My computer is back in the hospital and I'm starting to realize that I'm stuck in this dysfunctional relationship with Tekserve. I brought my laptop back to them last week, still suffering from narcolepsy and also from a misaligned CD drive. This time, I brought my computer in for diagnosis knowing full well how tight he and I were, and hoping that they'd be able fix his little circuits up while I waited. But no such luck. They took my laptop and left its sad motherboard and memory on a shelf in the back, rotting away in the clinic queue for the second time in as many weeks.

What gets to me is that the Tekserve customer service techies are really cool about the whole thing, at least upfront. The generalist who first took a look at my computer apologized for them not fixing it right the first time, said he put my laptop right at the front of the queue on the Tekserve technical techie's desk, and even left me with one of those computer science brain teasers I so detest. (Puzzle: Detect a loop in a linked list.) But the minute your computer in their care, it gets trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare of unfilled stock orders and bizarre "extensive" testing, and frankly I don't think I'm ever getting my machine back. I wonder if there's a heated debate in the back between the technical techie and the boss techie like on those medical shows: "I can justify keeping it here another twenty-four hours for observation, but after that I'm gonna release it."

"Dammit man, if we send it out there without a diagnosis, it'll be dead in less than a week!"

"Then you have a day to figure out what's wrong with it." Scene.

I already complained about the computer's first stay with Tekserve, which despite my Mac withdrawl, went pretty smoothly until they told me they needed to order a part. It just felt disingenuous to me, like they had the computer for four days at that point and they knew what it needed, so why didn't they put in the order as soon as I left? I don't have any proof of this, but I believe that's exactly what they did and "a part is out of stock" is their euphemism for "we're running behind," which is what I would've rather heard. I asked if they thought my computer would be ready that day and they told me no, but my annoyance and long face at having no computer (other than the five other computers in my house) for the weekend turned moot when I got the call at six in the evening, after I got home.

Instead I got to be annoyed because I had to make another pain-in-the-ass trip into the city to rescue my damn computer, which was explicity what I was trying to avoid when I asked them if the computer would be ready that day. We don't all live in Manhattan, Tekserve, so how about you work with us here for a minute? Like, when I call and ask for a status update, maybe tell me where in line the machine is so I can plan out my whole day. Thanks.

It's been a week now, and Tekserve still has my computer — which I'm assuming did not skip to the front of the line — and I'm getting antsy. I want to call them up and ask, hey what's up, but the work order they printed out for me says, specifically, "Please don't call to ask if we are done sooner, we'll have to stop fixing computers in order to answer the phone! We'll call you when it's done." I don't remember that admonition being on my first work order, so I feel like I made some horrible trespass upon them when I called that first time.

Also on the work order, which is cluttered with stuff like this, another warning: "We'll call when your repair is complete, please don't come to pick up your unit until you have heard from us." I bring that up because everyone I'm bitching to about my computer in absentia is telling me that I should put in a personal appearance at Tekserve, that you get better service when you're standing right there in the flesh. This has never happened for me, ever: I get the same indifferent service no matter what I do. Besides, what I am supposed to say to them: "I demand you drop whatever you're doing and repair my computer this instant!" I really do feel like they're not treating me right, especially on the re-repair, where they've now had the machine for longer than they did the first time. Next time, I'm seriously gonna just ask them to give me the new pieces and I'll do the repair myself.

Which brings me back to the whole dysfunctional relationship. See, my iPod is on life support, with its ticker holding less and less charge, and I'm going to need a new one. So what's the first thing I think? "Better go to Tekserve and get a new iPod." Goddamn it! After they took the computer hostage, I still want to deal with the Tekserve techies? Do I really have that little self-esteem? And of course, the answer is yes. The thing about Tekserve that I noticed is that, unlike every other electronics store, and especially the Apple Store, the Tekserve techies realize that you're an intelligent human being and don't talk down to you, almost in violation of everything Apple stands for. When I bought my computer at the Apple Store, the sales-phony spent like twenty minutes telling me how easy Tiger is to use and how you have to be a rocket scientist just to turn your Windows machine on. Or take a look at those "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads, where hypochondriac PC-guy makes a huge freaking deal about how tough installing a video driver is. Yeah, Apple: I'm too stupid to put the CD that came with the camera into my computer and follow the instructions on the screen. Last time I bought a PC peripheral, I tried to eat the USB cord that came with it, and then for like five hours I was all, "How come this hard drive won't show up in My Computers? Oh, maybe I was supposed to plug the cord into a port on my computer instead of dousing it in ketchup! How dumb am I! Now if I could only compare the shape of the plug and the shapes of the holes in my machine, and figure out where to stick this damn thing." Note to Steve Jobs: I'm not a toddler, and I'm not Mom.

So you tend to get sucked in when you're talking with a techie who shares your passion for Unix-based computing rather than just parrots back sales pitches. It's like we've got a connection, ending up in a $269 purchase, and I can walk out of the store feeling like a cool geek. (Answer: Hash the node addresses for time efficiency, or switch a flag bit on each node for space efficiency.) And I keep going back. Although next time, I'm not letting the Tekserve techies get anywhere near my beloved computer.

Vow of Celibacy

Here's a counter-argument to the proponents of abstinence-only sex education: the strip of condoms I found in my dresser drawer that are, as of today, past their expiration date, and the profound wave of unfulfilled, celibate depression that washed over me as I threw them out. They're not fish, you know — they have a lifespan of years, apparently. Even counting that Summer of Mono, I still had fifteen hundred nights, mornings, and lunch hours of potential carnality wasted.

I should've taken one of those virginity pledges with my church back in my younger days, before I turned jaded — apparently a sexless quarter-century will do that to you — and when it was okay to have sex with anything, regardless of whether it was inanimate. The virginity pledge route would've been a win-win for me: seventy-five percent chance I'd get laid, and if that fails, when I get to the Pearly Gates, I could tell Saint Peter, "I may have raped the earth and shown antipathy and callousness to my fellow man, but at least I kept my virginity oath." James Dobson says that's what counts. "So, Pete. There any loose women here in heaven?"

And there'd have to be, cause otherwise it wouldn't be heaven, would it?

Not that the opportunity hasn't quite presented itself — once. I was hesitant. I could get pregnant. The pill's ninety nine point nine nine seven percent effective. I knew all the erotic stats, plus in ninth-grade health, they showed us that Lifetime movie where the teenagers do it and there are Consequences. You know the one: Dermot Mulroney gets that late eighties' chick knocked up and she tells him and he's totally like, "I thought you couldn't get pregnant the first time," and the whole entire sex ed class bursts out laughing because even if you didn't know that you could get pregnant the first time, what kind of wishful-thinking dumbass would you have to be to say with a straight face that you thought you couldn't get her pregnant the first time. It's this constant being talked down to that turns young people to... well, drugs.

But our health teacher was — clearly not too squeamish — but too busy promulgating her paranoid Wilson Bryan Key theories to warn me that condoms are lubricious. Rip it out of the package (teeth help!) and the damn thing slips across the bed. Maybe I wasn't ready then and I needed a minute to get used to the idea of rubber condom grease all over my cock, like I'd been eating fried chicken and ribs off of it.

Bad metaphor.

Abstinence by default, the overwhelming sense of sexual hibernation, now fills me with disenchanted deadness. Purposelessness, in an evolutionary manner at least, watching the world slowly populated by Tom and Katie's crazy Scientologist alien children. Pining, the whole lubrication thing — and yes, I know, it's a convenience for (I guess) her pleasure — now seems trivial, and I'd die to slather my dick in lard and spermicide, maybe disinfectant, and just have a big old life-affirming slobbering food fight with some girl's vagina slime.

Worse metaphor.

I don't want to be thought of as a bad neighbor, but the rest of the block is starting to get to me today. Mom made me rake the gumballs and sticks and other assorted crap off our front lawn, and I just think that's the biggest bullshit job ever. I could see a point if we used our front lawn for anything, but as it is, the lawn's only purpose is to collect leaves and get mowed, and if I had my druthers, I'd pave over the whole damn thing. But I can't cause... what would the neighbors think? My family's been known to let the lawn grow into a mini-jungle, since our mower is petulant and we've got more important things going on, like porn and taxes, keeping us from fighting with it, but it's only the start of spring and so the debris can't be all that terrible. "Mom, the gumballs don't look that bad," I whined. "Why do we have to bother sweeping them up?"

And she explained, "Because we live in a neighborhood, and all our neighbors raked their lawns." I took a peek outside and all the neighbors did have pristine lawns; our suddenly looked a lot more feral. So I spent about an hour raking the lawn, grumbling the whole time about the Stepford robots who lived around me... stupid neighbors, cleaning their lawns. If they didn't waste their time raking, then I wouldn't have to waste mine.

The thing is that we have this deal where I reciprocate my neighbors' indifference, or maybe they reciprocate mine. I'm not sure who started it. I'm not very happy about it — I'd prefer to have a genuine human connection to my community, or at least the Stepford façade of one — but I've come to terms with what I've got. Anything more, like judging me because your lawn is manicured while I went for the all-natural look, is going to require something in return, more than us simply living on the same block.

I feel like there was a time when I had this attitude where there was this magical cycle of requited giving and happiness. Sure, I won't drive my car in front of yours, thirty miles below the speed limit, because I want to see you pleased. And then, because you're contented now, you won't tailgate me, and the world is in harmony. I wonder when that stopped, and not just between the random extras God throws into our lives, but between people who profess an honest relationship among each other. I know the spirit of communal giving was dead at Columbia, when they'd make me cheer along with some stupid-ass lion mascot before sending me wandering off into the cold, heartless maze of bureaucracy that was the soul of the institution. But before then?

People move in, means people move away, and it seems like the town was much less worked-on in my younger days. The park didn't have its child-safe playground and no benches (also child-safe) in front of the Corner Store on Martine Avenue. I don't want to fault the newcomers — being here a quarter of a century myself — but the more they add to the community, the more diffuse I feel, like Home is changing hands. Someday this place will be mine, and I'll rebel, tear up the landscaping, turn the front yard into a sand garden or something. I'll wrap the trees in enough Christmas lights to be seen from space, and in the summertime, I'll capture all the fireflies in glass jars and use them as lanterns. It'll be my formal introduction, and I might not be home, but at least home will have the opportunity to meet me.

This... Isn't... Jeopardy!

I've been a vast repository of arcane, useless knowledge since my earliest days, when I'd spend hours after school reading the World Book Encyclopedia. There was something about those glossy pages that made them much more enticing than running around the playground; that, and there weren't approximately five billion wasps living in the encyclopedia. I didn't actually realize that accumulating trivia might have some long-term benefits, the most prominent being that I joined the quiz bowl team and got to play with those buzzers just like a real game show... from the 1960's. Look, if you're into painting, or playing tennis, or the flute, how often do you get to push a button and have an electronic gizmo make a noise? Never. That's how often.

But here in America, it's hard to find a quiz bowl — probably thanks to our proud heritage as ignoramuses — and even harder to find a good one. Last night, Harrigan, Jason, and I tried out Quizz-Off, the misspelled, apparently ad hoc pub quiz down at Pete's Candy Store of the drunken spelling bees, and it was a little disappointing. The questions were comically simple (see my note about our proud American heritage above), but more importantly, I don't remember quiz bowl ever being so lethargic. This is why you need the buzzers: to eliminate the long, dead periods between questions, while the team is conferring and writing out their answers in triplicate, or worse yet, while the emcee is walking around the bar, handing out crude photocopies of the pictures in the visual round. We didn't stay long.

I'd go back to Pete's though, maybe for their bingo night or poetry series, and of course to be jealous of the huge factories-turned-lofts all around Williamsburg. Just not to show off how smart I am.

Much better — smarter and somewhat entertaining — is The Big Quiz Thing downtown at The Slipper Room, which contrary to the self-promotion on the website, is hardly New York City's sexiest event space. I've been in sexier auto body shops. It doesn't matter every other Monday night anyway, cause everyone's keeping their clothes on for trivia night. The Big Quiz Thing is emceed by Noah, who's half Wink Martindale and half campy Reno lounge act. I go to The Big Quiz Thing and I'm usually too distracted by his sequin-covered leisure suit to actually answer questions. At least he keeps the show moving with fast questions, inane music, and the sometimes-amusing banter between him, DJ Gretchen, and useless guy in the background Eric. It's not Jeopardy!, but despite the cheese factor, The Big Quiz Thing succeeds as a trivia contest, with a good range of questions from the Stuff You Should've Learned In School to stuff you've probably never seen before but a team of smarties could work out. The $200 prize and $1.89 trophy isn't bad either.

It was a good day today once I walked by the furrier down the street from where I work, Davidé Fur — I guess they're French or something — and saw the place emptied out, except for a few bare coat racks and some naked legless mannequins. I believe that if you wear fur, either you're an Eskimo or you're a horrible human being, but the 29th Street fur district is rotten even by the standards of people who club baby seals for a living.

All the fur stores in the neighborhood have the same window display, and I know the picture's not that good but, yes, those are adorable little stuffed animals lining the window sill. And yes, that appears to be a pink chinchilla overcoat. Could they make that poor animal's death any less dignified, maybe painting it with leopard spots or something? It's the teddy bears that are really egregious, though, because those little bundles of cuteness are what they're freaking skinning! It's like taking that "it puts the lotion on its skin" guy from Silence of the Lambs and hiring Victoria's Secret models to pose outside his house.

Davidé Fur was the worst of the worst because their window-dressing cuddly taxidermy was fucking life-size. They were pretty much inviting you, "Hey, you think this Siberian tiger cub is cute? How about you wear it home?" Maybe, maybe if they removed the stuffing and just laid out the animals' felt skin in the shape of a distorted, surreal Pound Puppy or something. It would still be despicable, but at least it would be honest.

Dear Guys at Google:

That web clips you added to Gmail, that pulls feeds off the web based on what folks have mailed me — I'm totally indifferent to it. I just leave it up because I figure, maybe once or twice in a lifetime, something worthwhile will appear, like a new Spam recipe, and I just wouldn't be able to resist. Hey, I'm only human. But can someone please explain to me why I keep getting some variation on this ad in my newsreader:


I know Google's got its spidery tendrils crawling all over the Internet, collecting all the information in the world, but what on earth in my e-mails ever suggested to it that I'd be a good candidate for employment at the CIA?! My e-mail is essentially all either stuff related to web design or quick letters to my friends like, "Wanna get lunch on Thursday?" Unless I just stumbled on some sort of codeword with that phrase, I think Google's got some re-parsing to do.

Speaking of which, I'd like to look at this ad from a national security standpoint, and I just don't know where to begin, aside from the fact that someone in the government thinks I would make a decent spy. (Then again, someone in the government also thought that Rumsfeld would make a decent Defense Secretary.) How about this? The content of the ad itself is twelve words, plus some initials, and somehow the most blatant possible typo managed to slip through? There's a 'c' in "linguistics." I don't know who would've picked up the mistake first: me or Microsoft Word, but it looks we both would've beat the people writing our National Intelligence Estimates. This lends credence to the theory that we were supposed to go to war with Iran — you know, the country that actually is trying to develop a nuclear arsenal — but someone's finger slipped while typing up a top secret intelligence analysis and now we're in the nuagmire that is Iraq.

And, periods, people! Good punctuation is important. Compare: "Let's eat, Dad" versus the commaless "Let's eat Dad." Totally changes the meaning. While I'm at it, every word doesn't need to start with a capital letter, only the first word in the sentences you've conveniently omitted and any proper nouns. I'm starting to wonder if this ad wasn't written by an eleven-year-old girl who just got done updating her MySpace page, which leads me to my final point...

"Apply Online Now" ...Online??!! This isn't a mystery shopper position that they're looking to fill here. Shouldn't there be a slightly more rigorous screening process, like maybe you have to show up in person if you want to handle our nation's most sensitive secrets? You know, just to prove that you don't have a comical Russian accent and a shifty black hat and moustache.

Last week, my computer decided to fall apart on me — literally, chunks of the thing were coming off in my hands, so I took the machine to Tekserve for some of their famous repair service. Fortunately the computer was still under warranty... but on the other hand, it was only nine months into its three-or-so year lifespan and I sort of expected my machine to be in the prime of its life. Workmanship these days just isn't what it used to be, I'll tell you. I could talk about my four-year-old Dell laptop, which works perfectly if not lethargically, or my Dad's second-generation iBook, now seven, suffering from an anemic battery, but otherwise working fine. But I'd rather talk about my Apple IIgs, purchased back in 1989, with no hard disk, one megabyte of RAM, and a 5.25" floppy drive that still works as if it's the first day out of the box. Man, did they know how to build things back in the eighties!

I brought my computer in on Monday and Tekserve estimated that they'd have it fixed by Friday, and I thought, "Well, that's just four days. I can live without my computer for four days, especially since we have five other computers at home." But it took less than six hours before Macbook withdrawl started, and by the time I got home Monday night, I was on my bed with my old laptop trying to get the same sort of dual-core fix and totally freaking out cause the Dell spent half an hour downloading and installing updates! It was pathetic. Like, I was carrying around notebooks with me, doing my work with pencil and paper. Totally Luddite.

Friday came and it was like Christmas with the anticipation of getting my computer back. I called up Tekserve and... it was horrible. A part was out of stock! It needed to be ordered! Try again Monday! It was like opening your Christmas gift and getting socks. I stopped by in person, too, cause maybe the guy on the phone was just toying with me. (I'd be tempted to do that if I worked in customer service.) I said I'd sit around, wait for a few hours... How could they not have the part? It's a relatively popular computer, not an obscure western European automobile! It's all they sell! Strangely, groveling didn't help. I went home disappointed.

But when I got home, the most amazing thing happened. Five minutes after getting home, my cell phone rings, and it's Ripley from TekServe. (Really? Your parents named you "Ripley"? Okay...) My computer's ready! Yay!... except now I've gotta go into the city tomorrow, and I told them I'd wait a few hours cause that's easier for me. And fine, they deal with computers better than they deal with people — which makes them my kind of people — but my computer's home! Welcome back, MacBook!

God I'm a dork.

I Try Not To Be Glib About Some Extremely Stupid New Age Fad Bullshit

Oprah, who Mom loves and I despise, is busy plugging this new hyper-produced self-help tripe called The Secret. Enigmatic, huh? The vagueness hooks you and the shame of mingling among the uninitiated sucks you in. You might be willing to shell out your hard-earned money just to satiate your curiosity. Would it help if I told you D'ohprah (sorry, couldn't resist) swears by it?

I'll spill for free. The Secret is available in book, DVD, or unauthorized YouTube form, and it promises three easy steps to incredible upper-middle class happiness: cars and houses, relationships, perfect health, and wealth. Surprisingly, none of those steps involves selling spurious new age advice to gullible morons. The guiding principle of The Secret is the Great Law of the Universe: "Like attracts like." I thought the Great Law of the Universe was F_g = Gm₁m₂/r², but at least now I know why I got a C+ in physics class. Through some ill-defined physical process that might or might not include messenger monkeys, the universe receives your positive thoughts and good vibes, then returns them to you in a more tangible form, generally piles and piles of currency.

Here's the secret:

Step 1: Ask.The canonical example off the DVD is a kid who wants a new bike. He cuts a picture of the bike out of an ad, then later we see him drawing a picture of the bike, sleeping with the picture under his pillow, dreaming of the bike... and one day his grandpa arrives on his doorstep with a brand new bike! Rhonda Byrne, the Australian reality-TV producer turned Secret creator (and who better to be giving life advice than someone who makes reality TV) puts it this way to USA Today: "People should start with little things like deciding a cup of coffee will come to you or that you'll see a feather. There's no difference between attracting a feather and anything else you want. It's as easy to attract one dollar as it is $10,000."

A cup of coffee? Really, aren't there easier ways to get coffee than calling upon the spirits of the universe? More to the point, I don't even know what that means, deciding that you'll see a feather. Let's say I decide that I'll see a feather today, and three days later I see a feather... so what, I was bound to see a feather sooner or later. A better example, Rhonda, would be the test I'm about to perform — I hereby decide that a six-legged smoke-breathing unicorn playing the harmonica will come to me. I have no doubt I'll be hearing hoofbeats and zydeco music shortly.

Step 2: Believe.

Real hard. Never lose faith. Clap your hands and sprinkle pixie dust if you have any. Rhonda doesn't really explain how the universe knows your thoughts aside from some quantum mechanics mumbo-jumbo, to weakly ground The Secret in an area of physics no one — even physicists — fully understand.

Some critics, those who look at The Secret from a social science standpoint, complain that this idea fosters a "blame the victim" attitude among True Believers. D'ohprah, if she's not disingenuous, should be distributing copies of The Secret to all the soldiers recovering in cockroach-infested Walter Reed Memorial Hospital, then telling them that they're paralyzed, limbless, blinding, and receiving mediocre treatment because they just weren't thinking positively enough.

Step 3: Receive.

Arguably the best step of The Secret, when, without leaving your comfy chair, the universe showers you with riches. Or, I suppose, if you asked for an end to the war, the universe has the Sunnis and Shi'ites lay down their weapons and start an orgy of hugging. But it looks like no one's asked for that yet.

The best part, though, is that you, True Believer, didn't have to lift a finger to improve your life. You got yourself a brand new bike without going through the trouble of, you know, a job. You lost thirty pounds without going to the gym, and there's one guy in the video who asks to date three women at once, and the universe brings three floozies right to his doorstep. So basically, The Secret makes your total douchebag fantasies come true (I just assume that he's dating three women at once because he's an asshole, and women love assholes) but it's not powerful enough to end the genocide in Darfur. Which is okay, though, since Darfur is far away, and I have magically appearing coffee.

Great Moments in Massage Chairs

You win, Brookstone. I concede victory to you and your lineage of ugly, overpriced, somewhat comfortable massage chairs. I was at the mall today, exhausted after ten minutes or so of walking around, so I popped into Brookstone for a robot backrub. The latest generation massage chairs have this big, big control panel with a ton of options: shiatsu, Swedish; more intensity, less intensity; kneading, rubbing, tapping; it controls your TV and your iPod and probably your garage door too. The Brookstone chair — the old generation chair, the one I grew up with — is quite possibly the world's most technologically advanced piece of furniture, like it was designed with Dr. Evil in mind. The new chair: I turn it on...

...and it starts talking to me, giving me instructions. Telling me how to sit in the chair ("head back, shoulders up against the rollers"). Thanks, Brookstone chair, but I've been sedentary enough in my short life that I don't need your advice. It's basically "ass on seat, get comfortable," right?

Reason #105 To Love Grounded

...is that you can come by in the morning, around 9:45 or so, sit down, order a coffee, and feel up one of the hot but not hot in a conventional way baristas. Grounded is this coffee shop in the city that I shouldn't be telling you about because it's a perfect storm of awesomeness and tinyness, and it's tough enough to get a table in here without you, dear reader, stopping by. (Although if you do stop by — you'll have to get a map and find it yourself — and you see me on the couch in the back, I'll slide over and make some room.)

There's this guy two tables down who's gotta be in his fifties and, okay, first I just saw him talking to the barista when she came in for work. Maybe he's a regular or whatever — he's there on his laptop minding, presumably, his own business and she came up to him. They're chatting. Whatever. Some people are just friendly, and Grounded has a brand of unpretentiousness all its own. The other, hotter but still not hot in a conventional way barista even smiled at me when I forgot to take back my buy-ten, get-one-free card, which those bitches at Casablanca Tea Room would never, ever do. Okay, but now Fifty-year-old Guy is sort of touching her, around the waist, like she's his prom date or something.

Maybe they're friends. Close friends.

My eyes are going back to my laptop but it's not two seconds later and he's all over her in ways that would definitely get him in trouble with the wife later on, massaging her thighs and ass like she's made of dough. You know that jar they've got up by the register that says, "Tips are good for karma?" Looks like they're good for something else, too.

A few minutes later, after she's punched her timecard or whatever, she goes back to this guy's table with her nose in a bag of organic fair-trade coffee, the most erotic of all the olfactory sensations, and they're ready for another go-around. Jeez, some of us are here, trying to think of stuff to write in our blogs, and you two really need to get a room. Still, it's always nice to know the possibility exists; it's a huge improvement over the Starbucks "they can touch you, but you can't touch them" policy.

I subscribe to this podcast, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, like my seventh or eighth-favorite podcast of the three that I listen to. It's produced by the New England Skeptical Society, which is devoted to the ultimately futile task of lifting the masses from their holes of ignorance by spreading the rationalist, empiricist philosophy of James Randi and debunking claims of the supernatural and paranormal. Progress report: stagnant, of course. It's a bit like your tenth-grade chemistry class, with that one student who, after fifty minutes of explanation, was able to comprehend that the energy of a wave-particle equals its frequency times Planck's constant, but then totally forgot E = hν by next class. Four freaking characters, and you could totally replace that Greek letter nu with an 'f' if that helped you remember "frequency," and you could program the whole thing into your calculator because your manic teacher completely teaches towards the test anyway, so it doesn't matter if you really understand the concept. But no, every day for a month, it's like, "How do I find the energy of a water molecule vibrating at 750 kilohertz?" and then for another month, it's like, "They're only telling me an excited sodium molecule emits light with a wavelength of 588 nanometers. How the hell do I find out the energy from that?" And it's the constant questions like those that keep us from taking first place in the New Jersey Science League competition.

Sorry. Right, skepticism. The podcasters from the New England Skeptical Society are getting more than a little frustrated with our culture of truthiness. It's not that I blame them; it's more as if I wish the timing weren't so much like a residual effect of our national stupidity. Things are, slowly, getting better: The Kansas School Board dropped intelligent design from its curriculum. Global warming is a Bush-certified fact. The idea of a nuclear Iran, the apocalyptic sequel to "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction," doesn't have same popular resonance as the first episode. It looks like the national skepticism index is directly proportional to the national "anger over government fuck-ups" index.

The New England Skeptical Society, and the whole skeptical movement really, was on the forefront of these issues. They're basically the people who kept asking Cheney and Condi and Rumsfeld for a little evidence, and the people who had a bunch of uninformed Toby Keith lovers (how's that "putting a boot up Osama's ass" thing going, by the way?) calling them unpatriotic for their troubles. Now the dividing line between the critical thinkers and those who call them narrow-minded because anecdotal evidence isn't evidence is sharp; although being on the side of the skeptics, I'll say that the other guys started it.

The problem is that the podcast is largely devoted to (duly) calling idiots the names they deserve to be called, and the guys on the podcast sort of come off sounding like jerks. You read this blog, so you probably have some idea of what I'm talking about. I want to sort-of apologize for that, on behalf of all of us who care about logic and reason and don't care about what you think... or more of what I want to apologize for is, in our zeal to keep more and more of the sheeple from falling into evangelical clutches, our pandering and condescension, our quick-and-dirty appeals to your base emotions and argumenta ad hominem. I can see the arguments in favor of dumbing down the scientific process so you no longer need a brain to comprehend it, and maybe there's some merit to saving one retard from the clutches of L. Ron Hubbard by calling Tom Cruise the looniest loony in all of Loonyland and insinuating that he keeps Katie locked up in their gigantic basement and impregnates her with alien sperm — but maybe there's also an argument that we'll eradicate more ignorance by explaining the process of critical thought and letting science do what it does best: question the existing beliefs.

I got my hands on the library's copy of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum the other day... and perusing the book for my own enjoyment and satisfaction, I suddenly remember why I haven't read a damn book since I graduated from college. Not really sure how I picked the book up, six-hundred and something pages, when there's plenty of good TV I can finish in an hour or less. Foucault's Pendulum has been called "a thinking person's Da Vinci Code," which sounds less than promising, since I don't think a thinking person would think much of The Da Vinci Code in the first place. At least I get to feel erudite, all mired down in the linguistic cacophony of great literature. Half the words in Foucault's Pendulum don't make any sense, and the other half aren't even words.

So far, I'm about a hundred pages in, and I'd still have no idea what the story is about if it weren't for the book jacket, and even those three paragraphs are tough to slog through. I don't what a Foucault pendulum has to do with any of this, but it looks like the novel is going to be about, sooner or later, three co-workers in a publishing house who have a computer randomly create a massive Pynchon-esque conspiracy theory that happens to be true and blah, blah, blah something about the futility of the quest for ultimate (or Ultimate, as Eco would randomly capitalize) knowledge. Mainly, I think you read the book cause it's on a syllabus, or otherwise to keep up with the other smarties at your Mensa gatherings.

I believe I mentioned my personal psychological theory when I reviewed The Da Vinci Code: the institutions that organize and run the world have grown apathetic towards the individual that alienation has become a sort of self-devouring epidemic, and even as we're powerless, there's comfort in feeling part of a powerless many fighting for access to the esoteric halls of knowledge. Oops: Foucault's Pendulum, set in the intellectualism of Europe in the sixties, and proudly inpenetrable, lives on the wrong side of our imaginary culture war — which is itself some sort of fascist conspiracy, maybe? — and eschews the confused, lonely, and oppressed who gave the government blood and semen samples so they could sit on a plane and read Dan Brown.

I don't mean to further split our cliques in a world where everybody's supposed to come together and sing, or something. But that attitude is, well, stupid, and it's unworthy of the non-existent elites. Despite what the Republican talking heads on FOX News will tell you, the divide isn't between the intellectual, liberal elites and the rest of you saps but between the rich, greedy power-brokering elite and the rest of you saps. We, the smarties, will let anybody in — you have to read Eco, and Pynchon, and Borges, but no one cares if you can't comprehend them. The bullshit is part of the joke, although our egos are too fragile to admit that. On the other hand, try stealing a ten-dollar DVD from the billionaires running Wal-Mart and see how fast minimum-wage security is on you.

A Bathroom of One's Own

I'm so looking forward to the day I get my own place, because between the IKEA catalog and last night, I've got so many awesome decorating ideas for having the most pimped-out bathroom on the East Coast, I can't wait to start going all Top Design carte blanche on my shower. I was at happy hour at this trendy Brazilian sushi weird-fusion place last night and I faked having to pee — turned out to be a big mistake, by the way, when I had to pee for real later. I go out and I don't think I'm the only one with a weird fascination over bathroom aesthetics. Maybe the news hasn't been passed down to gas station attendants and convenience store clerks, but some of us like our clean, private spaces in the middle of the hubbub. Hence the uber-chic switch-foggy glass doors, expensive British soap, and old dude handing out paper towels (that last one seems kind of overboard to me). And I don't even know what sort of paradise the women's room — or, uh, ladies' lounge — is. Probably have free mud baths or shiatsu massages or something in there.

Someone thinks the bathrooms at Rio 22 are something special because there's a whole web page devoted to them. And yeah, they're nice. Like, I would totally not be pissed off if the hostess sat my party in the handicapped stall rather than at a table. So here's what I learned:

First, the bathroom doesn't have to be some bright, pastel color. I don't know why white, or coral, or turquoise because the standard bathroom colors; it's almost like designers were going, "Now, what color would best complement the urine that didn't quite make it into the toilet?" I have to say that the dark walls and floor and the spot-directed halogen lights provide both the illusion that the room is larger than it is, and that you're somewhat sophisticated performing your bodily functions. Also, the buffed rocks in the sink; I guess you need to start off with some neutral base colors to pull this off, but they really turn washing your hands into a total Zen experience. I'm so doing this when I get my own place and totally making my friends jealous with their Western, mundane and materialistic hand-washing. Try to compete with that, organic soap and recycled paper towels!

But the best thing in the bathroom was the automatic toilet seat cover dispenser. You just wave your hand over the device and this plastic sheet snakes across the toilet, and I could play with that thing for hours and not get bored. It's really the best bathroom invention since the bidet. God, all this bathroom needed was the sexy-lady talking urinal and I could live in there.

I Ruin A Really Boring Three-Hour Movie For You

Lisa and I saw Zodiac this evening — because Wild Hogs was sold out :-) — and I don't get the reviews. Mainly it's the favorable comparisons to Seven and Fight Club that I'm at a loss to explain. Not that Zodiac isn't good: it's a wonderfully filmed portrait of its protagonists' growing obsession with solving the Zodiac killer enigma. But as a character study, and unfortunately, by design, it's not a study of the movie's most interesting character, it doesn't really explore any new territory, in the sense that Seven and Fight Club were, for their flaws, completely original visions. The whole theme where our otherwise irredeemable character gets lost in a puzzle for its own sake, then still fails to be redeemed, is nothing I haven't seen before, and the genre's conceit — at least the mystery is solved at the end — feels tenuously attached to Zodiac. Let's just say it's worth the ticket price, but I won't be bothering to watch Zodiac again when it makes its basic cable world premiere.

Zodiac did inspire me to reach into the newly popular "serial killer as twisted moral guardian" genre and come up with this movie pitch. Tell me what you think.

So there's this killer, right? And what he does is he sneaks into movie theaters showing important, critically-regarded films and he takes a seat behind the philistines who can't shut the hell up. I think you see where this is going. He kills the talkers in all sorts of gruesome, needlessly complicated ways, then makes some sort of wisecrack. He doesn't take himself too seriously.

I've got the first page of the script, too.

INT. MOVIE THEATER

We open in a somewhat crowded movie theater, playing the classic film "CITIZEN KANE." Near the back, we see RAY, 25, glasses, T-shirt, exquisitely good-looking, watching the movie silently because, even though "CITIZEN KANE" is slightly more boring than watching grass grow, he's polite to everyone else in the theater. Sitting next to him is THERESA, who is also respectful and quiet, and, again, incredibly attractive.

In the row behind them, there's a middle aged MARRIED COUPLE, fat, ugly, drooling slobs stuffing their fat, ugly, drooling faces with popcorn and soda. There's also three slutty, mildly-retarded TEENAGE GIRLS a few seats to the right.

TEENAGE GIRL #1
Ohmygod, I can't believe this is in
black and white.

TEENAGE GIRL #2
I know! Like, am I gonna have to read
this, too?

TEENAGE GIRL #3
Ohmygod, like you've got the cutest
cell phone!

TEENAGE GIRL #2
No, like your cell phone is so much cuter!

TEENAGE GIRL #3
Lemme take a picture of you two with my
cell phone!

MARRIED WOMAN
(loudest stage whisper ever)
What did that guy say?

MARRIED MAN
Rosebud.

MARRIED WOMAN
What's a rosebud?

MARRIED MAN
Oh, I bet it's his sled.

Suddenly, a CRAZY KILLER jumps out from the back row. He runs up to the couple and shoots both of them in the head! Then he shoots the three teenage girls.

RAY
(turns around)
Hey, do you mind? We're trying to watch the movie.

CRAZY KILLER
Sorry. My bad.

And it's just like that, over and over, for the next eighty-nine minutes. Three words: best movie ever.

I went to lunch at this restaurant Rice, this eclectic pan-Asian place where the dishes feature — go figure — rice. It's actually a pretty good place to eat, especially when it's not crowded, but lunchtime today was really busy and I was sitting about an inch away from two people who were annoying the living hell out of me. First of all, they weren't using their twelve-inch voices — and I'm gonna go off on a tangent here, but I don't understand why cell phone users are singled out in public for librarian-style shushing. We've all been around those cell talkers who've apparently never used a phone before and are unaware that you don't need to scream into the thing because the microphone is a millimeter away from your mouth, and I totally wish they'd make it legal to physically gag those assholes, but I don't see how people talking to each other like their conversation is a great proclamation that needs to be spread to the masses is any less irritating. I think the general rule of thumb should be, "Don't talk any louder than I'm talking," and I'm just taking a moment to enjoy dreaming about what a pleasant, tranquil world that would make.

Anyway, this couple's talking really loud, which annoys me, and then the waitress comes for their order and they're asking her for recommendations, which annoys me even further. Not that they're getting recommendations, but if I were the waitress, I'd totally be like, "I don't even know you, how the hell am I supposed to guess what kind of food you'd like?" Which is why I don't wait tables. Also because if I did wait tables, the first dumb question such as, "Is the chicken marsala good here?" or "Does the fettuccine have any salt in it. Cause the doctor says I can't have anything with salt in it and now it's been such a long time that I'll taste even a single salt molecule and...," and I would just fly into a homicidal rage. I mean, I go out to eat with my parents (rarely these days, cause I know better) and they ask dumb questions and, frankly, it makes me want to strangle them. What do you think they're going to say when you ask if the crabcakes are made fresh? "No, we usually buy our seafood a week old or so, and then sometimes the chef takes a piss in the sauce, too."

These people were getting recommendations on everything, but what really made my ears perk up and hope these people choked on a skewer is when one of them asked the waitress, "What kind of rice would you recommend with the curry chicken?" Granted, the place is called Rice, and they have a larger-than-expected choice of rice, but dude, it's freaking rice. It's not fine wine here! I've been going to Rice for about seven years now, so I'm not just saying this: they all taste exactly the same, which is to say, they all have that distinctive nothing taste of goddamn rice! This might just be a hang-up of mine, because when I go to Rice with one of my friends and they ask me which rice I prefer, I feel like I actually need to justify my answer (the Thai black rice, because I bet you've never seen rice that's black before...), but still, I think we can agree that you've gotten a bit anal when you're micromanaging rice.

Now that we've got smoking out of our restaurants and bars — not that I'm complaining — and out of our office buildings — which is awesome, especially in wintertime, when I get to pass all these shivering office workers smoking outside their building lobbies — it looks like the next step is taking smoking out of the movies. I don't mean out of movie theaters, which I'm pretty sure we've accomplished, and now parents can bring their toddlers' fragile lungs to see Norbit without any risk of getting cancer, but off the celluloid itself. Which I was kind of aware of, since we all know there are those anti-art types who won't be satisfied until we're all forced to entertain ourselves by starting at a blank screen in total silence, and even then, they'll find some sort of subliminal message on the screen, corrupting our children, but I didn't realize that our society's tobacco warriors, protecting our freedom to harm ourselves after fifty or sixty years, were organized enough to purchase ad space on top of a NYC taxi cab.

It's the Smoke Free Movies campaign, spearheaded at UC San Fransisco, that's convinced that the reason why kids die from smoking isn't because they're nihilistic burnouts in a world that condescends to them, but because they saw someone cool, like Humphrey Bogart or James Dean, lighting a cigarette in the movies as a shorthand artistic device. Professor Stanton A. Glantz, who was clearly never cool, argues that if the Motion Picture Association of America, the industry watchdog group that arbitrarily hands out movie ratings, arbitrarily gave every movie to feature smoking an R rating, think of all the lives we'd save! Because teenagers don't see R-rated movies, and they don't think that the extra violence and sex in R-rated movies makes them cooler than their PG-13 brethren! If Glantz really wanted to demean smoking in teenage eyes, then smoking should earn a movie an automatic G rating, just like those sickeningly moralistic VeggieTales movies or something.

You Are Getting Sleepy... Very Sleepy...

My mom, for the longest time, has been disappointed with the speed and direction my psychotherapy has been going in. I've been in therapy for social anxiety disorder, on and off but mostly on, since tenth grade — since this experience, actually — so she sort of has a point about this snail's pace progress I've been supposedly making. You might think that, since it is my life that's often socially deficient, I should also be disappointed with my therapy, but the lack of progress in itself never really bothered me until I got a letter from my insurance company saying they were tired of paying for my therapy and why the hell am I not cured yet? The last thing I need is some bureaucrat at Blue Cross Blue Shield judging me, so I succumbed to my mom's incessant nagging and decided to try a different tactic. Mom suggests (i.e., wouldn't shut up about) hypnosis.

I went in for hypnotherapy yesterday afternoon and I kept reminding myself to keep an open mind, which of course meant that I wasn't keeping an open mind. Not that hypnosis isn't a documented phenomenon or that my hypnotherapist was pulling past lives or repressed memories out of my mind. There was really little to no "self-discovery," but I'm getting ahead of myself. The hypnotherapist is apparently a real doctor, a med school professor, and a small, quiet woman who speaks in a steady, low monotone. I found it really easy to get hopelessly adrift in her voice. Her office is decorated in Rorschach art, and I feel like I'm being tested.

I opened the forum explaining why I'm there and distilling seven years of talk therapy into a couple of index cards. I tried not to read straight off my notes: "I have an ingrained belief that I'll go into social situations and appear ingenuous or callow, and that belief creates a lot of anxiety and often inhibits me from doing things. When I find myself in social situations, I perform poorly, and I'm analytical and self-criticizing, which only makes me more anxious. I want to ameliorate my anxiety prior to finding myself in social situations, and I want to quiet the self-critical voices that bridle me during social situations." Now that I type that out, I can't believe I've spent seven freaking years of my life on that.

For the first half of hypnotherapy, she's profiling me, which is where I start becoming skeptical. It had this kind of Myers-Briggs feel to it, with the overly general questions leading to false dichotomies and the questionable correlation between my answers and her interpretation of them. The old standby: "When you are in a group, would you rather be in charge of the group or let other people make the decisions?" Here I point out how complicated that question really is and that its underlying assumptions may be faulty, and I'm told to just go with what comes off the top of my head. Um, "When you're learning something new, do you prefer to learn by looking at it or by touching it?" (Turns out that "both" is also a valid answer.) "Would you describe yourself as an organizer, director, balancer, [I forget what this one was], or complier?"

The second test is even hairier in my opinion. She tells me to roll my eyes towards the ceiling, then to close my eyes and answer more non-descript questions. Now I can open my eyes again, and I'm supposed to clasp my hands together. Good. Finally, she comes over really close to me. I'm sitting in this big leather armchair, kind of on the edge with my knees bent, in flight-or-fight position. She puts my left arm on the armrest and her hand on my hand. There's this big red herring spiel, the gist of which is, "When I count to three, you will lift your arm up." It's not really a stage command; she sounds more like she's making a hypothesis, like when I tap your knee with this rubber hammer, you'll reflexively jump. More talking about breathing and relaxing and energy fields flowing through me. It's very new age. (I'll buy the breathing and relaxing stuff, but "absorbing luminous energy" and crap like that totally sticks out to the physicist in me.)

Here's the interesting thing. She finally counts to three, and I'm like, "What do I do?" This might be exactly what she's looking for, it occurs to me later. I don't want to choose to raise my arm because I'd only be doing so to validate her earlier prediction and not because she hypnotized me. And I don't want to not raise my arm, because I'd just be doing that to be contrary. My dumbass solution is to raise my arm, slow and shaky, like I'm being hypnotized, which is exactly what she was looking for in the first place. Interesting experience in suggestibility.

We arrive at my star chart profile thing, which my hypnotherapist says is "very unusual." I'm shocked. eHarmony.com said the same thing, so now it's got to be true. My eye-rolling is consistent with that of a complier (?), but my hand-clapsing indicates logical, left-brain tendencies(?) and most of my answers to the personality test questions highlight my "Apollonian" psyche (???). Whatever. Here's what I believe about how personality analysis works. I see two forces at work — the first is the actual set of experiences one has and the second is selective memory applied to those experiences, creating a narrative explaining one's role in the world. The former is what makes you miserable, and the latter is what you walk into therapy complaining about. The goal is to see how your experiences outward affect your experiences of yourself, and maybe change the filter you use to interpret the two... but again, I've been in therapy for seven years without tons of progress here.

In the second half of psychotherapy, the doctor recorded a personalized hypnotic cassette tape full of weird mixed metaphors just for me. I'm going to stop short of mocking it here because I really do want to approach this without preconceptions or bias, as much as possible anyway. I'm supposed to get comfortable and listen to it at least once a day, presumably without falling asleep mid-mantra.

Pictures of Animals Doing It

I went to the Bronx Zoo yesterday because Wednesday's pay-what-you-want day and I'm cheap. I went two years ago on a cold, snowy weekday and had an awesome time, and yesterday wasn't bad either. In the wintertime, a lot of the animals are down in their Bahama summer home, which is okay with me cause the zoo is really huge and hard on your feet and you never get to see everything anyway. The real problem was the most dangerous prey and their obnoxious little offspring and strollers and crap; I was kind of hoping the weather would be lousy and they'd all stay inside their dens, but it turned out to be a warm, sunny day. Plus the zoo is a lot prettier in the fresh snow than it is deluged in muddy slush.

Here's the highlights:
Baby giraffe, and damn these animals are awkward. Every step he took on those thin, thin legs I was sure something was going to shatter.

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Some sort of monkey. You can't really see it in this picture, but she (I assume) is leaping around her cage with a baby guenon clinging to her belly. It would've been really cute if she weren't surrounded by a million toddlers and their moms all saying, "Awww, look at the little baby monkey! How cute!"

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Adorable mice.

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As an antidote to the mice, I present lizards putting on a show. It's too bad they mate very slowly, or there might have been more parents answering their kids' awkward questions.

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I actually took this picture the last time I was at the zoo, but these white-naped cranes are the real reason I came. They're lanky but majestic birds and I could watch them dance around all day. Now through the magic of digital photography, you too can feel like you've watched the cranes all day. You're so lucky....

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I was on my way out when I ran into this peacock. Being birds and all, they don't really stay inside their pens, although they know that home is where they get fed. This guy was nice enough to walk right up to us, and I got some nice photos. Too bad I didn't get a picture of him flying back into his pen, cause when he opens his wings, he's freaking huge.

---

Black leopard.

Speed friending tonight, and it wasn't too, too bad. I credit my newly-discovered Love Tactics, which I've decided is too depressing to read but sort of amusing when you just skim it. It's really sleazier than I thought — the first half of the book is this collection of self-esteem boosting platitudes ("It's okay to be nervous!" "When given choices, be decisive!") and the second half of the book is basically an instruction guide for being a manipulative jackass. There's a chapter called "Cultivating Their Emotional Dependency" followed immediately by "Shaking Their Confidence," because nothing signals a happy relationship like emotional dependency.

I actually did some thinking... well, some therapy, since my last speed friending, in which I could've probably been replaced by a pre-recorded message for all the lack of emotion and personality I was showing. To be fair, my goal for the evening was to get in the habit of shaking people's hands while repeating their name back to them, and I succeeded! But it turns out that was a rather lame goal; I remembered everyone's name, and they remembered me as that banal guy sitting in between two much more worthwhile people. This is why I have a therapist; it took him like five minutes to tell me that I'm bullshitting my way through speed friending because my mother (who, by the way, hates my therapist) and the Love Tacticians of the world keep telling me that I'm not good enough and no one wants to hear about my dull, dull life. And it took fifteen years but it was such a relief to hear someone finally tell me, "What's wrong with saying you're a web designer but it's not what you want to do, and you want to be a playwright? There are probably plenty of Young Professionals who are in some kind of intermediary job that's not exactly what they want to be doing, and they'll relate to you."

Which I did, came up with a whole new, and surprisingly honest, line for that question: "I'm a web designer, but my life's goal is to be a writer." I also dumbed down my "Where do you live?/Where are you from?" answer to something I could remember under pressure. (It used to be, "I'm from Fanwood. It's about ten/twelve/fifteen miles south/west/southwest of Newark," depending on which words came out of my mouth.) And I reworked my "What do you do for fun?" answer, and I can't believe I went to two speed friending events stumbling for what I do for fun, because it's not like I haven't answered that question about a million times in the virtual networking world.

Now here's the thing: I keep making three-minute friends with dudes, maybe because I'm not following Love Tactic #7, "Be The First to Show Interest in The Other." This is in the non-disturbing part of the book.... No, sorry, I re-read the section, and there's nothing useful in it. On the other hand, at least I wasn't exercising Love Tactic #33: Use Silence.

Art Makes Me Cranky!

We did a Chelsea gallery tour yesterday; it's one of those few weekend things you can do in New York that's both snooty and free, plus Anne had to see certain artists' shows for her discussion forum in class. With Anne there, the whole experience of looking at art was new for me, since she's in a graduate level art criticism class and can come up with a sophisticated critique of what's on the wall, and I'm capable of relating everything to my insecurities and jealousy issues. I sort of observe Anne's thought process — and we ran into a bunch of her classmates during the gallery tour, and I got to watch their thought process too — and I really have to empathize with their innocuous art ideals: Let's try to figure out what this piece means, notwithstanding the fact that much modern art is pure gibberish to begin with. Maybe today's art students are tomorrow's asshole artists and art critics, but I'm actually pretty impressed with their ability to extract something, anything, from the pieces they're studying. I usually go with my gut instinct, which is, someone's playing you.

The first show we saw, The Shape of Time by Qiu Zhijie, was actually quite beautiful and emotionally resonant, and that was enough for me. Twenty-four photographs representing the twenty-four seasons of the Chinese calendar, each one taken with with a very long shutter speed, long enough that the artist could use a flashlight to "write" the name of each season on the photograph. My personal favorite is "Start of Autumn," a playground at night bathed in a weird, artificial green light, and the effect is hypnotizing. The Shape of Time is at Chambers Fine Art, 210 Eleventh Avenue, through the 24th, and even though getting over to that corner of Manhattan takes more time than you'll actually spend in the gallery, I recommend it.

Everything else was crap, but at least it was different styles and smells of crap. Our next stop was some dickweed gallery that exemplifies every single thing that's wrong with modern art, starting with their whore's exhibition, and I don't mean that in some metaphorical sense. Back in 2003, Andrea Fraser prostituted herself for "Untitled," an hour-long video of her boinking a collector for the bargain price of $20,000. I haven't seen the piece, but I'm totally fit to judge it. (Not sarcastic there: Look, if it turns out the piece is more than just the concept of "attractive so-called artist sleeps with rich collector for a chunk of his money: is it art?" then I'll be wrong, but my guess is that the idea just makes it a glorified porn video.) "Untitled" lives at the crossroads of our celebutard culture and the self-enclosed, self-gratifying art world, a combination of the post-modern delusion that meta questions about what qualifies as art make up art, Fraser's belief that her status in the art community automatically grants a greater meaning to anything she'll do — like we seriously believe that she'd be fucking someone poor or a rival's patron, and the idea that her piece stands on its own. Maybe she's too exhausted after that hour of sex to come up with a title? God, what a bitch. I hope she at least got chlamydia from her art.

Fraser's current show is in two parts: nude photographs of her apparently grafted atop classical paintings of nudes, which took me like half an hour to interpret and by then, I just didn't give a damn. And the video. Let me say, right now, that I am totally against mixed media artists or performance artists or whatever making movies, and I don't just say that because I sat through Miranda July's painfully pretentious Me and You and Everyone We Know. Not that artists can't make films for the sake of filmmaking, but you have to realize that since films, unlike the thing hanging on the wall, occupy a period of time, you need to keep your audience engaged. Frasier's ten-minute film shows her walking through the Vatican Museums, listening to the audioguide and pretending like she's not being filmed, and it's just ridiculous.

I know what she was thinking, too. She wanted to comment on how we (note the art critic's best friend: the vague, all-encompassing pronoun) experience art: The throngs of tourists crowding the Vatican aren't seeing the religious art with the awe and reverence the Renaissance masters intended and, worse yet, they listen to the audioguides to enhance the appreciation of the art that they don't have in the first place. Which is all well and good: it's just that the video doesn't say that. The press release Fraser sent out to Abstruse Intellectual Art Monthly says that — hell, my blog says that — but my blog isn't on display in a gallery, and rich women aren't offering me $20,000 to fuck them and then write about it.

Third stop was Ian Davis's uninteresting show, which apparently "incorporates the systems and geometry of minimalism within a descriptive style of painting that is timeless in its simplicity." That's the first sentence of the press release. You'll note that "descriptive style of painting" doesn't mean anything, and you can't really call something "timeless in its simplicity" unless it's been around for a long, long time. But anyway....

"Favoring the depiction of entropic situations over specific narrations, in Davis's universe systems crash and things fall apart. Whether populated or not (very often by groups of identically dressed men), all of his works retain a strong masculine presence, tinged by sardonic humor."

The best I can say is that his work is, in fact, very often populated by groups of identically dressed men. I often wonder which comes first: the painting or the press release, because this is pretty much the same A-minus nonsense I wrote in my Art Humanity papers, and my essays just parodied these press releases. Like, I totally missed the masculine presence (maybe Davis sprayed his musk on the paintings?), the entropic situations, crashing systems, and sardonic humor.

So by now, I'm kind of hungry and kind of grumpy (well, grumpier), but we had to move on and we say Doug Aitken's show 99¢ Dreams at 303 Gallery. I looked pretty kindly on the show, at first. The highlights, in my mind, were "Wilderness", a panel of hexagonal mirrors turning slowly at different angles; and "disappear", a panoramic photograph of a plane graveyard, cropped into the shape of the word DISAPPEAR and then put in relief from the wall, so it looked like it was protruding either into or out of the wall, depending on how you looked at it. There was also a funky-shaped marimba with nine notes that the public was invited to play, but I casually disregarded that as insipid. The trouble started when Anne and I decided to play "Figure Out The Theme of the Show, And Don't Refer to the Press Release for Help." I guessed that Aitken was trying to express the idea that what we see is a function of our physical relation to the object we're looking at, and then I realized that's a totally vapid statement, and then I realized that didn't necessarily mean I was wrong.

But alas I was wrong. Not even close. It turns out that the pieces are an expansion of "[Aitken's] fractured merger of mediums and information systems," which actually seems parseable, so I tried to parse it. "Information systems" are, I assume, systems containing information and "mediums" are the manner in which that information is transmitted to the receiver (that would be you, the person looking at the art). Aitken has merged the information with the transmission method, and then broken his (info + transmission) thing — although what I suspect he means to say is that the content of the information you receive can't be completely separate from the manner in which you receive the information and thus you can never receive the information the way it was intended. When I translate it into Comprehensible for you, he's really not saying anything that you didn't pick up playing that telephone game in kindergarten.

Okay, continuing with the second sentence of the press release: "These works combine light, sculpture, moving images and sound." That is true. I probably could've figured that out without Aitken explaining it, since I have eyes and ears and a sense of perspective in three-dimensions, but whatever. I'll pretend like you didn't just condescend to me, Doug. "For example, 'don't think twice ii', [random comma, sic] is made up of two over lapping [sic] concentric circles that proceed through an animated sequence..." I'll give you this one, too, Doug. God, you're embarrassing me! 'don't think twice ii' is made up of two overlapping concentric circles that proceed through an animated sequence. And here I thought you were full of shit! "By stripping away traditional representational imagery, these works get to the essence of a moment."

I'm so relieved! What the hell does that mean, "essence of a moment"? And how does one "get to the essence of a moment"? And how does "stripping away traditional representation imagery" get one to the essence of a moment? And finally, what does this have to do with the fractured merger of mediums and information, or did Doug forget all about that by the time he pulled the fourth sentence of his press release out of his ass?

Valentine's Day News: New Study Says Kissing Your Sister is Bad

To be perfectly honest — and apparently, gross — I never really knew what the big deal is. Besides homozygosity. I'm an only child, plus I've had relatives try to set me up with my cousins, so I just always fantasized that if I had a generic hot sister who was into that sort of thing, what the hell, right? What's a little universal cultural taboo between siblings engaged in self-exploration?

But researchers at UC Santa Barbara just had to go around ruining my fantasy, and also about three-hundred Veronica Mars fanfics. I love it when science gets its rational self applied to what we take for granted, and this story fascinates me. Evolutionary biology predicts that we humans ought to have some mechanism for guessing who shares our DNA: we ought to be quicker to help our kin because their reproductive success improves our standing in the gene pool, unless their reproductive success is with family, which weakens the gene pool. What the researchers found is that you can blame your whole incest squeamishness on, of course, Mom.

The good news is that, contrary to what Freud claimed, you don't have an ingrained crush on your mother, precariously tipping between your subconscious desire to return to the womb and social custom and pressure getting you to marry outside of your kin group. You form this notion of a kin group early in your life, watching your mother take care of your siblings, or, in terms of modern non-nuclear American families, your "siblings:" the people you grew up with, and the thought of doing it with someone your mom cared for gives you the willies.

Anna Nicole Dead: A Tearful Nation Mourns

Anna Nicole Smith, voice of a generation of fat retarded hicks, died the other day. I was absolutely shocked when I heard about this tragedy — not so much because Anna Nicole is dead but because I heard about it on CNN instead of The Insider or Access Hollywood one of those other coked-up tabloid gossipmonger panels obsessed with B-list celebrity news. Even worse, CNN's once-respectable anchors Wolf Blitzer, Paula Zahn, and Anderson Cooper (who really didn't have much more credibility to lose after hosting The Mole) aren't treating Smith's death with the requisite respect; that is to say, none. At least the duly sane among us have Jack Cafferty, who combines the sarcasm of Jon Stewart with the sex appeal of Larry King, putting Blitzer and The Situation Room in its place. If there were any justice in the world, Cafferty would've long ago been promoted from the guy who reads viewer e-mails to at least the guy who kicks Glenn Beck's ass.



But even Cafferty is kind of a pussy when it comes to morally evaluating Anna Nicole's death and the media response — I guess being televised live in front of a national audience of housewives who think they're too sophisticated for Oprah sort of neuters even the bravest of us. I want to go a step farther than just, "Who cares?!" Dead Anna Nicole = GOOD! Yes, I'm being flippant, and I don't want to hear shit from anyone who's less indifferent to Smith's death than to the any of the other approximately 6,500 deaths that occur in America every day. Every life is a sacred child of God — unless that life is being lived in Iraq, obviously — but the world is overpopulated and natural selection isn't working the way it once was and if we're going to get rid of someone, we might as well terminate a socially useless, narcissistic, drug-addled, semi-coherent, gold digging drunkard and stripper-turned-diet-pill spokeswhore. I mean, just think of how much Trimspa's now gonna be left over for the rest of us! Anna Nicole's death might have just solved America's obesity epidemic!

If Al-Qaeda is serious about killing as many Americans as possible, I'll tell you what Osama could do. He could send me and every other American a free iPod, Palm Treo, and GameBoy DS because there is an epidemic in this country, and that is pedestrians too occupied by their blinking electronic gizmos too look both ways when crossing the street and subsequently getting their oblivious asses clobbered by a sedan speeding through the intersection. Some dumbass in Brooklyn was hit by a bus while listening to his iPod so apparently now we all need to be saved from our portable electronic devices. Thank God for New York State Senator and self-appointed urban nanny Carl Kruger, who introduced a bill to fine pedestrians $100 for using their iPods and other electronic distractions while crossing the street. One supposes that the fine is waived if the street-crossing criminal is actually hit by a car and killed.

I am proud of Carl Kruger. It takes a lot of guts for an American politician to risk his career and alienate millions of iPod users just to stick to his principles, especially when one of those principles is "people shouldn't have to look both ways before crossing a busy eight-lane street."

On the other hand, I spend enough time sitting in city gridlock to be vehemently pro-running over pedestrians who dawdle in the middle of the crosswalk, pedestrians who obliviously step into a busy street (I've done this a couple of times), and the absolute worst: pedestrians who see the red DON'T WALK hand, then look both ways and see there's a car barrelling towards them, and still charge into the intersection! And no, I'm not just jealous of their faith in cabbies and their brakes. If this is what it takes to get these idiots out of the gene pool before they breed into dipwads who kill themselves by sticking those iPod earbuds up their noses and into their brain cavities and then we have to ban the earbuds too, I'm all for it.

I could make the rational arguments as well: Millions of people are able to cross the street safely while talking on their cell phones or fiddling with their iPods. It's also possible to be distracted without being tethered to a gizmo; Kruger should expand his bill to include crossing the street while sick, or right after a break-up, or if you've got a big job interview or presentation to make or... how about we just simplify things and ban crossing the street completely? This way, we'll only have to worry about sidewalk-related deaths.

The Veritas Forum is, let's be honest, a mildly-successful Christian proselytization tactic. They organize lectures on college campuses, ostensibly around secular topics but with a hint of that haughty know-it-all-ism that characterizes both the devout and liberal arts students. Veritas' mission is to "inspire the shapers of tomorrow’s culture to connect their hardest questions with the person and story of Jesus Christ," which is a sneaky way to undermine the whole concept of a "forum": individuals arrive with their own experience and ideas, but the forum itself grows organically out of the diversity. If you already know the answers, then you should really just get a soapbox.

Harrigan's been going to all the lectures this week, and she invited me to come along to one called "Minds, Machines, And Metaphysics: What Makes Us Human?" If you guessed Jesus, then you're right. But the talk was by a professor from MIT who worked in an artificial intelligence lab, developing "emotionally aware" software (not as creepy as it sounds), and as a scientist, she'd only make vague allusions to our divine developer, programmer, and debugger. If humans were able to build robots with consciousness, she would say, it would logically follow that those robots could deny their Creator. So, atheists, deal with that logic while you're burning in hell!

I don't see a ton of ways into or out of the whole mind-body dualism conundrum, so I sort of avoid the whole topic, and turn grumpy when I watch something like Ghost in the Shell, wondering, "Now what does that robot have to gain by falling in love?" The whole idea of automaton wants and desires — we can have a facile debate forever about how deterministic human minds are, but we're talking about glorified toasters here and desires that stand outside of whatever mathematical function the programmer uses to represent them.

And besides, couldn't you just unplug them?

The lecturer was emphatic about the point that these artificial intelligences certainly don't feel emotions yet. They built a robot with a mechanical face, for example, that smiles when you're nice to it and looks ashamed when you scold it, but obviously it's not experiencing shame in the way that we do. (Or some of us do, anyway.) It's analyzing the pitch and timbre of its operator's voice, comparing them to "pleased," "sad," "frustrated" templates and then moving its little countenance pieces. The fear that these things will someday supplant us as the dominant minds on the planet is laughable — although maybe a little less so if you believe God graced you with a soul and granted you dominion over all creatures, and along comes these godless liberal ivory tower scientists emulating that. The religious types tend to not like being humbled; I guess that's an advantage to believing that emotions are nothing more than physical brain states and free will is an illusion cloaked behind the laws of nature. We're already humbled. It won't be such a dramatic transition when we're enslaved by our future robot overlords.

No Touching!

There's this dude at work who, uh, touches you. Like, you're sitting at your desk, minding your own business, and he comes by and gives you a shoulder rub, Bush-style. It's weird. Funny when it's the German prime minister, a bit more confusing when it's you.

Maybe it's a cultural thing. I had this suitemate back in college who had the same sort of shoulder massage greeting; he was from Madison, Wisconsin, so ever since freshman year, I'd been imagining that they have a different concept of personal space out in the heartland. What the hell do I know? Where I come from, there's a tacit "keep your hands to yourself" rule: two people hugging meant they were either romantically involved or just won a football game, shaking hands was some sort of profound alien mind-meld act, and kissing on both cheeks meant you were snotty wannabe Eurotrash. I know a handshake is a massive collection of social cues, but I still feel weird. I don't want to be the guy who spearheads a campaign against shaking hands — although if I were that guy, I might combine it with a charity drive to stop the spread of the bird flu.

Every other touching gesture I can think of actually communicates something, like a hug ("It's nice to see you.") or a pat on the back ("Well done," or alternately, "I empathize with you.") or smacking someone's head ("There's a fly on your head.") Hell, that European kissy greeting actually makes it seem like you're excited and happy to see the other person, which really annoyed me while I was in Italy. I guess that's one good thing you can say about shaking hands: it's not phony. "We are in each other's presence." True enough.

But back to my own experiences with feely people, as rare as they are. I don't know how to interpret them. Are you just lonely? Do I look tense? Are you coming onto me? That would be flattering, which is why I'm skeptical. How about we all just say hi, that way it's easier on everybody.

"Quiet, Err. I'm transmitting rage."

I wasn't planning on seeing the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, but then came the guerrilla marketing campaign that shut down Boston and I want to be a part of the alarmist chaos! I guess the marketers didn't do such a good job lightboarding New York, cause I didn't find see Mooninites anywhere. I would've so taken one of those boards for myself, stuck it on my refrigerator or car or something, because this is the first time I can think of when I was in on the joke. Usually there's a billboard that says March 16: it arrives!!! or Are You Next?, and my thinking is, "Goddamn it, advertisement! I sleep poorly enough without your vague apocalyptic pronouncements." Then it turns out that they're selling Nikes or something and... well, I've usually forgotten about them coming on the 16th anyway.

The view from the inside, though, is hilarious, like when you hear Orson Welles' broadcast of The War of the Worlds and wonder how something so cheesy could spark that mass crazy. I'm sure I'd be infuriated if I lived in Boston, but not at the culture geeks who stuck the ads on random stuff. The media and the information presented to us is so thoroughly focus-grouped and sanitized that I'd just die if we didn't have the occasional indie sticker-sticker covering up stop signs or traffic lights.

I wonder to what extent the citywide freakout was a product of the Aqua Teens counterculture, and if they were blinking ads for mainstream sitcommery rather than Williams Street's typical dark absurdism, maybe they'd just go unnoticed. Like, would the same people be calling the cops if they were lit-up ads for How I Met Your Mother?