Testing again. Hang on.

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I'm at a point here where I need to seriously re-evaluate some basic ideas about why I do this site. My specific problem is that I want to talk a bit about Jaguar and I can't really do it with any amount of satisfaction unless I use the phrase "****-****ing ***-m******* slack-***ed pile of stinking, festering, god-d***** steaming dog **** that I wouldn't wish on the biggest ****ing *****ing enemy I have." And unfortunately I long ago decided that I shouldn't cuss in this blog.

I mean, good God. This latest upgrade to Mac OS X has given me absolutely no end of trouble. Now I understand why so many people commit felonies and go to prison. Spending three years in federal custody is no bowl of Cocoa Crispies, but at least while you're in stir, keeping a computer running isn't at the top of your PDA's action-item list.

It's just so surprising. Jaguar passed through my certification procedure just fine. The first Mac to get an OS upgrade is an old tower G3 I've got under the desk. It's like a white mouse in a lab: if the test subject starts gorfing up pea soup through its CD slot, no harm done. Not to me, anyway. The mouse would have a different point of view, naturally, but that's the reason why I long ago decided to simplify my life through Insensitivity. Then we move on to our human trials. My desktop Mac plays the role of all those college students and dope addicts who'll let you inject them with practically anything for $50 cash and a hot meal. I use the desktop on a daily basis but this isn't a Mac that contributes much to society; if the installation damaged the test subject I'd eventually get around to restoring it to health but the bottom line is that the Republic would continue to sail forward.

This is all designed to make sure that I don't install an OS upgrade on Lilith, my PowerBook, the repository of all my manuscripts, all my artwork, all my code, my notes, my research, and secrets that I hope shall remain buried until fifty years after I'm dead.

(Incidentally, I'm eliminating dairy from my diet. This commitment comes courtesy of the fact that -- unless I've had a stroke and lost the ability to process numbers -- it's November 5 and I've just seen a Christmas-themed commercial from the Dairy Council. End of aside.)

So I put 10.2 on Lilith and for a while, it was pretty schweet; Lilith was finding servers and printers and users as though it had the attention-span of an overly-sugared three-year-old and kept getting distracted by bright, shiny and pingable objects. But the first time I tried to use my blog it was a bucket of cold water.

It just plain wasn't working.

And this wasn't the flavor of Not Working that I had become accustomed to. I have a soft spot in my heart for the kind that's born when I'm too drunk, tired or impatient to write proper code and instead I just sort of cross my fingers and hope that simple force of will shall prevail where proper syntax fails. That's not a problem; a couple of weeks later, I'm rested and sober and after a moment's glance through my code I can tell right away that if I take that block where I wrote "Remember to add 'Fear Factor' to TiVO list" and replace it with actual programming instructions, only good things can happen.

It just plain wasn't working.

My blogger app would work about a third of the way in and then...phlphptptpttt. It's like I was asking it to count to seven and it decided to hang at four. Why four? I dunno. Sudden lack of ambition, I suppose, or perhaps with all those cool new OS features Lilith kept getting bored with this counting jazz and tripped away to look for cellphones to sync to or total strangers to bother via iChat.

Should I keep explaining how frustrating this is? My blogger essentially does three things in order: first, it asks me for a few details, then it converts the contents of the front window to HTML, then it takes that "nugget" and plugs it into the main page and the monthly archive. Finally, it updates the site's RSS feed.

So go ahead, code: blow up at any of these major stages. That makes sense. Or blow up before you begin or just as you finish. That gives me something to go on. But nope, you've decided to screech to a halt at a very random point where nothing tricky at all is happening. You're not even being polite enough to mail me an RSVP to let me know what the error actually is and where, specifically, it's happening. You just go all duuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... until I force-quit BBEdit.

That's, I mean, bad. I really don't have anywhere to go. Yes, this blogger is something I've written myself, but since it's AppleScript, if the same code stops working after an upgrade and it's not the fault of my work, then I have to simply be content not to post a damned thing to my blog until either Apple or Bare Bones decides who's figuratively sitting there with their heads buried in a huge urn of pudding and release an update.

On top of all that, the system is destabilizing. Every now and then, it trashes a Prefs file. Today, I lost everything; ever single app lost its Prefs file and I had to restore all of their various operational settings by hand. Could I figure out what the problem is? Well, sure: but you know, I've got this X-Wing model on my shelf that's been mouldering in shrinkwrap for three years waiting for me to build it up. That's what I want to spend my free time on...not convincing a fully-grown OS that there's no monsters under its bed.

I could have this all wrong, though. This morning's adventure was very illuminating. I got the 10:00 AM batch of email, the 10:10, the 10:20, and the 10:50 (cast aspersions on my geek credentials if you wish, but I'm such a believer in showering that I'm even willing to forgo email for 20 minutes if that's what it takes). Each time I'm reading mail and transmitting responses, none of which were of any real importance.

The 11:00 fetch brought a semi-frantic email from my Sun-Times editor. I'd filed my column before the weekend but he's lost it and if I don't re-send it ASAP tomorrow's paper will be sans Andres. I hit command-R to reply and like a charm, Entourage quit itself, citing a mail-system error.

The problem with aneurisms is that there's no way to screen for them. The doctor doesn't tap your forearm with a little rubber hammer and say that it really does sound as though a thin-walled bubble has formed on the sides of an artery in your head. You find out that you have one when it suddenly lets go and everything goes white and the next thing you know, Jesus is telling you how the third Star Wars prequel is supposed to go. If I have to sift the bright side from all this, it's that my noggin must be pretty aneurism-free. If I do have one, it's a milquetoasty one that keeps getting mocked by all the other aneurisms for being such a colossal chump that it'd sit by and tend to its stamp collection while my blood pressure made a serious challenge to Ted Williams' 1941 batting average.

Shutdown, restart, hey wow, it lost my prefs files again, but at least I got another copy of that column off. Still and all...God, I'm tired of this crap.

Meanwhile, I'm becoming increasingly-desperate to find a solution for this blogger problem. I finally gave up entirely on the idea of fixing the app, got the pre-AppleScript Studio edition of the app out of mothballs, and set to work adapting it to work with the newest permutation of YellowText. Hence, the previous post...the somewhat curt blurb I slammed out in the process of testing the script: "Is this working at all?!?"

It worked once, at least. The second time, nothin'. So maybe the problem's with BBEdit and not Studio.

Tonight I decided to try to cut BBEdit out of the equation completely. 99% of this code is nonspecific and will work with any text editor...but alas, there's a critical 1% that takes advantage of BBEdit's powerful regexp text-manipulation features.

I laid out on my sofa and gave it some thought. I could use FileMaker as the central engine, instead. The new version is about as hyper-super-duper-XML as it comes, & it'd make it a hell of a lot easier to transition this site to XML if I wanted to. Or I could simply switch to a commercial blogger like, well, Blogger, or LiveJournal or Radio for the timebeing.

Unfortunately, I'm a guy. So I'm dopey and filled with ego and I'll be damned if I'm going to admit defeat and switch to an off-the-shelf solution.

I got up off the sofa and started writing AppleScript routines to replace all the tricks that are specific to BBEdit. The code that bashes this here text into HTML and thence into an article ready to be shrinkwrapped and shipped takes up only about a half-dozen lines with BBEdit. As standalone AppleScript, it's a full page.

That's all I'm gonna do for tonight. Tomorrow, I have to figure out the best way to sling 3000-word articles like they were cufflinks. In BBEdit, I can just GREP it all into a simple template. AppleScript will need something with a little finesse.

Oh, well. The thing is, I meant to get around to this someday anyway. The next step in my blogger app's evolution is to make it a standalone app with its own integrated editor, cutting other text editors out of the equation completely; it'll be an all-in-one publishing solution. If this here code is standalone AppleScript, I can sling it into a new Studio project and, later on, into RealBASIC...which can accept AppleScript subroutines.

Until I've finished banishing BBEdit from the code, however, I have to make these posts manually.

Life's an adventure no matter how hard you try to avoid it.

Hey, incidentally, thanks for all the interesting emails I've received tonight, in response to my rhetorical "Is this working at all?!?" post. Within an hour I had a dozen missives ranging from "Holy mother of God! You're posting!" to stuff from people who helpfully wanted to tell me that yes, my posts were indeed making it to the server.

And then there was one email from a reader who apparently thought that I was asking The Big "Is This Working" question and wanted me to know that my work was beloved all over the world and that whatever rough patch I might be experiencing at the moment, life was certainly worth living so put the gun down and pick up a phone, OK?

An unnecessary missive. But the thought was a kind one, so I thank you. I'll be sure to print out a hardcopy for easy reference. I am, after all, still stuck with 10.2 for the timebeing.

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Today, I saw him. I actually saw The Ghost Of Workout World-Norwood.

He appeared to be a man straddling the margin between Late Middle Age and Early Senior Citizenry. He wore the same workout clothes he was wearing when he died in 1987, which after spending fifteen years underground yielding their fibers to worms and insects and micro-organisms, hung in grey tatters around his form.

All heads turned as he entered the treadmill/elliptical area. The Ghost made eye contact with no one and offered not one single wisdom from beyond the veil. "Words are wasted on the living" is the common counsel of the dead, and besides, forces beyond our ken allowed him to enter this brief intersection between the mortal and the spirit worlds solely to complete his Monday cardio and not for any other purpose.

The Ghost set about his work simply and dutifully, and having done it well, he shimmered back behind the veil, to return Thursday perhaps, or perhaps never, having finally succeeded in sustaining a heart-rate of 90% of his max for more than a half an hour and in doing so, earning his way out of Purgatory and transitioning to his eternal rest in Paradise at last.

That's what I came up with after clapping an unbelieving eye on the dude, anyway.

The only other possible explanation for what I saw tonight was that this was a regular, living guy with a brain and lymph nodes and everything. I discounted this notion. I can't imagine that anyone equipped with the basic, factory-installed apparatus for looking and thinking can hold in their hands a tee shirt that consists solely of a neckband, two bits of sleeve, and the sole remnant of its torso fabric flapping around his chest like a ragged bib...and then simply sling it on and head out the door without any further ado. The highly-disturbing phenomenon of micro-shorts on non-NBA cheerleaders -- particularly male non-NBA cheerleaders -- is already well-documented and while I don't approve of it, it doesn't have the same shock value that it had on me initially. But overall he was wearing a costume that humanity hadn't seen since Dean Martin's last variety special. Dean and Sammy wore it, playing a bickering pair of castaways who'd spent ten years peacefully co-habitating a deserted island until one of the Landers Sisters turned up in a liferaft.

I demand logical explanations for what I see. When the obvious explanation isn't logical, I'd rather chalk things up to ghosts, or Great Purple Clouds Of Insanity which occasionally descend upon sub-societies and cause no end of mischief, such as the creation of movies in which kids save the world through extreme snowboarding, land wars against forces that lack a clear centralized chain of command, and Christina Aguilera in general.

Oh, well. If that's the worst part of having to start treadmilling again, I'll be a lucky man. The weather is now reliably terrible and if I want to continue to do my Constitutionals, I have to do 'em inside. Fortunately, once you learn how to shower in front of strangers, you never really lose the knack.

(I was informed, incidentally, that my pleasant light-baritone was missed during the spring and summer months. I emerged from the shower where, finding myself alone, I amused myself with all three verses of "Our Great Mikado, Virtuous Man" and returned to the locker room to thunderous applause. Or at least to these two guys who were wondering what had happened to that guy who used to sometimes sing in the shower. Their comment was a clear violation of one of the Unspoken Rules of Public Locker Room Etiquette (Rule 6: don't say anything that might invite the thought "What the hell did he mean by that?") but I let it pass.)

It does take me a while to get used to treadmilling again. On the road, I'm actually thinking and observing. On the treadmill, I get to watch people gag down (and occasionally gag up) live slugs on "Fear Factor." It's a totally different head. The treadmill also makes it harder to slack. One of my persistent Mission Rules on these Constitutionals is that I refuse to go out on days when the weather's so bad that a sane man will only run out into it if they're fleeing a crime scene. Taking my Constitutionals indoors removes the option of taking the day off and blaming it all on the interaction between sun, earth, and atmosphere.

If you've been listening to my show on MacRadio, and if the "Mobility" show has been placed on the servers, you already know that I completed a half-marathon a few weeks ago.

(If you haven't and it has, check it out: I wore a microphone and a MiniDisc deck and recorded every second of my race, reducing it to a 40-minute show. If you've always wondered what it sounds like when an EMT slams a cardiac needle through someone's ribcage, this is your big chance.)

I finished it in fine shape. I got a big blister on my foot and turned my ankle in a grate somewhere around Mile 11, but after a couple of weeks of taking it easy, I was out of excuses.

(Aside: I had to spend a whole week icing and elevating my ankle and then it was fine. If there were such a thing as justice in the world, I would have simply had a slight limp. People would ask me "So what happened to your ankle?" and I'd nonchalantly say "Oh, this is a souvenir from the Bay State Half-Marathon; had an unfortunate interlude at Mile 11. My own damned fault, too...I had that prize money already spent, practically." I was really looking forward to having an actual sports-related injury to brag about, after spending so many years claiming that every clumsy, embarrassing bruise or sprain was the result of a poorly-refereed game of roller-hockey. End of aside.)

My next race will be the James Joyce Ramble -- the race that I entered last year but didn't turn up for, owing to the fact that (a) the weather that morning was 40 degrees with wind and rain, and (b) I'm not an utter barking nitwit. The hitch there is that I'll actually have to finish it in a reasonable amount of time. The attraction of the Bay State Half-Marathon is that they run a full-marathon at the same time, on largely the same course...so if I needed to take twice as much time as all the other half-ers, I'd still be finishing among a thick pack of runners.

I'll have no such luck at the Ramble. I can finish it at the back of the pack or even dead-last...but if I finish dead-frackin'-last I run the risk of being an unwilling Symbol Of The Unquenchable Human Spirit. I also run the risk of being passed by the guy who's walking the entire course on his hands as part of a radio stunt. This, I cannot allow.

"You're my inspiration!" a lady runner called out after passing me on the half-marathon course. This affected my pace for a whole two miles afterward as I mulled the implications. OK, yes; I readily acknowledge that my figure is hardly a gossamer one and that the day I match the speed of a qualified marathoner is the day we both read the route signs incorrectly and wind up simultanteously free-falling off a bridge.

But honestly, madam...do I merit such a heartless comment? Am I such an improbable sight that people imagine Jerry Lewis singing "You'll Never Walk Alone" as I cross the finish line? Tchah!

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Good God...has it really been this long since the last time I praised Building #19, the local chain of salvage stores whose story would, had it been around in Ancient Greece, have adorned thousands of decorative urns?

B19 just has this uncanny ability to sense ambient Need and respond to it. Witness:

1) After a Spring and Summer of outdoor Constitutionals, I've returned to the gym and its treadmills. "God," I said, not specifically to any deity, you understand, though if a member of a friendly pantheon were listing and willing to kick in, I certainly wouldn't have sniffed at their intervention, "when am I going to get around to buying a proper gym bag?" I've been using a motley collection of free tote bags with logos from various trade shows and dotcom ventures that had been lucky to have raised enough money for the bags, much less the orange $12,000,000 office complex that now houses the trendiest-looking Jiffy Lube in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The hitch was the cost. I got thirty bucks. I have more than twice that. But thirty bucks for a bag that just needs to hold my gym togs, a bottle of water, and shower-related accessories? For that, I have ten bucks, tops. Lo and behold, just a few days after resuming my gym workouts B19 gets a pile of Bosch-logoed promotional gym bags, replete with compartments for dirty laundry and other stuff. $6.19 a throw.

Not impressed?

OK. At Macworld Expo next January, I and two friends are going to participate in a presentation. "You know what we really need for this thing?" I said to them, as we made out plans. And then I described an item that would be utterly impossible to find. They haven't been made for years. Not only an impossible item, but a specific impossible item. It's as though "a cake pan shaped like Eleanor Roosevelt" wasn't tough enough; I had suggested that we find a cake pan shaped like Eleanor Roosevelt from her years as United Nations ambassador, not her time as First Lady, and that it be big enough to serve 12. Not 20, not 8: 12.

Oh, and I'll need a half-dozen of them.

I dismissed this thought shortly after airing it. But the next time I set foot in Building #19, there it was: United Nations Eleanor Roosevelt 12-Serving Cake Pans. As many as I could possibly want. Five bucks a piece, marked down from the $40 they commanded before they stopped making 'em.

Plus, the machine by the back door sells Cokes for at least a quarter less than anywhere else. Which frankly, is just gravy.

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What a relief; the most important (and most intimidating) item on my November calendar is behind me. I have spent an hour in a middle school in Medfield, Massachusetts giving a talk to my niece's combined fifth-grade class.

Oh, I was looking forward to it...absolutely. But as I sketched out my talk last week, I was cursed with a clear memory of what I was like as a fifth-grader and what I occasionally thought of the parade of humanity who trekked through our class assemblies. They entered the gym-auditorium with a spring in their step, filled with confidence and inspired by the opportunity to fill fresh, young minds with the wonder and grandeur of the topic at hand; one period later, they exited it with a sense of grim urgency and a determination to peel as much rubber out of the school parking lot as a car with automatic-transmission could manage.

People often ask me how to become a success as a freelancer, and I can say with confidence that positive word-of-mouth is your greatest ally. If you want to lock in the coveted gig of Medfield Middle School Afternoon Speaker, it's important to have an "in" who can urge to the venue that if they bring Ihnatko in, he's certain to bring in the bacon. For me, that valuable person was my niece.

(Though I'm not sure what she said when she made the pitch. My sister passed on an excited conversation my niece had had with a teacher last year. "My uncle is the coolest guy ever!" she'd said, and here you should picture my head getting all swelled up. I imagined her telling the teacher about about how I write for newspapers and magazines, and have published a few books, and occasionally do stuff for radio and TV and travel a lot giving talks...or maybe she told her teacher about my robot-building exploits, or that I sometimes turn computers into aquariums?

Then my sister ruined everything by relaying the rest of what my niece had said. "Sometimes, my uncle is driving around and he'll see something really neat in someone else's trash...and he'll stop the car and take it!"

OK, it's a fair cop. I have often said that if I'm ever the cause of a major road accident, it'll be because I got distracted by a truly epic pile of trash. When it's the night before Trash Day and a 50's-era TV set is spotted on a sidewalk, a sensible man pulls over and pops the trunk. I will tolerate no debate on that point.)

Well, I don't know what my niece said to this teacher but it did the trick. I got an email a month or two ago, we decided on a date and a topic that would work for both of us, and all was oof-biddle from there. I was gonna give a talk about basic electronics. Yes, it was a neat science-related topic, sure, it had applications later in her coursework, but its chief attraction was that it would give me an excuse to wear my Hat-Mounted Computer-Controlled Holiday Festival of Illumination. I described my flashing display of 16 12-volt lamps and in response she described a picture of 44 kids eating out of the palm of my hand (after their eyes adjusted to the glare) in immediate response.

Giving this talk was an interesting challenge. The "road map" for this talk was immediately obvious but naturally, I'd never given this sort of talk before and inventing and trying out new material in front of an audience for the first time is always a test of pyloric fortitude. And man, I hadn't spoken to fifth-graders since I was a sixth-grader. These kids were so young that federally-supported media-pigeonholing institutions such as "People" and "Newsweek" hadn't come up with a demeaning catchall-phrase for them yet.

I made a couple of trips to Home Depot and You-Do-It Electronics for visual aids, making an additional raid on my electronics parts-box for good measure, and eventually wound up with a system of hardboard, velcro and jumpers that allowed me to build and modify circuits on the fly as the talk progressed. I didn't wanna just talk about this stuff and I didn't wanna just draw stuff on the blackboard; I wanted the kids to see this stuff actually working, and what happened when you made little changes.

Did my talk go over their heads? I was worried about that when I put together the outline. Well, you decide. My talk covered:

1) What's inside a flashlight.
2) What a battery does.
3) What a circuit is.
4) What a switch does.
5) Wiring components in series to divide the available voltage in a circuit, versus designing a circuit with a parallel power bus which distributes maximum system voltage to all components at the expense of available amp-hours.
6) Subatomic theory.
7) The quantum theory of electrodynamics and rudimentary approaches to a unified field theory. (brief)
8) Spacecraft design and imperatives related to solar-terrestrial physics.

My goal was just to put Ideas in their heads. Was I going to be able to teach them electronics in just an hour? Naw. Not unless I spent the following couple of hours overseeing a class lab session and then sent the kids home with some gear so they could explore the subject further on their own. But I could give them a few things to think about.

That's really why I picked this topic. When you hook up a light bulb to a battery, you're doing one of the coolest things imaginable. Electrons are involved, and as you well-know, electrons are among the friskiest of subatomic particles; they'd be on the cover of PEOPLE Magazine's "Sexiest Quantum Entity Alive" issue, if they ever let their attention wander from what Princess Di is wearing now that she's been dead for five years.

I remember the time I learned that electricity and magnetism were related. That was cool. Early in my talk, I hooked up a motor to a battery to demonstrate that the same circuit that powers a light bulb will power anything else, so long as that Anything Else doesn't demand more power. Later, I hooked that same motor up to a light bulb and fiercely twirled its drive shaft, provoking weak pulsing light from the bulb. "Ten minutes ago, we used electricity to create magnetism," I explained, after quickly explaining how a motor worked. "Now, we're using magnetism to create electricity!" A small but valuable percentage of the minds in the room were blown. No doubt about that. I could tell because there were a couple of wisps of purplish smoke wafting around the light fixtures a minute after I said it.

This sort of dovetailed in with the most important part of the talk. How these little electrons create this thing we call "electricity"? The answer was so important that I wrote it on the board:

"I DON'T KNOW."

(And yes, I felt like Mr. Hand as I did so. I didn't comment on that because these kids were all born at least an entire presidential administration after "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" and that's not the sort of thing you want to acknowledge in the middle of the presentation. Gentle sobbing tends to kill whatever momentum you've built with your audience up to that point.)

You want to know another really cool thing I learned as a kid? That there are many topics where I -- even as a fifth-grader -- knew just as much about it as people who've been studying the question for their whole lives.

"How come one electron is an electron, but forty or fifty electrons (or heck, even more) sloshing through a circuit become electricity?" Ask a physicist with multiple doctorates and s/he'll give you a ready response. But if you keep responsing with "Yes, but why?" you'll eventually get to a level of abstraction where they just have to shrug their shoulders and say "I don't know. No one knows."

A 57-year-old Nobel laureate who says "I'm stumped. The phenomenon you mention could be the result of a little brown mouse in a cowboy outfit turning a crank somewhere for all I know." Coooolllll.

I'm happy that my talk didn't go short and that it didn't go long. It ended exactly when it was supposed to end, and exactly how I'd hoped to end it: by pulling all those threads together and explaining what Scientists do and what Engineers do. Then I was done.

What an experience. Whether you're speaking to ten people or a thousand, the key to good speaking is constantly paying attention to the energy of the crowd and making little tweaks on-the-fly as you go. But talking to fifth-graders is like surfing, or how I imagine surfing would be if those stuck-up jerks at the water park ever let me have a turn. You can have control and you can make that board do exactly what you want it to do...but the most dangerous thing you can do is forget that you and the board are riding an enormous elemental force that's collectively way more powerful than you are.

In a middle-school, the elemental force in question is the speed with which a fifth-grader can make and deploy a paper airplane, and the unanimity with which the other kids in the class will embrace this activity if you're boring 'em out of their little skulls.

I am also proud to say that I didn't say a single naughty word. I wasn't worried about deploying one of the Mount Rushmores, naturally, but when you're above the age of 17, words like "damn," "hell," and "Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick" don't even register as curse words any more and have a way of sneaking themselves into the output buffer.

(I did experience a certain drop in blood-pressure after I said "diddley-squat" and a sudden silence fell over the room. Did the phrase have some sort of naughty root that I'd forgotten about? Nope...it's just that the kids didn't know what it meant. Whew.)

The kids were a great audience and the Q&A at the end was lively. I made a minor tactical error when (in the process of talking a bit more about engineering) I un-holstered my PocketPC and explained that it could play music and movies and connect wirelessly with the Internet, and then unholstered my digital camera for a photo. They caused a sensation and quickly eclipsed any perceived Coolness of those four 3-volt light bulbs.

"How much are those?" a couple of kids asked, mindful that the final drafts of their Christmas Wish Lists are due sometime around Thanksgiving. If any of these kids have parents who can lay a $599 PDA inside their stockings (plus a $250 1-gig CompactFlash hard drive, plus a $129 Secure Digital card), I want to get his or her home phone number and see if their parents are interested in a late-term adoption.

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The actor who played the principal in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and the Emperor of Austria in "Amadeus" was arrested on pornography-related charges this week. He was arraigned the other day and in a statement to press announced "All I want is for the truth to come out."

And here I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the guy was guilty, guilty, guilty. If a jury has been deemed sufficiently media-savvy, they ought to be allowed to convict based on that statement alone.

Because that simple sequence of words betrays guilt and dishonesty. Tell me: why would an innocent person want the absolute truth about themselves to be made public?

If I'm ever accused of a crime I didn't commit, my statement will be "Folks, if I were ever dumb enough to let you rummage through my closets, you'd find skeletons stacked up in there like folding chairs after a junior-high fire-safety assembly. I happen to be innocent of this charge, absolutely. But the idea that the police and the press are going to be going through my house and my email and my Amazon.com purchases, and interviewing all my friends and co-workers and that girl in Brookline I used to clumsily hit on and the guy at the video store and going to my usual restaurants and asking the waitresses how much I tip has me positively scared green. I mean, just the thought of what my college roomate alone could say has got me pricing real estate in Ecuador and wondering if I'd rather be known as Guillermo or Escobal after I get there. Sweet Holy Mother of Merciful God Almighty, the last freakin' thing I want to happen is for The Truth To Come Out!!!"

This same week, a judge allowed Paula Poundstone to believe that possibly she might actually be allowed to see her former foster kids again some day. Her statement when originally arraigned on the charge of child endangerment? "I'm eager for the truth to come out." What did she finally plead guilty to? Getting hammered and then driving the kids around.

And this was also the week when Paul Reubens was arraigned on the same sort of pornography-related charges as the Ferris Bueller guy. His statement? That he collects antique erotica and apparently among the many collections he's purchased at auctions there were a couple of items that the police found questionable. Is Pee-Wee eager for the truth to come out? No; he merely claims that he's innocent and is pointedly not inviting "Access Hollywood" to read the poetry he wrote when he was 16.

The only reasonable conclusion to be made is that Paul Reubens shall be fully exonerated in the fullness of time. If I find bootleg "Free Pee-Wee!" tee-shirts available for purchase at the next NASCAR event or county fair I attend, I will purchase and wear one with confidence.

As for the Ferris Bueller guy...if he's smart, he's going to start building a defense based on the accidental misuse of prescription anthihisthamenes. That's really the only way you can recover from a public confession that You Want The Truth To Come Out.

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At last! For years I've been telling the plants in my office that the Humans wouldn't be the congealed and tangled ball of despair, failure, and "Brady Bunch" sequels that it is today if only they had me calling the shots. And apparently this word-of-mouth campaign has paid off because God finally put in the game on Wednesday.

The scene: the little public park in front of the post office. The time: a few hours after the first serious snowfall of the year. My mandate: Decide how the Humans should walk from Guild Crescent to the post office for the next three or four months, or until warm weather returns, anyway.

Thank God the Humans don't know that the Illusion of self-determinancy is merely another tool that the Creator installed in their cultural programming to make them easier to control. "No sir, nobody controls my destiny!" they bleat, vividly replaying in their minds a scene from earlier in the day when they finally stood up to their office manager and told him that if it was time to fill out the weekly copier-consumables requisition and they didn't happen to have a black pen handy, then he was just going to have to deal with the fact that he works with a maverick free-thinker. All the while, they're walking from the Crescent to the Post Office in the same set of footprints that every other pedestrian has used since the very first snowfall, months earlier.

See, by fixating on the Ballpoint Insurrection they don't have sufficient leftover duty-cycles to think about screwing up something important, something that actually keeps the system running, like the route connecting the Humans to the world courier network. Decisions like that are best left in the hands of people with Vision. It'd be arrogant of me to claim to be one of those people of course, but nonetheless I lay the following fact in front of you: God put me at the corner of Washington and Guild in front of that blank expanse of white. My holy mandate to be an instrument of leadership couldn't have been clearer if I'd seen it in the streaks of a freshly-Windexed bathroom mirror.

I've looked inward and reflected upon my soul and it occurs to me that my titanic humility -- an easygoing self-effacing modesty that others would do well to emulate -- was one of the factors that made God designate me and not any of the other tens of thousands in the postal district for this task. For like Moses upon contemplating his responsibility to deliver the Israelites, I too had my doubts about what lay ahead and momentarily wished that this cup would pass. Also like Moses, though -- honestly, the similarity between myself and Moses would have been scary if not for the fact that they felt so right -- I felt like my destiny was clear and then I took that first crunching step into the snow, a substance that would have stumped the hell of a lifelong desert-dweller like Moses so obviously God had picked the right guy for the job here.

One foot in front of the other. Let my sense of logic and my unflappable command of the intricacies of human nature dictate my next step. Follow the paved path that lurked somewhere underneath? Nope. The designer of this park -- drunk with ego, no doubt -- had laid out the path to divert the helpless pedestrian through pastoral landscaping and toward a monument to war heroes. My path would take you to the post office, straightish. It left the paved path after ten or twenty paces and cut across the meadow until it reached a pair of park benches. Decades of sitting and shuffling had eroded depressions in the earth around them, I acknowledged, and so twenty paces before the benches I began a gentle curve to lead the Humans away from the muddy puddles that were certain to form there when the snow began to melt.

Crisis averted. But the most critical juncture lay ahead: the transition from the park to the post-office parking lot. Steering a path is like steering a container ship: you have to start adjusting your navigation miles before an intended goal. Again, the arrogance of the park's original designer had reared its ghastly head; there was no factory-installed exit from the park to the parking lot. Pedestrians were helplessly forced to take a left turn and follow a route to the sidewalk half a block away.

As I strode past the bench, I determined that the landscaper's tyranny would end here. Here, dammit!!!

In an instant, I spotted a horse-sized opening in the stand of trees that marked the lower margin of the park. There were other openings, but this one had all of the bullet points that I was looking for in an exit point. (1) It naturally emptied between two parking spaces; (2) it created a comfortable and natural angle toward the entrance of the post office; (3) it was between two parking spaces that were a hair too narrow for trucks and minivans, thus offering the pedestrian a modicum of added visibility and safety as they emerge into the lot. If I had overlooked any of these imperatives, the Humans would be tempted to divert from the path I had imposed upon them. Just one person would take just a single step to get around a F-150. Then another would see that misstep coming up ahead and then cut a wider corner to get there...within a month, it'd dissolve into utter bedlam. If I truly cared about the Humans I'd make sure this didn't happen. I'd love to bury radio wires under the park and force everyone to wear shock-collars but naturally if I selected a path based on practicality and psychology I'd achieve the same effect without that nasty smell of burning hair.

I looked back upon the trail I'd completed. It was a marvel. Direct and confident, yet beautiful in its way; every footprint a display of patronlike love for one's fellows. I should hammer a few stakes along its perimeter so that when springtime comes, the department of public works can rip up that bastard landscaper's abomination and re-pave the path to my specifications and future generations can benefit from my thoughtfulness. One day, when Ken Burns makes a PBS documentary of my life and adventures, he shall surely see this path as the ultimate metaphor of the dynamics by which I led my life.

I should mention that while I was critiquing my work, a dog started to trot across the park, but I managed to plunk him in the head with an acorn before he could wreck my work. I returned today and was greatly relieved to see that dozens of Humans had chosen to follow my path to the very last step. They'd expressed zero interest whatsoever in the insane ramblings of the mutt. This was partly because the latter stopped less than a quarter of the way into the park (with a rather graphic imprint of the dog who flailed a lot while he fell to the ground), but mostly it was because the Rightness of the path I had laid before the Humans was readily obvious.

Getting back to the fact that self-determinancy is just an illusion to keep the Humans in line, I am of course well aware that this business of deciding how the Humans would get from Guild Crescent to the Post Office was naturally just a distraction that God laid before me so I wouldn't try improving the world monetary fund. I don't feel as though the Creator bamboozled me at all. Not one tiny bit. I'll be frank and say that while I've been whiteboarding a solution for the past three years, it's all really just spitball-economics.

But I definitely have a sense that I'm climbing the ladder here. If I keep delivering the goods like I did Wednesday, within the year I could be part of the team that figures out how to combat the populace's dietary vitamin "E" deficiency through a change in the typeface used in highway signs. From there, it's just a short leap to being asked to write the One Question that everyone will have to answer before they're allowed into the escape armada. The more you people start creating a positive buzz about that path I put together, the sooner I work my way up...and when I do, I'll be happy to share the Answer with you people. Believe you me, when the creature gestating at the Earth's core starts pecking at the confines of its shell seven years from now, you'll be glad that you were one of my regular readers.

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

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