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While reading an article on a topic unrelated to the content of this blog post I noticed the author use the phrase "seeped in," as in "Verizon... is seeped in monopolist culture." Having no opinion as to Verizon's monopolist tendencies, instead as I read this line I wondered to myself, "Doesn't he actually mean to say "steeped in"?

For a brief moment I wondered if I should muster up the necessary indignation warranted for a missing letter. But then I continued to the reader comments at the end of the article (an act which my wife has expressly forbidden me from doing because the anonymous comments at the end of articles so quickly drive me into a mindless rage) and saw that one reader--with the clearly ironic moniker "Decorum"--had the audacity to spew this vile, hate-filled rant:

You mean "steeped in", not "seeped in".

Faced with the prospect of agreeing with this anonymous hate-monger, I questioned my original assessment. Perhaps the author of the article had NOT meant to say "steeped in." Perhaps he had indeed meant to say "seeped in."

First I did a Google search for the phrase and what I discovered is that Google really dislikes when you search for "seeped in." If you do, Google instead assumes you're an idiot and shows you the results for "steeped in." If you go so far as to search for "seeped in vs steeped in," with the two phrases quoted, Google instead shows you results for "steeped in vs steeped in." Who's the idiot now, Google?

Let's take a look at Merriam-Webster online.

The third definition of steeped is "to saturate with or subject thoroughly to (some strong or pervading influence)." The example given is "practices steeped in tradition."

The second definition of seeped is "to enter or penetrate slowly, or to become diffused or spread." The examples are: "fear of nuclear war had seeped into the national consciousness" and "a sadness seeped through his being."

First of all, the Merriam-Webster dictionary has some seriously depressing examples for the word "seep."

Second of all, upon reflection the verb "seep" seems both appropriate and problematic.

On the appropriate side, the word seep does indeed connote the slow spread of an idea or concept, such as a monopolist culture seeping through Verizon.

On the problematic side, seeped is an intransitive verb, and--like the above sentence--one assumes the correct usage would have the seeper seeping into the seepee, rather than the seepee seeping in the seeper. Or, less clearly, something seeps, but it is not seeped.

And--on the appropriate side again--what the heck did that last paragraph mean?

The underlying issue here is one of an accepted idiom overwhelming a non-accepted idiom. Simply because the common cliché is to talk about something being "steeped in" something else doesn't mean that to NOT use the cliché is inherently wrong. Now, if the alternative usage is grammatically incorrect then that's a different story altogether. But it is not inherently wrong, it is just wrong.

My sister-in-law--using a Martha Stewart Craft Punch and a back issue of PAW--whipped this together while simultaneously eating pizza and conversing with her family.

The first thing the judge said: "No blogging or tweeting about your jury duty."

It's over now, so the court-ordered silence lifts and I can emerge blinking and squinting into the great bright light of irrelevant public disclosure. The experience carried both annoyance and knowledge, but in the aftermath of a trial I am glad to have carried out my civic responsibilities. My case lasted just four days--not including jury selection--and that was four days longer than it should have lasted.

My white collar criminal case involved government corruption, but on a small scale of minor "official misconduct." It involved stacks of invoices, purchase orders, bills of lading, expense reimbursement forms, employee reviews, budget spreadsheets, and one PowerPoint presentation. Essentially, it was like going to work every day.

Things I learned during jury selection:

• Based on an admittedly small sample group, seven out of twelve American citizens do not believe in the presumption of innocence. If more Americans believed in this fundamental right then I would not have ended up serving on a jury. Who are all these people who don't believe in the presumption of innocence? Didn't they attend grade school? Why don't they move to England? And is it possible they are lying simply to get out of jury duty? Which brings me to the second thing I learned during jury selection...
• A lot of people are willing to lie to a judge during jury selection. Who are these people? It works out in the end, I suppose. There are two types of people you don't want sitting on a jury: (1) people who don't believe in the presumption of innocence and (2) liars. When you tell the judge you don't believe in the presumption of innocence, it really doesn't matter whether or not you are telling the truth, because either way you have proved you are unfit to sit on a jury. But, seriously, are there no repercussions for such things? Each time the judge dismissed someone you could hear the disgust in her voice. But she's a judge, and she doesn't get to slap potential jurists in public.

Things I learned waiting for the trial to start each day:

• There is also apparently no penalty for jurists showing up really late repeatedly, aside from some sharp words. I'm trying to calculate the money lost (both private and public dollars) due to one guy who came two hours late every day. This whole trial would have been over one or possibly two days earlier if we had not been delayed two or more hours every morning. So that's eleven other jurists missing extra work plus the entire court system grinding to a halt.
• One can get a lot of reading done while waiting for a trial to begin each morning.

Things I learned during the course of the trial:

• Juries are important. As the defense attorney stressed, the government can pretty much do anything it wants to do to anyone they want to do it to, but before they can make it permanent they have to get through us first. It was gratifying to be able to quickly turn around a Not Guilty verdict for a woman who was clearly Not Guilty.
• Some of the stuff you see on Law & Order actually happens. Such as sleazy witnesses threatened with charges for other crimes and then given sweet deals by district attorneys to testify against someone else.
• Juries don't get the whole picture. There simply must have been some bigger story we never got to hear, because I can not begin to understand why this case came to trial otherwise. Either the defendant was some kind of crazy serial killer and this was the only thing the government could get past the grand jury (kind of like bringing Al Capone down via tax evasion) or--way, way more likely--some politically powerful person had an ax to grind and pushed to get these trumped up minor charges investigated over a flabbergasting six year period.
• After a six year investigation you'd think the Inspector General's office would be able to come up with something better than a charge that amounted to roughly three thousand dollars worth of discounts and for which they had virtually no evidence whatsoever. But you'd be wrong to think so.

Things I learned at the end of the trial:

• It's nice to be on a trial where the only injured party is the defendant and where you can take a small step towards healing that injury by judging her Not Guilty.
• Also, when the defendant, her children, and a roomful of friends and family members begin sobbing tears of joy and relief after they hear your judgement of Not Guilty, it's really hard to not start crying yourself. I'm very good at separating emotion from logic when necessary (I have an engineering degree); had the evidence shown guilt I would have voted Guilty. But--putting the logical side away and bringing out the emotional side--I am very, very, very happy to have been given the chance to clear an innocent woman's name.
  

I'm not going to post any links or names or details about the case (though it was covered by multiple New York Times* articles) because I'd like to protect what's left of this innocent women's privacy. She lost her job when indicted, and it's not clear whether she'll be rehired. As far as I can tell, the biggest loser here is New York City, which lost an intelligent, hard working, efficient, well respected, well liked, and honest public servant. I wish her the best and hope she finds renewed success in whatever she does next.

* Okay, but only in the "Region" section.

For no reason other than Sunday afternoon laziness, I tracked down a ten-year old teaser advertisement for the Volkswagen Beetle convertible. This ad came out the same time my job had me spending 50% of my time in West Des Moines, Iowa, in an office building that reminded me very much of the one in the commercial.

With so many ads at the time depicting my generation as rejecting work and adulthood for some imaginary endless youth, it was nice to one that embraced the realities of becoming a productive member of society with just a hint of ennui.

It did not inspire me to purchase a VW Beetle convertible, but I appreciated the quality of the ad nonetheless.

I spent Saturday at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY, a sculpture "landscape" about an hour from New York City.

In a previous post I described why I felt the Kindle has led to an erosion of Amazon's brand.

A "friend" pointed out that their full-throttle Kindle push results from the fact that this is a fight for their life in the eBook land-grab. They have to get as large a percent of the market as possible for the Kindle format, otherwise Amazon's core business of Books will gradually be eaten up by Apple and other eBook retailers (just as their other core business of DVD sales is gradually getting eaten by iTunes).

My "friend" has a point. With several competing eReaders out there pushing proprietary formats, Amazon has to gobble up as much of the market as possible. Unlike Sony or Apple, Amazon risks not only losing out on future eBook revenue, but as buyers move to electronic versions the company also risks losing their traditional revenue from physical book sales.

I still blame Amazon, however. Why? Because it's Amazon who has made this a winner-take-all landscape in the first place.

By making their eBook format proprietary to the Kindle, Amazon announced there would be one eBook reader and one only. Instead of selling eBooks to everyone, Amazon sells eBooks exclusively for Kindle readers. As others follow Amazon's lead, it means when a consumer buys a competing product Amazon can no longer sell books to that consumer. So if Amazon loses your Kindle business, they lose your future book business too.

(There are exceptions, of course. A Kindle app exists for the iPad and the iPhone, but that's only the case as long as Apple allows it. There's no reason to suspect Apple won't reject the Kindle reader on their devices in the future.)

If instead Amazon had gone the alternate route and utilized an open standard for the Kindle eBook format, the current marketplace would be very different. Amazon could have helped direct the entire eBook market towards such open standards... other emerging devices would have felt pressure to conform (though I doubt anything would have encouraged Apple to take an open-format approach). In this version of the world, even if the Kindle failed to become the long-term leader in the space, Amazon could continue selling eBooks to consumers of other eBook Readers.

To be fair, this would be much less lucrative and Amazon would have much less power. It's easy for publishers to distribute their own eBooks when no physical object needs to be constructed, warehoused, and shipped. Amazon would have to rely on its status as a trusted aggregator of reviews, recommendations, and trends to continue to draw customers. But this trusted position is exactly what Amazon has sacrificed.

Amazon deserves credit for giving the eBook market traction. The Sony eReader had been around for a while and it did take an open standards approach. But did anyone take eBooks seriously before the Kindle?

The interesting thing is that with digital music Amazon was the second mover and they took the opposite side of this issue. Apple sold iPod-proprietary music with tight DRM; Amazon pushed the market for change by selling DRM-free MP3 files instead. I'm not too worked up about the Kindle because eventually the same thing will happen with eBooks. In the meantime, unfortunately (and unlike music), there are no easy tricks to take a proprietary eBook and convert it to an open standard--at least none I know.

In summary: I agree Amazon is fighting to preserve its core business as books shift to a new medium. But I also think it is largely BECAUSE of Amazon that this new medium is an all-or-nothing game.

My review-ish post about Amis' The Pregnant Widow has been republished on This Recording.

Much anticipated and widely reviewed, The Pregnant Widow satisfied my desire for a weighty Martin Amis novel even if it did not entirely satisfy my desire for consistency.

Keith, a young Brit summering in an Italian castle with several beautiful women, might be the least despicable of Amis's protagonists unless he is the most. Does one feel sorry for him, ashamed by him, or embarrassed for him? As for whether this one summer could truly impact the rest of his life in such a way: I am neutral on the point. In a novel, the central event is always the most important in the characters' lives because the characters don't have lives outside of the novel depicting that particular event.

The sheer amount of literary references struck me more than anything else, and so I'm bypassing further review of the content for a straight listing of it instead.

Books read by the protagonist over the course of one summer:

Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (p 32)
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (p 39)
Pamela by Samuel Richardson (p 43)
Shamela by Henry Fielding (p 43)
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (p 80)
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne (p 81) [Closed after 15 pages]
Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen (p 108)
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (p 125)
Emma by Jane Austen (p 125)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (p 135)
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (p 158)
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (p 197)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (p 199)
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (p 202)
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (p 217)
Bleak House by Charles Dickens (p 253)
Pansies: Poems by D. H. Lawrence (p 278)

That's actually not as many books as I remember. I'm not including books read by other characters, and I'm not including some invented non-fiction books (such as Religions of the World) read by the author. I may have missed a few.

Books alluded to by the protagonist but not necessarily read that summer:

Dracula by Bram Stoker (p 161)
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (p 224)
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence (p 224)
The Odyssey by Homer (p 253)
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (p 253)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (p 268)
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (p 268)

I'm not including books alluded to by other characters. I definitely have missed a few.

Most of all, I thought this novel did a better job of quoting relevant poetry than any other novel I've read. Unfortunately such quotes stopped after around page one hundred and didn't pick up again until the end.

Poetry quoted in The Pregnant Widow:

Sexual intercourse began
In 1963
(Which was rather late for me)--
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Mind and Body run on
Different timetables:
Not until our morning
Visit here can we
Leave the dead concerns of
Yesterday behind us,
Face, with all our courage,
What is now to be.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

Action is transitory--a step, a blow.
The motion of a muscle--this way or that--
'Tis done, and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark.
And shared the nature of infinity.

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.

A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I, the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah, my deare,
I cannot look on thee.

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
...
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew...

...where they work, and age, and put off men
By being unattractive, or too shy,
Or having morals...

O Rose, thou art sick!
The Invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of Crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

There is a willow grows aslant a brook . . . but long it could not be. Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.

What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?

I think the above speaks for itself.

All page numbers from the first US edition published by A. A. Knopf, NY.

No hardcovers allowed in the Summer Sale, so we replaced Embracing Family by Nobuo Kojima with In Transit by Brigid Brophy.

Over at the Language Log, there is a brilliant and hysterical article about The New Yorker Magazine's refusal to allow subject postposing in any circumstance, no matter how convoluted it renders the resulting sentence.

Your opinion as to what constitutes "brilliant and hysterical" may differ from mine, but if you don't enjoy reading skillfully worded rants about arcane grammatical tics then you have no business here. Actually, in the case of the linked article, the Language Log is not complaining about the misuse of grammar. Rather, the problem stems from The New Yorker's over-application of grammatical guidelines.

Plus, you have to love the word "postposing."

The best quote from the blog is:

It isn't that easy to keep an eye open for specific syntactic features so you can change them; people tend to read for content and literary effect. But The New Yorker has someone who (i) can identify these syntactic situations flawlessly, and (ii) is astonishingly obedient, and (iii) works for a boss who is stone crazy.

In case you don't know the term "subject postposing," it means using this construction:

"I allow subject postposing", said The New Yorker magazine.

Instead of this construction:

"I reject subject postposing", The New Yorker magazine said.

My grad school thesis advisor, David Gates, crossed out just about every example of subject postposement in my terrible, terrible thesis. In order to justify this act he forced me to compare "he said" to "said he," pointing out the pretentiousness of the latter. But I doubt even he would refuse a light bending of this stylistic rule when confronted with the tortuous examples provided by the Language Log.

I often include images of book covers on this site, and often use Amazon.com as the source for these images. Unfortunately this means dealing with the "Look Inside" arrows that appear on certain books. While I appreciate the ability to look inside, it's not something I want cluttering the images on this site.

So I've been playing around with the images URLs on Amazon.com and have discovered that you can do all sorts of fun tricks.

[Note: All of the below images are stored locally since I have no guarantee that this game will continue to work in the future. But if you follow the links you can see the originals.]

Let's start with the image of David Markson's Going Down:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rHV4hgi1L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

I used this book because the base image on the book's page does NOT include a "Click here to Look Inside" on top of the cover.

If we remove the second set of codes, it becomes full size:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rHV4hgi1L.jpg

The SL number appears to be the size of the cover, while the AA number appears to be the amount of white space around the cover.

Hence with SL200 and AA400, we get:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rHV4hgi1L._SL200_AA400.jpg

Now the real fun begins... I noticed that in some other images there were codes to make the "Look Inside" arrow appear. What if we add that code to this cover image URL?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rHV4hgi1L._PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

Perfect! Note you can go in reverse and REMOVE this part of the URL for a cover image when you want it WITHOUT the look inside arrow. (That's why I started this investigation, after all.)

Those final SH and OU codes don't seem to have much impact. I believe they change the resolution, but I'm not going to worry about that for now.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rHV4hgi1L._PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_.jpg

It's more fun to mess with the position of the arrow...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rHV4hgi1L._PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,BottomRight,35,-76_AA300_.jpg

Or...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rHV4hgi1L._PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,1035,-1050_AA300_.jpg

Or...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rHV4hgi1L._PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,-5,30_AA300_.jpg

We can also use the smaller "look inside" image from the search result page...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rHV4hgi1L._PIsitb-sticker-arrow-dp,TopRight,12,-18_AA300_.jpg

And if we use the "SL" code twice, we can actually shrink the cover image, and then use another one to increase the size of the entire image (including the "Look Inside") so that the whole thing looks more proportioned.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41rHV4hgi1L._SL300_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-dp,TopRight,12,-18_SL300_AA300_.jpg

That's all my hacking for now. I unsuccessfully tried to overlay two cover images on top of each other but that did not work.

Fun for all!

In a manner of speaking, one could even say that The Last Supper was already deteriorating while it was still being painted.

From Wittgenstein's Mistress

All I had started to say, I think, is that I am seeing a painting that Van Gogh did not paint, and which has now become a reproduction of that painting, and which to begin with is of a fire that I myself have not built.

Although what I have entirely left out is that the painting is not actually of the fire either, but of a reflection of the fire.

So in other words what I am ultimately seeing is not only a painting which is not a real painting but is only a reproduction, but which is also a painting of a fire which is not a real fire but is only a reflection.

On top of which the reproduction is hardly a real reproduction itself, being only in my head, just as the reflection is not a real reflection for the same reason.

From Wittgenstein's Mistress

David Markson died six days ago but I've been at an insurance conference in Texas and didn't find out until today. My wife knew, apparently, but she didn't mention it because she assumed I already heard the news. Even if he didn't make the front page of the USA Today he will be missed.

Previous Markson books read by MixedMetaphors.net include:

The Last Novel
Readers Block
Wittgenstein's Mistress

I wish now that I had spent more time writing up my thoughts on The Last Novel and Wittgenstein's Mistress. I read The Last Novel during this site's long down period so the book was recorded merely as an entry in a text file. Wittgenstein's Mistress was actually the subject of a long report, so perhaps I will try to dig up my notes and post them.

Ten books from the Dalkey Archive Press Summer Sale have been ordered.

I made the first five selections and my wife made the second five:

1. The Dalkey Archive by Flann O'Brien
2. Op Oloop by Juan Filloy
3. Distant Relations by Carlos Fuentes
4. Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas by William H. Gass
5. The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud

6. Cigarettes by Harry Mathews
7. Homesick by Eshkol Nevo
8. Siamese by Stig Saeterbakken
9. Embracing Family by Nobuo Kojima
10. A Fool's Paradise by Anita Konkka

Based on Dalkey Archive's tagging system, these books have the following (aggregated) location categorizations:

Genres : Fiction : Europe : Nordic (2 books)
Genres : Fiction : Latin America (2 books)
Genres : Fiction : United States and Canada (2 books)
Genres : Fiction : Europe : British and Irish
Genres : Fiction : Europe : Western Europe
Genres : Fiction : Middle East
Genres : Fiction : East Asia and Pacific

And for books that were tagged as belonging to "movements and schools" we had the following categorizations:

Genres : Fiction : Movements and Schools : Oulipo (2 books)
Genres : Fiction : Movements and Schools : American Postmodernism

The other books could probably be considered as belonging to some "movements and schools" as well, but do not have tags as such.

It is left as an exercise for the reader to match the location and/or the "movement and school" to the correct book.

My favorite publisher, Dalkey Archive Press, is having a summer sale until June 4th.

Order either:
5 books for $35
10 books for $65
20 books for $120

Plus get free shipping.

I'm going for ten books, though I'm still picking them out. I know for sure that I will be buying the book from which the press got it's name.

A brief note about the recently read The Museum of Eterna's Novel by Macedonio Fernández:

As of the time of this posting, Amazon.com lists the author's name as MacEdonio instead of Macedonio.

I'm not the type to quibble over minor errors of grammar or punctuation but I found this slip amusing.

Macedonio Fernández is an Argentinian writer; with the capitalization of a single letter he becomes MacEdonio, the Scotsman.

Amazon.com also fails to properly accent the á in his last name, but that's less amusing so will go without comment.

**** UPDATE 6/2/2010 1:00 PM ET ****

I used Amazon's catalog update form to notify them of the error. They sent an e-mail back which included, among other logistical information, the line:

"The following suggestion(s) have been accepted and processed with an edit. They will appear online within the next two to three business days."

Together we will monitor the page and wait for the change to appear. As of noon on June 2nd the "E" is still capitalized.

**** UPDATE 6/2/2010 2:22 PM ET ****

Amazon has removed the capital E from Macedonio Fernandez's first name.

Ever since Amazon released the Kindle, ads for it have taken up the majority of screen real-estate on Amazon's home page.

This--perhaps unfairly--upsets me.

I don't fault other companies for using their web pages to market their own products. Right now Apple's homepage plugs the iPad. Microsoft's touts Windows 7 and other Microsoft offerings. Ford's landing page features the Ford Focus. Such behavior is fairly standard practice.

But with Amazon I feel oddly betrayed, and I will explain this betrayal with three points.

1. Breaking the Model

The first problem is that Amazon is breaking its previous model of giving me personalized recommendations. Yes, I still get personalized recommendations, but now I have to scroll down to look at them. I have to SCROLL DOWN! Who has time for that kind of effort?

But, seriously, based on past experience I expect Amazon to customize itself to my preferences. I used to tell them them that I was "not interested" in something and it would impact what showed up on my Amazon home page. This kept me coming back to Amazon's page on a regular basis even when I didn't have something specific to buy. Amazon used to be interested in selling lots of different things that might actually appeal to me. But no longer. Which brings us to...

2. Only One Product to Sell

The second problem is that Amazon only has one product to sell. Apple, Microsoft, Ford, etc., all rotate the products featured on the home page because they sell many products. But Amazon only has the Kindle, which means it's been years of nothing but the Kindle front and center. Obviously Amazon sells OTHER companies' products as well (though you'd hardly know this from visiting the home page). But now the site I traditionally go to for variety of options has the stalest message on the web.

3. No Longer a Trusted Source

And the final problem (and the most important issue) is that one of the traditional values of Amazon has been my ability to trust it for reviews and recommendations. This now breaks down. Not only do I fail to trust it in the case of the Kindle, I actually assume Amazon is actively and intentionally misleading me.

Typical messages that appear on the home page are:

"Kindle. Amazon's Number One Selling Product."
"Kindle. The Most Wish-Listed Product on Amazon."
"Kindle. More 5-star Reviews Than Any Other Product on Amazon."

I'm not saying Amazon is lying about these claims, but my feeling is that they are manipulated statistics and mostly self-serving bullshit.

For example, check out the bestsellers in electronics. While the Kindle is indeed in top place, you'll also notice that different styles of iPods make up 9 out of the top 20 (including 2nd and 3rd). So if the total number sales of iPods exceeds Kindles (which it probably does) would you really consider Kindle the bestselling electronic device on Amazon.com? Same story goes for the wish lists. And, for that matter, what about the product "books"?

Also, what's the timeline for "number one selling product" at Amazon? The only definitive count we get from Jeff Bezos is that "millions" of people own a Kindle. Well, even if you think it's unfair to count this against the entirety of the category "books," let's just consider a single book: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. According to various sources, Amazon PRE-SOLD millions of copies of the book. One must assume that they went on to SELL even more. So has the Kindle actually out-sold this one specific book? Is Amazon just choosing to ignore a product that outsold the Kindle yesterday but not today? Unfortunately we can't know, which brings us to the crux of the problem...

Amazon is asking us to both trust them as a source of independent metrics to judge a product (the news will even report on Amazon pre-sales as a measure of a book's popularity) while simultaneously using those metrics to push a product in which it has a clear interest in selling over other products. Let's imagine for a minute that the Barnes & Noble Nook (which you can buy through Amazon) started outselling the Kindle. It's unlikely to happen, of course. But if it DID happen, would Amazon put this on their home page? Of course not. So, even if every positive statistic about the Kindle they market to us is absolutely true, we can assume that they are cherry-picked and manipulated out of most meaning. This is true with all marketing and advertising, of course, but most companies are not trying to claim they offer objective product information.

This all matters to me because Amazon secured its strong brand by being a source for independent, objective, mostly-unfiltered reviews and metrics about product quality, value, and popularity. Maybe Amazon never claimed their information was truly objective. But with the Kindle, Amazon has made its un-objectivity official and has sacrificed its trusted position.

Game: Find the Music Source

Step 1: Listen for tinny music coming from somewhere on the train.
Step 2: Crane your head to the left.
Step 3: Look at the six people wearing iPod headphones.
Step 4: Try to guess which one is playing music so loud that you can hear it.

Game: Where Is that Smell Coming From?

Step 1: Where is that smell coming from?
Step 2: Try to move away from it.

Remember, it might be you!

Game: Spot the Pervert

Step 1: Look for a man abusing the train's crowded conditions to get away with standing uncomfortably close to a woman.
Step 2: You've spotted the pervert!

Remember, it might be you!

Game: The Music Producer

Step 1: Find a man or woman who is singing out loud, pretending as if they are not on a crowded train.
Step 2: Approach this person and tell them you are a famous music producer.
Step 3: Hand them the fake business cards you have printed up for this purpose.
Step 4: Tell them you couldn't help overhearing their singing and that you think they have real talent and that you'd like to bring them into the studio to do some recordings.
Step 5: When they ask, "Really?", respond, "No." and get off the train.

Note: Make sure to time this so that you can immediately exit the train. Otherwise you may be injured.

Game: Try to Read Your Book

Step 1: Attempt to get your book out of your bag.
Step 2: Hold it directly in front of your face with your elbows pulled into your body so they don't hit anyone.
Step 3: Try to read a few words.
Step 4: If you get to the end of a page, try to turn it.

Game: Look at the Top of Someone's Head

Step 1: Look at the top of someone's head.

Variation for shorter players: Look at the back of someone's head.
Variation for even shorter platers: Look at someone's back.

A good friend of mine had a humorous poem published in the New Yorker online today. It's not in the print version, which is too bad, but I think inclusion in the New Yorker website is still a great accomplishment.

Kafkaesque

Merriam-Webster online defines it as:

of, relating to, or suggestive of Franz Kafka or his writings ; especially : having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality

Merriam-Webster also apparently puts spaces on either sides of a semicolon and doesn't use periods, but that's a discussion for another time.

Are there any other authors who have their own word (adjective or otherwise)? Why does Kafka receive this singular honor?

I'm not counting the word Shakespearean which really just means "about Shakespeare" because that's cheating. I suppose you could use it to mean "evocative of Shakespeare," but we all know it's just a word someone invented because he or she felt Shakespeare deserved his own adjective. Joycean and Dickensian both fall into a similar category, though I think are slightly more legit. I've heard people refer to Joycean literary techniques or Dickensian characters. It's still a direct tie back to the author.

Despite my illogical and bizarre set of judging rules, I'm going to give a nod to:

Orwellian

even though Merriam-Webster simply lists it as an adjective under Orwell's name. But I think this one is often used to describe distopian/Big-Brother futures, as opposed to "this is like a book Orwell might have written."

There's also:

Quixotic

1: foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals ; especially : marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action
2: capricious , unpredictable

But that's about a character in a novel, not the author.

I entered "Kafkaesque" and "Orwellian" into Google and found a site focused on eponyms. They have a section devoted to authors and covered the same entries as me, with the addition of:

masochism (named for Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a 19th century Austrian novelist)
machiavellian (named for Niccolò Machiavelli)
sadism (named for the Marquis de Sade)

Definitions are left as an exercise for the reader.

Those are pretty good. Those are words that have nearly transplanted the authors. Not to say that these authors are not still important, but you'll notice that these words are used WITHOUT A CAPITAL LETTER, meaning we've divorced them from their proper noun status. Perhaps one day in the future we will use the word kafkaesque without even thinking of Kafka the author.

Around 9:30 am EST, Google went paranoid.

All results in Google searches are returning links that say "This site may harm your computer."

I mean ALL results. That includes sites like wikipedia.org. And Google. GOOGLE. Searching for "Google" on Google informs you that Google might harm your computer.

Perhaps Google has just taken an exstitential view to search results. They're not saying that a particular site WILL harm your computer. Just that it MAY harm your computer. And, certainly, that's true for all sites. The odds might be low, but "may" doesn't provide any percentages.

This isn't just some Internet Explorer thing, either. Firefox on the Mac has the same results.

I assume that one of the following things has happened:
a) Google has been hacked.
b) Someone at Google just put some new, buggy code into production and is about to get fired.
c) Every site on the internet, including Google, has been infected by a virus.

This has been going on for over 30 minutes now.

View image

UPDATE (10:17 AM EST):

The issue seems to be resolved. That was 40 minutes of Google being broken.

I live in New York City, so I thought I knew something about poor pedestrian behavior, but it turns out that the foot soldiers of the Big Apple are Boy Scouts compared to the battle-ready barbarians of Beantown.

A business trip to the Boston 'burbs required a train trip to the Back Bay and subsequent renting of a car. Getting out of the city was uneventful, mostly because I had printed out a turn-by-turn map and simply pointed myself towards a major (i.e. well-marked) highway. Returning the rental car, however, turned out to be an arduous task, complicated by a destination near the center of the city and the failure to have printed out reverse directions. Attempting to navigate any unfamiliar urban area proves difficult even in the best of circumstances, and is made harder when one tries to get real-time directions via cell phone from a wife using Google Maps.

But the thing that turned this city trip from difficult to harrowing? Bostonians.

They swarmed into the streets from every direction, with no thought to traffic laws or personal safety. Cars all around me slammed on brakes every few feet, desperate to inch their way through the offensive throng. Had it not been for the total pedestrian disregard for anything outside a one foot cone of vision, I would probably have made my train home.

There are two major differences between New York and Boston Pedestrians.

1. Boston Pedestrians Have No Fear.

They step out directly in front of moving vehicles, confident that the moving vehicle will stop. No one would do this in New York, because in New York we know that the oncoming driver will kill us. Especially if it's a taxi cab, in which case the driver will back up over our body for another pass, making absolutely sure we don't report the license plate number. Boston pedestrians have clearly played one too many games of chicken and beaten the drivers into submission. Bad things happen when one party gets the upper hand in a relationship, and this is a clear example.

2. Boston Pedestrians Are Organized.

They don't just step out directly in front of moving vehicles, but they do it as a group. People from all walks of life and all economic backgrounds are working together to thwart traffic. Sure, as a New Yorker my foot lingers for a moment over the break as I hesitate before stopping for some guy who lacks right-of-way, but, regardless of the green light, I'm not about to mow down seventeen people. In New York this would never happen. The one thing we New York pedestrians hate more than drivers is each other. No one steps into traffic and trusts other people to do the same. Here we push lone people out into the street to cause a diversion.

Note: the one New York exception is mornings on Wall Street, where there's a constant, two-hour flow of humans on pavement. The traffic lights have been updated to reflect this reality, however, and if you happen to be driving down Broadway in the Financial District at 8:45am, the lights are red for twenty five minutes and green for two seconds.

To conclude: I cannot decide whether I am enraged by or proud of Boston Pedestrians. Are they some higher level of pedestrian or an evolutionary throwback? But based on my skyrocketing blood pressure after this trip, I should probably never try to drive in India.

It turns out, I was not dead.

So, my hard drive died. It died the same weekend that I had replaced my laptop, where all my files were backed up. It died two days before my new external backup drive arrived.

I gave a thousand dollars to a specialty company that attempted to physically restore my drive, but after five months they let me know that it couldn't be done.

I gave up.

And then, today, I realized that the blog database, unlike all of the static content, was stored in a different partition, on a different hard drive. Maybe it's ridiculous I didn't discover this until now. But I don't care.

Everything has been restored.

I probably won't be doing too much blogging for a while, and I may not bother restoring some of the old features. But I will update all the books I've read, which I've kept offline these last months. Though no one cares about that but me.

Over and out.

Today, the team editor requested I remove the phrase "Future Growth" from a report title, shortening it to be, simply, "Growth," as he found the full phrase redundant. I could sense he took great pleasure in this, though I suppose it's his job to point out other's grammatical errors and either he take great pleasure in it or he dread coming to work each morning. Though what kind of man takes great pleasure in pointing out other's grammatical errors? Oh, right: me.

So, today's question: Is the phrase "Future Growth" redundant?

I argued to my editor that, in the context of the business world, it is not. A Google search (as of 7/15/08) for the quoted term returns "about 4,470,000" results, implying to me that a reasonable number of people have chosen to emply this redundancy. And, unlike a search for my favorite grammatical pet-peeve, "begs the question," none of the early results (nor any results I can find) are actually links to pages commenting on how everyone else is misusing the phrase. In fact, not even

Now, as we know, use by the masses doesn't make it correct, even if the sub-masses aren't complaining about the super-masses. But in this case, even a search for "future growth" and "redundant" turns up only results about actual future growth being redundant and not the phrase itself being grammatically redundant. Is my editor (and, by extension, me) the only one who thinks to post about this important topic?

So first, let's argue the redundant side:

FUTURE GROWTH -- REDUNDANT

Assuming we're not talking about a tumor, growth is a gradual process that occurs over time. Therefore, if you plan for your company's growth, you are of course planning for the future. Hence: redundant.

But, as I said before, I left it in the report title. Why?

FUTURE GROWTH -- NOT REDUNDANT

1) It's really just become an accepted business metaphor for communicating the more complex concept "the size which a company will be in the future after some period of growth." This I think is really what's going on. The term "future size" doesn't have the same ring to it, nor does it communicate the fact that the future size is both bigger and resulting from growth over time.

2) Future growth implies that the growth might not be consistent. A company that is growing slowly now might be growing quickly later. The future growth is variable! To put this into SAT analogy form...

Growth : Velocity :: Future Growth :: Acceleration

3) It's really just become an accepted business metaphor for communicating the less complex concept "growth." In this case, it IS redundant, but for the sake of sounding buzzwordy and compelling to the business world, we all have to deal with it.

4) According to dictionary.com, the second definition for "growth" is: "size or stage of development: It hasn't yet reached its full growth." So the word "growth" is not just a process, but also a stage or size. Hence "future growth" is nearly synonymous with "future size" except that it implies a bigger size. Actually, this is identical to explanation 1, except that in explanation 4 we are arguing that this meaning is not the result of an accepted business metaphor, but rather actual dictionary definition.

Is that valid? Can the "growth" in "future growth" be said to mean a stage or size rather than the process of growing?

This topic has begun to bore even me.

CHECK OUT MY SHORT STORY IN TORPEDO MAGAZINE VOLUME II!!!!

Since I've been drawing my web comic for one year now (actually, 1.7 years, with a 7 month hiatus) I figure its about time I do the honorable thing and pass on some independent web comics that I enjoy reading. Please don't confuse this with an attempt to place my comic on the same level as these excellent masterpieces.

Dinosaur Comics : A classic web comic about dinosaurs standing in the same position.

XKCD : A very, very clever techie comic. It may not be as funny if you have never used Emacs.

The Perry Bible Fellowship : Kind of hard to explain. It is posted somewhat unpredictably, but who am I to complain?

Indexed : I am completely jealous I don't write this.

Kate Beaton History Comics : I recently discovered this very amusing set of comics about history!

A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversable : It's beautifully rendered and fantastically written. I wouldn't call it "funny," rather, each comic is like a piece of art that tells an absurd story. This comic appears to be on permanent hiatus, but read the archive and take a strange journey into a surreal land.

1. Surprise! I'm Wearing a Wire! (Or recording you on a tape player, etc.)

Of the three, this is the least annoying movie clichè, because if I were in these situations I would also be wearing a wire. However, it's getting old. It's anti-climactic. Get the bad guy to admit something and then say, "Gotch! It's all on tape." Once again, if I ever managed to get myself wrapped up in this kind of situation I'd probably have a tape recorder surgically attached to my body and fed directly to the police. But sometimes I want my movie to end with more drama.

2. Surprise! I Was Wearing a Bullet Proof Vest!

How many times do I need to watch in shock as the protagonist of the movie gets shot down at the end of the movie, only to sit up a few minutes later, open his shirt, and reveal a bullet proof vest? It's gotten to the point where I no longer believe bullets have any power in Hollywood. Like the tape recorder, if I ever get mixed up with the kinds of people who protagonists get mixed up with in movies, I am going to start wearing a bullet proof vest all the time. And, if I'm ever shooting somebody, I'm shooting them in the head.

One more question about this: I've never worn a bullet proof vest, but are they really this easy to put under your shirt without anyone noticing?

3. Surprise! A bus just came out of nowhere and hit you!

This was cool when it happened in Final Destination. But now vehicles are coming out of nowhere in every movie. Has no one but me noticed that this is just a really low-tech camera trick? If you zoom the camera in on the victim, when the bus speeds into the frame it is totally unexpected. But the victim doesn't have the narrow field of view of the zoomed in camera... the victim has peripheral vision. And if the victim's mother taught the victim anything, it was to look both ways before crossing the street.

In the underrated 2001 film The Mexican (with Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts) they actually poke fun at this. Brad Pitt, in Mexico, looks down a road that goes on both ways into the horizon. Then the camera pulls in closer, he tries to cross the street, and a speeding truck forces him to stop. Based on the distance the truck would have had to cover in four seconds, this is clearly impossible. But that's the joke. How is it that a joke from The Mexican is being used as a dramatic plot point in serious films? I now flinch anytime the camera closes in on somebody because I think a speeding vehicle is going to mow them down.

Final Note:
Two of these three clichès are pivotal to the end of at least two of this years Acadamy Award Best Picture nominated films. In order to avoid giving anything away, I won't say which two clichès and I won't say which two films. But note that I've only seen two of the Best Picture nominees, so we're currently two-for-two.

Contest:
Find me a move that includes all three of these clichès! You will win a MixedMetaphors.net hat.

There's a fascinating article in the NYTimes about the proper use of a semicolon in a NY subway public service advertisement. I love that a reporter at the paper saw a semicolon in the subway and decided not only to track down the person who crafted the sign, but also interviewed various professors and "grammar pundits" for their opinion on its usage.

(This is an excerpt from a review of recent apocalypse novels. It first appeared on This Recording on January 25th, 2008, but this grammatically-focused section seems like an important inclusion on my personal blog as well. See the full article.)

Pre-Apocalypse: Set immediately before an impending apocalypse. Usually, because of heroic efforts on the part of the protagonist(s), the apocalypse is avoided. This type of apocalypse can be found mostly in summer blockbusters starring Bruce Willis, and possibly in the kind of novels I don't read. Examples are Armageddon, Deep Impact, and The Core.

Post-Apocalypse: Set amongst the ruins of the Earth after the apocalypse has occurred. Often these narratives contain lots of bleak social commentary, unless it's a three-hour Kevin Costner movie about water postmen, in which case it's a portrait of redemption and hope. Examples are The Road and The Pesthouse. Other examples are the zombie movies I Am Legend and 28 Days Later. Note that these two are a recent development in the zombie movie genre, since normally they fall into the next category.

Apocalypse: Set during the actual apocalypse, when all the cool stuff is happening. Since often the apocalypse is a quick event (a giant meteor, a nuclear war), this type of narrative requires the rare apocalyptic force that can be spread out over an hour and a half or a few hundred pages. Hence, this category is primarily made up of zombie or other monster movies, where the reader/viewer actually witnesses the slow destruction of society. Examples are most zombie movies (with the exception of I Am Legend and 28 Days Later, which both follow minimal casts long after the initial destruction is complete).

Post-Apocalypse-Apocalypse: This is when, during the post-apocalyptic period, there is another apocalyptic event, such as in The Pesthouse, when poison gas inexplicably rises from the ground and kills villages of people for no reason whatsoever and then the village burns to the ground. Or maybe this should be Post-Apocalypse-Holocaust.

Post-Post-Apocalypse: This category encompasses all books and movies that follow the rebuilding of civilization after the initial post-apocalyptic period has been survived. Yes, this is technically still post-apocalyptic, but there's an important distinction. The notable entry in this category is 28 Weeks Later, the excellent sequel to 28 Days Later.

Post-Post-Apocalypse-Apocalypse: Actually, 28 Weeks Later really falls into this category, since during the post-post-apocalyptic rebuilding of London, there is another apocalyptic event. If they decide to make the movie 28 Years Later, I'd just consider that cycling back to the Post-Apocalypse. We need limits, people!

But the award goes to the classic sci-fi novel A Canticle for Liebowitz, which is split into three parts and therefore becomes the only member of the Post-Post-Post-Apocalypse-Apocalypse category. Note that this is a (Post-Post-Post-Apocalypse)-Apocalypse novel and not a Post-(Post-(Post-Apocalypse)-Apocalypse) novel, which is entirely different.

For those of you eager for more MixedMetaphors in print, I've just had a new short story accepted for publication. It will be in Torpedo magazine, a literary journal published by Falcon vs Monkey, Falcon Wins press. Falcon vs. Monkey, Falcon Wins is a Melbourne-based independent publishing company, dedicated to supporting emerging writers and illustrators. Since it is in Melbourne, that means you're going to have to pay quite a bit of money if you want to get your hands on a copy. It's $20 (AU) for the journal plus $15 (AU) for shipping. As everyone knows, 1 Australian dollar = 0.877 U.S. dollars, so it isn't that bad.

There are quite a few NYC writers lined up in the April edition, so we may organize a reading in the city, in which case you'll be able to pick up a copy without the additional shipping cost. And if you can't make the reading in person, you can ask me to buy you a copy, and then reimburse me when I give it to you at my leisure.

Something crazy has happened. There is an audio version of my short story available from Wisconsin Public Radio!

WPR did a report on apocalypse fiction and interviewed Justin Taylor (the anthology editor). The piece will be available online tomorrow (Saturday, January 20th). But a recording of someone READING MY STORY is available now. I don't know who the reader is, but hopefully it will be clear once I can listen to the whole interview.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this audio version of my story. On the one hand, I'm very excited that WPR liked it so much they recorded it and put it online. On the other hand, you'd think I would have heard about it ahead of time: the license agreement for the anthology did not give away audio rights to my text. I'm not actually concerned, and I assume that this can only be good for my public image.

Check out my post on the Top Ten Books of 2007.

Now that MixedMetaphors.net has burst forth, naked and pure, from its own ashes, I will attempt to post something here other than links to actual posts I make elsewhere. But since This Recording is now my blog away from blog, I will let you know when my rambling nonsense appears there. Of course, you should also feel free to read it every day, whether or not I am involved.

A welcome back comic!

While MixedMetaphors.net was away, my blogging did not entirely halt. Check out some of these articles at This Recording:

A review of The Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England.

A debunking of an insulting Portfolio article.

A review of Eugenides' new book.

Oh, and this time I'm really back.

Welcome back, world.

My velo-bound, ninety-three-acid-free-page thesis will be ready for pickup at four o'clock. All I need to do after that is track down my adviser, have him sign both copies, and turn it into the school.

Today I watched ten minutes of Return of the Living Dead Part II. Why only ten minutes? Because of fear. Not fear of zombies. No, it was fear of the title.

Return of the Living Dead Part II

Doesn't the "Return" already imply that this is a "Part II"? Shouldn't it be called "The Living Dead Part II: The Return" or something like that? Return of the Living Dead Part II is like making the movie Ocean's Twelve Part II. Or Spider Man 3 Part II. It doesn't make any sense. Unless... unless what's happening is a diverging tree of movies and sequels.

Let's simplify this by calling our original movie "Z" and imagine an infinite array of movies, each expanding upon a subset of the movie space.

Z
Z II -> ZII II -> ZII III -> ...
Z III -> ZIII II -> ZIII III -> ...
Z IIII -> ZIIII II -> ZIIII III -> ...
...

Since I can't portray three- (or more-) dimensional space here, you'll have to imagine the ZII II II and the ZII III II and the Z IIII II III II and so on in their appropriate places. But the idea is that the movie Z II II (for example) takes off where Z II ended, which is also where Z III takes off, but in a different direction, allowing reinterpretations of the Z space. For that matter, why limit it? There could be an infinite number of Z II's, each taking off where Z ended but in a different way, and then an infinite number of movies taking off where each of those infinite number of Z II's ended. God, we need a new nomenclature (ZII-III III-II) just to capture this complexity.

This is not how movies are made!

But perhaps they should be...?

Has this ever been done before? I am reminded of the increasing number of Highlander sequels, each claiming to ignore all but the original.

In any case, the "Return" in Return of the Living Dead Part II could, I suppose, represent not that this is a sequel to a movie called Living Dead (or Night of the Living Dead or any other of the million variants on Living Dead) but, simply, that the movie involves Living Dead who Return. And, in fact, this appears to be the case.

Though this raises a different issue. I think the "Returning" part implies the "Living" part, and vice versa. Normally, the Dead neither Live nor Return, and if they are doing one they are probably doing the other.

But, I suppose, not necessarily, as these other possible movie titles demonstrate:

Return of the Unliving Dead, aka Someone Dug Up Unanimated Corpses
or
The Living Dead Decide To Go Somewhere They've Never Been Before

And that's why I had to stop watching the movie.

I realize I've been slacking in my blog duties. Recently my "creative" talents have been focused on my MFA thesis, which is due May 2nd. I've finally created the Peeps web comic, which I know some of you have been excited to see. (Or at least impatient to see.) It is, unfortunately, not very funny, more of a whimsical flashback to childhood. But at least it has some Peeps. Scanning actual Peeps required me to detach my all-in-one printer/scanner/copier and give it a thorough cleaning, even after which the next couple of scans had kind of a blurry yellow tint.

Anyway, after May 2nd I will be a little more consistent in my efforts. And if you are upset that today's comic did not feature giant, mutated Peeps... well, remember, now that I've scanned them in once I will always have those images available for a future effort.

I'll miss him.

NYT obit

You may remember the long, near-tragic saga of my attempt to see all three parts of The Coast of Utopia at Lincoln Center. By now I've seen the whole thing. Instead of forcing you to read my rambling, incoherent review on this blog, I'll instead point you to EconoCulture, an internet magazine of reviews, interviews, and general cultural content, where you can read my rambling, incoherent review there!

To summarize for those of you too lazy to read the first paragraph:
Support EconoCulture for supporting me, and check out my review of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia.

After much deliberation I have decided that April Fools jokes are dumb and that MixedMetaphors.net will not actually be going anywhere. This site is near and dear to my heart for the following important reasons:

1) It takes up too much of my time. Time that I could spend doing more productive things.
2) There is nothing of value produced on this site. It's all nonsense and poppycock.
3) I hate blogs.

That's right.

Thank you to all of the loyal readers who have been with me the whole way. You are all good people. Except for one of you. You know who you are.

Sincerely,
MixedMetaphors.net

After much deliberation I have decided to shut down my website. It was not easy to come to this decision, but I make it now for the following reasons:

1) It takes up too much of my time. Time that I could spend doing more productive things.
2) There is nothing of value produced on this site. It's all nonsense and poppycock.
3) I hate blogs.

Thank you to all of the loyal readers who have been with me the whole way. You are all good people. Except for one of you. You know who you are.

Sincerely,
MixedMetaphors.net

There is a great article in the NYTimes about a 31 year-old feud between Marquez and the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who, apparently, gave him one serious shiner. Also, a great quote about the equally interesting Gore Vidal / Norman Mailer feud. I won't ruin all the details. Read it for yourself!

I'm not sure what's happening with my blog, but leaving comments seems to be problematic. If you submit a comment and nothing seems to be happening, just be patient. It's working, just grindingly slow. In fact you don't even have to keep the comment page open. You can close it and walk away and when you come back the comment should be there if you refresh the page.

Anyway, I'll get around to fixing it. It's not like that many people are actually trying to comment here.

The last post got me thinking about zombies. I'm pretty much done with what you might want to call my "zombie stage," a time when zombies seemed to come up in conversation at least once or twice a day. At the moment zombies have been become more of a running joke in my life and not a constant obsession. As a public service to myself (if it's for myself, is it still public?) I'm going to chart the rise and fall of my zombie obsession.

STAGE 0: Not obsessed with zombies.
At this point I don't even know what zombies are, probably because I'm a baby.

STAGE 1: Scared of zombies, but scared of them on an equal level to everything else.
Zombies, vampires, werewolves, murderers, the dark. I probably haven't even seen a zombie movie at this point, just heard someone mention them or saw a picture. At this stage they are a frightening concept, no more real than any other monster, but when has that kept me from lying in bed at night and thinking about something?

STAGE 2: Still scared of zombies, but MORE scared of poltergeists.
At some point a babysitter let me watch the movie Poltergeist.

STAGE 3: Not really scared of zombies.
I become a semi-adult and am no longer afraid of the dark.

STAGE 4: SCARED OF ZOMBIES!!!
Not sure exactly when this happened. At some point I became aware of the metaphorical implications of zombie-hood, how it preyed not upon my fear of death but my fear of meaninglessness and loss, of futile attempts at art, of humankind's inability to rise above its animal nature. Plus those zombies are scary! In this stage I think about zombies a lot but don't mention it to anyone. This stage doesn't last long though, because the truth is my fear of zombies is tied directly into my desire to create an outward appearance of eccentricity.

STAGE 5: Mention zombies to others.
In various moments of weakness I bring up zombies to my friends and loved ones. I take my girlfriend to see the remake of Dawn of the Dead. I discuss how I chose my condo because of its zombie-proof features. I wonder aloud what I would do if a zombie infestation suddenly breaks out in the supermarket. My girlfriend starts to have nightmares (about zombies or about the fact that she is dating a crazy person? I don't know). She bans me from saying the word "zombie" and so I resort to calling them "z's" when she is around.

STAGE 6: Is it a zombie obsession or a zombie obsession obsession?
Suddenly everyone seems to know about my zombie obsession. Whenever I'm anywhere with my friends someone says, "What would you do right now if you saw a zombie?" For the first time in years I don't feel like talking about zombies. I have gone too far, I have talked about zombies too much.

STAGE 7: Zombies recede into the background.
Zombies become an alternate-personality concept, something I post about on my blog and use in some absurd literary short stories, but in rarely do my friends or I mention zombies anymore. But they are not forgotten. No, I am ever vigilant, looking for the signs of the coming zombie hordes. When that day comes I will be ready. This is my current stage.

STAGE 8: BECOME A ZOMBIE.

My Girlfriend: If I die, I want to donate my organs.

Me: Okay.

My Girlfriend: But the truth is I'm a little scared about the idea.

Me: Why?

My Girlfriend: I'm afraid that one day scientists might be able bring me back to life. But if I've already donated my organs...

Me: If you're scared about that, I can make sure they cremate your body.

My Girlfriend: What? I WANT to be brought back to life!

Me: Oh, I thought you were talking about becoming a zombie.

* * * * *

There are seven reasons I'm posting this conversation. (Actually, there are only two, but I've decided to set an arbitrary goal for my numbered list.)

1) It was kind of funny. The zombie thing was actually a joke, but my girlfriend thought I meant it. It's great when you're so crazy that you're girlfriend actually believes you are crazy when you aren't being crazy. This alone would not have been enough reason to post this conversation. Hence the six more reasons.

2) My girlfriend has requested that I include references to her in more blog posts, specifically in a positive manner. Apparently she feels I've been referencing her in a negative/neutral way or not at all.

3) I have no standards about what to include on this blog.

4) I haven't posted anything in a couple of days.

5) I enjoy tooting my own horn.

6) Zombies!

7) The metaphysical implications of organ donation, the afterlife, and post-mortem tissue regeneration is an important topic, one not discussed enough in today's culture. What makes up our identity and is it a uniquely non-Newtonian thing? Does this identity (or "the soul") exist after death, and if so is it connected in some way to our corporal form? Is it physical or spiritual, and how is it impacted by the idea of donating body parts and, obviously, the inevitable onset of world-wide zombieism?

I'm pleased that the new horror movie about the ten plagues, The Reaping, is being released on April 6th, smack dab in the middle of Passover. Excellent job by Warner Brothers for their synchronization with the Jewish holiday!

I have a hunch that this movie will become an immediate Passover classic, second only to the 1956 Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner film, The Ten Commandments.

I do have two concerns about the movie. First, it seems a bit heavy on the Christianity, with lots of priests but nary a rabbi in sight. Second, they have their plagues wrong. Anyone who has read the Passover Haggadah twice a year, every year, can tell you the ten plagues are:
1) Blood.
2) Frogs.
3) Lice.
4) Wild Beasts.
5) Pestilence.
6) Boils.
7) Hail.
8) Locust.
9) Darkness.
10) Slaying of the Firstborn.

But in the movie trailer they are listed out as:
1) Water into Blood.
2) Frogs.
3) Lice.
4) Flies.
5) Diseased Livestock.
6) Boils.
7) Storms of Fire.
8) Locusts.
9) Darkness.
10) Death of Firstborn.

I'm willing to accept "Storms of Fire" as opposed to "Hail." I get where they're going with that. Pep it up a little for the big screen. And "Cattle Disease" instead of "Pestilence" is just a synonym issue, dumbing it down a bit for today's less educated viewer. I'm even willing to overlook the swap of "Wild Beasts" into "Flies," though, frankly, I'm not sure why they made the switch. My guess is that "Wild Beasts" ups the action too early in the film. They're trying to keep things isolated to bug/amphibian terror in the first half of the movie.

But while it may seem like a simple semantic difference, the whole "Death of Firstborn" instead of "Slaying of the Firstborn" is a major change that doesn't sit well with me. It's so passive. As if the Firstborn just happen to die. No, this isn't some circumstantial death, this is about SLAYING. God sends out the Angel of Death to reap some holy vengeance.

Of course, with slayings I suppose the Haggadah solution might be considered anti-climatic. Maybe that's why there are no rabbis in the film. All the Jews are at home saying, "Guys, trust us, we've dealt with this kind of thing before. Just put some lamb's blood on the front door and you'll be fine." Meanwhile Hilary Swank is out killing satanic babies or something.

When I was a child we used to watch The Ten Commandments every year on Yom Kippur. I guess my parents wanted to keep us kids quiet while they were fasting but since it seemed wrong to have us watching Weekend At Bernie's on the High Holy Days they compromised with a religiously-affiliated film. Plus it's four hours long.

I'll do the same kind of thing with my kids, except those punks are going to watch The Reaping, and then I'll tell them that's what's going to happen to them if they don't leave mommy and daddy alone.

That reminds me of this time the babysitter let me watch Poltergeist and I spent the next five years convinced the tree outside my window was going to eat me.

Actually, by the time I have kids movies will probably be some kind of holographic image instantaneously injected into the brain. Forcing them to sit through four hours of black and white Charlton Heston will be the worst torture I can possibly inflict on them. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I ever actually enjoyed The Ten Commandments in my youth. But, hey, it was better than NOT watching a movie.

This all reminds me of the time my girlfriend and I went to see the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead while on vacation in Corpus Christi, Texas. (I'm still not sure how I talked her into that.) On opening night at 10 o'clock the line extended out the theater, and a conservative-looking couple with their three young daughters stood behind us. My girlfriend and I whispered to each other, shocked that parents would take their young children to see Dawn of the Dead, at 10 in the evening no less. Finally the father tapped me on the shoulder, explained that he didn't frequent the movies, and wondered if this was in fact the line to see The Passion of the Christ. I breathed a sigh of relief and pointed him elsewhere (he looked horrified when I told him what the line was actually for). Then my girlfriend and I spent the rest of the wait whispering about how we couldn't believe parents would take their young children to see The Passion, at 10 in the evening no less. I'm still not sure which movie is bloodier.

In Summary:
The Reaping opens during Passover. Isn't that funny?

For reasons I cannot fully explain the forthcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie fills me with a sense of excitement and what can only be called "the giggles." It would be untrue to claim that I ever considered myself a true Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan. Rather, they served as my introduction into the world of "camp," something to approach with a measure of gleeful irony, helping me understand that you can be both horrified and amused by ridiculous constructions of logic, in this case, four teenage turtles that have been mutated into ninjas.

But this being MixedMetaphors.net, my main point is one of grammar. Why "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" as opposed to "Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles"? I've never known the exact rule (don't worry, by the end of this post we will have that rectified) but it always seemed to me that adjectives should be listed in ascending order of importance. And what adjective is the most important - the most crucial - to the nature of these turtles? That they are ninjas? No, that they are mutants. If not for their mutant-ness they would not even be capable of ninja-ness! They are first and foremost mutant turtles, and only secondly are they teenage ninjas.

So I turned to my Chicago Manual of Style, which isn't really a grammar book and never seems to answer my most pressing questions. This time was no exception. I next turned to Google, which always gives me what I want but in a way that makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable with the results (there is a rude metaphor there, but I will it leave up to the reader). Google pointed me to learn4good.com, which had the following to say about adjective order:

Opinion -> Size -> Age -> Shape -> Colour -> Origin -> Material -> Purpose

That "u" in "colour" disturbed me, but I decided if British/Canadian English speakers use the rule, then it's probably stricter than any corresponding rule in American English.

So, if we classify the words in question as follows:

Teenage = Age
Mutant = Origin
Ninja = Purpose

It turns out that the name "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" utilizes correct adjective order after all. I will adjust my mental-block accordingly and give the Ninja Turtles their due. Yes, they may be teenage mutants, but were it not for their excellent martial arts skills they would have little hope of defeating the maleficent Shredder!

Today I guest contributed a post for the blog "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Sitting Here Listening to this Recording." Read my entry about sponge dinosaurs and the new movie Zodiac. Note that I am not responsible for the picture of Stacy Keibler in her underwear, though you are welcome to look at it. Also, there are certain things said of me that are untrue.

You should feel free to read the LaGWASHLttR blog beyond just my well-crafted article. It puts my blog to shame. It has things that MixedMetaphors.net lacks, such as content. But also, pictures and music and links to videos. It is as if it has taken full advantage of the internet, recognized its position in this vast network of various media and decided to be a part of it. MixedMetaphors.net, on the other hand, stands with its face to the wall. But, let us not forget, I hate all blogs, including this one, and I never intended MixedMetaphors.net to be anything more than a place to talk about how much I hate blogs. Which, frankly, I haven't done enough of lately. So, getting back to our statement of purpose: I hate blogs.

Sigh. My heart's just not in it anymore. Clearly - after almost three years of existence - this is not a blog about hating blogs. I'd like to say it is a place for a metatextual deconstruction of quasi-public journaling, but I don't know what most of those words mean.

Since this afternoon's post I have not been able to stop thinking about the Swiss accidentally invading Liechtenstein. In fact, I feel it deserves to be in all caps at all times and all conjugations: Yes, the Swiss Accidentally Invaded Liechtenstein.

This has led me towards a Philip Rothian envisioning of an alternate universe where the Swiss do, in fact, Accidentally Take Over Liechtenstein. We can call it The Plot Against Liechtenstein if you want to extend the Philip Rothisms. I haven't read The Plot Against America but I do own it in a delectable hardcover, and I understand that the "plot" has something to do with Nazis taking over America. Since I still haven't fully forgiven the Swiss for harboring stolen Nazi loot, this becomes an even more appropriate parallel.

Here is what happens in my imagined alternate universe: The Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein. Liechtenstein, not having an army, Accidentally Surrenders to the Swiss, despite the fact that the Swiss Have No Ammunition. The Swiss accept the surrender and Take Over Liechtenstein. At no point do the Swiss return any stolen Nazi loot, but who would expect these accidental aggressors to do such a thing right at the moment they are expanding their empire.

Next in this fantasy: nothing. The U.N. may or may not pass some kind of tepid resolution speaking for or against the Accidental Taking Over of Liechtenstein. Otherwise the world continues as usual. For the Swiss it is something of a Pyrrhic victory as they now are responsible for 34,000 additional Liechtensteinians.

I am perhaps being unfair to Liechtenstein. Because I have never been there and because it is so small I act as if no one would care if the entire country changed ownership. Someone would probably care.

There is a new comic today, one which I am particularly fond of because it involves a mixing of media.

This actually happened. The Swiss actually invaded Liechtenstein accidentally. It's perhaps the funniest New York Times headline ever. There is little I can add. Except to say that it would have been even funnier if the Swiss accidentally took over Liechtenstein, which, considering Liechtenstein consists of 34,000 people and has no army, doesn't seem so unlikely.

That's all for today.

For some reason I have been brainstorming titles for Harlequin romance novels set in an insurance company. Why? Because perhaps some small part of me misses my days as an insurance executive. Did you ever want to know what sultry seductions go on behind the scenes of the risk management industry? Read these books to find out!

- Underwrite My Heart
- Insufficient Coverage
- You're in Good Hands With All-State
- PPO & OPP
- Speaking as an Actuarial Statistician, You Are 17% More Likely to Go Home with Me If You Let Me Buy You Another Drink
- Short-Term Disability, Long-Term Affair
- The Marraige Rider
- The Co in Co-Pay
- HIPPA Violation
- Love, Actuary
- High Deductables, Low Inhibitions
- HSAs Are Both an Effective Means of Preparing For Medical Risk and a Good Financial Investment, Now Let's Do It

and, for the reader with different tastes:
- HMOsexual

I know I've ranted about the media treatment of Apple before, so I'll try to be brief. Plus since I haven't been inspired to post much lately I'm willing to jot down anything, even if it's annoying and boring.

The following news item caught my attention: Cisco, Apple settle over right to iPhone name.

I'm fine with that. I'm glad the two companies could come to some agreement that will hopefully be beneficial to consumers and each other. My shock is how the media and legal analysts seem to agree with Steve Jobs' point of view that the whole lawsuit was "silly" and are saying that the "there's little likelihood of future trademark tangles."

Are you kidding me? Two phones called the iPhone? Yes, one is using VoIP and one uses the cellular network, but how could anyone possibly imagine that these are not playing in - at the very least - a closely related space, if not the same space. To say that "Cisco's argument that the phones could eventually compete [seems] like an unlikely scenario" is not only short-sighted but a willful denial of everything we know about how business and technologies grow. Even if they never become direct competition to each other OF COURSE a second widely-advertised phone called the iPhone is going to confuse customers looking at Cisco's same-named product, which is just what trademarks are meant to prevent.

But, no, according to the article, legal analysts say things like "there's probably room for them to find peaceful cooperation," and "the combination of the two is obviously more powerful than the two butting heads." Which is all obviously a finger-shaking towards Cisco, since they are the one bringing a lawsuit and "butting heads" rather than trying to play nice.

Here's where your imagination needs to come in. Let's imagine for a moment that MICROSOFT released a new product called the iPhone without first obtaining permission for a name that had been in use by another technology company for the last seven years. Do you think the press and legal analysts would consider it "silly" for the other tech company to be upset? Do you think they'd take Microsoft's side?

I normally avoid cross-posting between my blog and my "book track" because who the hell cares what books I read? (Also, who the hell cares what I post on my blog? But since this is something I'm posting on my blog, it would be insincere of me to pursue that question further at this time.) I'm going to break protocol and direct you to read about (and buy!) the new memoir American Shaolin by Matthew Polly.

Find my book track notes here.
Find the Amazon page here.

My good reader, you embark now on a tale epic in nature, filled with tragedy and loss, grief and anger, fiscal nonsense and monetary ruin. It is many a man who has been brought to his knees by the saga of the one dollar Metrocard!

In New York City there lived a man. A man who, like many New Yorkers, rode the subway. A man much like me. But not me. Because this story is fictional. Let's call the man something soothing and generic, a strong, definitive name yet still ambiguous, a name that holds potential. But not too much potential. A name that defies the individual and instead captures the ideal that is the Everyman. Let us call him Man A. No. That's too much potential. Let's call him Man B. Yes, Man B.

Man B, as previously mentioned, rode the New York City subway. He used his pay-per-use Metrocard and each ride cost him two dollars. When he ran out of money on his Metrocard he would buy a new one for twenty dollars, getting the four dollar bonus. That's two rides free!

Then one day he needed to go to JFK Airport. Man B took the very convenient and comfortable MTA Airtrain. This cost him five dollars, also paid on his Metrocard. Due to various travel reasons that are irrelevant to this epic story he returned to New York via Newark Airport, taking the also convenient NJ Transit into Penn Station, for which he paid via credit card.

This meant that later in the week, after a few more subway rides, he was left with ONE DOLLAR ON HIS METROCARD! ONE DOLLAR!

For some time Man B clung to this Metrocard, refilling it and refilling it, always ending up with one dollar remaining. He couldn't throw away the Metrocard because he'd be throwing away one dollar, but he also couldn't figure out how to use that one dollar.

Finally, out of desperation, instead of refilling his Metrocard with twenty dollars, he pressed the "other amount" button and entered nineteen dollars. This would give him a total of twenty dollars. Of course this meant he was forfeiting the bonus four dollars simply to save one dollar. Perhaps not the wisest financial move but he didn't think about that until it was too late.

BUT, the Metrocard vending machine was too smart for him. While he did not get the four dollar bonus, he did still get a twenty percent bonus provided to all amounts purchased over ten dollars. This meant an extra three dollars and eighty cents, leaving him with a Metrocard containing twenty three dollars and eighty cents. Now he would be left with one dollar and eighty cents. WORSE THAN ONE DOLLAR!

Perhaps he could keep refilling his Metrocard in this way until he was left with an amount of money divisible by two. But no, because the twenty percent bonus meant that he'd always cycle back to one remaining extra dollar. Man B isn't going to go into the details right now, but trust me, Man B worked it all out on an Excel spreadsheet to double check and he's pretty sure about it. Man B can't quite explain why it comes out this way but he's fairly certain it has something to do with math.

Man B, thanks to the help of his Excel spreadsheet, discovered that the best he could possibly do would be to end up with an extraneous twenty cents on his Metrocard. Either that or take another one-way trip to the JFK Airport which he didn't expect to happen any time soon. Or he could put nine dollars on his Metrocard, avoiding the twenty percent bonus, but that would mean trading two dollars for one dollar, and now that he recognized this negative outcome he felt kind of foolish about doing it. Or, alternatively, he could take a round trip into New Jersey on the Path train, which charges a dollar fifty per ride and also accepts Metrocards. But why would he want to go to New Jersey?

The End

I've been debating getting an iPod (and I use the term "iPod" as a brand eponym for any mp3 player). One of my major purchase rationalizations is that such a modern music-playing device will motivate me to work out more frequently. I hear there is also such a thing called "podcasts" where in which a human will "cast" via said "pod," in ideal cases this casting will be done by a human who interests me enough to jog and listen simultaneously.

This morning I attempted to prove this rationalization by borrowing my roommate's "nano" (so-called because it draws power from microscopic, dancing nanobots, hence the fact that its name is not capitalized) when I went on my tri-weekly (oh, let's be honest: monthly) treadmill jog. For the first half of my workout the iPod seemed to be working; I ran with an intensity not seen before in this basement gym. Music served as a primal encouragement, like echoing drums before the hunt!

Then halfway through my run my left leg began to cramp up and my will to jog slackened. The miraculous nano appliance began to fail me. It is important (in fact, crucial to this post) to note that this weakening resolve coincided with the departure of the attractive woman who had been heretofore occupying the treadmill next to mine. Is it possible my exercise determination originated not from the music but from my instinctual desire to look manly next to a female of the species?

Yes.

Fortunately, at the precise moment of my waning spirits, the intelligent nano-based music player served up The Clash for my listening approval. Approved! I found the strength of character to jog another five minutes, or at least until my laundry cycle completed.

Morals:
1) Instead of getting an iPod I should pay a woman to watch me jog.
2) The Clash should always be spread abundantly throughout my playlists.
3) I should stretch more before running.

I have some important news that I have so far not mentioned on this blog: I am being published! A short story of mine will appear in the forthcoming anthology, The Apocalypse Reader. Following that link will take you to the Amazon.com pre-order page. (Well, it's "pre-order" at the time of this posting, though it will eventually become the "order" page and, I suppose, finally the "out-of-print" page.) My name doesn't appear on the cover, though I have no problem being reduced to "and many others" when it means I'm appearing in a collection with Rick Moody and Neil Gaiman and Shelley Jackson.

I won't give away what my story is about, though I don't mind saying it is about the apocalypse. Actually, if you have read much of this blog you should probably be able to guess exactly what possible apocalyptic event has captured my interest.

Also, in the coming months I should have another short story appearing in the literary journal Red China Magazine, so keep an eye out. I'll let you all know when it appears.

After cutting my hair I use less shampoo and conditioner as there is, in fact, less of my hair. But I also use less face soap. Which is odd, because - despite my recent hair cut - my face remains roughly the same size.

I've lived in my apartment for over a year and they (they = management) finally fixed the doorbell. Not having a working doorbell hasn't been my biggest concern, but it has caused some trouble. Despite the fact that I taped a "DOORBELL BROKEN" sign over it, every delivery person ever to come to my door tried to ring it. So a notification of a delivery in my apartment amounted to a faint clicking noise. Over the months I became very attuned to this subtle sound, able to discern it over the noise of the television, the radio, or even my white noise generator (which exists for the sole purpose of blocking out such sounds).

The new (working) doorbell provides relief from this constant pressure to achieve super-human hearing. But it comes with its own problem: it has been installed upside-down. Upside-down? Yes, upside-down. Instead of making the sound "Ding Dong" like every other doorbell, it makes the sound "Dong Ding." "DONG DING!" While that may not make much sense in text form, come to my apartment and ring my doorbell. You'll understand what I mean.

My building superintendent has been replaced.
The old superintendent was named Izzy.
The new superintendent is named Ozzy.

From Izzy to Ozzy

Does anyone else find that amusing?

As an extravagant holiday present to my girlfriend, I decided to buy tickets to all three Lincoln Center performances of the new Tom Stoppard trilogy. I only have a cursory knowledge of what the plays are about, but Tom Stoppard is one of my favorite playwrights and I've been meaning to see more theater while in the city... You can see how this is a great present for my girlfriend, no? Actually, Ethan Hawke is in the show and she has a special bond with him since one time they hung out together at a 20-person party. But that's not the point of this post. The point is that after buying tickets for Part I and Part II I discovered that there are NO SEATS LEFT for Part III! Nooooo! I am not at the Coast of Utopia, I am at the Coast of HELL!

My roommate is going to try and use the power of his platinum AmEx to get me some post-2/21 tickets for the third part, but I may just have to watch parts I and II and then read the script for part III or something. If anyone happens to have an extra two tickets to part III, let me know.

Anyway, I hope everyone is doing well. Sorry for neglecting the blog for so long!

<<<<<------ UPDATE ------>>>>>

GREAT NEWS SPORTS FANS!

Due to popular demand, The Coast of Utopia has been extended until May!!! I now have two tickets - center orchestra!!! - for part III!!! Can I use more exclamation points!?!?! NO!!!!!!

I'm not as much of a zombie fanatic as I used to be - mainly because I've gotten it out of my system. (If all goes well a zombie-themed short story of mine will be appearing in an anthology sometime in the next 6-12 months, but we'll talk more of that at a later time.) Regardless, my attention has been grabbed by a new book by the author of the excellent non-fictional manual, "The Zombie Survival Guide." This time Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks) recounts a fictitious (?) oral history of the zombie/human war in "World War Z."

I first saw this book while wandering Barnes & Noble with my girlfriend. It was erroneously placed on the "New Fiction" table, and at her urging I moved the stack to the "Current Events" table. She is very indulgent of my obsessions.

I'm starting to think that Google's unofficial slogan, "Do No Evil," is eventually going to cause them a PR problem (if it isn't already). So far Google has been fairly unblemished in terms of corporate vilification. Aside from a few clever jabs (such as this article from The Onion) and a brief outcry when people thought they were going to be reading user e-mail, most criticism hasn't yet entered mainstream consciousness. But as they grow in size and scope there will be more and more of it. And suddenly "Do No Evil" is going to become a constant pain.

Despite popular consensus, I believe most companies do NOT go into business in order to "do evil." During the late nineties the tech world was pretty much in agreement that Bill Gates was a bad person, even though just a few years earlier the tech world had loved Bill Gates for taking on IBM, the previous evil-company incarnate. The point is that when a company grows to a certain size, whether via a general distrust in corporations or some kind of laser-focused jealousy, regardless of that company's intentions, people start to suspect it of being secretly (or, in Microsoft's case, unsecretly) evil. And, like it or not, Google is at (or beyond) that point. They can no longer buy up other companies and release new free utilities and have everyone exclaim, "Google is the best! They have my best interests at heart!" Frankly, they've gotten away with that kind of response a lot longer than most.

When the tide changes, and the mainstream media and culture responds more cautiously (if not negatively) to new moves by Google (such as, perhaps, their latest push to not just own all your data but also all the documents you create) they are going to discover every single negative article and web comic and political cartoon poking fun at "Do No Evil." In fact, do a Google search on "Google do no evil" and after a couple of links to Google's corporate philosophy you'll find the rest are all questioning the motto.

Now, to be clear, I'm not claiming that Google is doing evil. I think they're just a company trying to grow and earn money by providing real value to consumers and being a good global citizen. But it doesn't matter if that's true, because big companies are seen as evil. So now Google has a choice to make:

1. Stick with the motto "Do No Evil" and have every critic constantly mock it and poke fun at it and question it and use it as a symbol of Google's supposed hypocrisy and call it a lie and essentially increase the level of general criticism every time Google does anything.

2. Drop the motto, which would be like admitting that they've decided to start doing evil.

A friend of mine works at AOL and he asked me to try out a new "snaggable" module. I am in no way endorsing AOL Video, aside from saying that it is AWESOME! But, also, just in case my friends or relatives from any of the following companies are reading, I would like to say the following video services are also awesome: Microsoft, Google, and Apple! All AWESOME!!!

I stumbled upon a link to the art of Peter Callesen and I think it's amazing stuff. Check it out, and make sure to look at the "A4 Papercut" page because I think that's the most impressive work.

A new idiomatic tic of the English language has made it into my sights. What do people mean when they use the phrase "single greatest" to describe something? How does "single greatest" differ from "greatest"? You know what I'm talking about: "That's my single greatest fear," or "What do you consider your single greatest strength?" Doesn't the word "greatest" already imply some kind of singular position in a list of other potentially-but-not-quite-as-great things? Take, for example, the following comparison: "Of the hundred foods I like, all 100 are the greatest." That doesn't make any sense! Why? Because only one thing can be the greatest. Greatest implies single. Does "single greatest" mean that not only is this thing being described the greatest of other potentials on the list, but it is the ONLY thing on the list? I don't think so, because that would rid the significance of being the greatest. If your greatest strength is also your only strength, then it is also your weakest strength, etc. I suppose the word is merely serving as a grammatical intensifier (like "very" or "really"), putting emphasis on the phrase but not actually changing the meaning in any way. And, I admit, I sometimes use words like "very" or "really" so it's hard for me to fight against the totality of redundant intensification. But my problem is that "very" and "really" are intentionally purposeless adverbs, they are recognized as doing a specific non-functional job. "Single" is usually a valuable player in the word community, it contributes to the meaning of a sentence - in fact, it oft serves a pivotal and irreplaceable role - and I dislike this blatant disregard for the otherwise important meaning "single" adds to the English language.

In just about every bad television show or movie where a hostage negotiator is negotiating with somebody who has taken hostages, at some point the hostage negotiator says something to the effect of "Why don't you let the hostages go and take me instead?" All the police/FBI/etc are always shocked and upset, though I don't know why this move should come as a surprise to them - haven't they seen every other bad television show and movie with hostage negotiations?

I understand from a dramatic point of view why this works for a show. Instead of random pedestrians at risk (difficult for the audience to care), suddenly the protagonist is put into the dangerous situation (due to an act of self-sacrifice no less). It's such a standard move in bad (and some good) plot-lines that I have to ask the question: DOES THIS EVER HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE? In an actual hostage situation, does the hostage negotiator ever say, "Why don't you let the hostages go and take me instead?" Ever?

In theory, hostage negotiators have also watched movies and television shows, so they at least understand the concept. Yet for some reason I doubt they do it. In fact, I suspect on the first day of "Hostage Negotiating 101" the very first thing they tell you is, "Do not, under any circumstances, offer to swap yourself for the hostages."

One more point: If I ever find myself having taken hostages and the hostage negotiator suggests that I make this trade, I'm going to say "no."

I thought the first four comics might have been a burst of random, one-time creativity. But when I decided to make a fifth, things started to seem a bit more semi-consistent. So I have added a "comics" link to the top of the site and I will now begin posting a new web comic every Monday. That's right! Every Monday! This is a commitment that I will in no way uphold!

Also, for those of you interested in limited technical accomplishments, I have made some adjustments to the site settings so that you can link more easily to a specific section.
Instead of: "http://www.mixedmetaphors.net/index.php?section=blog"
You can now use: "http://www.mixedmetaphors.net/blog".
Isn't that nice?

There's an obvious media bias that nobody is talking about, there is a journalistic personal preference pervading the news, and this blogger has decided it's time to take a stand! I'm talking about the constant pro-Mac position taken by supposedly objective reporters, the blatant advertisements for Apple in the guise of news. You think I'm kidding? Check out some of these 2006 stories on MSNBC.com... (MSNBC! If you didn't know, the MS stands for MICROSOFT, and yet still the Apple-biased media defies its own corporate owner. That's just plain un-American.)

Mac Pro: The ultimate in desktop computing
Back in black: MacBook world's best laptop?
'Boot Camp' for Intel-based Macs likely to woo Windows users to Apple
Why Steve Jobs is winning the digital download wars
Not to mention the pointless retrospective Newsweek article about the greatness of Steve Jobs titled: It's the Apple of His Eye

I was going to include some links to negative articles about Microsoft but that would take all day. It's all "Microsoft admits Windows flaw," "Microsoft fails to quash Vista fears," "Microsoft warns of critical Windows flaw," "Microsoft delays wide launch of Windows Vista," plus a wide range of So-and-so sues Microsoft.

If a news site partially owned by (and branded by) Microsoft allows reporters to flaunt their own computing opinions in the face of the facts how can we trust any news site to objectively report on computers? This is a CONSISTENT and PERVASIVE problem flooding all of the so-called news we see every day, and despite the tremendous amount of evidence the mainstream (i.e pro-Apple) press refuses to acknowledge or even to talk about it! Even when studies show five out of six reporters in the "Mac-Media" use Apple computers to write their stories, still they deny any bias.

But this blogger will not be silenced. I don't care who calls me a PC-nut-job or a Microsoftie or an MSFT-winger, I will fight for the truth!

It turns out that yours truly (i.e. me) has decided to swear off his (my?) unemployed graduate student life-style and get a part-time job. A job? Yes, a job! I am working again. Alas, I am no longer in insurance management, as part-time insurance management positions are hard to find. Plus I wouldn't want one if I could find one. But, I admit, insurance management did make for some good blogging. My current job, so far, has made for poor blogging. I'm working remotely, meaning I'm programming from my NYC apartment for a company in Texas. And I'm working remotely, meaning I'm working in a distant and aloof manner. The few people I interact with at my new company seem like smart yet busy people and provide little fodder for mockery, aside from perhaps the fact that no one responds to my e-mails.

Note: I'm trying desperately to come up with a funny way to end this blog entry but it looks like it's not going to happen. Please go back and reread the two sentences that play with the varying meanings of "working remotely".

For years I've stubbornly stuck to my website's miniscule font size. I'm not sure why. Despite my love of words, I think pages of text are inherently ugly. Websites would be so much more attractive if they weren't bound by things like readability and content. By shrinking my default text size down to microscopic ants wavering just on the edge of vision I turned my page into a shimmering field of white-on-maroon scribbles, into a work of design rather than a work of text.

But lately I've been having trouble reading my own shrunken text. So, finally, I've upped it two levels from xx-small to small. I think it looks terrible. But at least I'm no longer getting headaches trying to read my own website.

Serial killers are called serial killers because they kill people in serial, i.e. in a series of killings. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, I started wondering about their opposite: Parallel killers, meaning killers who kill people in parallel, i.e. all at once. Well, we already kind of have a word for that (or so I thought): Mass murderers. But mass murderer really just implies someone who has killed masses of people, which would be a term for a very successful serial killer. In fact, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (aka dictionary.com), defines a mass murderer as:

mass murderer n. 1. A person, especially a political or military leader, who is responsible for the deaths of many individuals. 2. a. A person who kills several or numerous victims in a single incident. b. A serial killer.

Look at 2a and 2b! Those things, in my mind, are contradictory! Yet here they are listed as identical. Oh, dictionary.com, you have mangled the english language once again. Note that Merriam-Webster Online doesn't even have a definition of mass murderer so I couldn't compare.

But it is a tricky point of semantics. Like I said, a serial killer could also be a mass murderer if he (or she!) has killed masses of people in a series of incidents. And, also, a mass murderer who kills his victims in one tragic event might still, technically, be killing them in series. For example, the person my girlfriend refers to as "The Luby's Killer" brought a machine gun into a Luby's and shot everybody (though I too am frustrated by Luby's, I cannot condone such behavior), these people can't be said to have been killed in parallel. Really it requires a bomb or some other exploding device to get to parallel level of killing.

In summary: Mass murderers can be either serial or parallel killers, but not both.

Wait... What if a mass murderer executes a series of parallel killings?

This post is way too morbid. I'm cutting it off.

"See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this (expletive) and it's over," Bush told Blair as he chewed on a buttered roll. It's been all over the news, caught during an impromptu moment when the microphones were supposed to be off. I, personally, am shocked at his language. Shocked and offended. I expect better from the leader of our nation. The president, without regard to who might be listening, made the cardinal sin of language: he misused the word "irony."

Oh, have we learned nothing from the Alanis Morissette scandal of 1995? As I go through the president's statement over and over in my head I can't help but think the word he should have used instead was the simpler, more direct "thing." Yes, let's look at a revised version of the sentence:

"See the thing is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this (expletive) and it's over."

Perfect.

Now, I admit, it's possible (and, in fact, actual) that I am missing the full context of the conversation. Depending on what was said immediately before Bush's overheard statement his use of the word irony may have been entirely appropriate. Let's imagine some of the scenarios.

Imagined Scenario Number 1, Dramatic Irony:

Blair: Can you believe everyone else at the G8 summit thinks asking Syria to encourage Hezbollah's actions will stop the violence?

Bush: See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this (expletive) and it's over.

Blair: Exactly! You are correct to point out the dramatic irony in a situation where people say one thing and we, as observers, recognize that the exact opposite is true.

Imagined Scenario Number 2, Verbal Irony:

Blair: Dude, I totally think we should end this cycle of violence by having Syria encourage Hezbollah's actions, lol.

Bush: See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this (expletive) and it's over.

Blair: Exactly! You are correct to point out my use of verbal irony in saying something with an intended meaning contrasting to the literal meaning of my words.

Imagined Scenario Number 3, Situational Irony:

Blair: And to think, for years we thought that the answer to peace in the Middle East was to have Syria nurture Hezbollah.

Bush: See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this (expletive) and it's over.

Blair: Exactly! You are correct to point out the situational irony in this reversal of logical cause/effect relationships and justifiable expectations.

Blogging is totally 2005.

Loyal fans of MixedMetaphors.net, you may begin your revelries! Despite your dwindling numbers you are a loud and boisterous bunch. Or perhaps you are not so loud and boisterous, perhaps I have you confused with the construction going on next door, the construction that has taken six months and consists solely of one loud screeching tool that does something ineffable, ineffable even to those using the tool, because if they knew how to use it the construction going on next door wouldn't have taken six months. Anyway, that's off topic. My point is that MixedMetaphors.net is back online. It looks almost the same as it did before it went offline. Yay.

Yes, that's right. After a brief (six month) hiatus, I've finally gotten around to ressurecting my computer and my website. Right now I'm still playing around with the server so I'm not going to spend time writing a blog entry that may not even work. Hopefully all will be well soon.

As some readers know, I'm coming off a 5+ year stint as an insurance industry tycoon (give or take a a year depending on what you consider insurance and give or take five years depending on what you consider industry tycoon). Insurance often gets a bad rap, with salesmen portrayed as doddering leeches and executives painted as heartless villians reaping riches at the expense of others. And though I've left the business and sworn never to go back (well, sworn never to go back aside from the part time insurance job that is putting me through grad school) I do still get slightly defensive about the topic. I know I make fun of it all the time, but that doesn't mean others are allowed to. It's like New Jersey. I don't live in New Jersey anymore, but I'm still from New Jersey. And if you're from New Jersey you can make fun of it all you want. But if you're not, don't be talking your trash in front of me!

The Coalition Against Insurance Fraud recently released the 2005 Insurance Hall of Shame. It tells the story of particularly egregious offenders, people who burnt down populated apartment buildings in order to collect the insurance money, people who faked their own deaths to collect benefits, and a woman who pretended to be a princess, built up 500K in debt buying diamonds, and then pretended it had all been stolen so she could get reimbursed and pay off her bills.

The point is: We in the insurance industry wouldn't have to be so untrusting if you people stopped burning down your own buildings, faking your own death, and calling yourself Princess (I mean you, Sidey 2.0).

I'm going to stray from my typical incoherent rambling to discuss something I consider of great importance. Recently some news has come out suggesting that not everything in James Frey's memoir "A Million Little Pieces" is completely true. It was an Oprah Book Club choice and has sold over a million copies so you can imagine people are furrowing their eyebrows. (This will teach Oprah to resume recommending books by living authors.) To add some more absurdity to the story, Random House is now offering refunds to anyone who bought the book and is so upset about the potentially fabricated or exaggerated details that they can no longer stand to see the book on their bookshelf. The only condition for return is you have to have the enjoyment you felt while reading the book wiped from your memory.

Here's my opinion about the potentially fabricated or exaggerated content: WHO CARES? Have the 1.77 million people who have read the book been retroactively robbed of the pleasure they had while reading it? No. If you had a great meal at a restaurant and found out later you were actually eating people, would you want your money back? Of course not! Well, wait, maybe that's a bad example. But there's a big difference between being tricked into eating human flesh and reading a slightly fictionalized memoir. All memoirs contain potentially fabricated or exaggerated details. Show me a memoir with no fabricated or exaggerated details and I'll show you a very boring book. There's a dirty little secret in the writing world where novelists who can't get their first-person novels published actually change the title page to say "A Memoir" instead of "A Novel" and suddenly find takers. And, once again, who cares?

There's a difference between a biography/autobiography and a literary memoir. The biography is an educational process, the reader is attempting to learn something about a public or historically relevant figure. The reader has a vested interest in the content of a biography being true, the reader is attempting to learn something about the world. But a literary memoir is different, the reader is not attempting to learn something about the world, the reader is just trying to learn something about a person and about humanity. A literary memoir is really just a novel about a person the reader doesn't know who happens to be real. But the fact of the matter is that the events in an exaggerated memoir still could have happened. So what if they didn't? You're still reading a story that COULD be true, so all the content about drugs and law enforcement is still representative of potential experiences you might want to learn more about. And you're still learning about a person and about humanity. Does finding out later that some of the events were not entirely true lessen the enjoyment you had while reading the memoir and thinking the events actually happened? Does it mean you didn't learn something? No, because that would take a philosophically suspect time-traveling cause and effect argument I am not willing to accept at this time.

Yes, I'll admit it's kind of dishonest. Would the book have been as successful had it been labeled "a novel" instead? Maybe not. Probably not. Would it have been any different than it is now? No, of course not. Except for those two words on the cover it would be exactly the same. If it's good reading it's good reading.

I haven't read the book myself, but I'm hereby throwing in my support for James Frey, alleged fabricator of memoirs. Let's here it for fiction!

Before I write this post I want to state that I debunked myself before I even began writing it. Disappointing, but I'm going to write it anyway.

And also before I write this post, I want to point out that the previous paragraph is paradoxical, since I can't write in the post that I'm writing something in the post before writing the post.

That being said, let's start by reviewing a snippet of a conversation I had with a friend last week:

* * * * *

Friend: It took a split second.

Me: A split second?

Friend: Yes, a split second.

Me: What do you mean by a split second?

Friend: Uh... A second.

Me: So why didn't you just say a second?

* * * * *

This revealed two things to me:
1) Somebody, somewhere potentially misused the phrase "split second." And, as you know, if a single person in the entire world potentially misuses a phrase one time I need to say something about it.
2) I'm an annoying friend.

But, the facts are the facts, and here we are. What is going on with this phrase "split second?" What does it really mean? How is it supposed to be used? Is "split second" simply a strange synonym for "a second?" Does it mean, as many people seem to use it to mean, "an instant?" Or (and here's the BIG AND ALREADY PROVED FALSE HYPOTHESIS) does it mean HALF A SECOND?

I thought to myself, if you split a second, you get half a second. Brilliant, I thought to myself, I have deconstructed the term and can write about it. Then I took the brilliant step of looking it up in the dictionary...

"An instant, a fraction of a second. This expression alludes to a stop watch that has two second hands, one above the other, for timing more than one athlete or intervals of a race by a single athlete. Each hand can be stopped independently of the other, so a second can be "split" when one second hand stops a fraction of a second after the other. [c. 1880]"

Here are things I have learned from this experience:
1) The term "split second" has been around since the 1880s and it has a perfectly logical meaning that 99% of the world is using correctly.
2) I have nothing of interest to say anymore on this blog.

I was going to post something about the mass transit strike but then the mass transit strike ended before I had a chance. Anything now would be too retro. Besides, there's no way I could write a funnier article than this.

Instead of starting this post off with a witty but redundant riff about how everything is more expensive in New York City (it's true) I'm going to jump right to my point: everything is more expensive in New York City... except, because of a what is apparently a strange economic phenomenon, bagels. Bagels here are, unlike every single other thing in the city, cheap. It's about forty cents to get a bagel. With cream cheese? Forty three cents. With eggs and cheddar? A dollar ten. If you just wanted a plain slice of cheddar cheese it would be two dollars, but on a bagel it's suddenly a dollar ten. To save money I buy all my cheese on bagels, then I peel off the cheese and throw away the bagels.

It's because bagels are everywhere here. You can't find a store without them. The bagels at the super market too expensive? Go next door to the convenience mart. Those bagels too expensive? Go next door to the other convenience mart. Third and fourth convenience marts still too expensive? Try the sushi place. Or the guy with the cart selling shish-ka-bob and bagels. Bagels have saturated the market. People use bagels instead of currency. Four dollars and twenty three bagels, please. Instead of leave-a-penny-take-a-penny we have leave-a-bagel-take-a-bagel. I tried to give a bagel to a homeless guy and he refused, he already had enough bagels. He'd constructed a make-shift shelter out of bagels.

Why are bagels so popular here? Everyone who lives here will tell you the bagels taste better in this city than anywhere else. Do they? Well, I live here, and I will therefore tell you that the bagels taste better in this city than anywhere else. Don't believe me? Give a New Yorker a bagel from another city. He'll take one bite and say, "Where did you get this bagel? This bagel isn't from around here." But don't try to do this if you're not from New York City, you'll only hurt yourself. The right question to ask is why do they taste better in this city than anywhere else? Perhaps it's the water. Perhaps it's simply the taste boost that comes with the knowledge that you are eating a bagel in the city that invented the bagel. You say bagels were purportedly invented in Poland in 1610? Well then how come those bagels don't taste as good as the ones made in New York City? I thought so.

For some reason the cheap bagel theory only holds true if you're trying to buy one bagel at a time. If you order a dozen you're screwed. One bagel: eight cents. Twelve bagels: Twenty two dollars. Why? Because they know if you want to buy twelve bagels then you really need bagels. And don't try to buy twelve individual bagels; they're too smart for that. The eleventh bagel, eight cents. The twelfth? Twenty one dollars and twelve cents. You'll have to buy eleven and then go next door for the twelfth bagel if you want to avoid the surcharge. Of course all your coworkers will know something's up. They'll say, "Wait a minute? Is this twelfth bagel from a different store? Yes, yes I think it is. You bought eleven bagels at Murray's and the twelfth bagel at Rick's Convenience Market! You cheapskate!" Because not only can New Yorkers tell whether a bagel has been made in New York City, they can narrow it down to the street, to the store. It's like fine wine - this bagel has been infused with the hint of fruit from the nearby vendor and just a touch of Italian spices from Famous Ray's next door.

Of course, if you try to get smoked salmon on your bagel: a hundred and eighty seven dollars.

Anyone who has spent any time driving or walking with me in a downtown setting knows of my deep hatred for bicyclists. Specifically, I mean urban law-breaking cyclists, the ones who ignore red lights, jump from sidewalks to pavement and burst through pedestrians yelling, "Bicyclist!" as if that excuses them.

I also, for that matter, am annoyed by pedestrians who cross in front of moving cars, though usually only when I'm the one in the car they're crossing in front of. But there's a big difference: Law-breaking pedestrians put their own lives at risk. Law-breaking bicyclists put everyone's life at risk. I've seen many near-accidents because of bicyclists zipping across a busy road. I thought it was bad in Austin (a very bike-friendly pro-Lance Armstrong town) but it's nothing compared to the Kamikaze bikers in NYC.

So yesterday I got to live out my wildest fantasy: I beat up a bicyclist. Seriously. Read on for the story.

I'm walking down the street. I'm stopped at the corner of Broadway and E Houston (there are both major NY streets) waiting, like a good pedestrian, for the "walk" signal so I can cross Broadway. The walk signal comes. I check again to make sure those last cars zipping through the red light have gone safely by (there are always at least three), and I begin to cross. Note: I am NOT the first person to step into the road. I'm probably the third or fourth.

At that moment time slows down and out of the corner of my eye I see a bicyclist hurtling towards me. A bicyclist who has sped across Houston through moving traffic, a bicyclist who has gone BEHIND three other pedestrians who have already begun crossing the street, a bicyclist who is just in time to crash into me. He yells (pointlessly) "watch out" as he jams the breaks and his tire hits my leg.

This is where it gets good... Some anti-bicycle self-preservation instinct kicks in (probably a genetic leftover from the cavemen days when wild bicycles stalked the plains) and I thought to myself that either I was going down or this goddamn bicyclist was going down. So I reached my arms out, put both hands on his upper body, and shoved him over. He and his bike went sprawling, and he slid under a car.

Okay, so he didn't really go sliding under a car, but I did shove him hard, keeping the bike from hitting me directly and using the force to regain my balance. He managed to keep his feet on the ground, though his bike fell down underneath him. He yelled at me, "Look where you're going!" and I yelled back, "You were the one doing something illegal!" Then I hustled across the street because he was a lot bigger than me.

Oh, it was a glorious day for pedestrian rights!

December is well underway and, like every year, 'tis the season for non-stop awful music, for giant light-draped trees and holly and poinsettias and nativity scenes plus that one slightly-torn paper menorah that gets taped up in the shop window. Thanks for that paper menorah, by the way. Yeah, it really makes me feel better about patronizing your store. Throw me another bone, why don't you?

I promised my girlfriend (who does, in fact, celebrate Christmas) that I would try not to be so Grinchy this year. But I can't help it. I'm acting as Grinchy as ever. The very concept of the Grinch inspires Grinch-like feelings. Apparently it's so evil to not love Christmas with all of your heart that you are labeled a bad, ugly person. Calling someone a Grinch for not loving Christmas is like the Bush administration calling anyone who criticizes the war a traitor. Don't you people realize anything? Someone can criticize the war and still be a patriot. And someone can dislike Christmas and still be a normal human being.

This year there's an interesting twist, because conservative Christian groups are "fighting back" against the "war on Christmas." No more holiday cards, they say. No more holiday trees, they say. No more holiday sales, they say. They want Christmas cards and Christmas trees and Christmas sales. Well, guess what? I AGREE! The only thing worse than tying up traffic for hours in every direction to light a damn tree is pretending somehow this tree-lighting event is inclusive of non-Christmas-celebrators. I don't WANT to be associated with the tree and I, like conservative Christian groups, also consider it offensive to call it a holiday spruce. While I appreciate the attempt at inclusivity it is misguided. Instead of making the "holiday season" more diverse it is actually a way of tricking people into celebrating Christmas.

That being said, I do have some concerns about the "War on Christmas Conservatives" (henceforth known as WoCC):

1) WoCC's seems to be blaming non-Christians for the "War on Christmas." I think 99% of the "War on Christmas" is led by politically correct Christians trying to be inclusive, which, as I said above, is misguided. But it's especially offensive to blame ME for trying to edge my way into the holiday action. I don't want forced to be included, but I also don't like when WoCC assumes I am trying to force my way into the hot Christmas action. I want nothing to do with it. Don't start burning Jews because the White House calls the Christmas tree a holiday spruce. I might not like the trees and the holly and the poinsettias and the music, but as long as you keep the government-sponsored nativity scenes to a minimum I'll deal with it.

2) WoCC's are attacking shopkeepers for calling December a "holiday season" instead of the "Christmas season." I agree that Christmas trees should be called Christmas trees. I agree that when you send a holiday card to a Christian it should say Merry Christmas. But these shopkeepers have a legitimate reason for calling December the holiday season: Not all of their clients celebrate Christmas. WoCC has called for a boycott of any store that has a "holiday" sale instead of a "Christmas" sale. Boycotting a store because they encourage Jews and other non-Christians to shop there? That smacks of something other than Christmas spirit.

This has taken me off-point, which is that I promised my girlfriend not to be a Grinch. So, in that light, I'll end this post as follows: Merry Christmas!

Here's the sign posted near just about every elevator in the country:

"In case of fire use stairs"

Is it just me or does that sentence mean something different than it's supposed to mean? The intended warning is actually:

"In THE case of fire use stairs."

In my polluted mind there is a big difference between "in case of" and "in the case of". Every time I read one of these signs I interpret it to mean I should NEVER use the elevator because while I am on the elevator there might be a fire. A similar sentence might be "In case of rain bring an umbrella." The implication isn't that you should only bring an umbrella if it is already raining but that you should bring your umbrella no matter what, IN CASE it rains.

Now, according to dictionary.com, "in case of" means "if there should happen to be," which would point towards the "in case of fire" interpretation, and NOT the "in case of rain" interpretation. Right? "If there should happen to be a fire use the stairs," makes sense. "If there should happen to be rain bring an umbrella," also makes sense, but it isn't making the sense originally intended. My rain sentence should be "In case it rains..." and NOT "In case of rain..."

It turns out I was wrong and all those signs warning me to take the stairs in case of fire are correct. Way to go elevator sign makers!

One faces some interesting point of view shifts when relocating from Texas to New York. For one thing, weather.com says it "feels like 33 degrees" outside right now. And when the coldest you've been in the last seven years is 50 degrees, 33 degrees feels COLD. But, aside from atmospheric contrast, there are other, social differences.

In Texas I always felt like a liberal. Austin is a liberal-leaning city, but Texas itself, obviously, is a very conservative, very Republican state. Though I chose to refer to myself as a moderate, deep down I felt this might be an insincere appellation, because obviously my political opinions fell left-of-center.

But now I am in New York City, attending an MFA program in creative writing. Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator from Nebraska, is the president of my school. Suddenly, strangely, I feel like a conservative.

A story: Once in Texas I was sitting in a restaurant having a conversation about John Kerry. A man at another table leaned towards us and said, "John Kerry was once involved in a plan to assassinate the president, and if you vote for him you're committing treason." Well, golly. Thanks for sharing, mister. You see how in such a state a guy could feel a little bit liberal for even considering voting Democratic?

In NYC things have reversed. I find myself holding my tongue for fear of being lynched by liberals. It's not like I would go so far as to say something as evil as recommending we cut taxes or privatize social security. I mean I'm afraid to say that all Republicans aren't evil.

Now I know what it means to be a "crazy liberal." In Austin I thought it meant you were Sidey.com. But now I realize that comparatively Sidey.com is a goddamned Bush-lover.

The good news is this: I AM A MODERATE!

It's nice to know I haven't been lying all these years.

And if you think I'm stupid/ill-informed/evil/irrational, I don't care.

Important pre-post note: In this entry title the word "Smells" is not intended as the intransitive verb but, rather, a noun. That is to say this post is about smells one encounters in New York, not a statement that New York is smelly. Though it is.

As anyone who lives in New York knows, the city is host to many different smells. Most of these smells are bad: garbage on the side of the road on trash day, the weird urine smell that whooshes out of sidewalk grates when a subway goes by, the greasy scent wafting from the vents of each of the eight million restaurants. Yes, these bad smells do plague the city, but they are not the problem. When you see one of these smells coming (yes, you can see smells in NYC, that's the way it works) you just stop breathing for a few minutes until the danger has passed. What concerns me are the GOOD smells. By good smells I don't mean the smell of hot nuts from the hot nut vendor. I mean the scariest smells of all: the UNIDENTIFIABLE good smells.

Sometimes I'll be walking along the city street and my nose will be hit with the refreshing scent of the ocean breeze. Ahhh, I'll think, inhaling the salty tang of the sea deeply into my nostrils. Or I'll be in the subway and notice the lilac tang of fresh linen, and I'll close my eyes for a moment and breath it in, mentally escaping for a moment from the crowded underground passage. Then my eyes will pop open, I'll clasp my hand over my nose. Because I'll realize there is no ocean breeze anywhere in smelling distance. There is definitely no fresh linen in the subway. What I am actually smelling is an unknown combination of BAD smells, grease and urine and garbage and lord knows what else. Somehow these bad smells have combined together to masquerade as a good smell, these evil offals have TRICKED me into smelling them.

Oh, beware the unidentifiable good smell in New York City. Because if you can’t immediately identify it, you don’t want to be smelling it.

I'm not used to having a roommate; it's been five years since I've lived with anyone other than myself. But more importantly, my roommate does not appear to be used to having a roommate either - my very presence scares him. If he doesn't notice me come home and than sees me walking around the apartment: he yells in fear. If he comes home and I shout "hi" from my bedroom: he yells in fear. If he comes home and I don't shout "hi" from my bedroom and then he sees me: he yells in fear. If he comes home and I am sitting on the couch in the living room: he yells in fear. If I walk in the front door and he's sitting on the couch in the living room: he yells in fear.

There is pretty much no way for him to see me in the apartment and not yell in fear. I'm afraid I'm going to give him a heart attack. We discussed how to prevent these shocking confrontations and he suggested I call him every time I am about to come home, though, of course, this wouldn't account for the times when he leaves and comes back and I am still there. I'm not about to register my comings and goings with my roommate, so he may just have to get used to being scared by my existence and I will have to get used to a lot of yelling.

I was thinking about random topics, as I often do, and I started to wonder about the notion that a piece of paper can't be folded in half more than 8 times. It's something I learned at some point in my life and have never been able to disprove. Right now I tried it on a Post-It Note and could only get to six folds. Hence it must be impossible, right? Wrong!

A quick web search revealed that in 2001 a Pomona Valley high school junior, Britney, derived the formula for the maximum number of times paper could be folded and then proceed to fold a piece of paper in half 12 times. Way to go, small town math whiz Britney! She later used this mathematical talent to become a champion figure skater!

Seriously though: Go Britney! Way to put the long-established "paper can't be folded more than eight times" facists to shame.

Last night at school I had what could be considered a "bad workshop." By bad workshop I mean a) I got a lot of negative feedback on my story, b) this feedback was mostly contradictory, and c) there was not much constructive I could take away from the class aside from the fact that the story obviously was not working. I really have no problem with negative feedback, in fact, I want negative feedback - as long as I can walk away and have some idea how to improve things. However much my ego wants to walk into a room and have everyone tell me my story is the best story ever written and needs no changes, my brain recognizes I wouldn't be getting much for my education if that's all I ever heard. I'm also fairly sure I'm not being over-sensitive... the instructor pretty much told me I should throw away 18 pages of a 19 page story.

Fortunately for me, I have a HUGE ego. There is little anyone can do to convince me I'm not at least a decent writer. Even for this particular story, I'm still fairly confident it is at least as good as other stories recieved by the class with far more positive feedback. So while this is not good news for my story, it's good news in other ways; a passing of a test of sorts. I think in order to have any chance as a writer it's important not just to have some writing talent, but also to have the ability to handle repeated and intense discouragement. This can only be done if a) you have a masochistic obsession to continue forward at all costs or b) a big fat ego. I am pretty sure I qualify for both.

Normally I don't take posting requests, but since this directly impacts me and since I have nothing better to say, I'm going to pass on a message from my roommate:

* * * * * * * *

Can you post on your blog that your roomate smells because he hasn't dry cleaned his clothes in over 3 months?

Seriously. I haven't found a single place in NYC that uses a system other than the carcinogenic and respritory problem causing PERC. I want to avoid the chemical and so I haven't dry cleaned my stuff since early August. I've done hours of searching each week and it's something... it's pissing me off and i smell.

For the sake of my roommate, my roommate's coworkers, and my roommates roommate (me), let me know if you can recommend a PERC-free dry cleaner in Manhattan.

Whenever some major change occurs around these parts it seems like I suddenly lose all interest in posting. It happened when I first made my temporary switch to blogspot, though eventually I got my act together and the floodgate of nonsensical flimflam reopened. Then I got excited about resurrecting the original blog but once again the waters have run dry after this move. Maybe it's just because I have nothing funny to say... but when has that stopped me before? It's certainly not stopping me now. Oh, lord, this blog is so stupid! Why do I even have a blog? WHY? I'm just polluting the web with random noise, drowning the universe in additional needless communication. Did you know that there are 23 exabytes of electronic information communicated or stored per year in one form or another (over phone lines, e-mail, newspapers, etc)? That's 23,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information a year, a million times a million times a million, if a byte is one letter in a word, that's over a million million million words, that's a stack of books 150 feet high for every person in the world per year, and that's just the words exchanged in some sort of written or electronic format. I realize MixedMetaphors.net is just like .0000000000000000001% of that, but still, do we really need more?

I'm on a three-day whirlwind insurance tour of Indianapolis, IN, Schamburg, IL, and Merriville, IN. Oh, how did it come to this? Didn't I escape this lonely traveling salesman life for a more stable existence in NYC? Teach me, Schamburg, for I am weak with weariness and you must hold some answers. Last night I ate at The Cheesecake Factory. Oh, The Cheesecake Factory, you are such a ridiculous attempt at chaining a high-end restaurant, with your fifty page ad-filled menu and your oversized portions and your seasonal pumpkin cheesecake! I swore never to eat at you again, but in Schamburg, IL I did. You are the sign of how low I have sunk. Oh, you have made me exclaim "Oh" three times in a single post, four if you count that one in quotes.

Finally, after months of suffering the evil clutches of a canned blogger site, the original MixedMetaphors.net web server is back.

That means you get all of the following:
- Maroon colored background!
- Impossible to read font size!
- Incredibly slow load times!
- And Excel artwork!!!!!!

Maybe Blogger hasn't been such a bad host after all. I may end up messing around with the blogspot templates and embedding the blogger blog directly into the MixedMetaphors.net site. In the meantime, please make sure to leave comments at www.MixedMetaphors.net and NOT misplacedmetaphors.blogspot.com.

A man selling batteries - DID NOT GIVE MONEY

A man playing a tambourine and spinning around and around without falling over - DID NOT GIVE MONEY

Another man selling batteries - DID NOT GIVE MONEY

A man asking for money - DID NOT GIVE MONEY

A woman asking for money - DID NOT GIVE MONEY

A three-piece Mariachi band consisting of one trumpet, one guitar, and one bass guitar player, each member wearing full Mariachi garb, who played/sang two songs between the Columbus circle and 125th street stop on the Uptown A Express line - GAVE MONEY

Notes:

- There seems to be a lot of people selling batteries on the subway, and I'm constantly surprised by how many people actually buy batteries from these guys. Apparently the subway is home to a bustling battery marketplace.

- I expect this list to grow significantly when I have lived in NYC for more than a couple of weeks.

- I'm a sucker for Mariachi bands.

Last night on the subway I witnessed and participated in what is probably a mundane experience to long-time New Yorkers but, to me, was fairly interesting. As I entered the subway car (the A line, going uptown) my first hint of something wrong was when I noticed a pair of ratty shoes on the floor. This was followed by my noticing a pair of very dirty bare feet, which in turn were attached to a man lying down on one of the subway car benches. I decided to go sit on the other side of the subway car, far from those extremely scary feet, where I began writing in my notebook, otherwise oblivious to my surroundings.

A few stops later, I glanced up to notice a horde of people crowding down to my end of the subway car, all pushing to get through the doors connecting to the next car. Sure enough, shambling towards us was the barefoot homeless man, moaning incoherently. What made this barefoot shambling moaning homeless man particularly more offensive than your typical New York City barefoot shambling moaning homeless man was that he was spitting up some sort of saliva/vomit mix all over the floor. I decided it might be in my best interest to also change location, but due to a hold up in the crowd, I actually had to dart past the man and exit from the other end of the train. For the rest of the ride I sat and watched as people would get on to the original subway car and then immediately come pouring through the interior doors to safety.

Since you know how my mind works, it was impossible for me not to immediately compare this event to a minor zombie attack. I witnessed a diseased, barefoot, moaning, drooling man shambling after a running mob. In fact, I'm still not convinced that it WASN'T a zombie attack. Frankly, I think the entire New York subway system could be overrun by zombies for about a week before anyone noticed anything different.

But to avoid the fantastical and focus on the cerebral for a moment, this event also made me wonder the same thing I wonder whenever I see a human who has fallen to such catastrophic depths: what is keeping me from a similar fate? Could I end up as the next foul-smelling, mumbling, saliva-spewing, barefoot man on a subway car? Where is the line that divides me from him? Is this a "there but for the grace of god go I" sort of thing or is my very essence such that I could never sink so low? And why do I even consider it sinking low? Who am I to compare lifestyles and judge? Perhaps that man has actually discovered some meaning to life I have missed and has reached a pinnacle of human existence I will never be able to comprehend.

Well, the title of the post really says it all, but I'll kill the joke by explaining it. As you may or may not know, I'm commuting three hours both ways from NYC on Thursday and Friday to finish out this ill-advised consulting gig I started over the summer. I'm supposed to be done at the end of October but the project I'm leading keeps changing requirements and we've been pushing back the release date. Since I won't have "fulfilled" my commitment until we finish the project, I said today that I feel like Sisyphus. Someone overheard and poked her head in my office to say the title line. I was impressed with the immensely depressing sense of humor required to compare one's job to Sisyphus and choose his.

The long and unending saga is ended, making it both short and contradictory: I have an apartment in NYC! Finally, after months of searching, I have semi-moved into a great place on Houston Street. My new bed is being delivered on Tuesday morning and next weekend I will be renting a truck and picking up the remaining boxes and furniture from my free storage unit in NJ (formerly known as my parents' house). While I'm still making the painful commute to small town Pennsylvania every Thursday and Friday until my work obligations are concluded, at least I have an actual apartment to put all my stuff.

But I know that you, the reader, are wondering how YOU benefit from this news. Well, it means that my web server is back, humming along in my new IKEA desk (alas my former desk does not fit in my tiny NY place and will remain with my folks until I have a bigger home again), and as soon as I get a cable modem the original feature-rich MixedMetaphors.net will be back online.

To continue with the boring, non-absurdist updates, I have begun my MFA program and so far am getting a lot out of it. I submitted my first short story to class last Monday and we'll be workshopping it tonight, so I am a bit nervous. (Okay, extremely nervous.) Workshopping a story is a bit like taking your clothes off in a subway train and having people say, "Well, I suppose it is enjoyable, but perhaps this section could be longer, and, seriously, do you really expect anyone to buy that ending?" I've heard horror stories about MFA classes decimating other student submissions, though our first day of workshopping was fairly friendly. I'm hoping the kindness continues.

A recent comment on my site brought it to my attention that only two blogspot-ers have listed "absurdist theater" in their profile interests list, one of those two blogspot-ers being me. This seemed like an impossibility. EVERYONE loves absurdist theater. But, no, it's sadly true. Perhaps, I thought, our fellow blogspot-ers have all taken their love of absurdist theater as a given and therefore failed to list it. Then it occurred to me that everybody else had listed "theater of the absurd" instead (which, according to various dictionaries, is the correct term). No luck. Apparently, not only are there only two blogspot-ers who consider "absurdist theater" an interest, but also we are unified in our stubborn desire to refer to it incorrectly.

Why "theater of the absurd" instead of "absurdist theater"? Let me be clear: I know the term "absurdist theater" is technically incorrect. Dictionary.com defines "theater of the absurd" as "A form of drama that emphasizes the absurdity of human existence by employing disjointed, repetitious, and meaningless dialogue, purposeless and confusing situations, and plots that lack realistic or logical development." Dictionary.com defines "absurdist theater" as "No entry was found in the dictionary. Would you like to search the Web for absurdist theater?" Hmmm... Good idea. Searching on Google for "theater of the absurd" provides 139,000 results. Searching on Google for "absurdist theater" provides 644 results. Considering you can enter gibberish into Google and get over 1000 results, that's a pretty poor showing. And while 139,000 results is nothing compared to the 224 million listings you get when you enter "sex," it's still a hands down victory for "theater of the absurd."

So, you ask, what's my point? And why, you ask, am I writing this at 5:30 in the morning. Let me answer those questions in reverse order: 2) I can't sleep and 1) I don't really have a point. In fact, you might even refer to this as a form of blog that emphasizes the absurdity of human existence by employing disjointed, repetitious, and meaningless dialogue, purposeless and confusing situations, and posts that lack realistic or logical development.

One final note: In an attempt to research why one term is used over the other, I went crazy and entered "theater of the absurd" and "absurdist theater" into Google AT THE SAME TIME (both in quotes). Strangely, I got 814 results, more results than when I entered a LESS specific search string. I guess I don't fully understand the mostly-random magic that is Google. Needless to say, I didn't find an answer. I think perhaps this is like asking why we call cheese "cheese" instead of... I don't know, instead of calling it something else. Yes, there's an etymological explanation as to why we call it cheese, but there's no explanation as to why we didn't name it any of the other infinite possible combinations of letters.

An interesting question has been asked, to me by me, about why MixedMetaphors.net sucks lately. In its glory days there were hysterical postings about superheroes and zombies and insurance. Lately it's been nothing more than a place for me to mumble about my current location within the North American continent and mention what books I've been reading. But why? WHY? Well, I've been busy. Busy? Yes, busy? But how could I be busy when I've been living in the middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania doing nothing all summer? Here's how: I haven't been living in the middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania doing nothing all summer. That story was merely serving as my cover. I've been living in the middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania doing SOMETHING all summer. And now that my cover has been blown I'm going to go ahead and speak the truth.

Four months ago in Austin I received a phone call at three in the morning. It was a call I'd been expecting for some years, a reminder of a debt unpaid to Z.E.D.S., the Zombie Eradication and Defenestration Society, a group to whom I owed my life many times over. When holed up in a weakly defended 7-11 during the untelevised and now all-but-completely covered-up 1992 zombie uprising of Piscataway, NJ, the fearless heroes of Z.E.D.S. pulled me out from under a burning slurpie machine and air-lifted me to safety. And now they needed me. It was a call I was honored to take, though I did pause to ask them how come they always called people at three in the morning, to which they replied something about the rates being cheaper. I told them I would do anything to help the Society: assist them in the anti-zombie research laboratory, infiltrate the new zombie-spreading anarchist group that was popping up in small towns up and down the eastern seaboard, even hunt down lurking zombies in the rural areas of Pennsylvania where recent sitings were making the local news. Instead they wanted me to manage a web development team building an online insurance portal for non-captive commercial-lines agents. Apparently Z.E.D.S. had created a small regional insurance operation and heard I had some expertise. Well, a debt is a debt, and I was on the next plane.

Unfortunately a few months later someone at A.M.Best realized that Z.E.D.S. did not, in fact, stand for Zurich Employee Benefits Services (we're not quite sure how they got that idea in the first place) and decided that any zombie-based operation was to be considered inherently unstable both financially and otherwise. Our risk rating plummeted from A++ to C-/D, which pretty much screws you in the insurance business since C-/D translates directly to "if you try to file a claim against an insurance policy not only will it be ignored, someone will come to your house and steal your pillows." So we lost all our clients and had to sell off our book of business to a property management company in the D.C. area looking to branch out and provide coverage to owners. This put me out of a job and on the street, the kind of street you don't want to be on at 2 AM when the nearby anti-zombie research laboratory has been raided and contaminated by a zombie-spreading anarchist group.

Anyway, now that the whole Z.E.D.S. fiasco is over, I'm getting the hell out of here and moving to New York.

I've been living in this extended-stay corporate hotel in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania since May 1st. It's a nice enough place, it's clean and... well, it's clean, but the pillows leave a little to be desired - they are a tad lumpy for my taste. I finally got around to bringing my own pillows with me for increased comfort. This week the normal cleaning guy (and owner of the building) was on vacation and therefore a temporary maid cleaned the rooms. I guess she didn't realize I had brought my own pillows and they have been replaced with the ones I don't like. This is the first time I have been to a hotel and they have stolen MY pillows.

It's tough being homeless. I don't mean to compare my current situation to that of the actually-homeless. I'm living in a corporate apartment in small-town Pennsylvania, and though small-town Pennsylvania is lacking in some of the civilized nuances I have come to expect in Austin, one could hardly say it bears any resemblance to sleeping in the subway. In fact, I don't think I've felt so free of commitment in many years. I have no mortgage, no car loan, and all of my possessions excepting two suitcases of clothing and basic toiletries are in a truck heading across the country to my parents' house. In fact, my only recurring bill is my two year Verizon wireless plan, which, to be honest, I wouldn't feel so bad about defaulting on. If there was ever a time to cut up all my credit cards, withdraw all my money from my bank account, and disappear to an island somewhere, this is, without question, it.

BUT, assuming I don't want to flit off to Guam, there are some inconveniences, such as all my possessions being on a truck bound to my parents' house and not having a place to live. Do you know how hard it is to find a decent apartment in Manhattan? Unless you are currently trying to find one then you don't. If you ARE currently trying to find a place then you're probably the person who rented the one available unit in the entire West Village before I could get into the city to look at it. So either way I don't want to talk to you about it. At least once my stuff gets to my parents' house and is unloaded into their garage I can truly say I am living the grad student experience. What else are parents for other than free storage?

For a moment I'm going to be non-glib. I love this place. This is the longest I've ever lived in one location since leaving my parents' house. I've never been happier with my living space before. Owning my own condo has been a great experience, it made me feel so good about coming home every day. This Tuesday night, after having been in Pennsylvania for so long, I woke up and couldn't figure out where I was. Finally I realized I was home. And it made me sad to know that it wouldn't be home much longer. Austin has been very good to me and I will miss it. I know I will be happy in NYC, perhaps happier than I was here... I know I certainly will be happier with my life now that I am going back to grad school and getting out of the insurance industry. But that doesn't change the fact that I fell in love with a place and leaving it isn't easy.

So, now I'll say it again like I mean it: Goodbye home.

I'm writing this from my Austin condo, my last post from this location. Everything has been shipped out and I'm heading to the title company to sign over the deed. Fortunately I was able to hack into a wireless network for this one final goodbye.

Goodbye home! I hope your new owner takes good care of you.

For many years I've been an angry advocate for the dismemberment of those who misuse the phrase "beg the question." Why did I stand so firm on the side of grammatical purity? Because people were out there, people who were otherwise not to be considered evil, using the phrase improperly. But recently I've seen that my own justification itself begged the question. Misusing "beg the question" was wrong because it was wrong to misuse "beg the question." Such logic is textbook question begging! And this realization, in what I formerly considered to be incorrect usage, further begged the question: why did I even care?

It pretty much comes down to two things:
1) Pragmatism. People, institutions, publications, and authors whom I respect all utilize the phrase "beg the question" using the new, theoretically incorrect, meaning. It's a losing battle. For the most part, if you use the phrase properly (to point out circular logic) most people, even well educated and otherwise grammatically prudent people, don't know what you are talking about. They stare at you and wait for you to follow up with a question that was begged, a question that won't ever come. So as a "beg the question" purist I spent my time either a) berating people for using a phrase the way 99% of the rest of the population now uses it or b) sounding like an idiot.

2) Realism. (Okay, "realism" and "pragmatism" are synonyms, but I couldn't think of a good one-word heading for list-item number two.) The fact of the matter is people who are using the phrase "beg the question" with its new, altered meaning are actually making perfectly valid grammatical sense! Though the phrase "beg the question" is meant to point out circular logic, based on changes in the English language, specifically changes to the usage of "beg," the WORDS "beg the question" do, in fact, mean exactly what most people now use them to mean. Often purists such as myself state that people should say "demands the question" or "asks the question" instead of the incorrectly applied "begs the question." But though these alternatives would also work, that doesn't mean "begs the question" is incorrectly applied.

So, with that, I pass on the task of ridding the world of incorrect usages of "begs the question" to those who are more resilient against changing times and more duty-bound to archaic rules. I will not go so far as to start using the phrase with its new meaning, but I will at least stop correcting those who do.

Note: Actually, I'm pretty sure I'll still keep correcting everyone, but only because I enjoy being a pedantic know-it-all.

I'm pretty sure I've created some kind of property dispute between my employer and a neighboring residential apartment company. Since being here in Pennsylvania I've taken to walking to work, as my walk is only slightly longer than the walk I'd have to do from my car in the back of the company parking lot to the building. (No matter how early I get to work it appears that the parking lot is full.) My complete walk-to-work path consists of:
a) crossing the parking lot of some small residential apartment buildings.
b) walking over a grassy field for about 20 feet.
c) getting on a jogging path and navigating that path.
d) crossing the parking lot of my current company.

Aside from the brief moment when I have to tramp through the grass, it's a nice, simple walk. Sometimes if it rained the night before I'll end up with some grass stuck to my shoes, but no one at the office ever seems to notice.

Unfortunately, a chain of events have led me to believe that my path will soon be cut off. First, some "No trespassing" signs appeared all over the parking lot of the apartment building. Then, a new sign appeared in front of the company jogging path stating that it is for employee use only. Then, dividing the jogging path from the field closest to the apartment building, wooden stakes appeared in the grass with the words "property line" stencilled on them. And then, this morning, I noticed some new metal fence posts set up along that property line, obviously intended for an actual fence.

I can't help but harbor the suspicion that all this nonsense is because of me. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but I have never seen anyone else cutting from the apartment building to the company jogging path. One time a woman who was walking to her car in the apartment building parking lot asked if she could help me and I said, "No, I'm just walking to work." It was the kind of "Can I help you?" that sounded more like "You are on my property," but perhaps it is still a little self-aggrandizing to think that my little morning perambulation has sparked a fence building frenzy.

Here's the ironic twist to the whole story: I am an employee of the company that owns the jogging path and I am a resident of the apartment building that owns the parking lot. At no point am I trespassing! If they are in fact building the fence because of me, they are putting in a lot of effort to stop one person from doing something he is doing legally. The second ironic twist is that I'm moving to New York in August. It will all have been for naught... By the time the fence is complete I'll be gone.

I played cricket yesterday with some Indian guys from my office. It was my first cricket experience and made me feel very British... well, I suppose it should have made me feel very Indian, but I'm pretty sure the British are the reason cricket is a big sport in India, so the indirect connection is still there. Here are some interesting things I learned about cricket, especially in its relation to baseball:

1) I kept running towards first base even though you're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to run towards a wicket on the pitcher's mound instead.

2) Oh, there is no pitcher's mound, there's a "bowler's" mound.

3) There's also wickets.

4) It's a lot easier to bowl than it is to pitch. Because when you bowl the cricket ball you actually have to bounce it once, so you don't have to be a strong enough pitcher to throw it straight over the plate like you do in baseball.

5) You can get people out by pegging them with the ball. It's awesome. Unfortunately no one told me that and I missed my one chance to peg someone with the ball. Instead I just ran after him like a spaz.

6) Before you bowl the cricket ball at the batter you have to circle your arm in at least one complete revolution, which, frankly, looks kind of dorky.

7) There are no strikes or balls in cricket. It was very hard for me to keep track of how long I'd be at bat. Essentially, you keep going until you've had 6 good bowls, whether you hit them or not, or until you get out (you get out if someone catches the fly ball, pegs you with the ball while you are running, or knocks over the wickets --- PROTECT THE WICKETS).

Those are all my thoughts about cricket.

I'm not really sure what the point of this post is, but I wanted to share my cricket thoughts with the world.

Since my official blog (www.MixedMetaphors.net) seems to be offline at the moment, I've decided to keep an unofficial blog. I've been itching to record my thoughts in a public forum and this way I can do so. Eventually I'll transfer all my posts back to MixedMetaphors when I've completed my move to New York and have my server set up and running again.

My one complaint is that mixedmetaphors.blogspot.com is taken. Darn you! Doesn't everyone realize I am the rightful owner of all MixedMetaphors related web addresses? The answer to that would be, apparently, "no." Anyway, this is really just a status post. Coming soon: An interesting post describing my experience with the game of cricket.

Important news about last weekend in Pennsylvania: It was a heat wave, an official heat wave! Why? Because it was 90 degrees three days in a row.

Texas scoffs at Pennsylvania.

Last night I dreamt I lived in a small town where the next election held a referendum on whether to close down all the public libraries. Someone had put together a detailed calculation as to the exact value of all the books in the library and how it wasn't cost effective. The day before the election I wrote this empassioned letter explaining how the calculation was incorrect because it only considered the purchase price of a book. The value of a book, I argued, is significantly more, because books have an intangible and incalculable benefit. I went on to write some shmaltzy stuff such as, "how do you calculate the value of 'Treasure Island' for the twelve year old boy reading under the covers, etc., etc.?" Pretty embarrassing prose, really, but I know how to play to my crowd. After the vote, the library closure measure, which had been polling at 56% in favor, ended up losing by 64% of the vote. (You'd think in a dream it might be a little more dramatic, but I suppose in today's polarized electorate 64% is a landslide.) Anyway, I became something of a town hero. It was quite compelling.

The point is that I have been having some vivid dreams lately. I think it's because I've joined a gym and have been working out three times a week. Sore muscles must be invading my sleep or something. I've been talking about actively joining a gym for about 8 years now and it seemed like my time in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania could be better spent getting in shape rather than watching TV in my extended-living hotel room.

1. Undo

2. You've made a mistake and the thing actually isn't done.

3. The thing that has been done is a repeatable task, such as closing a door or walking down the block. While, theoretically, it is in fact done, if one so chooses one could reopen the door or walk back up the block.

4. The thing that has been done is such a trivial task that referring to it as "done" is mostly meaningless, such as letting the water drain out of the sink. Yes, that water is gone, but if you're going to say "what's done is done" every time you flush the toilet things are going to get a little melodramatic.

5. Time travel

NOTE: This is sort of a stupid post, but last night it came to me in a dream. Honestly, I had a dream about this exact post (well, except for this note at the end). After all that subconscious preparation I figured I had better go ahead and post it. I almost got up at 4 am to do so, but I decided that I'd rather go back to sleep and if I couldn't remember in the morning the world would probably be better off. Unfortunately for the world, I remembered.

It has come to my attention that multiple people are concerned that the previous "would we still have legs" entries might be offensive to people who don't, in fact, have legs. I intended no offense, and I hope people realize I wasn't trying to comment on people who do or do not have legs but questioning whether a human being would need any independent means of locomotion if the ability to teleport at will were available. This includes cars and wheelchairs and, highlighted by the title not because of any bias but simply because of sheer percentages, legs.

No, I mean, really: Why would we?

Think about it.

Think about it: You're sitting on the toilet, trying to do your business, and then *ZAP* someone has teleported right next to you. A little more broadly, in a world where humans could teleport at will how could people maintain any notions of privacy or, for that matter, of personal property? If someone can teleport anywhere what is to stop them from popping into a neighbor's house and stealing their television?

I think the personal property matter would be handled in one of a few ways. Perhaps society would develop to be "property-free," but I find this hard to accept. Maybe an teleporting alien race could develop that way, but teleporting humans would still want their stuff. So I think either there would be some way to create teleport free zones (bank valuts, bathrooms, your house, etc.) or, barring that, all personal property would be "lo-jacked." What I mean is this society would develop incrediby good marking and tracking technology, meaning you could code any owned item to yourself with an unbreakable but public key and you could find its location instantly if someone stole it. Theft would become mostly impossible. (For uncodable things like money everyone would simply use electronic accounts, which we're moving towards anyway.)

As for privacy the issue is a little more tricky. Let's assume there is no way to create teleport-free zones (if there is than privacy isn't a big deal)... In that case there'd never be a way to safely use the bathroom or have sex or simply do anything private. I think that the culture would develop such that teleporting into someone's personal space would become so taboo that it simply wouldn't happen. People don't run around naked very often in our society. Why? Is it because it is illegal? Yes, I suppose, but more importantly, people just wouldn't even consider doing it. It is so taboo and so wired into most people's brains that they would probably pass out if they had to be naked in public. Teleporting into someone's personal space would end up becoming like that. No one would teleport into someone else's bathroom without checking first not because it would be rude or illegal (though it would be) but because it would be unthinkable. Would some people do it? Yes, but some people also take off their clothing in public and commit murder (not necescarily the same people).

I'm not sure why I'm going on and on about this but for some reason I can't stop thinking about the teleporting society. Next up for discussion: A World Where Humans Teleport At Will - Would We Still Have Legs?

Think about it: You could build your house in any inexpensive remote location you wanted, regardless of where you worked or where your friends and family lived. Factories and office buildings could go anywhere because workers could just teleport there instantly. Restaurants would thrive solely based on quality, not location (in fact, it would suddenly take years to get reservations at the world's best restaurants because there'd be no travel limitations). Property value would essentially even out over time and become almost a commodity. Only business specifically tied to a land feature would have to pay for ideal space (ski slops, beach resorts, that sort of thing) but any inside space (dance club, bar, doctor's office) could be located anywhere.

Let's assume there's some limit to how much a human can take along during teleportation - you can't teleport your whole house, for example - I think current airline carryon restrictions are a good measure (one personal item and one reasonably sized piece of luggage). Therefore there'd still be a need for physical transportation and though cars would be rare (you'd only need cars for moving larger-than-luggage size stuff) there would be tons of trucks and trains bringing goods to all these remote office buildings and factories and homes. Would homes and factories and offices end up built near each other simply to save on supply transportation costs?

Man, the changes to society would be enormous. Would civilization be anything like it is now? Would we even recognize it as a human society?

I suppose in terms of discussing how teleportation would change human society, the cost of real estate is an odd starting point. But since I'm trying to sell my condo it's on my mind. Next discussion topic: If Humans Could Teleport At Will How Would Anyone Ever Feel Comfortable Using The Bathroom?

Unless you are incredibly anal, you probably haven't noticed anything different at MixedMetaphors.net. But there have been changes, and if you didn't know better you might think these changes were a step backwards, and, interestingly, you'd be correct. When I post two entries in the same day, instead of displaying the date once, the date is repeated for each entry.

The reason behind this is quite complex, and just to make sure MixedMetaphors.net is sufficiently obscure and boring I will explain these reasons to you. But, I warn you now: unless you really really want to hear about Movable Type minutia, stop reading now.

In my implementation of Movable Type I make excessive use of categories, in ways not entirely intended by the system. I can post to different pages of my site by setting the appropriate category label on the entry (blog, plog, books, or intro). I think that the default way to do this would actually be to have a separate Movable Type blog for each category, but screw that, I'm innovative. To add additional complexity, rather than simply creating a different template for each category I wanted to create one template module that each main category template could call. Standard object oriented programming concepts, you know, code reuse, cut down on maintenance and all that. Unfortunately, while Movable Type lets you easily step through each entry in a category, you can't set that category as a variable, meaning my template module can't use the default Movable Type category listing mechanism. Instead I have to step through all entries and use a special IFEQUAL block to compare the current entry to the variable category. Unfortunately this caused an additional problem around date headers. Movable Type tells you when you're displaying the first entry for a new date. However, since I'm not able use the default category filter and am manually skipping inappropriate entries, on days when I've posted in TWO categories (both blog and plog, say) the second entry will not show its date header, even though it’s the first entry for that category! Previously I simply avoided this issue by not posting two entries in two separate categories on the same day. This seemed like a big limitation. What if I finished reading a book on the same day that I wanted to write a new blog entry? Unacceptable! I came up with a complex way of fixing this issue involving setting lots of flags and doing lots of checks. Then I decided to show the date for every entry. Simple, effective, and of minimal cosmetic detraction.

I was recently taken to task for abusing the much-abused phrase "by the way." I began an e-mail to a friend with this loaded clause, and he replied:

I don't think it is fair of you to begin a conversation with "By the way" as if we were walking down the street and something distracted your attention for a moment. We have not written to each other in a good long while and "By the way" just doesn't flow as easily as it should.

You have been warned.

I could not agree with him more. I looked up "by the way" in the dictionary and it defined it as "incidentally." I looked up incidentally in the dictionary and it defined it as "apart from the main subject; parenthetically." So, my friend is one hundred percent correct. It is nonsensical to begin a conversation with the phrase "by the way" because no main subject has yet been defined. You can only say "by the way" mid-dialogue.

Perhaps I consider my friendship with this e-mail correspondant to be an ongoing life-long conversation and therefore at any point a new topic is actually a topic change. But I will admit that's probably stretching it, even for me.

I have been given the grammatical smack down and I like it.

Is a modifier misplaced if based on context it can only have one possible meaning? If there is no confusion, can it be considered misplaced?

For example, take the following sentence:

"He was looking for an old man from the distant mountains who once knew his mother."

Theoretically, "who once knew his mother" is a misplaced modifier, because it is modifying the distant mountains as opposed to the old man. However, since the phrase is "WHO once knew his mother" as opposed to "THAT once knew his mother," it can't possibily be modifying mountains and can only be referring to the man. Obviously it is the old man who once knew his mother, not the distant mountains, because mountains aren't a "who."

So is this considered a misplaced modifier or not? Where does one go to determine these things? How can I answer all my immediate and trivial grammar questions?

As much as I love Amazon.com, the site seems to repeatedly fail me when it comes to providing notification of new books. Nick Hornby is out with a new novel, called "A Long Way Down" which I am excited to read. However, I was told of this by my sister. My sister! She had already got the book out of the library and asked me about it, assuming I had already read it. Not only hadn't I read it, I didn't even know about it. I realize we're only talking a matter of days here (it was released on June 8th) but, still, what's going on, Amazon? Why didn't I know about this? Nowhere does this book show up on my recommendations or on my new releases watch. I've bought every Nick Horby book from Amazon already and I've marked them all with five stars. How could Amazon possibly fail to recommend this to me? More importantly: I've actually told Amazon.com to put Nick Horby on my list of authors to watch! But (after a quick check) that list now appears to be empty, so some time in last couple of years Amazon apparently lost this data. That's a pretty bad move on their part, if you ask me. I essentially told them, "Hey, Amazon, I will give you money if you tell me about these books," and they said, "Forget it, we'd rather not have your money." Instead, my 'New Releases' section contained three (THREE!) different versions of Harry Potter 6, and when I checked 'not interested' for all of them and refreshed the page I was then recommended the book-on-tape version instead. I am NOT GOING TO BUY Harry Potter 6! Stop pushing it on me!

Anyway, the important news is that Nick Hornby is out with a new novel, "A Long Way Down." I'm going to buy it from Barnes & Noble out of spite.

My loft is the cleanest it has been since the day I moved in, I'm flying back to Pennsylvania tomorrow morning at 7:20 AM, and I no longer have a car. Oh, I sold my baby, my beautiful Honda S2000, she is no longer mine. Logic tells me I won't be needing her in Manhattan, and since I'm only back in Austin three more weekends this summer it seemed like the right thing to do once I had a good offer. But oh I loved that car. Love. Loved. Maybe I won't even have my condo for those final three weekends; it goes on the market this Thurday. I'm excited about moving to New York but these are sad days when you start realizing you are leaving home. Soon strangers will be viewing my house and casting judgement, soon strangers will be driving my car. She's quick tempered but forgiving, petite but powerful, not overly dressed but oh she's wild. I hope they treat her well.

I'm normally an easy going guy. Despite a sporadic but unchecked tendency towards road-rage I pass through most of life blithely ignorant of the constant annoyances around me. But despite this, there is a pet peeve that manages to burst through my typically calm exterior and turn me into a raging, spiteful misanthrope: Airplane lean-backers.

I cannot stand people who recline their seat on airplanes when I am sitting behind them. I despise these people. Leaning back in your seat on an airplane when someone is sitting behind you has got to be the rudest thing any one person can do to another person.

Yes, I realize that the seats on airplanes are made to recline. In fact, on some trips the flight attendant will announce after take off that people should "now feel free to recline their seat into a comfortable position." "No!" I want to stand up and yell! "Feel no such freedom! Your freedom in leaning is bondage to your fellow traveler!"

Before I mathematically prove that reclining your seat should be punishable by death, let's compare the positives afforded to the leaner compared to the negatives forced upon the poor passenger behind that leaner (the leanee). Keep in mind that I am 6'3".

Negatives forced upon leanee:
1) Practically impossible to use a laptop because the seat in front of you now forces the laptop screen down at a 45 degree angle.
2) Trying to lean forward to eat the airplane meal without spilling on yourself can actually involve hitting your head on the reclined seat in front of you.
3) Reading becomes a contortionist act because the reclined seat actually blocks the light in the area you would naturally position the book.
4) And, of course, your knees become crammed up against the seat in front of you. Maybe this isn't an issue for those under six feet tall, but trust me, it is actually physically painful and it reduces your already limited range of leg motion when a flat wall has lowered itself onto your knees.

Positives afforded to leaner:
1) You are leaned back a little.

I'd say that leaning back gives the leaner about a +2 on the comfort scale, but it causes the leanee at least a -8. And I'm being conservative in my estimates. Let's assume there are 100 people on the plane and they all lean back. The overall impact is a -60 comfort level! Everyone is unhappy! Based purely on a utilitarian view of average happiness, seat reclining should be illegal! Let's face it: Riding in a plane for five hours is uncomfortable. But we're all in it together. Why are we working to make it even worse?

I have to admit, I've begun to take my frustrations out on the leaner in front of me. If I get the timing right I can jam my knees up against the seat just as they start to lean back, preventing them from doing so. They'll try a couple of times and eventually give up, assuming the seat is broken. Oh, the evil glee I get from this, chuckling to myself for the rest of the flight. Unfortunately this is a difficult maneuver. Either you sit there the entire time with your legs braced for reclining pressure (which is even less comfortable than dealing with the reclined seat) or you need to get lucky. I've developed an amazing "spidey sense" that tells me when someone is about to lean, but it only works about a quarter of the time. Once I've failed to prevent a leaner, I spend the rest of the flight waging an immature battle. Mainly this involves banging my knees into the seat in front of me as much as possible, especially if I notice the guy has fallen asleep. It's childish, I know, but if I can't be comfortable because of him, he won't be comfortable either.

I do recognize that there are some exceptions, though they are few:
1) No one is behind you.
2) It's redeye. I think leaning should be disallowed even on redeyes but one has to pick their battles.

I think some entrepreneurial airline should start up flights with a no-reclining zone. I'd definitely give them my exclusive flying business. And while they're at it if they could throw in a no-baby zone flying would be perfect. And by perfect I mean still the worst thing you can legally pay money to experience, but slightly less so.

In the last three weeks I've been to Las Vegas twice. My first trip was to participate in the time honored Vegas bachelor party tradition. My second trip was to participate in the time honored Vegas bachelorette party tradition. The first trip was me and nineteen other guys. The second trip was me and four women. I was invited to the first trip because I'm a groomsman. I was invited to the second trip because I'm a bridesmaid. Or, rather, a bridesman. I've never been a bridesman before and still am not quite sure what to expect, other than being able to tell you that, no, thank you for asking, but I will be wearing a tuxedo.

I was very excited about these trips for multiple reasons:
1) I expected to enjoy some spending time in Las Vegas with good friends on both trips.
2) I imagined the nearly-back-to-back Vegas weekends was an excellent opportunity for me to perform an anthropological comparison of gender differences in the wild.
3) I was hoping for some hot girl-on-girl-on-girl-on-girl-on-me action.

Sadly, expectation number three was a bust, but the good news is I had a great time on both trips and also was able to examine first hand the animal we call woman in her native habitat (Vegas bachelorette party). I suppose it is possible that my presence had a Heisenbergy effect on the whole thing and had I not been there the weekend's main activity would have been spontaneous naked pillow fights.

Here are some similarities between bachelor and bachelorette parties:
S1) lots of drinking.
S2) lots of hanging out by the pool.
S3) lots of sleeping late.
S4) lots of food, specifically at the Smith & Wollensky steakhouse.

Here are some differences between bachelor and bachelorette parties:
D1) not quite as much poker playing in bachelorette parties.
D2) at a bachelorette parties the entertainment is more likely to involve Cirque de Soleil or the DVD-game home version of Family Feud.
D3) instead of trying to hit on all bachelorette parties within sight, when you are in a bachelorette party you just hang around and wait for bachelor parties to hit on you.

To elaborate on D3, I have to admit it brought me great evil joy to introduce myself to the bachelor party guys when they came by to hit on the women. It obviously hastened their exit from the scene, sending them off looking for groups with less manly bachelorettes, but in my defense, my bachelorettes were either married, engaged or lesbians and therefore not really interested in meeting bachelors (despite the "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" mindset). Nothing kills the mood of a bachelor more than when he introduces himself to four lovely women inquires as to their evening only to have a guy wearing a matching lei say rather gruffly, "Yes, we're having about as much fun as five girls can have."

In the course of discourse I've come upon a sentence which strikes me with grammatical fear and unrest. A poeticized version of the troublesome sentence is as follows:

"It is sentences like this that give me pause."

The sentence itself is fine. But I was struck with the grammatical equivilant of one of those moments where a repeated word suddenly loses meaning. You know what I mean. Repeat the word "moment" a hundred times and it becomes nothing but meaningless sounds produced by lips pursed together just so, which, really, is all a word is: wind whistling across damp skin, lunatic sounds devoid of context. The above sentence suddenly deconstructed in my mind and did the same thing. "It is sentences" lost grammatical coherency (though valid, how could it not sound odd?), and "this that give me" appeared all wrong (taken out of context it breaks down). I suddenly wanted to say "It are sentences like this that gives me pause" instead. Grammar too, like words I suppose, exists only because we define it to exist. How can there be rules about stringing random barks and howls together? How can we claim one way of streaming and screaming nonsense is better than another?

It are sentences like this that gives me pause.

Say it enough and it sounds right. By enough I mean ten, twenty, one hundred times. If you push hard enough you can fit the round peg of sound into the square hole of grammar. Yes, the peg is round and the hole is square. But it is a very big hole.

The fantastic book "Empire Falls" by Richard Russo (which I recently read) is now a two-episode movie on HBO, premiering Memorial Day weekend. I saw an advertisement for it on HBO and while I'm not one to review a movie before I've seen it, it looks phenomenal. The characters seem perfectly cast - each time I saw an actor or actress on screen during the preview I could guess which part they played immediately and was correct each time. I suppose the movie could easily fail to meet expectations, especially since my expectations are now unreasonably high, but I hope not.

Unfortunately I am planning to head to NYC this weekend for some much-anticipated revelry, damn it. That means I can't sit at home all weekend and do nothing but watch the premier. Fortunately this is an HBO mini-series event, which means they'll play it about a 1000 more times for the next thirty days. No one better tell me how it ends!!! Oh, wait, I've already read the book.

Hey, the website is back online after a week of downtime. I cancelled my Time Warner cable service since I'm spending the summer in another state and won't be watching too much TV in Austin. Apparently this did something to my network requiring a cable modem reboot, but since I wasn't physically nearby to do so it had to wait until my return.

Of course, I haven't had access to MixedMetaphors either, so the promised "best of" review isn't done yet.

Can you believe it's been one year already? One whole year! That's right, MixedMetaphors.net is one year old! Remember the first post, one year ago? Oh, it was so witty and brilliant, and it's been one long and glorious downhill slide from there. Unfortunately I've been traveling and I've had little time for blogging lately, so I'm actually writing this post on May 4th. But just because I can I'm going to label the post as May 1st. That's right, I can LIE about when I posted something. Now you can never trust the accuracy of the post dates again.

When I have more time (not sure when that will be) I'll do a year in review, highlighting the best posts, the worst posts, the longest posts, the shortest posts, the funniest posts, the most controversial posts (i.e. posts producing the most reader response), and, of course, the now-coveted "Most Meta Post" award.

Apparently the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Michael Chabon, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" is being made into a movie for potential release in 2005. I stumbled upon this when looking up Chabon in IMDB.com to see his credits for "Spiderman 2", where, interestingly, he is given credit for "screen story" not for "screen play." He does get screen play credit for AAoK&C, at least in IMDB right now.

I'm probably the last person in the world to know about this. Anyway, there's more information about it here.

For those who care, I have officially accepted a place at The New School for matriculation in Fall 2005. I will be studying to get my MFA in creative writing, with a focus on Fiction. The program is in the evenings, so my plan is to continue working, though I don't know doing what just yet. I'm interviewing with some companies, though those companies shall remain nameless now and forever more, just in case I start working for one of them and then post further office rants. I'll be spending the summer consulting for a former boss of mine (who was let go in the first round of corporate layoffs last November and has since found work as CIO of a new insurance company) starting May 2nd. That means I'll be in Austin only for weekends over the summer until I officially move to New York (with or without a fulltime job) in mid-August.

Assuming both participants are for some reason fighting to the death, who would win?

Fight: 1,000 Ants vs. an Unwrapped Hostess Twinkie
Winner: 1,000 ants

Fight: Three Rabid Squirrels vs. Horse
Winner: Horse
Notes: Though the horse would later succumb to rabies

Fight: Sisyphus vs. Rock
Winner: Rock

Fight: Sisyphus vs. Papyrus
Winner: Sisyphus

Fight: Papyrus vs. Rock
Winner: Papyrus

Fight: My Previous $250 Cell Phone vs. My Current Crappy $40 Cell Phone
Winner: My current crappy $40 cell phone
Notes: I am assuming winning the fight in this case is interpreted to mean "able to make and receive phone calls."

Fight: Giant Iowa-State-Fair-Winning Hog vs. a Giant Iowa-State-Fair-Devouring Frog
Winner: Giant Iowa-State-Fair-devouring frog
Notes: The giant Iowa-State-Fair-winning hog is so grossly oversized that it can hardly move. The giant Iowa-State-Fair-devouring frog is supernaturally large and can therefore not only move, but, in fact, can devour the entire Iowa State Fair, and since the giant Iowa-State-Fair-winning hog is a part of the Iowa State Fair, the giant Iowa-State-Fair-devouring frog, by definition, also devours the Iowa-State-Fair-winning hog.

Fight: 250-Pound Chain-Twirling Biker vs. Ninja
Winner: Ninja

Fight: Loca Maria from "Taco Xpress" vs Juan from "Juan in a Million"
Winner: Loca Maria
Notes: Not only are her breakfast tacos superior, she could almost definitely kick his ass.

Fight: Eleven Healthy Wildebeest vs. Two Tigers
Winner: Eleven healthy wildebeest
Notes: Assuming the eleven healthy wildebeest organize and attack rather than scatter they can hold their own, though several may be brought down in the process.

Fight: Me vs. Truck
Winner: Truck

Fight: Mouse vs. Cat
Winner: Cat
Notes: This is not a cartoon

Fight: Coyote vs. Roadrunner
Winner: Coyote
Notes: See previous note

Fight: Superman vs. Spiderman
Winner: Superman
Notes: Of course! Not that Spiderman isn't way cooler than Superman. .. but, seriously, Superman is pretty much unbeatable.

Fight: My Faith in the Basic Goodness of Humanity vs. Current Events
Winner: My faith in the basic goodness of humanity
Notes: It was a close fight

Fight: Tree Frog vs. Lake Frog, in the desert
Winner: Tree frog
Notes: Both frogs eventually die of dehydration, but tree frog holds out longer

Fight: Regular Squirrel vs. Flying Squirrel
Winner: Flying squirrel
Notes: See "Superman vs. Spiderman" notes.

I'm in New York for a Monday interview (what can I say, I'm a fast mover...) and interestingly enough (ironically? coincidentally?) I am staying in a hotel that is across the street from the headquarters of my old/current company. I can actually see the old stomping grounds from my hotel room window. (Well, I probably shouldn't refer to it as "the old stomping grounds" since I was only there twice in four years. Alas, my obligations took me instead to West Des Moines, Iowa. West Des Moines, Iowa is one place I will definitely not miss.)

I don't have very much funny to say right now but I figured I would post something since I paid eleven dollars for internet access. And I didn't even have any new e-mail! I needed to get somebody's phone number off the net - I hope that person appreciates the eleven dollars I paid to get his phone number.

The definitive update on my life is: I'm probably coming back to New York sometime in the next one to six months. Okay, that wasn't really definitive, but it's lining up that way. And I can't really say "back" to New York, since I never actually lived in New York, but I'm from New Jersey, and that's close enough, it's the tri-state area. New Jersey boy is coming home.

Two very important updates on the life of MixedMetaphors.net today.

One, it's my birthay.
Two, I was fired.

Yes, that's right, your read correctly: it's my birthday.

Oh, and also I was fired. Fired because my boss felt my blog was presenting a poor image of the company. No, just kidding. I suppose I should really use the term "laid off" or "downsized" as it turns out the months of stuggling to get resources funded, budgets approved, and project directions determined were signs of an impending office shut down. The entire Austin office is being closed over a period of six months.

As for my feelings about it, my spirits are high. I believe my team is a top notch group and I expect they will all find new jobs easily (if you are looking for some seriously high quality java developers let me know and I'll send some resumes your way). As for me, I have no worries. Let's just say I'm a man with options. Yes, options. This seems like the perfect opportunity to have a bulleted list! But, no, I don't feel like making a list. Suffice it to say I could create a list if I wanted to, a list of: options.

Perhaps MixedMetaphors.net will now go back to clever ramblings about superpowers instead of angered rants about corporate politics. But who knows what will be next? Nobody knows!

His homepage.
His blog.

The term "resounding no" strikes me as overused. It's one of those terms that has become so commonplace it takes on a wide-spread casual use, standing in where the original would do, except in this case the original is a two letter word. Noes always seem to resound, which, essentially, means they ring out or, rather, are loud. I think what someone means when they say "resounding no" is "emphatic no", or perhaps in some more accurate cases they mean that multiple people said "no" at once, but really what I think people now mean is simply "no".

I looked up "resounding no" (in quotes) on Google and got back 88,500 results. I also looked up "resounding yes" and got back 131,000 results, so, apparently, "resounding yes" is even more overused than it's negative counterpart. Interestingly, "resounding maybe" returned 1440 results and "resounding sorta" 8.

The moral? Everyone is aware that noes and yeses resound and to say as such no longer means anything. In the future I'd suggest choosing a more descriptive and original adjective.

Here are some possible alternatives:
- An emphatic no
- A frustrated no
- An enthusiastic yes
- An echoing no
- A particularly supportive yes
- A trenchant no
- A momentous yes
- A dogmatic no

Or, perhaps, the classics:
- No
- Yes

I'm a little concerned about the treatment water gets at most self-service-beverage eating establishments. Go ahead and order a water at any fast-food place and you'll see: people who have requested soda get large sturdy chalices, often logo-emblazened, to slake their calory-craving thirst, but the water drinkers get tiny dixie-cup-sized thin plastic cups, just about enough for one shot of H2O. Why this second-class cuppery? Once the restaraunt has lost the soda sale it's not like it'll cost them more if you fill up a thimble or a bucket. But beyond the simple size-descrepancy, the water doesn't even get it's own spigot at the soda fountain. It's almost always relegated to be a sub-function of one of the less popular non-carbonated drinks (lemonade, for example) where one has to manually press the tiny lever with one's finger. WITH ONE'S FINGER! If I can't shove my cup up against a giant plastic switch it's hardly worth drinking. Half the time what you get is a mix that's 3/4 water and 1/4 lemonade. This is no way to treat water.

I don't have a solution to propose aside from the half-jesting post title. And there's really nothing to be done about the mini-sub-spigot issue aside from, perhaps, jumping the order counter and demanding to fill up my cup directly at the kitchen tap. Next time.

Allergy season is upon us. It's the time of year when I walk around sniffling and sneezing, clutching to crumpled up tissues stuffed haphazardly in my pocket, and zonked half out of my head on pills. Sometimes I think that allegy medication doesn't actually relieve any symptoms but instead just makes me not care about it as much. I'm thinking that I should move to the desert. I'll probably develop an allergy to cacti.

I'm not sure I understand the concept of allergies. Why do we have them? Yes, medically I understand what is going on. But I mean on a more philosophical level: why allergies? What purpose do they serve? Evoluntionarily speaking they don't seem to provide any benefit. Did cavemen have allergies?

Here are some things I've tried that have not lessened my allergy symptoms:
- a daily spoonful of local honey
- blowing my nose over and over and over again
- putting my face over steaming water
- changing my A/C filters
- holding my breath when I walk past somebody mowing the lawn
- lying down
- sitting up
- watching tv until two o'clock in the morning
- whining about it

Here are some things I've tried that have not necessarily lessened my allergy symptoms but have at least made me case less about it:
- Prescription drugs
- Over the counter drugs
- And, most successfully, prescription drugs and over the counter drugs at the same time

On the way to work today, I heard an ad on the radio for a house of ill repute, aka a strip club, which claimed to have "the world's most exotic dancers." What does that even mean? This appears to be a case of an idiom crossing the boundary into the absurd, or, as the case may be, a mixed metaphor.

Let's deconstruct. Dictionary.com defines "exotic" as follows:

exotic adj.
1. From another part of the world; foreign.
2. Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange.
3. Of or involving striptease: an exotic dancer.

It appears that the strip club is somehow confusing definition 3 with definitions 1 and 2. Since an exotic dancer is someone who does a strip tease, I don't see how an exotic dancer can be the MOST exotic dancer unless they somehow do the MOST strip teasing. Perhaps one strips down to the very base of her soul. Unlikely. Perhaps they mean that these strippers are foreign? Come see our foreign strippers, shipped in from India, outsourcing at its best! Also unlikely, and, to be nit-picky, based on definition 1 still somewhat nonsensical: How can something be the most foreign IN THE WORLD? When you consider the scope of the whole world, nothing is technically foreign, unless you're talking about extraterrestrials. What you'd really need to say is "America's Most Exotic Dancers" or, perhaps just clarify the original statement, "The World's Most Exotic Dancers, But We Mean Exotic From An American Perspective". Finally, perhaps our strip club marketers mean to imply definition number 2, that their strippers are the most intriguingly unusual and/or excitingly strange in the world. Perhaps this would be an effective slogan for a circus freak show, but somehow I believe that drunken frat boys are actually looking for the intriguingly USUAL and the excitingly NORMAL. And I suppose it is possible they simply meant that they have the most exotic dancers as in sheer number of exotic dancers, that this particular club has hundreds and thousands of exotic dancers, hence the MOST exotic dancers of anywhere in the world.

In summary, obviously the strip club was using the word "exotic" to mean "beautiful" but got confused by the use of the term "exotic" in "exotic" dancer. I suppose this is a whole lot of hoo-ha for me to make fun of one stupid ad. Be it a lesson for all cheaply made strip-club radio advertisements: DO NOT MIX METAPHORS OR YOU WILL FACE OF THE WRATH OF MY MIGHTY PEN!

Though not really a pen... My mighty keyboard, then.

Yesterday for lunch I spent a quiet hour on the patio of the newly opened, too-giant Wholefoods in downtown Austin. But this post isn't about the pros and cons of the mega-organic-grocer, rather, I need to discuss a much more complex matter. It was quite windy out there on the patio, and despite my best efforts to keep everything on the table, one napkin escaped and blew onto the ground, skipping across the wooden deck with the wind currents. Not wanting to litter, I ran to grab it, only to discover it had landed in a pile of twenty napkins. Apparently, the layout of the Wholefoods patio is such that it creates a napkin vortex, the wind corralling all loose napkins into one paper-filled corner. Thus came my dilemma. Should I:

a) Pick up one napkin from this pile of twenty napkins, thus cleaning up the mess I made, but leaving the rest of the napkins untouched?

b) Pick up no napkins, since the complete set of strewn napkins represented a larger janitorial problem, therefore absolving me of my duty to clean up my one lost napkin?

c) Pick up all the napkins, since I was already there to pick up my own napkin?

It was quite a conundrum. I didn't want to be responsible for littering yet I didn't even know which napkin was mine. I certainly wasn't going to abandon my lunch to clean up all the napkins, some of which were dirty. What to do?

In the end I picked up two napkins. One to represent my lost napkin, thus exculpating myself from littering guilt, and one to satisfy the time-trusted axiom, "Leave the place cleaner than you found it."

n.

A long word.

adj.

1. Given to the use of long words.
2. Long and ponderous; polysyllabic.

You've got to admit, that's a great word.

It seems there have been a rash of blog-related firings lately. Employees have been sacked for posting private corporate details, photos or content that tarnished the reputation of the company, or simply unflattering information about the business. While I certainly haven't done the first two, I suppose it could be argued that I've made a few not-particularly-flattering posts about my job. Though, really, my comments have all been of a generic nature, lambasting general corportate culture rather than my particular employer. Plus, my employer is never mentioned, and, in fact, my full name is never actually mentioned, so unless you happen to know me and know that this is my website, there's no chance of besmirching the good folks who send me a paycheck.

I'm not concerned about this blog causing me trouble at work but I thought the news article was interesting. Blogging comes with many ups (for example, the chance to publicly make a fool of yourself) and many downs (for example, the chance to publicly make a fool of yourself) and, apparently, also the possibility of losing your job.

I've discovered a new web comic called "Dinosaur Comics" at qwantz.com. It's the same exact picture every single day (some dinosaurs stomping on things) with different text. The dinosaurs discuss philosophy, logical fallacies, religion, and other topics not typically covered in comic strips. Just the fact that it uses the exact same strip image every day is amusing to me. My favorite comic so far is about "garden path" sentences. Every time I read it I laugh.

I was making some pasta the other day only to discover that my linguini and my angel hair had gotten mixed together in my pasta canister. This was cause for concern, as both have different boil times if you want al dente. It required a long and annoying process of pasta separation and led me to multiple thoughts about the nature and history of different pasta types. I looked up the words "spaghetti", "linguini", and "angel hair" in the dictionary. Here is what I found:

spaghetti - Pasta in long, often thick strands.
angel hair - Pasta in long, extremely thin strands.
linguini - Pasta in long, flat, thin strands.

As anyone can see, these three definitions raise deep, troubling questions.

Is spaghetti the superset of angel hair and linguini? Based on these definitions, I'd say it is. Spaghetti is often thick, but not ALWAYS thick. Therefore, spaghetti could be extremely thin, meaning that spaghetti would also be angel hair. What about linguini? Well, we've already shown that spaghetti can be both thick and thin. But what about flat? The definition of spaghetti makes no mention of shape, just length and thickness and strand-ness. A flat strand is still a strand. Therefore linguini is also spaghetti.

So what about this concept of the flat strand? Can we assume that a normal strand is columnar? Or is a strand shapeless? Is the term "flat strand" contradictory, the linguistic equivalent of "vodka martini" or "chicken fajita"? Surprisingly, not only does the definition of "strand" fail to give any explanation of shape, it actually fails to describe pasta altogether:

1. A complex of fibers or filaments that have been twisted together to form a cable, rope, thread, or yarn.
2.a. A single filament, such as a fiber or thread, of a woven or braided material.
2.b. A wisp or tress of hair.
3. Something that is plaited or twisted as a ropelike length: a strand of pearls; a strand of DNA.
4. One of the elements woven together to make an intricate whole, such as the plot of a novel.

I suppose that definition 2.a. is the closest, if you assume that one strand of spaghetti is really just a single filament from a larger set of pasta, but that's not a tight connection. The reality is that Merriam Webster and dictionary.com both FAIL TO ADEQUATELY DEFINE "STRAND" TO ACCOMODATE ITS USAGE VIS-A-VIS PASTA!

When I was a kid I loved the Earthsea novels by Ursala K. Le Guin. Well, apparently it was turned into a Sci-Fi channel mini-series and will be out on DVD on March 8th. Did anyone see this when it was on television? Is it any good? Stumbling across the listing made me nostalgic for the books.

As a follow up to a previous entry, it appears that Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new novel will be available in English translation on 10/25/2005, exactly one year after the original Spanish version was published. At least, Amazon.com says you can buy it and it will be delivered on that date, and Amazon.com is where I go for 99% of my book news.

A friend of mine has recently started a blog, The Good Life, over on blogspot. It appears to be clever, well-written, regularly updated, and not completely inane - everything MixedMetaphors is not.

I'm staring at a stack of books right now wondering what I should read next. I'm afraid that my book purchasing habits have outpurchased my book reading. The current front runners are:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Molloy and Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
A Kaddish for An Unborn Child by Imre Kertesz
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
Herzog by Saul Bellow

An interesting mix... plus some books of short stories I haven't finished and a few others that I'm not bothering to list because they haven't made the cut. I'm not sure how I got into this book backlog, this back booklog, but I might have to restrict myself from any more trips to BookPeople until I manage to lessen the unread stack.

Why am I bothering to post this to my blog? Because my blog isn't just about witty rants on corporate politics, but also meaningless rambling about random thoughts and trivial musings about daily nonsense.

Getting resources approved has been very, very difficult lately. It's been somewhat futile, because every time I actually manage to get a new resource approved, there's another hiring freeze and all previously approved positions are refrozen until reapproval. Here's the current process:

Step 1: Submit resource requests to upper management
Step 2: Push resource requests all the way up the chain because everyone needs to sign off.
Step 3: Get approval.
Step 4: Find out there's a hiring freeze and all positions need to be reapproved.
Step 5: Repeat steps 1-3.
Step 6: Locate candidate to hire.
Step 7: Find out there's another hiring freeze, put in place by the same people who executed the first hiring freeze, and all positions need to be reapproved.
Step 8: Repeat Step 5
Step 9: Repeat Step 7.
Step 10: Repeat Steps 8-9.
Step 11: Repeat Step 10 indefinitely.
Step 12: Give up and hire the candidate as a contractor and hope nobody notices the extra expense each month.

Despite the fact that I got distracted by list antics, the point is clear. Getting new full time positions approved is proving to be impossible. But, really, my problem is not that I can't hire the people I need, it's that the whole notion of "approval" is broken. I'm getting approval from the same people who then tell me there is a freeze nullifying that approval. Here's a brief abstracted conversation to showcase the absurdity:

Me: Can I get approval for X?
Them: Yes.
Me: Great!
Them: But there's a freeze on X, so you can't.
Me: Who instituted this freeze?
Them: Us.
Me: But you just gave me approval.
Them: Yes, but there's a freeze.
Me: But you made the freeze! Your approval can bypass the freeze!
Them: True. Okay, approved.
Me: Great!
Them: Wait, there's a NEW freeze on X.
Me: What does that mean?
Them: This new freeze puts all previous approvals on hold.
Me: But you just gave me approval to bypass the freeze, and then you immediately created a new freeze!
Them: Correct.
Me: Why did you give me approval to bypass the freeze if you were just going to refreeze? And why did you give me approval in the first place if there was an existing freeze negating that original approval?
Them: Nobody knows. NOBODY KNOWS!!!

Seriously, nobody knows.

- I'll just take your word on that.

- Are you sure you shouldn't be allocating a little more here, just in case?

- We need to cut out ten million dollars from the total budget, but we'll find that in someone else's group.

- Didn't we tell you that this year your budget was going to be saddled with the annual amortization of these previous projects you with which you were only tangentially involved? Oh. In that case, we won't make you cut two million dollars to cover it.

- Do you mind if I smoke... marijuana? Because, seriously, I need to get into the same frame of mind you were in when you wrote this thing.

- Incidentally, these donuts are coming out of your cost center.

- Don't think last night is going to get you any more dollars allocated to travel and entertainment.

- Do you think glasses make me look nerdy? Seriously.

- We're just going to make up the monthly expenditure report anyway, so, sure, I'll approve whatever you've got.

- But will it save you 15% on car insurance? (Actually, this might be something you hear at one of my budget meetings, but for different reasons.) (You know, I hate jokes that are funny only because they make reference to other pop cultural jokes which are, themselves, not funny. For examples, I can't stand parodies of the MasterCard "priceless" ads. Something isn't funny simply because it mimicks another joke. So I recognize that this list item is unfunny and derivative. But, frankly, this whole post is sort of dumb, so I'll go with it. It's a theme: Unfunniness.)

- Okay.

- Approved.

An interesting site that discusses the change in dating from a marriage-based culture to a hookup-based culture and how that impacts society. I don't necessarily agree with everything here, but I think it is a really interesting and important topic of discussion.

There have been a lot of business books published analyzing why it is that various corporate projects fail. But what about all those projects that never even start? Whether it's paying for data center upgrades, building a new online store or expanding the call center, most big companies have some sort of internal review process for new initiatives; making it past that gauntlet of executives to get the needed signatures can be daunting. It should be easy: if the revenue/savings are greater than the expense then "yes", if not, "no". But nothing, nothing, nothing is easy when you present to the board. So for everybody trying to rustle up internal funding for just such a corporate venture you should take a look at common reasons (some taken from actual meeting minutes) projects are rejected.

1a. Too expensive
Detail: The expense of the project is greater than the potential revenue or cost savings.

1b. Too expensive
Detail: While the expense of the project is less than the potential revenue or cost savings, the board doesn't like the look of that number. It looks big. Come back when it looks smaller. Or more round.

1c. Too expensive
Detail: While the expense of the project is less than the potential revenue, everyone on the board knows you made up those revenue numbers at the last minute and no one believes them.

2a. Too inexpensive
Detail: Why are you wasting the board's time with this project? Just buy the damn computer using the normal purchasing process.

2b. Too inexpensive
Detail: While the potential revenue seems enormous compared to the minimal expense, the board feels that it can't possibly be a high priority project if it costs so little.

3. Not our core business
Detail: While it sounds like a great project, this isn't our core business. You shouldn't sell shoes if you're not a shoe store. Yes, I know your project has nothing to do with shoes. That was a metaphor.

4. Too many high priority projects
Detail: The guy before you presented a much more exciting project, and we don't want to start two projects of this magnitude at once.

5. Nine women can't have a baby in one month
Detail: Self-explanatory
Further detail for those who don't take the board's word as gospel: While the project looks appealing, you're trying to build an entire new business process in two months by throwing money at it, but even if you hire 100 people there is a limit to how many resources will be effective at solving the problem.

6. Rome wasn't built in a day
Detail: See number 5.

7. This is how our business has always been done and we're not going to change it now, a.k.a. the crotchety-old-man rejection.
Detail: Self-explanatory.

8. Wait until the senior board member retires
Detail: Self-explanatory

9. No Good Reason
Detail: The board doesn't have to justify itself to anyone.

10. ROI form improperly filed
Detail: Yes, the board is rejecting a high-revenue, low-cost project because of paperwork. The paperwork is for the greater good. Without paperwork there would be chaos. Chaos!

11. History of Failure
Detail: All your projects fail, so no more new projects until you get the last one to start generating revenue. Additionally, for your own welfare you probably don't want to remind us about past failures by proposing more projects.

12. Good Money After Bad
Detail: This isn't actually a new project, it's a subtle way of getting more money for a previous project which apparently costs twice what you said it would cost. We don't want to throw good money after bad. The actual project cost is this new cost plus the money you've already spent, which is too much. Stop trying to fool us.

13. Meta-Rejection
Detail: How come you keep proposing new projects to us? Because we keep rejecting them? We probably had good reasons. Next!

14. De Facto Rejection
Detail: We'd have to start this project immediately to make it successful and we can't make up our minds that quickly. Instead we're going to keep pushing off a decision until the project goes away by itself.

15. Sick of hearing so many projects
Detail: It's been a long day, can't we hear this project proposal at the next meeting? All in favor? Aye! See you next month.

There are, of course, many, many other reasons projects are rejected, but this list should help you get started. Good luck!

I'm sick again. I seem to be getting sick a lot lately. I think it has something to do with the fact that my girlfriend works with children. Children are little incubators for germs. Cute little incubators, I'll give you that. So she has these super high tolerance levels from extended exposure, but she brings all the germs home for my body to experiment with. I just ended a sentence with a preposition, see how sick I am? I have nothing funny to say. This blog is becoming unfunny. And unupdated. The book track section is a lot more active and interesting than the blog, but who really cares about that section? Anyway, I'm just raving because I am sick. Feel better everyone in the world who is sick! Feel better!

It's been a week and I finally got around to fixing my servr. The fixing process took about five minutes. Five minutes I couldn't be bothered to spend before now. I've probably lost all my readers over the last week, but that's okay, because, as you know, I don't like my readers. I find them perplexing and unnerving. Now this blog can finally reclaim its true purpose: lunatic rantings into the void, to be ignored by everyone. Blogs are like the shouted nonsense of insane street walkers, dispersed into what is theoretically a public space for discource, but nervously disregarded by the embarrassed passerbys unlucky enough to be within earshot. Yes, that's me. One day I'll probably be out there physically on the street. When I look back at my MixedMetaphors.net days, pausing to take a break from haranguing pedestrians with hollered tales of impending doom, I'll know that this blog stage of my life was not wasted. No, it was practice.

In the near future MixedMetaphors.net is going to be taken down for significant server upheaval. Of course, a more savvy techie would be able to do all my planned changes in about ten minutes, though I'm expecting at least a full weekend of hard core tinkering. The end result won't actually be noticible to you, the reader, except perhaps for a slight bit of added speed. But on my end it will reduce the computer clutter under my desk. Anyway, good luck to me. There's alwasy the chance that I completely fry my machines.

I've just decided that I want my first child, regardless of gender, to be named "Metaphor". I think that's a pretty name.

This is a true story that happened to my brother's friend in Seattle. He was out walking his dog one evening when he witnessed a fight going on a block away. The strange thing was that there were a bunch of other people watching but not doing anything about it. One of the men pulled out a gun and shot the other, sending him to the pavement and killing him. The dog started barking, and some of the people turned to look, so my brother's friend ran away. He went to the police and told them what had happened, and the police were concerned that he was a witness to some sort of gang or organized crime violence. Later the police informed him that there was someone going around the area with his picture looking for him. The police put a cop outside his house to protect him while they investigated the crime. Then, a few days later, a man knocks at his door: it's one of the guys who was watching the shooting! How did this guy get past the cops? My brother's friend runs out the back door of his place but another guy is waiting for him there and grabs him. He's sure he's about to be killed. Then the guy says to him, "Hey, buddy, I'm the director of that film you saw. We've been looking all over for you." It turns out that my brother's friend had wandered onto the scene of an independent film. He and his dog had been captured by one of the cameras. The director actually liked the effect of having a lone bystander and his dog in the cut, but needed to find him and get his release to use him in the movie.

Quiz: Where was this urban legend first told?
Answer:

A) Someone's legal will replaced by a fake will bequeathing total inheretence to the identity thief.

B) Fraudulent purchase of 2004 Indiana State Fair 1,115 pound award-winning "World's Largest Boar".

C) Someone mistakenly arrested for slave trading.

D) Four hundred thousand dollar second mortgage taken out on somebody's house.

E) Victim discovered that someone attended a university using his stolen identity and graduated with a C average.

F) Child was rejected from a prestigious prep school because two people showed up pretending to be her parents and claimed that, as Wiccans, the school would need to make some serious changes in order to support their religious beliefs. I'm not actually sure how this technically classifies as identity theft, but it's an interesting story.

G) Entirety of victim's mail, including paychecks, directed to another address for over a year before victim mentioned it to anyone, including her husband.

True: A, C, D, F, G
False: B, E

I was just kidding when I said that a previous post was the second part of a three-part series on interesting words, but lo and behold, here is the third part of the three-part series!

A long time ago (July 2004) MixedMetaophors.net briefly touched upon negative words (such as "inane") that have no positive counterpart (such as "ane"). Well I stumbled upon a clever article in the online journal, "The Quaker Economist," which lambasts this concept, refered to as the "delinquent positive". I'd like to pretend that I wrote the humorous rant myself, but that would be dishonest and MixedMetaphors.net has high ethical standards. Since I can't really add to the humor of that letter, I'll let you read it for yourself (scroll down a bit to find the relevant section).

In case you are looking for a simple list of delinquent positives, here are all the ones included in the article:

deplored / plored
disdain / dain
disputed / puted
deprived / prived
decieve / cieve
distracting / tracting
disgusted / gusted
uncouth / couth
discard / card
indispensable / dispensable / pensable
indiscreet / discreet / creet
delete / lete
deny / ny
defiance / fiance
disturb / turb
distraught / traught
deteriorate / teriorate
decay / cay
decrepit / crepit
demolish / molish
destroy / stroy
inertia / ertia
detain / tain
disheveled / sheveled
inebriate / ebriate
and, of course,
delinquent / linquent

The article did not mention our previous contributions of:

inane / ane
nonchalance / chalance

Today I am participating in an eight and half hour meeting to discuss identity theft insurance. It's the latest coverage craze to sweep the nation: insurance to protect you in the event that your identity is thefted.

Picture this: A large employer, as a benefit to its employees, arranges for a carrier to provide an identity theft insurance product to anyone who wants it. The carrier collects personal information from all the employees who apply for the coverage and puts this information in a big billing list. The carrier then proceeds to lose that list and everyone who signed up for the product has his or her identity stolen. Well, at least they had insurance.

I'm not saying this actually happened.

This conference call has begun with an hour long presentation about how identity theft happens and who is at risk and who is doing the theft and how extremely difficult it is to recover from it when it happens to you. I'm not sure how much I'm at liberty to discuss, but all I know is this is some scary stuff and I want identity theft insurance now. Of course, not from the theoretical carrier described above.

Today I bring you the second part of a three-part series on interesting words. NPR had a story this morning about a new book called "In Other Words: A Language Lovers Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World". The book lists words from other languages and cultures that are difficult or impossible to translate into English and then attempts to translate them into English. I'll be purchasing the book, but at the moment the only words I can provide as examples are the ones in the NPR story, so you can click the link above if you want to know what "Meraki" or "Litost" mean.

I've stumbled upon a curious and interesting blog called Double-Tongued Word Wrestler" maintained by a lexicographer for the Oxford University Press in NYC. The site lists new or fringe words, and it's an amusing place to see what words are lurking on the edges of the language. Recent entries includes such terms as "chones" (underwear), "duckshove" (to pass the buck), and "metric butt-load" (no explanation necessary).

My girlfriend and I were discussing the familiar playground taunt, "Liar, liar, pants on fire." Apparently, she used to conclude this with "Stick your head in doo-doo." I can't remember how we used to wrap up this clever rhyme in my New Jersey elementary school days, but I can assure you it wasn't like that. Possibly something about hanging oneself with a telephone wire, which, frankly, is quite disturbing. In my attempt to recollect the proper termination of the quip, all I can think of are ridiculously high-brow phrases no child would ever understand, let alone utter. So, here they are:

Liar, liar, pants on fire
Immolate yourself upon the funeral pyre.

Liar, liar, pants on fire
Rebel against the corrupt Bush empire.

Liar, liar, pants on fire
Your base antics fill me with ire.

Liar, liar, pants on fire
Tales of your dishonesty will be intonated by a satanic choir.

And while we're at it:

Made you look, made you look
Stole your mother's pocketbook
Turned it in, turned it out,
Turned it into a symbol for man's cruelty to man.

Trick or treat, smell our feet
Give us something good to eat
If you don't, we don't care
We will ultimately get our revenge when you suffer the agony of watching us poor street urchins starving to death on your lawn, knowing all the while you could have done something to prevent this awful tragedy.

I'll be heading out of town until January 4th to do a multi-state multi-purpose trip.

Places include:
Seattle, Washington
Los Angeles, California
Lake Tahoe, Nevada

Purposes include:
Seeing family
Skiing
Miscellaneous

A message to all my loyal readers:
"Who are you and why are you stalking me?"

I'm thinking of starting a new project, entitled "The Zombie Diaries" which would be a fictitious blog posted by someone hiding out in a post-apocalyptic near-future where zombies have overrun the planet. I don't know why, but the concept intrigues me. I've wanted to create some sort of ongoing fictional blog for some time. Does anyone else know about any blogs like this, where the blog itself is a continuong story (or even just a fake blog of some kind)? It seems like an interesting organic fiction project, writing a novel one paragraph at a time. It wouldn't necessarily have to be about zombies, of course, though setting the whole thing in the future makes the question of dating the blog a little easier, rather than me having to somehow keep in synch with the actual posting date. Any other suggestions for a good fake-blog topic?

I've stopped cross-posting to the main blog every time I post to my mostly-personal book track, but since MixedMetaphors has tended to idolize Dave Eggers, I thought it was of interest that I really disliked his newest book.

My blog has devolved into the worst form of meta-blog lately: all I can think to post about is how I'm trying to fix my blog. Actually, aside from the comment spam post (and this post) I suppose I haven't actually been posting about that sort of thing, but I've been thinking about posting about that sort of thing, which, to me at least, makes the blog feel self-referential in a mundane way, and for you makes the blog boring and empty because my disillusionment means very little of anything is being posted. But, hopefully, you should be seeing all this self-referential disillusionment and boring emptiness just a wee bit faster because I've theoretically fixed some of the performance problems. The fix apparently just involved shutting down the firewall and then restarting it, so I have no doubt that in about two days it will be slow again.

I still haven't been able to get MT-Blacklist working again, though perhaps with some help from my Microsoft ISV Buddy it will finally happen. As Vice President of the Avenue Lofts condominium HOA I've been charged with creating a website for our building, which means I'll be renting out actual managed server space, which means I might just steal a little space for myself and give up on this self-servered blog experiment.

Coming Soon: The Avenue Lofts webpage!

I was quite ill this weekend, the sort of illness that involves a restless sleep on the bathroom floor. Fortunately I have a nice, fluffy bathroom mat that provided a modicum of comfort, as well as a very patient girlfriend. And, no, I was not sick from too much partying (in fact, I missed two parties I had claimed I would attend) but, rather, from ennui. Okay, not from ennui. I just love the idea of ennui. Really, I was just sick from being sick, from some microscopic invader that found its way into my fragile system, sort of like ennui but less conceptual.

After 7 months I've finally been tracked down by the comment spam bots. I used to have a nifty spam blocker MT-Blacklist that did an amazing job, but I haven't gotten it to work since switching to my Windows server. In the meantime I have turned on comment approval, which means that all comments will need to be approved by me before they appear on the site.

Note: Any comments about how Windows servers suck and that's why I couldn't get MT-Blacklist to work will NOT be approved.

When listening to voice mail if I am sitting in front of my computer I will open up "Notepad" and write down notes about who left me messages so I can call everyone back. Today it seemed that I was missing phone calls and getting messages each time I stepped out of my office. I kept coming back to my desk, opening up a new file in Notepad, listening to the message and jotting down the phone number, then calling the person back. After deleting the fourth notepad file I felt a momentary pang of guilt for wasting so much paper.

The end.

I'll be spending Thanksgiving with my girlfriend's family. I've been warned that her aunt is planning on asking me why the two of us aren't married yet. It's definitely one of those questions that has no correct answer, so instead I've been coming up with what NOT to say.

"Sure, it's been a year and a half, but I like to think of this more like an extended fling."

"Yes, we love each other, but, to be honest, I can't stand her family."

"The milk's free."

"Didn't she tell you? We eloped last month."

"We're waiting to see if the baby is white."

"Because... because I'm in love with you."

"My wife wouldn't approve."

"My male lover wouldn't approve."

"I'm looking for someone with bigger boobs."

"While we're very happy together and do, um, love each other, we're kinda at a stage in our lives when the future is still, you know, being determined, I guess. She's applying to, um, graduate school, my current job will be involving, uh, more travel and, maybe, a possible relocation or something. While this doesn't mean we don't, like, want to be together and, you know, stuff, it does mean we, uh, want to wait and see, uh, where, um... OH MY GOD LOOK OVER THERE!!! WHAT IS THAT? SERIOUSLY, LOOK OVER THERE!!!!" [run away]

In today's teen-scene, instant messaging has evolved its own shorthand, a set of abbreviations meant to inspire, amuse, and titillate. Instant messaging has also invaded the corporate world, aiding workplace discussions and providing a more efficient means of employee cooperation. But along with this communication facilitation it brings a host of internet-age etiquette issues. Some clever abbreviations used in a social setting are not appropriate for a more professional environment. To help smooth this technology transition, MixedMetaphors.net brings you...

Workplace-Ready Instant Message Abbreviations

FYI: For Your Information

IMO: In My Opinion

INALB: I'm Not A Lawyer But

IALA: I'm A Lawyer And

IALAA: I'm A Legal Aide And

TGICF: Thank Goodness It's Casual Friday

BOS: Boss Over Shoulder

BTS: Boss Touching Shoulder

BEIEAOSH: Boss Engaged In Egregious Act Of Sexual Harassment

LTASM: Let's Take A Smoking Break

ITTQ: I'm Trying To Quit

YAQ: You're A Quitter

DYGMBP: Did You Get My Budget Proposal?

ROTFLAYBP: Rolling On The Floor Laughing At Your Budget Proposal

SINTBAOICDMJ: Seriously, I Need That Budget Approved Or I Can't Do My Job

CTMO: Come To My Office

CWJDTOIM: Can't We Just Do This Over Instant Messenger?

NO: No.

IWFH: I'm Working From Home

YF: You're Fired!

YCFMIQ: You Can't Fire Me I Quit!

YCQBYF: You Can't Quit You're Fired!

FITS: Fine, I'll Take Severance

INHAMS: I'm Not Here Ask My Secretary

TPTIEA: The Proper Term Is Executive Assistant

DYSJATOCPDSWTWAMOWBFAP: Did You See Jane At The Office Christmas Party? Dude, She Was Totally Wasted And Made Out With Bob From Accounts Payable!

MCIWAICTHDBTPMOHFTHSIGUAWHTGYTRT: My Computer Isn't Working And I Called The Help Desk But They Put Me On Hold For Three Hours So I Gave Up And Will Have To Give You The Report Tomorrow.

IYCIWHDYSMTIM: If Your Computer Isn't Working How Did You Send Me That Instant Message?

UXZSIXBZCF: Ummm.... Xxyzyxy Zyxyxxxx Something Is Xyzyxy... Broken... Zzyyzxxxx Computer Failing...

YF: (See Above)

WHOHW: Working Hard Or Hardly Working?

HHHS: Ha ha ha. Schmuck.

That's my shirt pocket.

The Nick Hornby book, "Fever Pitch", about a fanatical football (as in soccer) writer who follows the ever-losing Arsenal is being remade into a movie about a fanatical baseball writer who follows the ever-losing Red Sox. However, now that the Red Sox have won the World Series the screenwriters are rewriting the end of the movie! The rewritten ending, Jimmy Fallon as star, and Farrelly brothers directing does not, in my opinion, bode well for this film. I'll probably just rent the still-fresh 1997 version starring Colin Firth instead.

Yo mama so stupid she doesn't realize this joke is simply a member of the broad based set of 'yo mama' jokes, part of a generic category of humor people use to cleverly mock each other, and not an actual insult aimed upon her intelligence.

A new book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Memoria De Mis Putas Tristes" (or "Memories of My Melancholy Whores"), came out today. It is only available in Spanish, which makes me very unhappy. Marquez is one of my favorite authors and it's been 10 years since he's written a novel and, damn it, I'm ready to read another one. If a translation isn't available soon I'm going to have to make my Spanish-speaking girlfriend read me this version.

I'm back from vacation not a day too early, because if I ate one more cheesesteak or slice of pizza (or both) at three in the morning I'm not sure what would happen to me, but I can only assume it wouldn't have been good.

1) The movie "Primer" is very, very good. I don't really want to say much about it for fear of giving anything away, but it is definitely worth your time. It is a complex movie that needs some thought, so go to see it with a friend who will be willing to sit around afterwards and discuss it. And if you don't like that sort of thing, don't see the movie.

2) The showing I attended of Ionesco's "Rhinoceros " was of poor production value, which made it hard to appreciate. The protagonist was acted as a whining coward as opposed to a determined individualist, (and in my opinion it should have been the latter) altering the whole tone of the play. Anyway, that's what you get with small Off Broadway shows.

3) At the risk of sounding like the sort of person who holds everything to the high standards of New York City, here is a sub-list of things that are better in New York City than in Austin:

 a) Pizza
 b) Cheesesteaks (though the optional use of cheese whiz is a questionable practice)
 c) Sushi
 d) Chinese food
 e) Delis (especially the matzah ball soup)
 f) The ability to get all of the above items at three in the morning

4) Being that I grew up in North Jersey, I'm prone to having the "New York City Is Better Than Anywhere Else In The World" complex. So, to counteract that feeling, here is a sub-list of things that are better in Austin than in New York City:

 a) Mexican food
 b) BBQ
 c) The weather
 d) The price of absolutely everything

5) Go see "Primer".

Some things to tide everyone over until I am back from vacation:

1) A new book has been entered on Book Track.

2) I will be seeing a production of Ionesco's "Rhinoceros " tomorrow night. Ionesco is the grandfather of absurdist theater.

3) I am about to go see the critically acclaimed independent film, "Primer". I'll let you know.

That's it. Enjoy my vacation.

A new story has been posted to the fiction section. It is very much in draft stage, but such is the result of workshop deadlines.

I remember the NJ HSPT (High School Proficiency Test) had a reading comprehension section where you'd answer a question about which sentence in a brief narrative did not belong. A favorite of mine was a story about a boy who's father had died in Vermont, and the offending sentence was "Vermont is where Cabot cheese is made."

Anyway, along these lines, I was reading an article about a failed controversial copyright bill more suited for discussion on the high-minded Sidey.com 2.0 when I ran across something that struck me as odd. About two paragraphs from the bottom is the following gem:

"The bill also designates the oak as the national tree."

Is this for real? The bill was intended to make it easier to fine or jail people for song/movie swapping. I can't decide whether the bill actually designated the oak as the national tree or whether the author of the article was making a sarcastic comment about its wide-reaching nature (along the lines of saying "this bill includes everything but the kitchen sink"). Perhaps the bill was defeated not because of the controversial copyright measures but because Senators prefer elm.

It seems a great deal of October marketing (i.e. shop window signage) revolves around the use of the exclamation "boo" in replace of vaguely "boo"-like syllable fragments. I have three theories:

1) Shop owners actually think this is clever.
2) Shop owners have a great sense of holiday irony and think this mundane pun is so overdone and stupid that it has once again become clever.
3) The concept of word "boo"-itization has simply been deemed a Halloween/October theme, done with total straight-faced seriousness, similar to putting out jack-o-lanterns or other faux-spooky decorations.

I suppose it is number 3, which I can begrudgingly accept, but when I'm lying awake at night pondering my deepest fears it is that I live in a world where everyone thinks saying "boo-tiful" instead of "beautiful" is genuinely funny.

The other Halloween conundrum with which I am faced is costume related, mainly, what should it be? At first I considered going as a zombie, but that seems a little too common. Plus, it would require too much make-up and special effects. Then I thought perhaps I could go as a guy who has been BITTEN by a zombie, which would involve only a small wound on my arm and, I suppose, a slow but tragic deterioration into the living dead. This might be a bit too subtle for most Halloween partygoers.

My costume requirements are:
a) Relatively simple to put together.
b) Don't involve a lot of make-up.
Though since I'm getting a head start this year I might be willing to compromise on the first requirement.

My current ideas are:
1) Guy who has been bitten by a zombie.
2) Some variation on a devil theme (I already have horns and a tail).
3) Some variation on a pimp theme (I have various pimp accoutrements).
4) Something that requires interestingly shaved facial hair (I've been growing my customary pre-Halloween beard just in case).

Perhaps I could be a devil pimp who has been bitten by a zombie (with, of course, interestingly shaved facial hair).

At Sidey.com 2.0's persistent insistence I installed the Firefox browser on my computer. It is clear from initial testing that it is a vile, bitter tool, hell-bent on committing great acts of pure evil. Aside from it's obviously iniquitous nature, it seems pretty much like Internet Explorer except with tabs. Tabs, I admit, are sort of cool. I've also heard some rumblings about less security holes, etc., but if you, like Internet Explorer, had a thousand thieves with high-end lock picks trying to find a way into your house while your neighbor only had to deal with one guy holding a bent wire hanger probably your house would also seem less secure. But, is it really less secure? No. I'm sure Sidey.com 2.0 will regale me with lots of reasons why Firefox is actually more secure rather than just seemingly more secure, but, frankly, I'll be using this blog as an irrational pulpit for the greatness of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

The installation of Firefox did achieve one goal: the partial completion of a promise I made back in August to fix the site so that the main body is centered on lame, non-IE browsers. Well, the site now works on IE and Firefox. Hopefully the Firefox fix also fixed the site for Safari and Opera, but since my technologically advanced quality assurance labs are neither technologically advanced nor labs I wouldn't know.

Dear Blog,

It's been a long week since I last blogged. How have you been? I've been fine, though a little peaked, and, frankly, a little piqued, homophones that both imply some level of distress, but in rather distinct and, in this case, accurate ways. I am not peaked or piqued at you or because of you, of course, my good blog, but shall we say, in spite of you. And I say that in the idiomatic sense, meaning "regardless", not in the literal sense of spitefulness. But either way it's sort of irrelevant because I was being disingenuous, you had nothing to do with anything, so, really, it wasn't in spite of you (however you choose to define "spite") but, simply, it was irrelevant of you. But that's not why I'm writing. Or should I say: blogging?

So why am I blogging, you ask? No reason. Simply because you are like an old friend with whom one no longer has much in common but with whom one still keeps in touch on a semi-regular basis even if there is nothing compelling or new to discuss, forced to write letter after letter, or, more likely in this technologically advanced age, e-mail after e-mail, even though these letters or e-mails are vapid and pointless and serve only to keep a slowly dying friendship on a vague sort of life support, each letter or e-mail one more gasping breath, until eventually there will be no more, and a few months or years later one will look back and think, "I haven't heard from so-and-so in a long time, perhaps I should contact him or her, but, actually, I never really liked him or her that much anyway so forget it, I suppose I'll just be thankful this relationship is finally over and hope to god he or she doesn't try to contact me again." Fortunately I don't have any friends like that. Except for you, oh blog, except for you.

Your friend, though, to be honest, not really,
Jeff

John Stewart and the writers of the Daily Show have a new book out, "America: The Book". As a book promotion, Stewart recorded a special web video for the Amazon.com website. It's more of a mock Amazon.com advertisement than it is an ad for the book, but that just makes it even funnier. See it at the link above or click here if you want to skip directly to the video.

Here's something I find very interesting about The Daily Show: Apparently it transcends political affiliation. I was talking to a co-worker in Iowa and he was complaining about the liberal media bias and he mentioned John Stewart as an example of a CONSERVATIVE media figure. I was shocked, since as I understand it John Stewart is definitely a liberal and doesn't attempt to hide it. But I had another conversation with a different very-right-leaning friend and, though he did know that Stewart is a professed leftie, my friend praised The Daily Show's equalitarian approach to political mockery. I think it's a great example of (a) how humor transcends political opinion, (b) how people can laugh at their point-of-view being mocked when the mockery is genuinely funny, and (c) how someone can have strong political views yet still provide unbiased news/humor.

Thomas the Tank Engine came to Austin this weekend and he parked at the Austin Convention Center, across the street from my home. From my window I could see Thomas chugging along (he was going back and forth on the old train tracks at fourth street) and every time I drove by I would look over and see a giant blue train face smiling at me. There are real trains that run near the city, and when a train whistle blew in the distance Thomas the Tank Engine would blow his in response. I find the whole anthropomorphic train thing amusing. Rumor has is that Sir Topham Hatt also made an appearance.

My nephew is a big fan of Thomas and therefore I've seen a few of the videos. I was thinking about getting my picture taken with Sir Topham Hatt but there was an hour wait, plus he was charging fourteen dollars. Oh, Sir Topham Hatt, how fame has changed you.

I read a lot of books, so many that I sometimes forget which ones. That's not quite true, I do remember the books, I just don't always remember when I read them or why I read them (if, indeed, there was a reason). I've decided to keep track by listing them all out in their own special sub-section, which I don't expect anyone will care about but me. However, if you are a stalker and are interested in what books I've read and my brief opinions on them, you now have the opportunity.

Note: I seriously do not think anyone aside from me cares about this. But as this blog, like other blogs, is a personal journal in a public arena, I am posting things of personal interest for personal reasons even when the public (or a very, very small sub-set of the public) might be reading. I suppose you all know and understand this already and you don't care when I post something that isn't of interest, you just move on to the next item, which, likely, you also don't care about. For some reason I feel the need to apologize every time I do something that could possibly be interpretated as against blog etiquette... which is odd, considering how much I dislike blogs.

*** Another Note: Link has been fixed! ***

and somebody just used the word "interpretate".

I forgot about the birthday of Sidey.com 2.0 (not the birthday of the website, but of the man behind the website) and in order to make up for my egregious forgetfulness I decided to post both an apology and birthday wishes here for the whole world to see. Happy Birthday Sidey.com 2.0! Sorry 'bout that.

I suppose this question has been asked by numerous folks standing in line at their local greek deli, but what makes something "world famous"? Mostly attributed to decent but, as far I can tell, certainly not globally renowned foodstuffs, one typically sees this bold assertion on items such as the "world famous spanikopita" or "world famous chicken salad" or, as I noticed at the airport yesterday (the airport!) "world famous donuts: best donuts in the world!"

While I might be willing to accept the slight possibility that the Austin airport donuts are world famous (I suppose airport items, being in close proximity to planes, are more likely to encounter some sort of global recognition) I am hesitant to even consider the extreme claim that these supposed-nonpareil donuts surpass all other donuts in the entire world.

Here are my questions:
1) Do these food items asserting world famous status actually have world famous status?
2) If not, do the people asserting world famous status expect shoppers to believe in said world famous status, or has the term "world famous" devolved into a grammatical intensifier, with no connection to its original meaning, now representing something more along the lines of "this item is a customer favorite"?
3) And, finally, what would it take for something to actually be "world famous"? On how many countries or continents must your fame be recognized to move from "famous" to "world famous"? Is it enough for one guy from England to have come once to your store and complimented the chicken salad? And what distinguishes fame from a general agreeance that the chicken salad is good? If a lot of people like your chicken salad, does that actually make it famous (locally or otherwise)? For that matter, what if one time your chicken salad was tainted and killed fourteen people, making internation news? Wouldn't that also qualify it as world famous?

The last post brings up the question: When is counter culture NOT culture? The term "counter-culture" is semi-contradictory; it really should be counter-established-culture. (It's sort of like how "alternative" music is just as popular as "popular" music. True alternative music doesn't get played on the radio, or, at least, it doesn't get played on any radio stations aside from weird indie college radio shows at 3:30 in the morning.) I suppose that if counter-culture wasn't still culture, it wouldn't be counter-culture, it would just be some random guy in a basement who has a particularly odd lifestyle but doesn't have any impact on the world. Yet, then again, most counter-culture (counter-established-culture) movements probably begin just that way, as true-counter-culture movements, meaning unknown no-impact-on-culture-established-or-otherwise movements, spearheaded by one random guy in a basement who has a particularly odd lifestyle, until eventually enough people have joined him such that it spills out of the basement into the world and becomes an actual counter-established-culture movement. Eventually it may become mainstream enough to be called, simply, culture.

I was going to mention the odd McSweeney's "Operation Ohio" where university students can sign up for a phone call from a famous writer on November 2nd to remind them to vote, (which, I suppose, is a way for the left-leaning McSweeney's to get usually-liberal college students in swing states to register and, at the very least, reminded to head to the polls), but I'm starting to feel there's too much posting about McSweeney's-related topics. MixedMetaphors.net is not some kind of McSweeney's fan-zine.

I mean, I do like McSweeney's. It's a post-modern counter-culture literary movement that has rounded up some of the best contemporary writers and, I think, has changed journals and publishing for the better. But, then again, I'm thinking it's getting about time an even newer batch of writers take up the gauntlet with a post-post-modern counter-counter-culture movement that knocks McSweeney's down a few pegs. Sometimes I think they seem a little too smarmy over there at McSweeney's.

In a previous entry, commenter Matthew had the following to say:
"As excited as I am about the concept, I don't buy in to the free hat offer. I am still waiting for my Oval with Points hat."

What could this cryptic comment mean? The explanation demands attention in its own blog entry.

Q: What is "Oval With Points"?
A: Oval With Points is a sculpture (or, rather, a series of sculptures) by Henry Moore, the English abstract sculptor who lived 1898-1986.

Q: What's it to you?
A: One of Henry Moore's Oval With Points sculptures is located at Princeton University.

Q: So?
A: For various reasons, I used to spend a lot of time on the Princeton University campus, and was very fond of Oval With Points. I was struck both by its beauty, its simplicity and by the inherent absurdity the sculpture seemed, in my mind, to embody.

Q: What does commenter Matthew mean when he refers to an Oval With Points hat?
A: Though I'd forgotten about it until now, MixedMetaphors.net is not my first inane web site. A decade ago, back when the web was in its infancy, I had another site. Yes, it was the Oval With Points Fan Club. The fan club had over 100 members worldwide, sent out monthly newsletters, and was once even officially recognized as a "weird site of the day" by the formerly popular "weird site of the day" site.

Q: The hat? What about the hat?
A: Oh, yes. The hat. Well, you see, I've been making empty promises about MixedMetaphors.net hats. But, as you may have guessed, this is not the first time I've claimed shipments of non-existent hats were on their way. A decade ago commenter Matthew was a member of the now-disbanded Oval With Points Fan Club. And yes, in return for his loyal membership he was promised a hat. A hat for which he is, unfortunately, still waiting. The shipment, it would appear, has been permanently delayed.

Q: Wait a minute! So are there MixedMetaphors.net hats or not?
A: The shipment has been temporarily delayed.

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky: Yeah? And?

Pablo Picasso: What about it?

Humphrey Bogart: Can I help you with something?

Ernest Miller Hemingway: Why are you waving a light bulb in my face?

Thomas Alva Edison: Uh, yeah. I invented that you know.

Albert Einstein: I was born the same year the light bulb was invented.

Herbert Hoover: Do you think this might be more interesting if you chose various historical figures who were alive BEFORE the invention of the light bulb?

No.

1. There's a new entry (number 4) to the excel artwork section. I know how much everyone loves excel art, so I thought I'd let you know. It's actually been there for a while, but apparently it went unnoticed.

2. I've removed the guestbook from the site because no one was signing it. It's embarrassing to have an empty guestbook. I'm not sure why people requested a guestbook if they weren't going to sign it. As punishment it has been removed.

3. You may have noticed that my posts have been less creative lately and more along the lines of a) links to other sites, or b) inane rants about Uncle Ben's Instant Rice. It's not because I've been feeling less creative lately, but actually because I've been focusing my creative talents into a new writing course at UT and I don't have as much time for the blog. And, really, because I've been feeling less creative lately.

4. I'm not sure why I'm even posting this update or talking to "you" as if "you" care about what's happening on the site or in my life. But I have a website and a blog and I therefore need to post to it. The strange thing is I constantly post to this site and yet convey no actual information about anything. What's the point? Maybe I should start posting little tidbits about my day-to-day existence. But then my mundane day-to-day existence will become a justification for my blog, or, worse yet, my blog will become a justification for my mundane day-to-day existence.

Sigh. This weekend I'll post another funny list about superheroes and then I'll feel better about the whole blog thing.

Apparently there is a live-action movie version of "The Last Unicorn" in the works. The original animated movie was one of my favorites as a kid. Schmendrick the Magician, somewhat depressingly I suppose, is still my hero.

Some of the original animated version voice talents are returning to play the live actors: Christopher Lee as King Haggard, Angela Lansbury as Mommy Fortuna, and in an interesting statement about aging vs. immortality, Mia Farrow is returning not as Amalthea the Unicorn but as Molly Grue. (Considering how Molly Grue responds to Amalthea the Unicorn when they first meet, it will be all the more poignant considering that Mia Farrow used to BE the unicorn.)

Thanks to my friend An-Lon (who remembered my college computer was named "Schmendrick") for sending me this link and pointing out the Mia Farrow character switch.

This weekend I attempted to make Uncle Ben's Instant Rice and met with disaster. First of all, I don't know which Uncle Ben's product I had, but it wasn't Instant Rice. The directions on my box required twenty minutes of steaming on the stove top, which I don't consider instant. Unfortunately, even though I followed the directions exactly, I burnt it, which not only meant I didn't get my rice, it also meant I had to scrub a pot. Am I the only person in the world who screws up Uncle Ben's (Not-so-)Instant Rice? Probably. Since I really wanted rice, I then attempted to make another batch using the microwave instructions, which, believe it or not, required twenty FIVE minutes! That's not minute rice. That's almost-half-an-hour rice. This experiment was arguably more successful, as I did get some non-burnt rice out of it, but it was pretty soggy and flavorless.

The point is (and I'm sure you're all wondering about my point) I've ordered a new rice cooker from Amazon.com, as recommended by a friend. Which, on second thought, isn't really a point. So, I suppose I have no point. I just felt like talking about non-minute rice.

Back in college a friend of mine snagged the "Codex Seraphinianus" from the rare books collection of our library and kept it around as a coffee table book for about four months before being threatened with expulsion. It's a strange and beautiful encycolpedia with pictures of bizarre creatures written in an indecipherable language. Reading it one is sure that if there was only some way to translate the squiggly script then many great secrets would be revealed. Something reminded me of this wonderful book, so I looked up some links online.

The unofficial Codex Seraphinianus website

Luigi Serafini website

"Viewers are confronted with a blinking cursor. As they type, rooms begin to take shape in the form of a two-dimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The architecture is based on a semantic analysis of the viewer's words, reorganizing them to reflect the underlying themes they express. The apartments are then clustered into buildings and cities according to their linguistic relationships."

http://turbulence.org/Works/apartment/

You need to try it to understand.

Other amazing projects can be found at mw2mw.com.

ADDED NOTE: You do not need to install any of the 3D VRML tools to use the "apartment" site. That's only if you want to view the 3D renderings of your linguistic apartment. The 2D blueprints are interesting enough.

Apparently, Mel Brooks is producing a new movie called "The Producers", which is a movie version of his Broadway musical, "The Producers", which, of course, is a musical version of his movie, "The Producers".

I find this amusing.

While at Book People with my girlfriend I noticed a new instruction manual improperly placed in the humor section, The Zombie Survival Guide. Before I had a chance to read through it my girlfriend managed to steer me safely away into the nearby classics section where I found myself distracted by some excellent Nabakov. Okay, just kidding... I don't want to make my girlfriend sound like she has something against my lunatic obsessions. In fact, in an effort to induldge me, she suggested I purchase the zombie guide, but I decided it could wait as I had already loaded up on discount fiction. Plus, stuff about zombies scares me.

Interestingly (interestingly to me, that is), I'm actually working on a short story about zombie survival, though my story is not a how-to guide, but rather about someone so obsessed with zombies that he doesn't notice the zombie-like routine of everyday life. Or something like that. It'll be less banal sounding in story form, hopefully.

There are two new plog entries for your mocking pleasure.

While I'd love to take credit for this very amusing list, I can't, because I didn't write it. But I can take credit for bringing it to your attention. You're welcome.

Feel better?

As soon as I saved that stupid "Cross Out Your Birth Month" entry I started to question it. Why would I do something like that? Because other blogs are doing it? I hate other blogs. Now I've gone and linked myself to them, both metaphorically and literally, in this meme-blog-event-thing, and I've inadvertantly become a "part" of the blogging "community". (I can't possibly put enough sarcastic sounding quotes around those terms.) Do we all think we're clever because we're spreading the equivilant of an e-mail chain letter? (Note: I suppose e-mail chain letters are the equvilant of regular mail chain letters, but, seriously, who even remembers those anymore?) It cheapens my whole blog, which, as anyone can tell you, is already very, very cheap. Cheap and proud of it.

Plus I've gone and revealed personal information about myself. Yes, it's information conveyed through the non-negation of a mundane birth month characteristic list, but it is still the sort of thing I don't want to be doing. (Not because I have a problem sharing personal information, but, rather, because it upsets the whole public/anonymous balance of the blog universe.) This sort of slip-up is what happens when you spend all day on a conference call with the phone muted.

What? You think my parenthetical comment in the previous paragraph contradicts what I said in the first paragraph? Do you? Huh? Well, it doesn't! I can both hate, not want to, and belong to the blog community at the same time.

I blame joshmag.com, a blog I both respect and emulate, because he did it first.

april:
Active and dynamic. Decisive and haste but tends to regret. Attractive and affectionate to oneself. Strong mentality. Loves attention. Diplomatic. Consoling, friendly and solves people's problems. Brave and fearless. Adventurous. Loving and caring. Suave and generous. Emotional. Aggressive. Hasty. Good memory. Moving. Motivates oneself and others. Sickness usually of the head and chest. Sexy in a way that only their lover can see.

It's budget month in corporate America, or, at least, in my slice of corporate America. This means, for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, that I'm spending every day staring at tiny numbers on a spreadsheet trying to make them look convincing, or, failing that, at least pretty. The goal of budget planning, of course, is to submit a budget just a little bit higher than you actually need (because you have to give accounting something to cut) without making it too high (because then they'll just laugh at you and cut everything).

Here is a step-by-step guide for middle management planning of a yearly budget.

Step 1: Ask your boss what your target spending number should be for next year. Your boss already knows this number. Your boss will not tell you this number. You are asking for the same reason people play the lottery, those reasons being (a) you believe in miracles and (b) you can't do complex math. That first reason will help you as you struggle to do your budget without the much-needed input from your boss. The second will not.

Step 2: Plan out everything your team is going to do next year. Since the budget has to be submitted three months before your company plans the actual goals for next year, this is impossible. Mainly, it involves waving your hands in the air frantically. Much of the budget planning process involves waving your hands in the air frantically, and, therefore, the act of waving your hands in the air frantically will henceforth be referred to as WYHITAF.

Step 3: Get last year's planning spreadsheets. If you've been doing this for more than a year then you've hopefully kept all the spreadsheets you created last time. Throw these spreadsheets away. These spreadsheets mean nothing, because your actual approved budget had nothing to do with what you submitted as your requested budget. However, looking at them briefly will serve as a reminder that you somehow survived before and this will give you hopes of surviving again. If you didn't keep last year's planning spreadsheets or if you didn't do this last year, commence WYHITAVVF (waving your hands in the air very, very frantically.)

Step 4: Look at this year's official approved budget, which is in no way similar to what you submitted as your requested budget, but will be enormously helpful in planning next year's budget. Oh, wait, no one ever gave you your official approved budget. You've simply been crossing your fingers all year hoping you don't go above it. Sigh. Hope you haven't gone above this year's budget.

Step 5: Look at your "actuals". If you have a semi-competent accounting department, they'll have provided a spreadsheet showing you what you've spent so far this year. If you have a semi-competent accounting department they'll give this to you in the form of a blurrily faxed hardcopy with miniscule print. They do this because it is their job.

Step 5b: Spend the next week tracking down all the erroneous expenses that have somehow been charged to your department.

Step 5c: Assuming you're not completely changing the size or responsibilities of your team, it's reasonable to assume that you can plan next year's budget by looking at what you've spent this year. (If you ARE completely changing the size or responsibilities of your team, commence WYHITAVVF and skip to Step 6.) Copy everything you can from the "actuals" spreadsheet into next year's spreadsheet. Multiple everything by 1.25, unless you boss has told you that next year you'll need to cut expenses, in which case multiply everything by only 1.15.

Step 6: The spreadsheet still isn't nearly complete, even after Step 5c, because the format has changed enough (as it does every year) that you can't make use of all your "actuals", plus the numbers accounting gave you were not complete to begin with. Stare at your spreadsheet for a few days. WYHITAF and make the rest up.

Step 7: Submit.

Step 8: Wait for your boss to tell you the answer to the question you asked in Step 1. Revise all your numbers accordingly.

Step 9: Resubmit.

Step 10: Find out 8 months later that you are over your budget because what you submitted the previous year was cut and no one ever told you about it.

[This entry was formerly a link to an image of the Sour Patch Watermelons logo (two smiling multi-colored waltermelon slices), but apparently that image no longer exists online. Now this entry is merely a description of its former self, which I find strangely soothing, and, in the end, more pleasing than the original entry. Mmmmmm indeed!]

[Comments have been left unaltered from their previously altered state.]

There's this new comic strip called "Prickly City" which is intended to provide a conservative "rebuttal to the likes of Doonesbury and The Boondocks". As far as syndicated comic strips go it is mildy decent though mostly uninteresting, which describes about 49% of comic strips (50% being treacly flapdoodle, and the remaining 1% being okay.) I have no issue with a conservative themed comic strip (though "Prickly City" does seem like it is trying a little too hard to stick to the party line). My concern is that the comic's main conservative viewpoint is espoused by a young African American girl, while the author is most definitely white. I have no problem with a white cartoonist penning a black character, but it seems a little bit disingenuous for Scott Stantis to push an agenda in this way. Am I being overly sensitive? Perhaps most comics in the 'liberal media' are pushing liberal agendas in the same manner. I suppose Berkeley Breathed, author of "Bloom County", used an impoverished African American girl to preach what can only be called an extreme liberal viewpoint (they lived in a commune, for goodness sakes). Yet for some reason this seems different to me.

By popular request...

1) High fiving (also, similarly, knocking fists)

2) Discussing zombies, zombie movies, or other zombie related topics

3) Watching poker-oriented television shows

4) Playing "Snood" while I am talking to her on the phone

5) Using the word "smooch" or any of its grammatically-suspect conjugates

That's it. I'm sorry if this list isn't as naughty as all you dirty-minded readers thought it would be. Frankly, I'm not sure what you were expecting.

1) Cartoons

2) Naps

3) My parents

4) Breakfast cereal

5) Biting people (as in "the act of biting other people" not "people who bite") (not that I do this very often these days, but I do appreciate it)

That's it. Everything else I either always appreciated, never appreciated, used to appreciate then stopped appreciating but never started appreciating again, or didn't ever appreciate before starting to appreciate.

1) Well-written, brilliantly-acted independent films about an ignoble yet sympathetic anti-hero's slow descent to rock bottom due to uncontrollable drinking or gambling.

2) Jerry Orbach

3) Google. I mean, I still use it, but, really, I just don't appreciate it anymore.

4) Expensive modernized versions of old-fashioned furniture, available at a Pottery Barn or Restoration Hardware near you.

5) Linen shirts

6) Topical and/or literary allusions in overly-clever, laboriously-enunciated essay-style "reports" on NPR.

7) Blogs. Okay, I guess I NEVER appreciated blogs.

8) Crème Brule. I'm sick of it. I suppose it might just speak to the sort of restaurants where I dine now compared to the restaurants at which I used to dine, but it seems like everybody serves Crème Brule these days. And I don't like it anymore.

9) MasterCard "Priceless" ads.

That's it. Those are all the things that I used to appreciate and now don't. Everything else I either still appreciate or never appreciated.

Bitten by Radioactive Elephant:
Superpowers
- Super-memory
- Super-strength
Weakness
- Hard to find parking

Bitten by Radioactive Turtle:
Superpowers
- The ability to harden skin into a protective shell-like covering.
- Super-speed, but ironically.
Weakness
- Large mortgage

Bitten by Radioactive Monkey:
Superpowers
- Ability to use opposable thumbs.
- Ability to communicate through rudimentary signs and grunts
Weakness
- Dead-end job that slowly leads to drinking problem

Bitten by Radioactive Sea-monkey:
Superpowers
- Ability to shrink to microscopic size and then do nothing such that others doubt whether the resulting tiny speck is an actual living creature or just a floating piece of lint
Weakness
- Will die if shaken

Bitten by Radioactive Rock:
Superpowers
- Can smash scissors
Weakness
- Vulnerable to paper

Bitten by Radioactive Spider:
Superpowers
- Ability to climb walls
- Ability to shoot webs
Weakness
- Imminent copyright infringement lawsuit

Bitten by Radioactive Bald Eagle:
Superpowers
- Flight
- The "Eagle Eye" ©
- Super-patriotism
Weakness
- Bald

Bitten by Hive of Radioactive Bees:
Superpowers
- Ability to control bees
- Ability to convey exact location of a distant flower through an intricate dance
Weakness
- Ennui

Bitten by Radioactive Worm:
Superpowers
- Super-digging
Weakness
- When cut in half, will regenerate into two copies of self, one good and one evil. Evil self will perpetrate a string of murderous and diabolical acts, turning the confused but irate public against good self. At the culmination of an epic battle ranging six years, four continents, and three hit summer movies, good self will be forced to finally kill evil self, but the philosophical implications of such an act will leave good self wracked with regret and doubt.
- Birds

Bitten by Radioactive Human:
Super-powers
- Ability to walk upright
- Super-ego
- Ability to wage holy war against enemies
Weakness
- Guilt

I stumbled across an article about Jára Cimrman, a fictitious Czech anti-hero "credited" with multiple inventions (the light bulb, the telephone, etc.) and various philosophical theories. For thirty years two writers have been documenting Cimrman in plays and movies, and there is a Czech theater troupe that performs plays about him (and, theoretically, "by" him). Since I don't expect to learn the language and travel to the Czech Republic, perhaps instead I will track down the movie about him, which, hopefully, will be subtitled.

We're not really ADA compliant yet, but I did change the style sheet to use relative font sizing rather than absolute font sizing. Now if you don't like my tiny font you can use your browser's text size feature to adjust it. This is espeically useful if you're trying to read something in the fiction section. Personally, I like tiny font sizes, because text-as-content is ugly, and if you shrink it down really small it sort of loses its capacity to convey meaning and therefore serves no purpose and therefore becomes "art".

Future enhancements:
1) Fix site to work on Safari and Opera and those other lame non-Internet Exp