I know I'm not just speaking for myself here when I point out, with utter dismay, that there was a time when people shared their Christmas spirit with the neighborhood by covering their house, and maybe their shrubbery, in strings of lights, and it was quite beautiful. But holiday tackiness found an opening somewhere and began to seep in: first those wire-frame light reindeer — like, we know that Dancer and Prancer aren't on your front lawn, cause we live in New Jersey and not the Yukon — which gave way to inflatable Santas, ratty plastic Nativity scenes, and cardboard Grinch cut-outs. But maybe two Christmases ago, the neighbors — yours and mine, and you know who I'm talking about — decided they'd snatch all the undeserved holiday attention on the street by leaving a giant inflatable snow-globe in their front yards.

Which is bad enough on its own, but I was in Drug Fair this morning, passed by one of those balloon snow-globes with a price tag on it, and realize that people actually pay money for this gaudy kitsch! A six-foot snow-globe goes for about two-hundred dollars — two-hundred dollars that could theoretically be exchanged for goods and services is instead going to uglying up someone's house, and that makes me very sad. I mean, you can drop a beat-up '88 Oldsmobile with three wheels and one cement brick on your lawn for free. Wrap it up in blinking colored lights for Yuletide; you can even use those mesh net lights if your holiday spirit is only matched by your laziness.

I would go around town with a BB gun, deflating all this crap, but you know... it is Christmas and all.

A Completely Impartial Review of the New Museum

I got to check out the New Museum — and let's not start a slapstick routine here, that's the museum's name, okay? — yesterday, about a week after its re-opening and re-imagining. I never had very nice things to say about the old New Museum... er, the previous New Museum, except that admission was only three bucks. The art was nothing memorable, save for one animatronic sculpture on temporary display of a boy fucking a goat, and a piece by Tom Friedman that was a six-inch sphere of cursed space, which is totally cheating. Some of Friedman's other work was less dickish, which is why I can't remember any of it.

I guess they tore the old museum down, quietly: I spend a good deal of time in Soho and blissfully unaware of the move. The new New Museum is, according to the pompous jackass art critic in the Village Voice (and having a last name that's both hyphenated and has an acuté accent ain't helping, Christian), "an instant classic." This dude so wants to sleep with the New Museum. The museum is, from the outside, a stack of precariously-balanced gleaming white boxes, kind of cool and inviting on its own... but the hyper-modern structure lives on the Bowery, a street most notable for its many grunge punk rock clubs and restaurant supply stores, and to say it doesn't fit in is an understatement. Not that I'm particularly fond of the Lower East Side ex-tenement architectural vibe, but the new glass and fiberglass buildings popping up like zits feel like Tim Gunn walking into the Bowery's homeless shelter in his thousand-dollar suit and shiny tie and making fun of what the residents are wearing.

Speaking of which, all the staff at the new New Museum has to wear these black uniforms with, like, leather shoulder patches, and they totally made me think of rebel storm troopers on casual Friday.

The show, "Unmonumental," is the same tired, lazy, pointless sculpture and installations we've come to expect from modern artists, and I guarantee that everybody on display is friends of a friend of a curator. Admission is twelve dollars, which goes to support performance artists walking up and down the street, screaming love poetry "a reflection on the difference between speaking and listening—a kind of confession combining the idiom of politics, the transmission of secrets, and the language of love." Do what I do and bring along a friend who works at one of the city's art museums, is totally into art, and is therefore obligated to go to the New Museum and think deeply about "the Object in the 21st century" anyway. They get an art community free pass plus a guest pass, so it's like I get to be an incomprehensible douche for a day, too!

Like I really need an art museum to do that. ;)

Briefly, the exhibition includes — and I'm not sure that I didn't hallucinate this whole thing — a bike, on top of a pile of fuschia bricks, with bags of rocks hanging off the handlebars, a pole sticking out of its back, a fur drape hanging off the pole and a picture of Mel Gibson taped to the fur.

Normally, there's this moment where I challenge the artists to justify themselves, taking up my time and energy and potential for a MacArthur Genius Grant, but not anymore. The justification is damn futile; the artwork, like the museum itself, is self-absorbed and solipsistic, unaware of anything beyond its own boundaries — like the idea that just maybe, there's some poor guy walking to work on the Bowery, he just wants to sell his restaurant supplies and now this indifferent behemoth is suddenly blinding his eyes and not purchasing a pizza oven. Nothing in the New Museum is the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, for example, celebrating the resplendence of God and beauty and salvation. The pieces here have no context, no story, and they rarely even serve as examples of whatever abstract, abstruse philosophical psychobabble the artist's trying to reflect.

I did, however, like the bathrooms. They had this high-speed hand dryer thing, and it was like all whoooooosh!

Thought Experiments

I picked up Valerie Plame's memoirs at my library — Barnes & Noble — but only made it through ten or so pages before the book became absurdly redacted. I promptly moved on to something more readable. Fair Game cold opens with Plame's months-long job interview at the CIA. I've been interviewing recently, so I can totally relate — unless you're on The Apprentice and your interview's systematically produced for maximum drama and entertainment, all job interviews are more or less the same, evaluative tools for matching candidates to positions. The best and the brightest, they're looking for the same thing whether you're working at Microsoft, Merrill Lynch, or the CIA. (I love their "Now Hiring" page, by the way. Ever since Jennifer Garner started recruiting for them, it's replaced the "NSA for Kids" page as my favorite clandestine agency website.)

None of this surprises me, but according to Plame, the CIA's hiring process (back in her time) included a battery of number-two pencil tests, a Myers-Brigg inventory Myers-Brigg evaluation, some examination — sounds like the ultra-sketchy Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory — where one deciding question was "Do you prefer tall women?" (First, compared to what? And second, people with a little reasoning ability would easily recognize this as a false dilemma.) I'm sure traders at the Carlyle Group and engineers for Halliburton are given the same ridiculous tests, and it goes a long, long way to explaining how the hell we got our army into Iraq.

One question in Plame's interview — I guess this might be important in her line of work — was: What do you do if you're meeting with a contact in a foreign hotel room and the police knock on your door? This kind of stuff — solve this problem — intrigues me, much as I hate it when I get asked these questions in an interview, because the permutations send my mind into a thrilled flurry. I'm still working on the most efficient way to count the windows in New York City. (I wonder if building plans need to be kept on file in City Hall?) Plame's question, and her obvious answer, are great thought experiments (well, thought experiments for me, if not her)...

You'd strip down, hop into bed with the foreign contact, and pretend you're having an affair. But my immediate response: Do people still fall for that? You're sort of relying on the police being incompetent, disposable goofballs to pull the fake affair off. What I've learned about open-ended engineering is that your first answer is almost always the wrong one, even when there are no right and wrong answers... I hate the learning curve, since it usually turns into a real-life mess, but you know.

Live and learn.

Avoid the ass-backwards parts of the world where you'd be stoned for committing adultery. The problem is if the police are looking for you, and they come upon you having sex, they'll still arrest you. I guess you could read the question assuming that the police were looking for your contact, and you'd pretend to be a sweet, innocent thing randomly caught up in international espionage. Really? Hope nobody would check?

Still working on this brain-teaser, but I think it needs to be dealt with on a micro level. Issue one: the police are interested in you. Remedy one: make the police not interested in you. My guess is that the best way to accomplish this is to be a victim, the more pathetic and more in need of the police, the better. Issue two: the police are in the same room as you. Remedy two: not be in the same room as the police. I haven't solved this one yet; running out a window or something seems like a losing proposition, although if the police are going to fall for the illicit affair tactic, I can also see them busting into the room and finding an open window with the curtain blowing around. Issue three: the police are going to take you to jail. Remedy three: get the police to take you somewhere else, or nowhere at all. I don't see any way you'd be staying in the hotel room — maybe if you handcuffed yourself to the bed or something.

My best idea so far would be to drink a bottle of ipecac and spend the next hour or so grossly ill, hoping that your puking all over your captors might be a bit more imperative than whatever intelligence you have. But I like optimal solutions and arbitrage — and yes, the problem is designed to not have an (apparent) optimal solution — but the puzzle still remains. In the academic.

Steerage

The Times ran this article, "Class Conflict on the Airlines," complete with accompanying sardonic picture and, hey, were you aware that airlines have been trimming the amenities in coach? Airlines save money by throwing out what used to be essentials — according to the article, United stopped handing out their delicious pretzel mix and saved $650,000, while American Airlines saved $600,000 by scuttling the pillows from their flights. Would this be a good time to point out that United took in $19 billion in revenue last year, and American made $22 billion?

Anyone who's ever flown knows the situation is different in first class, because the airline insists on shuffling the cattle through the luxury zone, just so we can see what we're missing. Lie-flat seats, four-course meals, noise-canceling headphones, while people have literally died from sitting in coach for too long. At least Singapore Airlines is doing something about deep vein thrombosis, restoring some legroom to economy class.

No, I'm just kidding. They're distributing brochures laced with magic blood thinners.

Here's where the free market system fails miserably. United says that eight percent of its fliers make up thirty-six percent of their revenue, and they'd lick those guys' balls all the way from Dulles to Düsseldorf if they asked. So applying some math skills, you have to figure that United's leaving ninety-two percent of their customers — and nearly two-thirds of their revenue — in Seats of DEATH, and taking us for cheap tourist fools buying carefully worded lines about "The passenger who is buying a ticket from us based on price sensitivity — we also want to make sure they have a comfortable flight." I'm not calling bullshit right here, but judging from our nation's hack comedians at open-mic night, there's a market for flights with peanuts, and no one cares to meet it.

The airlines epitomize the trouble with letting corporations do whatever the hell they want in the name of making a dollar. There's a diverse market that gets relegated to the "have" extreme and the "have-not" extreme. I might be willing to take a ten dollar flight on a FedEx cargo jet, but at even economy class prices, someone, somewhere should have to meet certain minimum expectations: that I'll get to my destination as efficiently as humanly possible, and that I won't have to spend eight hours in a Seat of DEATH. I don't think that's a lot to ask, but apparently ninety-two percent of you do.

Have a Very Polemic Christmas

Here's an article in the NY Times Sunday Styles section — which I don't read — about the latest trend in eco-friendly holiday gift giving, and the resentment it creates among some people who do read the Sunday Styles section. The holiday drama starts with a socially conscious nucleus gift-giving handmade recycled crafts or charitable donations and the once-valent rest of the family, expecting real presents, turning resentful. Not to mention euphemistic: "We spent so many years so poor, where we didn’t have the money to do much,” said Cynda Reznicek, whose sister gave her a compact flourescent light bulb last Christmas. "We're at the point now where we can be a little more extravagant.... It's just a joy."

This is the point where I fruitlessly remind you how Christmas is supposed to be about the birth of our Savior, and peace on Earth, and mirthful times with your friends and (possibly politically backward) family, and spreading Christianity by co-opting a pagan solstice festival. But that's not what struck me.

I always thought there was this tacit rule in society that when someone gets you a gift, even if it's a light bulb — which, let's be honest here, ranks above underpants and below socks — you're either under twelve years old or otherwise at least feigning gratitude, you selfish jerk!

Kenneth P. Green, a resident scholar on environmental issues at the American Enterprise Institute — I'll point out that's not really any sort of credentials on this issue, but anyway — accidentally clears up the spirit of gift-giving: "The point of the holidays for many people is the joy people get in giving." No... if you're bitching about what you unwrapped, then the point of the holiday is the joy you get in receiving, potlatch be damned. You know, every family has their Christmas issues, and most of those are way more trivial than the health of our entire planet. The difference is the twenty-five year old rivalry between your two uncles because one got a car as a graduation gift back in 1982 and the other didn't doesn't manifest itself when presents get unwrapped. "A power drill! That fixes everything, for the remaining hour we have to be in the same room."

I'm not judging, although avarice does rot your soul, but the gift is supposed to be a gesture of generosity and not a fantasy of watching football on a big TV or impressing your girlfriends with designer shoes. It's one thing to expect something else, but to actually complain about the light bulb is the mark of someone who, next year, seriously deserves to get shit. (I was going to say "coal," but an environmentalist wouldn't give coal as a gift.)

Year of the Robot

Every Christmastime, I take an hour and drool over the bi-annual Sharper Image catalog, and imagine our dystopic future ruled by superfluous gizmos from Korea. Progress marches on this year, with the catalog's opening pages devoted to pet robots of every conceivable species, from vacuum cleaners (now with "anti-tassel" technology!) to insects to re-animated Elvis. Elvis lives!

When the androids become self-aware and the revolution inevitably happens (June 12, 2012: mark your calendar), there really won't be any greater indignity than being killed by a three-hundred dollar animatronic rockin' Elvis.

Okay, no robot apocalypse, but the damn things still creep me out, especially as they're evolving into more "lifelike" creatures of servos and sprockets. Pleo the Brontosaurus here, or whatever he's supposed to be, "develops his own personality, moods and habits," needs training and socialization — he really seems like a lot of trouble. A pet without the dander, and the affection... so he's pretty much Pig.

I find these androids just a tad condescending towards humanity. Not so much the engineering nerds at Honda creaming themselves over Asimo because it's been years since they've had contact with an actual human being, but the rest of us. He can run, he can dance, he can play the trumpet! Big deal — I can do all those things, plus I can walk downstairs without toppling over. (Usually.) Suck on that, Asimo!

And you know what else Asimo can't do? Love, that's what.

That's what frustrates me with this so-called robot vitality, and I see us raising a generation of children believing computers can show true empathy. And the reverse, like when you're stomping on ants and there's a half-crushed one writhing, waiting for the sweet release of death. It doesn't count as a living thing until it's squished on its thorax with those six little legs twitching pathetically in the air, and Wittgenstein notwithstanding, suddenly your sick mind apprehends how that feels for the poor thing. And someday robots will get the same recognition — that's what "lifelike" means, after all — and hippies will protest over the poor working conditions, long hours, and meager pay for all the Screwbots and Weld-O-Matics toiling away in factories for the benefit of the rich first world.

The Sharper Image needs to re-brand. They're not lifelike, they're bipedal toasters, although now I expect to see Toaster-Bot 3000 in next year's catalog. (Headline: "Your new robotic best friend wakes you up, makes breakfast, and dances!")

I Am Swank, Briefly

My high-powered NJYP connections introduced me to Netparty, a site organizing networking functions for young professionals, and apparently people like me as well. Netparty held their premiere NYC event last night, where 1700 young professionals were expected to crowd into a club, trade business cards, and possibly hump each other, but in a totally professional, business-casual way. I went, expecting the social-phobic, fish out of water disaster these things usually collapse into — but I enjoy these stylish clubs, first because I get off on that slick, trance, mood-lit ambiance and second because I feel like someone important walking into this secret, sacred space, like Page Six or Heidi Montag might stop by and I'd get to be on the other side of the tabloid glossy for once. As if that's a worthy goal, but I think we can all agree that it sounds better spending tonight like every other night, commuting home, stuck in traffic.

The party was held at Hiro, an exclusive club that usually has no reason to be open at six on a Tuesday night. I confirmed this with a couple of the bartenders. Hiro is one of those obnoxious places that's kept hidden from the plebeians — 371 West 16th Street doesn't even exist during daylight hours, camouflaged as a service entrance for what I always thought was a homeless shelter but turns out to be an expensive hotel. It's easier to find at night because you can just look for the line of beautiful people heading into the Maritime Hotel's service entrance. I arrived a few minutes before the party sort of kicked off at six and the line was already down to the corner.

I was probably the only person waiting on line not talking into, e-mailing from, or texting on some kind of handheld electronic gizmo.

I'm generally super-awkward at these events and I somehow found myself sitting at the dudes' table. All of you with — not social skills so much as social confidence — haven't experienced this phenomenon, but basically you're hanging in the clu trying to look engaged, failing usually. One of the system admins already at the dudes' table — everyone at the dudes' table is inevitably a system admin — calls you over and you collapse, sucked into this black hole of low self-esteem, and wind up sitting with dudes sadly pointing out who's hot, or even more sadly not pointing out who's hot. Dudes and their repressive asexual work ethic are actually here for networking.

Here's where the night becomes awesome. So I'm at the dudes' table trying to explain this Netparty concept to some system admin who doesn't really speak English and is, seriously, expecting someone to make a presentation tonight, and just generally getting frustrated cause I've been sitting at the dudes' table since I was seven or eight years old. I want to escape and I see the woman who was in front of me on that long, long line outside sitting by herself. Understand: I never do this. I've never done this. But I was totally sick of being this guy's instruction manual — "No, you have to go and introduce yourself" — that I excused myself to go "mingle."

I went up to... the bar.

I checked out upstairs.

I brought my drink into the men's room. I've never seen this before: they have all this metrosexual styling product over the sink and a guy who charges you two bucks to use it. I'm a firm believer that you can judge the classiness of a joint by its bathroom — fake white marble, high-velocity hand dryers, those big bowl sinks. Hiro had the bathroom of your corner deli, plus the guy selling fancy soap or whatever was sort of creepy.

I left the bathroom and, out of places to wander, I introduced myself to the woman from outside. "I remember you from the line..." I'm not sure what the big—

Hold on. I'm forgetting something. It didn't hit me till later, but: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can't figure out what I was afraid of, since this went smooth as, well, curling up in a ball and floating underwater. Sure, the circumstances were really favorable — no competition, plus I had an opener, plus I don't know what the hell Hiro put in my drinks but I was spinning for hours — but still, in instant replay, it can't see my looming disaster approaching from anywhere at all. There's a moral somewhere in here; I really hope I can dig it out.

Your Dog Looks Like a Whore

I wish I could have more nice things to say about the folks at eccentricpets.com because it looks like they do some really good, important work. They're in the animal rescue business, finding homes for unwanted pets... and then dressing them up. I believe I have a new arch-enemy. Putting a raincoat on your dog when you're taking him for a slushy walk might not be too bad, but this meretricious greyhound mini-skirt or the dress for a guinea pig or hamster robs every last shred of dignity from a creature who eats its own poo. (Really, click on the link because that hamster dress needs to be seen to be believed.)

In case your poor pet didn't look ridiculous enough in the "Dazzling Doggy" mini-skirt at right, you can contact Ruth Regina at Wiggles Dog Wigs for the full-on canine tranny look. Half these dog wigs are so freaking ridiculous they couldn't even get a dog to model them. Dude, they're dogs — they already have hair and unless they're performing in a Vegas show they don't need more, and they certainly don't need it to be platinum blonde. Words fail to describe how much I wish I could lock this woman in a room for a week with all of her over-coiffed dogs.

Man, I don't even have any vitriol left for "animal communicator" Donna Velardi.

Meeting

I met up with some friends, and some friends of friends, this evening and brought them to P.S. 1, which... if you ever want to impress your crew with both how much obscure, over-the-river New York City you know and how coolly Zen you are, P.S. 1 is the singular place to bring them. It's a branch of my still-loathed Museum of Modern Art and full of dippy, over-commentaried installations, but redeemed by James Turrell's awesome sanctuary Meeting, guaranteed to leave jaws agape.

It's both easy and hard to describe: a white room, wooden bench around the perimeter, and a hole in the ceiling. A skylight, literally. Turrell pulls off some sort of optical illusion where the ceiling's maybe twelve feet over your head, your eyes scan across to the hole and the sky is right there. At my first Meeting, there was a debate among my friends, "Is that just twilight projected onto a screen? It has to be. I bet they're pumping cold air and wind in the room... no, look, there's a plane. How did he do that if it's a screen?"

Once your mind resolves the issue, the Turrell room is a great, chilly little place for meditation. No one will stop you if you need to sit in lotus position for hours or perform corpse pose on the bench, and there really aren't too many places where a bunch of grown adults, strangers to each other, will lie on a dirty carpet together and it won't be awkward. Plus we got lucky with a perfect, deep pink evening where the illusion crept closer and closer as dusk turned to night.



Credit for the photos goes to Harrigan, who's a photo ace. Seriously, she was setting the aperture and exposure manually. I can barely take pictures that aren't motion-blurry...

Same scene. My picture:

Harrigan's picture:

Not that my picture doesn't have its charm, but I was going for something a teensy bit different.

Also on display, this guy. Min Tanaka, a conceptual artist putting on a special live exhibition. So watch the video, and see if you can guess what his conceptual art gimmick is. (Note: I had the camera sideways, filming, figuring it would correct itself. Oops. Doesn't matter, since he's not any less inexplicable rotated ninety degrees.)

If you guessed that he "dances the space around him," because you are unaware that "dance" is an intransitive verb, then you are correct. Also, he doesn't like being videoed, since some security ninny told me to put the camera away, even though there were at least five professional photographers in the room, blocking everyone's view, and taking snapshots. So I didn't get on camera the part of his dance where he randomly bangs his head against the wall, presumably because the space told him to do so.

I'm really glad the New York Shipping Association put up this ad for the ports of New York and Newark, because I used to load and unload my dry shipping all on my own, with the cargo ships dropping anchor in my driveway and holding the steel shipping containers in my front yard, but it looks like contracting that to an outfit that's not twelve miles inland, and with stevedores and giant cranes, will be a lot more efficient. Now if I could only find someone to deliver my mail for me and a place to land my 747.

In my first reading of the ad, though, with the foreign couple and the line "From brides to bulldozers..." I thought the port was advertising their smuggling operation for mail-order brides and eastern European prostitutes into the U.S. Turns out they're just talking about importing wedding dresses and silverware, but I have little doubt that the Port Authority has more skill with shrinkage and political graft than they do with wordcraft.

Singapore Weighs In

Not exactly a nation known for its subtlety, the Singaporean press gave us this well-labeled political cartoon yesterday, with so much blunt symbolism that, at first, I mistook it for a French New Wave film. It strikes me as one of those newspaper cartoons from the days of the Hayes administration, when Americans were a humorless people yet to evolve to drawing satire, and just as inscrutable. Why is Bush holding that "Anti-Terror Ally" square? I know America and Pakistan are allies in the War on Terror, or at least we are on paper, but... And is Musharraf hugging that Dictatorship tiger or trying to control it? What's with the sandal? The footprint of tyranny? That doesn't make sense.

(Oh, I get it: it's a flip-flop. It would just be easier on my brain to move on to a cartoon reinforcing the idea that Fred Thompson is too scripted.)

Missed Connections

Reuters reported the most saccharine news article since Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack met cute, a true Big Apple love story that absolutely never happens in real life: New Yorkers rally to help online romeo. The timeless love story goes like this: Boy sees girl on Number 5 train. Boy falls instantly in love with girl. Boy loses girl. Boy posts crude drawing of girl on website. The whole freaking city of New York searches down girl. Boy and girl go on Good Morning America. Dopey women across America squee.

The story's just like out of a movie. No, seriously.

My personal Cupid must be broken. He doesn't drive hot girls to sit next to me on the train, or inspire a captivating Chemistry.com profile, or stir a whole jaded city to search for my soulmate. Ass. Can I trade him in and get another one? Preferably one who'll get my cute barista whose name I don't know to chat with me and see the sweet, vulnerable, yet surprisingly virile guy beneath this tortured soul, pining over lattes and pastries..... I'll stop now.

I guess I just don't understand what makes this random subway guy any different from the hundreds of other random subway guys and girls posting on Craigslist's "missed connections" bulletin board. "R train from 57th to Lex - m4w -26."

"Irish Actress at Whole Foods - m4w."

"Beautiful man in Yale sweatshirt - w4m - 28."

It's a giant anthill out there — strange enough, though, that it's got to be at least ninety percent the drones who are posting. (Also, ants don't need wings. They're fucking creepy enough already.) What are the odds missed connections could ever possibly work out? Like, example: "Blonde on The E Train - m4w - 30." This blonde on, well, the E train was "reading a book and seemed totally into it." She has to be looking for a missed connection, on Craigslist, recognize herself, try to place the guy that's all wistful over her, and want to meet him. "I looked at you one last time and you and I met eyes for a second. I wanted to say hello but didn't feel like making a semi spectacle on train, so I am trying to find you here." Seem likely?

But this guy gets put on the Jumbotron? Not fair! I'm saying right now that once I'm rich, I'm gonna set up this laser system to draw my face on the moon. That ought to catch the attention of that cute barista whose name I still don't know... although once you're rich, I bet you don't have to be quite as tacky to find love.

Speaking of which, here's another Reuters romance (sort of) article: "No deal! Woman's bid for rich husband deemed poor offer." This gold-digger posted what's got to be the most heartfelt ad ever on Craigslist. "I dated a business man who makes average around 200 - 250. But that's where I seem to hit a roadblock. $250,000 won't get me to Central Park West.... I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don't think I'm overreaching at all." She described herself as "superficial," like, no shit, bitch.

A "mystery Wall Street banker" replied:

Your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity ... in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won't be getting any more beautiful!

So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Let me explain, you're 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!

It doesn't make good business sense to "buy you" (which is what you're asking) so I'd rather lease.

Sounds to me like some mystery Wall Street banker is in lurrrrvvve. They really do sound perfect for each other. She can fritter away her afternoons in Bergdorf Goodman and Jimmy Choo while he's at work fomenting the inevitable class war, then they can spend their nights together having passionless sex and beating up handicapped orphans.

I'm just kidding — I'm sure these two utter tools would never beat up handicapped orphans. There's no money in it. But organizing handicapped orphan streetfights....

Scab

Dear American Media Conglomerates:

I generally sympathize with the working man, the Americans like myself who perform the tedious, backbreaking labor necessary to keep our great nation supplied with the coal, the industrial machinery, or the non-English speaking domestic help it needs to thrive. I'm disturbed when greedy corporations stepping on these good Christian folk, and thankful for the unions supporting our working-class as they struggle to put food on their dinner tables. But with your screenwriters on strike, and broadcasters threatening to fill the airwaves with absurd new reality show mash-ups like Are You Smarter than a Singing Midget Who Loves New York? I feel like now is a good time to compromise a few principles, step across the Writers' Guild picket line, and offer up my writing talent — just to keep television running smoothly, of course.

And also because I'd fucking kill for the job these thankless little sell-out shits aren't doing. I would write for TV shows or movies gratis... I would write for the vast wasteland detritus — Zoey 101 or The Jimmy Kimmel Show or that super-sterile original programming on the ABC Family Channel — just to see my name in the credits and hear something resembling my words out of the actors' mouths. I would pay Viacom, Disney, Warner Brothers or NBC Universal to write for them. FOR CHRIST'S SAKE, ARE YOU LISTENING, STUDIOS!!!???

Not that I'm looking to screw anybody, but it's like watching professional beer tasters or racecar drivers complain about their jobs, but even more oblivious to the irony. I'd just love to watch some NBC exec march up to Tina Fey and throw her 30 Rock words back in her face, "You got into this business because you're funny, and you're weird, and you're socially retarded. And you also got into it because it pays well," and yes, I'd miss 30 Rock but the idea of Tina Fey working some shitty normal job like the rest of us suckers, like Tina Fey as a claims adjuster or Jon Stewart painting dotted lines down the freeway, is just so comically absurd — somebody ought to write it into a Saturday Night Live sketch, if the writers were actually working.

So I'll be stopping by Rockefeller Center and Viacom's headquarters in Times Square tomorrow, pushing aside the picket lines and that giant inflatable rat (I'll stick a few nails in the damn thing if that makes my proposal any more appealing), and pitching my ideas about a new comedy where a fireman and a pyromaniac share an apartment and date women who are way out of their league. Oh, oh, and I've got this one about obscenely rich, spoiled teenagers in Montana who wear skimpy clothes and have sex with each other. And one about four professional women who run their own shipbuilding yard....

Looking forward to scabbing for you!

Thanks,

Jay Harris

Men Suck!

The subway system is Seoul, South Korea is re-introducing womens-only cars, and that makes me sad for our species, as we took a giant step backwards in our thousand century evolution beyond our bestial instincts. Other cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, and Mexico City have all decided that grown-ups need to be treated like we're at the sixth-grade dance because the concept of anio means anio, or é proibido means é proibido, or na means na is too mature for us. I think this CBS News report, hosted by a hot blonde chick, about Tokyo's grabbiness problem, more or less sums up the issue in a sexual harassment video right out of the late-eighties. Shiatsu Boss in the video comes off as pretty pervy, like that really unfortunate comely woman wants a shoulder-rub after spending all night in one of those claustrophobic office-tube beds, but I'm damn impressed by the balls on those two office horndogs, ogling that dirty magazine with their co-worker right freaking there! Unproductive, lecherous, and not at all ashamed of it, like it's their biological prerogative.

Turns out that Seoul is a festering petri dish of unabashed sleaze — you know, without trying to be judgmental, except they need to complicate daily life keeping the boys and girls apart so nothing inappropriate happens. I don't even see an attitude problem here, unlike the gender-separated subway cars in Cairo or the antipodal testosterone packed cars on the Paris Metro. When big fat guys are stuffing passengers past the closing doors, there's a bit of plausible deniability — not to mention honest accidents — in the situation that some people who have no qualms about paging through porn while they're supposed to be crunching numbers might take advantage of.

If Seoul ran more frequent, emptier subways, it's not like anyone's going to complain. Other than the gropers.

Annual Halloween Rant

Of course I drive to work this morning and the trees are flowing with toilet paper, because today's the day witches and goblins come out, so naturally kids have to vandalize their neighbors' lawns. I'm not above hiding in the bushes with a garden hose, except "House" was on. Man, if Mischief Night fell on a Wednesday, I would've been so ready to ambush those little bastards. Halloween night, fifteen years ago, was when I officially became jaded, after some fucking delinquents smashed our jack-o-lanterns in the street and egged our house... and man, how I'd still love to hunt those punks down and feed their faces to my Rottweiler.

I'd never really do that, of course, because I don't have a Rottweiler.

I've never gotten together with a bunch of my drunk and/or stupid friends and TP'ed someone's house, and now I feel like I missed out on something, like a Nerf war with more cleanup and the adrenaline rush of knowing you could be caught. The other option is playing by society's rules, and what do you get out of that? Candy corn and ennui, that's what.

We're DOOOOOOMED!!!

The Bush administration is, once again, failing to heed the warnings of the world's top scientists, who've noticed strange happenings in our environment and are rushing to spread the word. We're facing a threat far worse than terrorists or global warming — astrophysicists at the University of Salamanca in Spain have postulated that, in the near future, our familiar three-dimensional universe will lose its time dimension and pick up a fourth space dimension. So maybe this whole string theory craziness doesn't have the visceral sci-fi imagery of the Earth swallowed by a black hole on Long Island, but "the fact that the Universe seems to approach a future sudden singularity at an accelerated rate of expansion might simply be an indication that our braneworld is about to change from Lorentzian to Euclidean signature." Translation: we're literally at the end of time, about to be cast off into the void of never and eternity.

All I'm saying is, you know that Mastercard fantasy hedonism weekend you've always dreamed of but would forever be putting off? You might want to get on that.

Those of you who are given to alarmism and panic should hole up in your tachyon-proof bunkers right about now.

I was having a shit day, so thank God I ran into this absolutely true news story that totally made me laugh:

India official dies after monkey attack

NEW DELHI - Wild monkeys attacked a senior government official who then fell from a balcony at his home and died Sunday, media reported.

I could handle the monsoons and the plague, but throw roving monkey street gangs in and I have every reason I need to never visit India, ever.

An optimist might point out that if the Indians can't even keep their leaders safe from killer monkeys, our failure in Iraq doesn't look quite as bad by comparison.

Coca-Cola Brownies

It's been a while since I baked anything. I miss throwing flour all over the kitchen and vanilla extract aroma and licking the batter — oh, how awesome were the days you could gorge yourself on unbaked cake?! You can't do that anymore cause batter has raw eggs in it, and raw eggs can have salmonella in them, and why is our chicken population so sickly lately? Screw SARS and avian flu, I want to lick the mixer blades! I made hash-free Coca-Cola brownies, which isn't as weird as it sounds at first, and they came out good, if more than a little globby.

Here's the recipe.

1. Put two cups sugar and two cups flour into a bowl. Mix with spoon.

2. Put one cup unsalted butter or margarine (that's one stick), one cup Coca-Cola, and three tablespoons cocoa in a pot. Pot on stove, stove on high, boil the mixture.

3. Clean up mess from exploding cola pot.

4. Pour boiling soda/cocoa/butter mixture over sugar/flour mixture.

5. Put two eggs, one half-cup of buttermilk, one tablespoon vanilla, one teaspoon baking soda, and one and a half cups of those little marshmallow things into the sugar/flour/soda/etc. bowl. Mix with mixing utensil. The end product, which you can't freaking eat, isn't watery or anything, but it's thinner than most batter.

6. Line a 9" x 13" baking pan with aluminum foil (makes cleaning up easier), smear Crisco all over the aluminum foil, and drop a thin layer of flour on the Crisco. This is the step I always forget, and then I have to resort to some ridiculous improvised MacGyver contraption to separate brownies and foil without the former crumbling away.

7. Pour batter into baking pan. Put baking pan in oven. Half an hour, 350°. Don't burn yourself.

8. Make frosting. The timing here is tough because you want the frosting and brownies to both be warm when you marry them. Say five minutes. Take that pot, which hopefully didn't explode back when you were boiling Coke earlier, and put another stick of margarine, three tablespoons of cocoa, and six tablespoons of Coke in. Boil it up again, taking to heart any lessons you might have learned the first time you did this.

9. Dump a box of confectioner's sugar into a bowl. I mean, take the plastic bag out of the box, take the sugar out of the bag, and put that in a bowl — but you knew that, right? Right?

10. Pour boiling margarine/cocoa/Coke mixture over sugar. Stir. Stir! Stir!!!!

11. Brownies are done when you can stick a toothpick in them and the toothpick comes out dry

12. Remove baking pan from oven, aluminum foil from baking pan, big layer of brownie cake from aluminum foil. Smear frosting on. Let cool. Refrigerator helps.

The brownies turn out pretty gooey, and I sort of wound up with a giant brownie blob you have to eat with a spoon in my refrigerator. They're a little less chocolaty and a little more sugar cookie-y than the standard brownie, but not nearly as sweet as I was afraid they'd be, considering how Coca-Cola brownies are basically sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and more sugar. They're a nice change from my usual coffee-flavored brownies, although I'm not thrilled about taking a Coke-plus-Mentos sort of risk every time I make them. There are easier ways to make a mess in my kitchen.

Top Secret

It looks like I sent my resume off to this Princeton company that makes a "semantic collaboration workspace that seamlessly ties together people and analytical applications to help our customers collect, organize and process disparate information in order to quickly and effectively respond to changing conditions," whatever that means. It's basically a electronic doohickey that receives data and filters it. Anyway, they got back to me with an email including this completely comforting information: "Due to the nature of our work and customer base, you will be subject to a government security investigation." I assume that Semandex employees are also issued photo ID badges, encoded with your retina scans and maybe some DNA, which isn't Orwellian at all.

Not that I have any real secrets to keep, aside from a somewhat embarrassing web browser history laden with HTTP requests for softcore porn — which, just so you know, can easily be tracked and linked back to your cable modem or DSL line — but the only reason I'm not cowering in paranoia as our government illegally taps our phone lines and AT&T sells them our domain name server requests, is that there's three hundred million people in the country and I'm pretty sure when it comes to the most boring and irrelevant, I fall somewhere in the top two hundred ninety-nine million. It's a pragmatic thing, fully, since I certainly don't trust the government — especially this government — to keep its prying eyes away from me because unjustified spying rends the freedom and priciples that make America great. The data is collected and dumped into this mechanical Semandex filter, and who knows what a buggy computer or an overzealous bureaucrat will do with it. (That, by the way, is my only real concern with this blog: jerks exploiting it, and idiots interpreting it out of context.) It seems better to not encourage them.

I don't really know if I could obtain government security clearance anyway — I got fired from a webmaster job at the theater for writing in my blog. I might have a rather fuzzy line between what's supposed to be private and public, but I'm quite sure I wouldn't be revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent. I'm not that stupid, or politically vindictive.

The whole black market thing really confuses me, from both the inside and out. Like, how does one get started in international gun running? What's the job interview like? (Speaking of which, the CIA is hiring. Also available on their website, employee profiles... which kind of seems like it would defeat the purpose.)

And on the other hand, where are the links between the black market and the general population — how do I purchase a Slovenian prostitute, if I wanted to? There's no listing in the yellow pages for "Sex Slave, Retail." (I didn't check, I'm just assuming.) The weird thing is that I have friends who don't have library cards but know where to buy illicit drugs. Really? Friend of a friend of a friend? I mean, I don't even know who to call when my cable TV goes out; the idea of being a link in the chain of a Robert Ludlum novel is unfathomable to me.

I was in my blanket fort the other day and I got this brilliant coffeehouse idea, which you are free to use provided you give me credit and maybe a free mochaccino or two. You know how coffeehouses have chairs and tables, and maybe a friendship sofa in the back, right? Not anymore, because I've got a serious cafe revolution germinating — rugs on the floor and a whole Linens 'n Things' worth of bedding. You've got a sort of Zen, minimalist, comfy vibe going, but here's the best part: the customers get to make their own pillow forts!

Enterprising souls have tried something similar with great publicity and, apparently, mixed results. But that was dinner, my idea is just about pick-me-ups and hanging out. And that was for professional jackasses with disposable income who've probably lost their sense of whimsy around the same time they were cashing in their stock options — "It's dinner and dessert in bed! We can eat, then we can screw!" Only to be disappointed when it's all a little too public and you're stuck in under the sheets being platonic and talking about other dudes. (On a side note, Grounded is playing Marvin Gaye right now, which I think would be a lot more appropriate if you're in a blanket fort! With somebody else.)

You need to tap into that puerile market, folks still dreaming about how Hollywood will someday option their screenplay.