Well, the broadband was installed a couple of days ago. Here, I'll prove it:

See? I put a two megabyte picture file up on my website. Back when I was stuck with dialup, each photo I uploaded had to successfully navigate a complex decision tree. Viz:

Does this picture serve an important function? IE, does it help tell the story, does it mark a transition from one sequence of thoughts to another, or is it interesting or beautiful in and of itself? If so,

Have I cropped the photo to eliminate extraneous detail and focus the viewer's attention? IE, have I fully exploited my ability to intensify the impact of the image, through editing and enhancement? If so,

Have I chosen the smallest acceptible image dimensions and level of compression? IE, have I transmogrified this JPEG in such a way that it conveys the greatest amount of necessary information in the shortest possible download time, so as not to test the patience of the viewer?

If so, go ahead and upload the image.

With broadband, this tree compresses nicely down to

Aw, **** it; whether it's 20K or 2 megabytes, I can FTP it in just a few seconds.

Incidentally, I took that photo tonight, in the basement of the Dedham Community Theater in Dedham, Massachusetts. That's where you'll find the gent's lavatories, a walled-off counter that used to be the coat check room fifty years ago, and the Museum Of Bad Art. If you must visit three art museums this year — if were a condition of your parole, let's say — and you've already been to the Charles M. Schulz Complex, MoBA should be next on the list.

MoBA is a great gallery because it doesn't settle for the mundanely bad. The kitschy and the tacky aren't worthy of the museum's preservation. When you look at a velvet Elvis or a majestic oil of Christ looking down over a Winston Cup car, you're capable of just moving on. It doesn't make any real impact; you've invested only as much time as it takes for your brain's operating system to locate the word "Crap" in the frontal lobe of your cerebral cortex and dump a pointer to that into your CPU's cache.

The truly bad is endlessly fascinating. It's not just the art itself: it's the realization that somebody thought this was a terribly good idea. That sensation is crystal-clear. This piece was somebody's vision. It filled them with a sense of purpose and they had to see it through to the very end. You keep looking because you want to understand why. When the artist finally put down his instrument, did he do so with a sense or pride and accomplishment? Or did he finally comprehend that the gulf between a Keen Interpreter Of The Human Condition and just Some Schmoe Who Had Fifty Dollars And The Address of An Art Supply Store is sometimes a deceptively yawning one?

Here in Boston, there's a commercial that runs constantly in the early afternoon

(also known as the "LoserVision" part of the broadcast day. Advertisers figure that anyone who's home watching TV at 1 PM must have absolutely no employable skills whatsoever and the commercials reflect that. One commercial is particularly offensive. A woman approaches a bank teller, beaming with pride. "Hi, Jessica!" she says, smiling as if she's just been injected with Joker toxin. "I'd like to make a deposit!"

"A deposit?" the teller says. She's skeptical. "What happened? Did you win the lottery?"

No indeed; thanks to the Medical Office Assistant Course at Bryman, she's just begun a fabulous career typing and filing colonoscopy results for $2.70 above minimum wage. If I were the ad copywriter on this one, I'd just go for broke: "A deposit? What happened? Did the liquor store start accepting food stamps?" If you're going to insult people, you should at least have the courtesy to do it in a clear and direct fashion.

I mean, the ad community is doing a great disservice to an entire segment of the population. Being home on a weekday afternoon doesn't make you a loser. No, their audience are losers because they're watching "Elimidate." The time and day are completely irrelevant. End of aside.)

...which advertises the Visual Communications department of a local vo-tech school. Via voice-over, students explain their motives for pursuing a career in a creative field. "I want to create an image that makes people feel," one of them insists, while a sketch of a guy twisting his hands skyward (towards an indifferent God, no doubt) fades into view.

Yes. Absolutely. This is definitely what happens when someone says "I want to make people feel" and then rushes out to buy a set of pastels in a state that lacks a mandatory five-day "cooling off" period for the purchase of unlicensed art supplies. If you want to pursue a far loftier and sincere impulse, go with "I want to create an image which makes people think 'Wow, This Dude Is Really Into Van Halen' every time they look at my three-ring binder" instead. Bad art is bad art, but you can't go wrong with a bitchin' "5150" logo done in ballpoint.

The Museum Of Bad Art has a permanent collection of more than 200 paintings and sculptures (nearly all of which were purchased at thrift stores or plucked out of trash piles and donated public-minded patrons of the arts). Each is awe-inspiring in a different way and the consistent quality is due to the curators' rigorous selection process. No mass-produced art (so the velvet Elvises are out), no student art (the curators have no desire to ridicule people who didn't know any better) and no "ringers" (pieces intentionally created to create an impression of incompetence; that's the MoMA equivalent of a forged Picasso).

Again, every one of these paintings Seemed Like A Good Idea At Some Point to someone. For me, the fascination is in trying to figure out exactly where it all went off the rails. It's the same fascination that forces me to re-watch "Heaven's Gate" once every few months. This Michael Cimino western is truly a beautiful film. Every shot is glorious cinematography. The opening scene is equal in drama and iconography to the opening scene from "The Godfather."

But still, it's a bad, bad movie. Bad enough to strip paint. David Lynch would walk out of the theater shaking his head and complaining about baffling plotlines and scenes that seem to wander on and off the screen like pedestrians outside the "Today Show" set. Yet I'm powerless to resist it. I read Final Cut, written by Steven Bach, the studio's Head of Worldwide Production. He had a front-row seat during the development of "Heaven's Gate." After all, this is the guy who aggressively urged United Artists to sign Michael Cimino (then red-hot after making "The Deer Hunter") regardless of the project, regardless of the cost. Bach spent three hundred pages explaining in painful (for him) detail how this movie came to suck so mightily. He did it with great precision and devastating effect. If Bach had been prosecuting a first-degree murder case, the judge wouldn't have merely said "The defendant is found guilty as charged." He would have said "The bailiff may fire when ready." Did this scare me off? No. To the contrary...I was intrigued. As luck would have it, the Harvard Film Archive screened "Heaven's Gate" at the end of the month and by golly, Steven Bach told no lies. The end credits rolled, the lights went up, and then Red Cross volunteers moved throughout the theater, distributing blankets and hot coffee.

Good for me: I didn't meekly accept the word of a third party. I insisted on seeing it for myself and forming my own opinion. So. "Heaven's Gate" is a horribly bad movie. We're agreed?

No. The HFA had screened the 138-minute version of the film. "Am I being unfair?" I thought. "This is the version that the studio cut together after they took the film away from Cimino. The director's cut is almost three and a half hours long. Maybe that extra hour of footage is the difference between a disconnected mishmash and a consistent, compelling narrative!"

So I went and got the Michael Cimino version. Not at Blockbuster, either: it was only available on Laserdisc. In Japan. Still, I located a copy. I turned the lights off and I got comfortable. And you know what? It was better. I was sitting on a big, comfy sofa instead of a beat-up Harvard theater seat, and I could stop the film and take a bathroom break whenever I wanted. As for the actual movie, well, the nicest thing I can say is that on a suck-per-minute basis, it wasn't any worse than the studio cut.

Surely by now I've thrown more goodwill at "Heaven's Gate" than anyone involved in the production did. I should let it die with some semblance of dignity. But I just can't pull the plug. One of the funniest scenes in "Final Cut" takes place in a screening room filled with studio executives. Making this film had been a huge soap opera. Cimino filled their lives with so much tension and drama that most of them had their water coolers replaced with Pepto-Bismol dispensers. "It'll be another 'Deer Hunter,' they kept assuring each other. "When we see the final product, it'll all have been worth it."

The director strolled into the screening room and settled into a chair. This was it: this was the date he had promised to deliver the finished cut, with a running length set at two and a half hours. He began with an apology. The movie was too long, but they shouldn't worry; he intended to cut another twenty minutes before the premiere. Then the projectionist dimmed the lights and for the very first time, an audience got to see "Heaven's Gate." All six hours of it.

It's part obsession and it's part sickness. I acknowledge this freely. But part of me can't dismiss the flashes of rational and inspired filmmaking that occasionally bob up to the surface. They're there, and they're enticing. If Cimino were given another two hours to tell his story, would "Heaven's Gate" morph into brilliance? Well, maybe. Look at Sergio Leone's "Once Upon A Time In America," or James Cameron's "The Abyss." During their respective years of eligibility, both films won the coveted Golden Crap award, which is the Crappy Jury Prize honoring the Crappiest Film at the Craptown Film Festival. But with footage restored, they're brilliant. With it, the lame doth walk and the blind doth see. If you had spotted some spark, some sort of potential in the original and you could muster enough faith to subject yourself to an even longer version of that mediocre movie, you were richly rewarded.

None of the Museum Of Bad Art pieces inspire that sort of faith or dedication. You walk into the theater's basement, you look, you go take a whizz, you come out, you look again, you check your zipper, and then you leave.

Still, their paintings invoke that same basic reaction. Some of these artists are "Spinal Tap"s. They have an undeniable amount of fundamental skill, but zero taste or maturity. Others are Salieris: God filled these people with an overwhelming desire to Create, and then (after elbowing Saint Peter and chortling "get a load of this") He made them artistically mute.

Part of the equation is there, but vital chunks of what it takes to create true art are missing. What would these paintings have become, if they were produced under the right conditions? That's the question that keeps people coming back. The interest in Bad Art is a reflection of our fascination with Potential. We'd all like to think that we're just one breakthrough away from being able to create true Art: something instinctively executed, subliminally powerful, and utterly devoid of pretense.

Those who us who somehow manage to figure it out win a spot in the Guggenheim or the National Gallery. Most of us will wind up in the basement of a movie theater in suburban Boston, next to the mens' room.

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One of my editors sent out an email tonight that went out to me and a bunch of people in her San Francisco office. It discussed a small amount of business and then closed with "...and let's give a big hand to Gary Coleman, for getting us to laugh at Democracy again."

I felt like I had no choice but to break a fundamental rule of online etiquette by clicking "Reply To All." I responded to the Bit Of Business and closed with

And how about a hand for Arnold, for getting us to laugh at California again?

No, wait...that was the Oakland A's.

Naturally, this was immediately followed by an apology. "Give me a break," I wrote. "They're about to throw out the first pitch in the Sox/Yankees AL championship. I've precious few minutes left to act all cocky about our chances at making it to the World Series."

The Sox have already beaten the hometown team of one set of my editors. They're now fighting a squad representing another set of editors. If — praise merciful God and all his glory — Boston winds up playing Chicago for the whole ball of wax, they'll be trying to beat yet another set of editors' favorite team.

As you can imagine, it makes for a rather edgy couple of weeks. "As Apple ships the last Final Candidate release of Panther to its partners and developers, the company finds itself in the unlikely position of coming to market with a superior OS at a time when Windows is vulnerable." That's what's in the manuscript when I email it. The Chicago Sun-Times takes one look at this, decides that it's a bit to wordy, and changes it to "The Red Sox blow" before putting the paper to bed. "What would Ihnatko do without us?" my editors marvel, before briefly considering running the column under a photo of Bill Buckner instead of my smiling mug.

Win or lose, I'm already happy. The Boston Red Sox are playing the New York Yankees in a seven-game series for the league championship. That's a great matchup. Everybody wins. I should note that one group will win slightly more than the other group, but still, when a classic rivalry between two legendary teams is played out with something this big at stake, it's a gift to us all.

I am nervously counting my sins, however.

I said something unkind to a classmate when I was in fourth grade. When I fervently pray for a Sox/Cubs World Series — and indeed I am; I've even set up a little Buddhist shrine that I copied out of a 1988 "People" magazine article about Richard Gere — the error weighs on me. If God's so split on the idea that he could just as easily go either way, will my one ill-considered shout of "Buckethead! Buckethead!!!" cost every baseball fan their Fantasy Series?

And yes, everybody wants it to happen. The last time the Sox played the Cubs, it was for the 1918 World Series...and neither team has won it since. If they meet again in this year's championship, well, the Gummint will just have to declare a seven-game federal holiday and be done with it. Close the schools and the banks. Suspend trading on Wall Street. That's all.

Otherwise, we'd have bedlam. As a defense attorney, arguing for an immediate stay of execution and a new trial is tough enough as it is. When you have to pretend that you don't know damned well that the judge has his browser opened to ESPN.com's live GameCast, that just plain undignified.

Meanwhile, I have emailed my Sun-Times editors, promising that if such a Series happens, a crisp $10 bill — cash, mind you; no need to go reporting this to the accountants — will go to anyone who can procure Wrigley Field tickets for me. The bait has been set...now I just lie back and wait.

Anyway, last night I was the focus of a brilliant new commercial for satellite radio. I'd just spent two whole days working on That Project I Can't Talk About Yet and having finally finished and filed, I was desperate to leave the house ("Never hang around at the scene of the crime," I tell budding writers. "If they want to put me in jail for writing 90-word sentences and making up words when I can't think of something suitably priturient, they'll have to catch me first") but I was also desperate to keep following the Cubs/Marlins game and the California recall election.

Not a problem. Thanks to extra innings, my quick trip to the drugstore to get a beverage and then stretch my mental legs turned into ninety minutes of driving, while I flipped between ESPN and CNN. I left the house shortly before a ninth-inning home run kept the Cubs alive and returned shortly after Arnold promised to kleen up guvvament. Yes, if I'd stayed at home I could have seen the same show without having to spend $24 on gas and oil, but do keep in mind that travel broadens one and should be encouraged.

Speaking of That Project I Can't Talk About Yet...I should be able to talk about it shortly. Interestingly enough, this week two readers sent me kind emails asking the same question. There's a ready answer but it involves TPICTAY. So if you're reading this, you are officially the first people to know what it is that I'm not talking about.

Oh, wow, man...I just had a flashback to Reagan's testimony during the Iran/Contra Scandal...

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Continuing the fine legacy of Bob Hope, who at the drop of a hat would toss a change of underwear, a three-wood, and Joey Heatherton into a duffel bag and fly right off to some Godforsaken part of the world to show his support for those brave, brave Americans who confront strife and chaos on a daily basis, Ihnatko heads to California in a few weeks.

It started off with an invitation to keynote at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference. Cool; I missed the first O'Mac Conference, so that was an easy Yes.

But the funny thing about this sort of travel is that it's often like getting a bill through Congress. All kinds of riders get tacked on. Every four years, they need to renew the 1832 legislation that permits the Army to pay its soldiers in cash instead of eggs, but by the time the quorum call is made, it's also approving $11.2 million for a scholarly treatise on the history of the stapler and taking voting rights away from everybody with both an "M" and a "K" in their last names.

The big difference is that I like travelling and I like giving talks...so when folks invite me to make a couple of detours when I'm town, that's a plus. And there's no burden on the taxpayer, either, apart from that time when I spoke to the Boston Macintosh Users' Group at the Department of Transportation Building. In my own defense, the sprinkler systems in other auditoriums I've spoken in were able to knock down blazes twice that size before they got out of hand.

A pal of mine whom I like to visit is now working for a school system. Can I Caltrain to Redwood City to talk to the kids? Mmmm...probably not; it's too far and too early in the morning, but maybe during my next trip to the Bay Area. A prep school wants me to do much the same; actually, they're close by so let's see if we can make that one work.

The Oregon MacPioneers group is having their annual jamboree and trivia melee...would I like to come up and serve as master of ceremonies? Maybe do a little Q&A? Dinner provided?

Well, they used the two magic phrases: "User Group" and "free dinner." I'm as good as there. But there's also that other word, that glorious word, the word that rings through my ears like either a Vivaldi quartet or post-OzzFest tinnitus: Oregon.

Isn't it lovely? O-re-gonnnn.

Sigh.

I was pretty excited about going to Hawaii. But now that I've been there and to the other state that's Obnoxiously Difficult To Get To, Oregon and Idaho and Delaware seem as exotic and enticing as Bali Hai. Another state off the list. One step closer to being able to say I've slept in every state in the Union.

Which is not to say that I'm not keen on experiencing the unique delights of the Pacific Northwest. For some reason I expect that what with all the woodsmen about, it'll be possible to get a truly weapons-grade breakfast on Sunday morning. This, I intend to do. And yes, I will indeed be humming The Lumberjack Song an awful lot while I'm there.

There's only one disappointment about this trip: I will be near San Francisco on Halloween. Not in San Francisco on Halloween, as I'd originally hoped.

I've never sat in the VIP viewing area during a launch of the Space Shuttle, I didn't scramble to board the last helicopter during the Fall of Saigon and I wouldn't have gone to the Liza Minelli/David Geist wedding last year even if I'd been invited. But I figured that being in San Francisco on Halloween was going to give me the jist of it.

Making things worse, I'm actually leaving for Oregon at 1 PM, which hardly counts as Halloween at all. So it would appear that my chances of seeing a bearded man walking around in leather chaps and a latex nun's wimple are doubly-remote. Still, I'm an optimist at heart, and thus I take consolation in the fact that San Francisco is the one part of the country where men in erotic rubber religious habitry know no season.

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Testing a new blogger feature.

Ever seen a photo of John Belushi?

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Testing a new blogger feature.

Ever seen a photo of John Belushi?

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Testing a new blogger feature.

Ever seen a photo of John Belushi?

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Testing a new blogger feature.

Ever seen a photo of John Belushi?

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Testing a new blogger feature.

Ever seen a photo of John Belushi?

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(Sigh.) The Writing Thing just ain't going well tonight, sensation-seekers. Usually, when one thing isn't going well, I hit the "Pause" button and start writing something else. If that doesn't work, I move on to another writing project. Eventually, my Auxiliary Ego Generator sparks up again, filling the air with the distinctive noises and smells of a two-stroke diesel engine and thankfully, I'm right back in my usual operational mode, wherein I adamantly believe that anything and everything I write is by definition a Perfect Gem of Flawless Truth, Beauty and Wisdom.

Well, things are going so poorly tonight that I burned my way through all of my Things To Write the same way that the Red Sox tend to burn through relief pitchers. By the end, I was forced to start writing a little code instead.

At least the code came out well. It's another behind-the-scenes addition to my blogger app. By now you're all used to seeing the "GoogleText" button at the bottom of every entry; if you feel like you haven't wasted enough company time reading what I wrote, clicking this button will take you to a Google search on a related subject. It's just like the end of an ABC After-School Special, when an announcer would chime in to tell you that if you are interested in learning more about sex, the Library Of Congress recommends the following books: Duane, The Teen Who Made It To Second Base And Then Died (Reader's Digest Press, 1968)...Jesus Thinks That Orange Scarf Makes You Look Like A Hooker (Dallas House, 1973)...

So I've just spent a half an hour making that feature a little more robust. Now, the app sports a set of radio buttons that lets me choose whether GoogleText will link to a list of webpages, images, or Usenet discussion messages.

It's yet another hip-hip-huzzah for AppleScript Studio. I got the idea for this enhancement last week, but I was way (way way way) too busy to code it. Still, it seemed like a winner, so I launched Studio's Interface Builder app and added the buttons to my blogger's user interface. Even though they weren't actually hooked up to anything (much like the button on the President's desk labeled "Summon Secretary Of Defense To Oval Office"), it was good to get the idea out of my head and into some tangible form. And because they behaved like buttons, I had a whole week to click them and decide if the feature wouldn't work better as a popup menu, for instance.

A rapid development environment like AsS (tee-hee! tee-hee!) gives you the best of both worlds: first, you get to play with the Fischer-Price Busy Builder Software Construction Set, and then at a later date you get to use that...the...

Dang. The word's right at the tip of my tongue. It's a grey, squishy, wrinkly thing? Between your ears and behind your eyes?

Man, this is gonna bug me. You know the thing I'm talking about? Tastes like a spoiled peach, weighs more than a kidney but less than a double-bladed axe?

Well, anyway, the point is that you can do the visual stuff immediately and then do the thinking and problem-solving at a later date, when you're in the mood.

Click on GoogleText to see what I'm talking about.

Back to work. I hope.

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An unusual workday, this: I wrote a UK column early this morning and a Sun-Times column in the afternoon. Was it Douglas Adams who said that last-minute panic tends to focus the mind quite effectively? I think so. The man had tremendous passions for comedy, science fiction, fantasy, science, technology, sociology, and conservation. He also had the thrilling ability to express this brilliance through every medium imaginable. He mastered treeware, moved on to the analog technologies that the preceding generation created and then to the digital ones that sprung up in his lifetime. If he hadn't been taken from us several decades too early, surely one day we would have slapped Douglas Adams' latest work on our butts and enjoyed it transdermally.

But not the least of his beloved and enduring legacies was a vast library of aphormisms about being behind on his deadlines. So any time you hear a quote which is both (a) funny and (b) on the general subject of being behind schedule, slap the buzzer and say "'Who was Douglas Adams,' Alex." Because the odds are definitely on your side.

Hence this Unusual Workday. I rarely finish more than one complete thing in a given day. I've already mentioned my desire to flee the scene of the crime after filing a column or an article, but there's a definite I Don't Wanna And You Can't Make Me aspect in play, as well.

But I'm behind, so here I sit. Who wants to leave, anyway? The Red Sox and the Cubs have entered into an ingenious agreement to drive "Fear Factor" off the air and make sure that "Five Simple Rules..." doesn't profit overmuch from the death of John Ritter. Tune in your radios and TVs and then yank out the dial: as if the 2003 post-season weren't remarkable enough, out by out and inning by inning, millionaires are losing their minds.

How else to describe Saturday's Sox/Yanks game? There's rivalry, yes. Absolutely. Dogs and cats certainly have their differences, but if they're both from Southie they'll happily set aside their historical issues to heckle a Yankee southpaw working a 3 and 2 count. Sox and Yankee fans see this as a point of pride and maturity. Our teams didn't come about due to the increase in the Southwest's importance as a media outlet and their uniforms weren't the result of focus groups, color consultants, or a web-based poll sponsored by a dubious line of dietary supplements.

Why is one team named after a laundry item? Why does the other's logo look like it belongs to a Midwestern bank that's gone through a few too many mergers? Answer: It's always been that way. And to change anything at this point would be like putting pants on the Lincoln Memorial. It no longer registers as a clumsy mistake; it now simply belongs to itself.

And of course, in the off-season — way way way in the off-season — we're capable of acknowledging our respect for the talents and legacy of the other team. We're even almost willing to admit that when we Photoshopped an opposing fielder's head onto that gay porn centerfold and slipped it onto the Jumbotron during the national anthem, we might have gone over the line a bit.

The respect is real, and we're proud of that. But the enmity is very real, too...and boy, do we bury that deep inside. Yet it's always boiling under, and on Saturday...blammo.

At least twice, I was certain that the umps were going to pull the plug on the whole enterprise. When it appeared that Pedro had thrown a seventy-something coach to the ground without provocation, I got a chill: a Red Sox pitcher injuring the Yankees' beloved elder statesman/plush toy was just the spark that would take a bunch of stupid, you-took-our-table-during-lunch-period-style macho shouting and posturing and turn it into a full-blown bloody melee.

And now two Yankees are facing criminal charges for going all Joe Pesci on a Fenway groundskeeper? There's some baaaaad mojo floating around, kids. Thank Heaven that yesterday's game was rained out and everyone — players, managers, and fans — had a chance to cool down.

I don't know what angels say in lieu of "Thank Heaven" — perhaps "thank that unmarked door in the hallway in the Upper Atrium which, I've heard, leads to a special VIP lounge...maybe yes, maybe no, all I can say is that I got just a glimpse of Johnny Cash when he was first processed in, and you'd think I'd have bumped into him again by now." But whatever-that-is, thank it. Because if Saturday's game had happened right before a change of venue, the only sensible thing for Major League Baseball to do would be to recall some battle-hardened National Guard troops from Iraq and redeploy them to The Bronx.

Fortunately, that's not how the schedule played out. What did happen is this: the rain-delayed game will be played Tuesday at 4 PM, and moments after the last out of the game, the Cubs will be in Wrigley Field with only nine innings standing between them and their first National League pennant since World War II.

It was an unforeseen turn of events and it instantly filled me with immense disappointment about the California Recall election. I thought it'd been a perfect circus. But oh, if only the election had been held just one week later! From 1 PM until the moment the polls closed, the only people voting would be the slim percentage of the electorate immune to the magnetic pull of the greatest single day of post-season play in baseball history.

Somehow, I suspect that Gallagher would have been in there with a solid chance.

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Have you ever seen someone walking towards you and thought "Holy cow! That guy's wearing a beard of living bees!" and then he comes closer and you realize that no, it's his actual hair?

I'm just comparing notes. Normally I'm not one to stare, but I simply had to take another hard look at that guy. And while yes, I was mistaken, no, I certainly wasn't in the wrong. It wasn't a simple case of my brain wanting to see a beard of living bees instead of simple, run-of-the-mill (or "run of the mill that was closed down seven years ago and has more or less been taken over by hoboes") unkempt, bushy facial hair. He sported a specific look: even upon closer inspection it was the same rounded, constantly-morphing blobby formation that results when you strap a small box containing a queen bee to your chin and let the pheromones do the rest. I'm fairly confident that the man had the cranial topiary carved-to-order.

Is it even possible to walk into a barber shop and say "Cut my hair and trim out my beard so it'll look like they're made out of living bees?" Where do you suppose such a cut would be available? I'm thinking Atlanta. I couldn't tell you why, but it just seems like the right answer.

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It's mid-October. All over the area, people are building scarecrows for their front yards, putting together Haunted Hayrides, staging a production of "Oklahoma" featuring a Cast of the Damned, et cetera. For this golden moment, hay is a common item, available cheaply and abundantly at any Home Depot.

So if you've stopped at a traffic light and you happen to see another car roll by with big tufts of hay sticking out through the seams of the back doors, there's probably a perfectly innocent explanation. "But if this were August," I swore to myself the other day, "I'd have to peel out into traffic, chase the car down, and sideswipe that no-good varmint straight into a mound of garbage cans and empty cardboard boxes, 'Starsky And Hutch'-style."

Why? Because (a) I'm a responsible citizen, thank you very much, and (b) outside of the Halloween season, there's only one possible explanation for the presence hay in the backseat of a 1999 Mercury Sable: suburban cattle rustlers.

It's textbook: they were so excited by their prize that they got sloppy. They were just on their way to the mini-mall near the supermarket to return a video when bang: they happened across a top milker just wandering around a front yard near the middle school. There was a car in the driveway but the TV was blaring inside...why not take a chance? So they manhandled the cow into their backseat, tossing a furtive half-bale in there with her to protect the leather, and as they slammed the door and stomped on the accelerator, their impulsive naughtiness made them so giddy that they didn't notice that they were leaving a hay trail all the way back to their split-level mock-colonial in Auburndale.

In a word? J'Accuse!

I dunno. Writing all of this out has left me with second thoughts about my inaction. When, I ask you, would be the best time of year to rustle suburban cattle? Absolutely: Halloween. The one period when the normally eagle-eyed and remorseless Massachusetts Rangers are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt regarding errant bedding and silage.

Maybe I should have stepped in. Out here in the untamed wilds of the South Suburbs, there's the Law, and then there's Justice. One has to step in where the other fails. That's the pioneer spirit that this community was founded upon back in 1956, when a shrinking industrial base raised property taxes in nearby Maynard, prompting our town council to re-zone a former marshland for residential use and OK the construction of 180 units of moderate-income housing, along with a bond issue to support improvements to the area's water and sewage infrastructure.

As you can understand, it's important not to turn your back on such a colorful legacy.

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I don't normally waste the Internet's limited space on something as bland to a link to Somewhere Else, but here's a link to Somewhere Else:

E! Online News - Lawsuit Claims Liza Battered David

Why am I making an exception? The final paragraph:

Since the split, the two have holed up on opposite coasts, with Minnelli mainly keeping to Manhattan, and Gest reputedly hanging at Jim Nabors' Hawaiian estate.

Sometimes, you come across a snatch of text that continues to delight and entertain you for hours after you've closed the book. The first page of Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas" is one. The last passage of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is another. I don't know who this "Joal Ryan" is, but I shall follow his career with considerable interest. For his simple choice of final words — on its face, a simple reporting of the facts — was responsible for a good 40 minutes of office anti-productivity, populated by lots of random giggling that none of my goldfish understood.

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At the moment, the Mac OS X 10.3 Installer is "Processing Base System Part 1" (the writing of files is 3% completed and the remainder is expected to take about 5 more minutes...hey, thanks for asking).

Panther should be up and running by the time Regis shoots his first hateful glance at Kelly Ripa tomorrow morning. The fourth, at the very latest. Once again I shake my head in wonder. How exactly do the majority of the Humans get by with only one computer? I've got four Macs here in the office and sometimes the simple task of writing and printing my usual Thursday morning letter to the editors of Modern Ferret will have me hopping through the entire roster, looking for just one that's in a functional sort of mood.

This installation is no different. It's going to tie up the hardware for a good hour or two. I don't care; I've got Lilith here to keep me warm and to provide me with fan-fiction about the Dukes of Hazzard gettin' it on with the cops from "CHiPs." And it's a damned profound upgrade, too. Installing Panther is like getting your house fumigated. It's a non-trivial exercise and if something goes wrong, it can go spectacularly wrong. Sure, I'm confident that when it's all done I'll be swimming in the warm, perfumed ocean known as A New Kick-Butt OS but nonetheless there's always the chance that I'm in for the most creative three days of my life. I hate hauling out the same tired old profanities, y'see. When a system upgrade has turned my kind, sweet Macintosh into a the exclusive Northeast franchisee for Bad Karma, I try to shout out things that are new and rather unique. It's part of my obligation to society; I refer to this as "Paying It ****ing Forward."

Decorum prevents me from providing you with specific examples. Back when I installed System 8 and I suddenly lost all of my serial ports, I found myself blurting out a simple, two-syllable word that absolutely stopped me cold. It was so beautiful. Direct, unquestionably offensive, yet powerfully evocative. It authoritatively paints the target in the most amusing and ridiculous strokes imaginable. He will immediately see the legitimacy of your claim and yield the parking space.

When the dust settled and the birds returned to the trees, I felt like I had just invented dysentery. What a tremendous power I suddenly had over the those puny little ants, ie, the rest of the world's human population. All I had to do was take this new profanity down to the train station, expose it to a few people ("Get a load of that guy at the Au Bon Pan. What a *******, huh?") and within 70 hours, everybody would be using. Within four days, Saturday Night Live would use the word as the basis of a new running character, and within four days and fifty seconds, they'd have run it straight into the ground.

(I hope you don't think I'm threatening to actually do that. Nonetheless, if you've ever had even the slightest inclination to bow down before me or something, it certainly couldn't hurt.)

Installing an OS upgrade is indeed a big deal. That's when you find out that your Mac was missing a critical firmware upgrade and you've just exchanged your $3000 productivity tool for a wicked-cool-looking thing to set your drink on top of and stick Post-Its to. Or that the one app you absolutely need is the one app that's absolutely incompatible. Or that the new OS doesn't have a driver for your old printer. A million things can go wrong. None of them involve both your parents being kidnapped by a Toronto terror cell that's promising dark consequences if you fail to round up every last Canadian quarter currently on US soil and return them all to the Bank of Ontario within the week, unfortunately, so good luck getting your boss to understand why all of your projects are going to be late.

The Installer is now Preparing Traditional Chinese. Damn. I'm totally in the mood for a pork lo mein but I'm still stuffed from dinner. I forgot that I was at an aw-thentic barbecue joint. I ordered a rueben sandwich with a side of chili and the latter arrived as an enormous mound of pulled pork mixed with beans and chilis and topped with a numbus of shredded cheese and sour cream. After a lifetime of experiencing chili the New England way (through school-lunch programs, or cans that promise that the contents double as sloppy joe mix) I order chili expecting a fluffy, watery bowl of beans and ground beef, not a thick mop drenched in barbecue sauce.

I'm a man who refuses to shirk in the face of adversity so of course I finished the chili. But when the sandwich arrived it was met with an attitude of tremendous sadness and so after a half-interested bite I asked them to wrap it up.

Getting Out was terribly important tonight. I've been holed up in my office so long that even the half-empty soda cans were sick of looking at me. So busy that when Santa Madge, my FedEx driver, dropped off a package from Apple which I knew would contain Panther it had to sit there on the steps. I signed for it at about 9:50 AM and then I finally went to bed. When I woke up later in the afternoon, there were a couple of emails that had to be answered straight away, which left me scant minutes to shower, shave, and head off for a late afternoon appointment.

You're probably familiar with that form of inertia. When you're in the office, you can't get out. When you're away from the office, you can think of no earthly reason to go back. In my case, there was a Catch-22: to do a really good job of fleeing my responsibilities, I'd need my passport, and my passport was locked in a filing cabinet inside my office. Under advice of senior counsel, I decided to go eat some dead pig instead.

Installation is complete and I've been playing with the boxed-and-shipping version of Panther for the past hour.

The new metal Finder fills me with mixed emotions. On the one hand, it all makes me want to vomit. Ambitiously. I want to engage in the sort of puking that provokes whistles of respect and a great many promises to find out what I've been drinking and then stay the hell away from it forever.

On the other hand, I'm pleased that it's just as bad as I thought it'd be. If I actually found myself liking it, I'd have to issue retractions for a lot of statements I've been making since this year's WWDC, when screenshots of the thing were first released.

I'll be writing a couple of columns about Panther, so there'll be plenty of opportunities for me to honk on about it. But on the whole, I really like what I've seen so far. I've been doing the same things I'd normally be doing with Jaguar, only it's faster and it's easier and I'm enjoying it a lot more. Without really thinking, I command-tabbed to switch between apps. In Jaguar, this causes each of the hundred or so icons in your Dock — each the size of a baby's fingernail — to loft into view. Only about a dozen of these represent apps that are actually running, so each time you hit the Tab key you have to look closely to see which app you've actually selected. You'll skip ahead by one icon, then by fourteen, then by three, then by eight...oftentimes I have to go all the way around the horn once before successfully and carefully selecting the app I actually want to switch to.

But in Panther, command-tab causes a translucent Aqua-fied panel to appear in the middle of the screen, containing bit, fat icons of running apps and nothing else. Tab-Tab and I'm back in business.

The new DVD player kicks butt, too. I remember being in a briefing with Apple a year or two ago, complaining about the stagnance of this app.

"But what could we put in there that it doesn't have already?" they asked me.

"Well, how about this: when I eject a disc in mid-play, the player makes a note of the disc's ID and where I was. When I stick it in the drive again an hour or even a year later, it cues it back up to where I left off. Or why can't we take advantage of the fact that the player is actually a computer with its own OS? There's nothing stopping it from putting closed-caption text inside its own window so I can scroll back to see what I've missed, or apply an AppleScript to it. There's nothing stopping the player from letting me create my own custom bookmarks for each disc. Or..."

And gorblimey: this new player has everything I wanted. I'm not saying that this player is the direct result of that meeting, of course...just that it's great to have a player that's nearly as good as the one in my daydreams. There's a big fat AppleScript menu in there, filled with functions that I can't wait to take apart.

(Prediction: within a month, there's going to be something like the CDDB, only for nude scenes. You pop in "Mulholland Falls." The player accesses the central NSDB database in Utah, downloads a list of start and stop points, and just plays you the parts in which Jennifer Connelly can be seen naked. Score another PR coup for the Incredible Power Of AppleScript.)

You still can't take screenshots while DVD Player is running, though. Grr.

Exposé is my new best friend. Hit F9 (or move your mouse to a hotspot, or configure your own activation mojo) and Panther miniaturizes and tiles every single open window so they're all completely visible, with nothing overlapping anything else. Click on the one you actually want to see and the screen animates back to the way it was, with the selected window on top. The animation is terribly cool: the pile of windows is like a deck of cards shuffling and then unshuffling themselves.

I've already started to abuse it. I'm keeping news sites open in separate windows and activating Exposé so I can keep tabs on all of them at once when I've otherwise got my nose in a book. It's like when Elvis used to have six TVs in his dining room. There'd be one for every channel and one for every bullet in his gold-plated revolver.

There's also a function which causes all your windows to scatter — yes, they actually scatter — to the edges of your screen, exposing your Desktop and all the items thereon. Managing a mess of stacked, overlapping windows has been the one pain in the keister about using Macs that's stuck with us since System 1.0...and glory be, we're free at last.

Suffice to say that after my first couple of minutes I pulled a sheet of paper out of my wastebasket and was jotting down notes on things I liked about Panther. It's now an hour later, and I've had to get more paper.

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It takes so little to make me happy. Such as: learning that this year's Halloween episode of "The Simpsons" will star Jerry Lewis as Frankenstein's Monster. How could anybody be discontent, living in a world in which such things are possible?

I do want to put the show's producers on notice: don't you dare screw this one up. You want to know what finally turned me into an ex-viewer of "Saturday Night Live"? When they had Janeane Garofalo in the cast. If the best you can do with someone of her calibre is to put her in a waitress uniform and have her deliver a sandwich and one line of dialogue to Adam Sandler, it's time for our relationship to end. I don't care if you did give me John Belushi as William Shatner, and Eddie Murphy in "Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood," and Christopher Guest's documentary about the Men's Olympic Synchronized Swimming movement. We're done.

And so I say to you, producers of "The Simpsons": you spent the first half-dozen seasons filling up a giant underground tank with Goodwill. With nearly every episode you've done since the Nineties, you've been drawing upon that surplus. Every time Homer inexplicably changed jobs; every time a character did something so big and so permanent that the only way to move on to the next epiosde was to decide to pretend it never happened; every time your writers forgot to take their ADD medication and wrote an episode which changed premises nine different times before pathetically collapsing across the finish line like a potassium-deficient triathaloner; and particularly every time you put on a show that not only sucked, but featured characters who would explicitly state that this episode sucked and the writers no longer care; well, every time you did that, you drained the tank another inch. I'd turn off the TV, think "Hey, remember that one when Bart sold his soul to Milhouse? That was cool," and then the coppery taste that tonight's episode left in my mouth would dissipate.

But if you have Jerry Lewis playing Frankenstein's Monster and you still manage to substitute endless catch-phrases and desperate ironic detachment for, you know, actual comedy, well...

Actually, I'm stumped for a good, solid threat. I'd say that I'd stop watching the show, but the show gets delayed and pre-empted by football so often that I actually can't remember the last time my TiVo actually succeeded in recording it. But whatever it is I'm threatening to do, don't you dare think I won't follow through on it.

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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the New New Year's Eve: staying up on the night when Daylight Savings ends, just to watch the clock in the corner of your screen flip from 1:59 AM to 1:00 AM.

Best of all, this basic thing happens twice a year...so there's twice the number of excuses to get schnockered and pass out in a friend's hallway.

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

This page and its contents are © 2003 Andy Ihnatko.