read the funnies, answer my mail, finish writing a column, and then see if I can walk to Central Park North before I have to get ready for dinner.

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Forty Achings And A Mule

Tuesday, September 28 7:08 PM

The TV here in my room at the Marriott suddenly looks like a painting that a Post-Impressionist started and a Neo-Plasticist finished. It's interfering with my enjoyment of the fine (well, not so much) comedy "The Whole Nine Yards" but it's also a warm reminder that I am indeed living in the Push-Button World of Tomorrow. Just five years ago, "The TV is screwed up" meant you were looking at static, or ghosting, or the dreaded White Dot, the inverse black hole from which no entertainment can escape. Today, it isn't a problem with the rabbit ears or a loose bit of coax: a bad picture means that the decompression of a digital video stream has gone all wonky. As I write this, the static parts of the image are mostly fine, but parts are a little bit watery. And the sectors with constantly-changing imagery are a complete mess, making it look like Michael Clark Duncan has a Pennsylvania Dutch quilt in a headlock, instead of an impotently-flailing Matthew Perry.

I do indeed have blog entries for Sunday and Monday, but judging from the empty canisters of ether and the grapefruit rinds littering the room, I was clearly in my Hunter S. Thompson mode this weekend...so I'd like to take a quick read-through before I actually post them. But I do have one rather timely item to post: I can comfortably say that on tonight's Late Show, David Letterman will be talking to one rather sweet tomato in Rupert Jee's Hello Deli.

I had a meeting today on 52nd Street, and after returning a few phone calls in the lobby it was 4:30 and I found myself walking back to my hotel. That happens to be the time when Letterman's audience starts filing in for the 5:00 taping. It was pouring rain, and that's precisely why I chose to make the one-block detour to 53rd and Broadway. Fans of the show know that Tuesday's usually the night when Dave talks to someone in the street and I was wondering if the rain was scaring people away from the Hello Deli. Of course, real fans know that unless you're (a) female and (b) somewhat- to seriously-hot, you really have no chance whatsoever of being invited to go on-camera and play "Beat The Clock" or "Trump or Monkey?" or anything else that Letterman's staff comes up with as a New York-hip answer to "The Price Is Right"'s games.

I reached the corner of 53rd and Broadway...right in front of the theater. I turned right to head up Broadway. I was powerful-thirsty, and the little bodegas on Broadway near my hotel do not see me as their target market. Their target market consists of people who have recently been whomped in the head with a 2x4 (arguably a reliable demographic in New York City) and who are thus willing to spend $3 on a can of soda. Me, I'm willing to walk a few blocks to save a few bucks, so up to 54th I went. But no sooner did I step off the curb when I heard someone say "Excuse me...do you have a moment? I work for the Letterman Show."

Oh, bless your heart for thinking that he was interested in me....but no, he was talking to this shockingly beautiful woman who had been standing at the corner waiting to cross. She had to be a model. Had to be. It wasn't just that she was beautiful; she was also incredibly well put-together. Not too much makeup, not too little. She carried herself with runway-perfect posture. The last time I had seen that sort of carriage was after I'd seen "The Producers." I'd been hanging around the street, having had a terrific time at the matinee and not particularly wanting the afternoon to be over, and watched as the performers began to filter out through the stage door and into the street.

Folks went ga-ga over Gary Beach (who played Roger DeBris to perfection, and who'd come out specifically to chat and sign people's Playbills) and some of the other actors. Meanwhile, the dancers were emerging in dribs and drabs. As anonymous chorus folks, they didn't really stand out onstage. But there on the street, even in plain clothes, it was a completely different story. I remember one of them specifically. She strolled unnoticed through the throngs of folks who were hoping to catch a glimpse of Matthew Broderick or Nathan Lane. Her body was firm and perfectly toned and even when walking, her movements were unmistakably those of a dancer. In an earlier and simpler age, she'd only be dancing until a steel magnate happened to catch her show and then inevitably and immediately proposed marriage.

I called my pal's attention to her. "She's trying to blend in with the crowd," I said. "That's like a gazelle trying to blend in with a herd of pack mules."

I saw the same sort of thing there on 53rd Street. I'm not sure if she was a model-actress or an actress-model, but I'd be willing to put good money on either one. We'll all find out tonight, I'm sure. Because the Letterman staffer continued to talk, explaining that on Tuesdays, Dave usually likes for Rupert to pull someone off the street to play a game, and it'll only take a few minutes of her time, and it'll be so much fun...

Disillusionment City. They were seeding the crowd with a ringer, pre-ordained and tied with a big purple ribbon. Well, OK. Makes sense. They'll probably have her sign all the waivers ahead of time and make sure there won't be any surprises. Besides, golly gee would she look great wearing nothing but a big purple ribbon. Just take my word for it.

I wasn't disappointed, personally. I walked to 54th Street, bought me a Gatorade and a 1-liter Coke to enjoy later, and then I strolled on back past the theater. I passed by that same staffer.

"Good eye, son," I wanted to say, but two layers of umbrellas separated us and besides, there are things that men simply intuitively understand; saying these things aloud would only have ruined it.

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