Man. Myth. Morland.

Disconcerting new trend: people breaking off weeknight plans with me and then departing the country.

I personally take this as tacit verification that my company is intolerable, my wrath swift and terrible, and my tracking skills exacting, if domestically-skewed (or, to use the proper government-championed nomenclature, "homeland-skewed").

:: Morland first annual award for best title of a fictitious food blog primarily concerned with the ordinarily disparate culinary topics of sushi and dairy products

The couple on the far right in the horizontal panorama above was cloying. Let's call them Dick and Jane. They wandered across the community garden together until Dick stopped in his tracks, a playful smile on his face. Jane continued for a few paces until she noticed and turned around inquisitively. Dick, maintaining eye-contact all the while, backed up and sat down on the wooden bench underneath the sagging tree. Jane followed him. In front of a dozen strangers enjoying the nicest weather in weeks, Dick and Jane showed the world the definition of sucking face. For half an hour.

We had no such luck. A woman ("community garden elder") pegged us for frat boy date-rapists and told us we were disturbing the tranquility of the garden with our frisbee-playing. Taunting others with the exhibitionism of sweet youthful amore was apparently not disruptive.

Oh community garden elder and makeout couple. My heartstrings, you trample them.

Phineas: Yo Thad, long time no see, whaddup?
Thaddeus: Fin, my man, not much.
Phineas: How's your girlfriend - what was her name? Cassandra?
Thaddeus: Yeah. She's good... well, you know we have the standard couple problems, but nothing major.
Phineas: I hear ya, like visions of the rapture and all that?
Thaddeus: Yeah bro, she's always waking up in the middle of the night with these prophetic apocalyptic visions and stuff.
Phineas: Seriously. My girlfriend has this phobia that the time of the seraphim exacting their ultimate revenge for the sins of humanity is nigh. Totally normal.
Thaddeus: Chicks, huh?
Phineas: Yeah.
Thaddeus: Word.

New guerilla marketing tactic: print out flyers for your product/service. On one side, put the typical advertising information. Be as obnoxious as you like. Leave the other side blank except for what looks to be a handwritten message saying the following:

Hey - I was walking by and saw that as the car parked in front of yours was leaving, it bumped your fender slightly. I didn’t see any damage, but just in case, it had [state] plates reading XXX-123. The driver looked like a foreign national too, so you might want to keep this (you just can't trust those immigrants).

Then place the flyer under the windshield wipers of any parallel-parked car you come across. No one's going to discard your ad - guaranteed uptake in sales.

The appeal of music is multi-faceted. Some artists lure us with stunning instrumental innovation, others with gritty energy, still others with erudite lyrics bordering on inscrutable. Often it is not the music itself but its progenitor or fellow fans that pique our devotion. One sure-fire way, and this goes well beyond the topic at hand, to garner a following is to produce art with which others identify. The Darwinian landscape of popular music has seen this born out time and time again.

There are two kinds of identification at work, one I believe more prevalent than the other, more potent kind. The first is vicarious identification, a.k.a. escapism. It's an inextricable bedfellow to bombast - the Hulk Hogan persona we adopt in front of the mirror before a shower, the SATC-inspired window-shopping for Manolos. Don't dismiss this too quickly as unrelated to identity, for it is the tapping of the listener's alter-ego that results in the remarkably swift path to his or her heart and wallet. The list of the careers in the music industry alone funded by this urge could fill the seats of a hundred sold-out arena tours*.

The second identification is more direct and profound. It is deep recognition - the echo of an experience or emotion, a bonding between commiserators or celebrators. This is why so many Betty Ford patients have an affinity for Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love of All", and why androids idolize Kraftwerk. It's why stalkers just love "Sunglasses at Night" by Cory Hart.

I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can so I can
Watch you live and breathe your storylines

Mmmm. Everyone has felt like that at some sociopathic point in their lives and when they did, Cory was there, a pillar of solidarity.

For myself, music tends to prompt the former identification process often, and the latter rarely. The topics that do typically tap the second type are common ones that transcend background and place (substance dependency, being a robot, stalking), but the broader the human trait at hand the less specific it feels to me, and thus less poignant. There seems to be a dearth of aural entertainment glorifying the life of bland upper-middle-class office drones, so I make special note of the instances where some particular minutia prompts a visceral reaction stemming from sharp empathy.

I encountered one today. My life is highly dissimilar from that of a working-class Englishman on the dole, much as it is from a soybean farmer in Arkansas or a club-hopping aristocrat in Ibiza. As such, my enjoyment of The Streets' stories is part curiosity, part amusement, part appreciation, but not much recognition. On the track "Such a Twat" from his latest album though, there's a moment of consonant understanding. In the midst of recounting his drunken exploits from the night last, he offers apologies for the shoddy reception of his mobile phone to his mate on the other end. After the call drops for the second time, the song's beat stops cold, as Skinner seethes over dead silence:

Hello? Aw... fucking phones, man!

The unifying frustration of poor wireless coverage. That's a shared aspect of our lives with which I can truly and completely identify, and just one of the reasons I'm anticipating seeing him this Wednesday.

*An important footnote: I am not in any way implying that the artists in question are themselves presenting a facade or being disingenuous. They may be (Vanilla Ice) or they may not be (Tupac). As I am talking about what draws the fans and not what drives the musicians, I am making no distinction between these extremes.

It’s a long flight from Munich to San Francisco, even non-stop. But recently two enterprising Apple product managers cut the distance dramatically with a few at-hand tools: iChat AV, iSight, 17-inch PowerBook G4, a Boeing 777 and an orbiting satellite.

Well that's just great - seeing as video conferencing has caught on like wildfire (I mean, do you know anyone who doesn't use videoconferencing for everyday tasks, like ordering take-out or contacting the wife from a strip club claiming to be working late?), I'm sure this will herald a new age of ubiquitous mobile presence.

Except: that impressive shot out the cabin window shows two engines, and the ostensible aircraft in question only has one per wing. Probably a simple copy error, but still...

UPDATE: Stefan digs around to find it's in fact an Airbus A340. Why must Apple PR copywriters turn this announcement into a house of lies?

SON OF UPDATE: Setfan pinged them with an email and they changed it. Behold the mighty power of reader feedback.

A small, older woman tapped me on the shoulder this morning on the way to work. I pulled out my earbuds and leaned slightly in her direction.

It was. I told her as much. She seemed confused nonetheless. I asked her where she was going, and my eyebrows arched as I saw the address written on the slip of paper she showed me.

"Oh, that's actually two blocks away from here - just go upstairs and up to 17th, you don't need to take the train at all," I offered. She stared blankly. I repeated my statement to no avail. The conversation lulled for an awkward minute on the sweltering platform before the very Q train about which she'd inquired pulled up to the platform.

I shrugged and let her board. I put my headphones back in and followed her on, stopping to lean against the doors and wallow in a smugness one can only attain by listening to an iPod on the subway. Why, I thought, did she maintain that the train was the superior path, despite my conflicting advice? I'm not in the habit of lying to old women, unless I'm wooing me a sugar momma.

We're a funny lot, aren't we? At some point in our past it paid to strike a balance between steadfast commitment and self-examination. A little doubt is healthy, too much is paralytic. Some of us have this see-saw tilted a little this way or that, some are positively out of kilter, and most all of us adjust it based on the situation.

A perceived bad hair day can mean a thunderstorm of self-indictment. Hitherto rock-solid assumptions of beauty and worth are rendered gelatinous in a heartbeat. Is there no solace from cruel uncertainty, oh mirror of pain? Curse you Sassoon!

But theological beliefs can remain a tranquil sea of certainty against the utmost upheaval. No amount of contrary evidence unsettles our decision. We. Are. Dead. Sure.

Granted these same examples can be juxtaposed without a problem - a priest's crisis of faith certainly dwarfs quotidian coif quibbles, while the self-delusional prowess of some of the toupee troopers I see on those subway rides requires a transcendence of reality approaching the religious. We pick our battles, or have then picked for us. Rarely is one a self-conscious priest battling the demons of both grooming and satan on the same day. It's an evolutionary cul de sac. Instead we're built to have one foot on solid ground and another testing the waters.

I wonder sometimes, is everything I find so certain really so? I based my whole career on an incontrovertible fact: that being the #1 klezmer-rap superstar in this game was the most important priority in my life, and that everything else would fall into place given this one requisite. For a while it appeared an accurate supposition; those first few platinum years were some of the happiest of my life. But then came the multiple paternity suits, the hydroponic soy farm investment scandal, the Scotch Guard addiction. I spent all my time debating which diamond-studded tongs to use at my annual St. Bart's roast suckling pig cookout, and never wondered why I was having the cookout in the first place. I mean, I know why I had the house in St. Bart's (tax haven), but how on earth can I expect forty guests to eat over seven tons of pork, immaculately brazed or not?

The smaller the details, the more I sweat over them. This race called fame will do that to you. I think now I might have been testing the wrong waters, questioning the easy choices, and ignoring the bigger ones. But it's not too late.

Trend alert! In our hyper-sexualized modern times, claims the NYT, young men are popping erectile-dysfunction medication to obviate any potential performance issues:

Even as the makers of erectile dysfunction drugs switch their pitches from the elderly to the middle aged, an increasing number of young men like Bill are creating a very different market niche.

They are using the pills casually, as party drugs, for their novelty, as an insurance policy against the effects of alcohol or for an increase in prowess — a hope that experts say is often based on a misunderstanding of what the drugs do and what their partners may want.

Wow, that's news to me. It's not like they published an almost exactly identical article last December, right down to the focus on comparatively high use among the homosexual community:

Rather, [Chris] is one of an increasing number of sexually healthy men, many in their 20's, 30's and 40's, who doctors and sex therapists say are using impotence drugs — Viagra, Levitra and the new Cialis, a k a "the weekender" because it stays in the bloodstream for 36 hours — as psychological palliatives against the mighty expectations of modern romance.

Some of these men use the drugs when they are not feeling 100 percent virile, others to stave off anxieties that occur with a first-time partner, and still others to fend off what might be called the Samantha complex, a fear of wilting in the face of a new wave of sexually empowered women.

Apparently, "Bill" is the new "Chris". Excuse me for getting a, um, rise out of this, but can we save the re-runs for network television and herpes simplex flare-ups? Is it unreasonable to demand, as an attentive and voracious reader of all the latest erectile-dysfunction news, that I not be patronized and implicitly labeled an amnesiac?

In Washington State, health officials cite anecdotal evidence of young men mixing erectile dysfunction drugs with Ecstasy into a blend called sextasy. The officials said that some youths steal erectile dysfunction drugs from their parents, or order them online.

Sextacy now joins "sexecutioner" and "sexcapades" in the ammunition drum of rap album titles. I'm sextatic.

Same: hipsters, bars, idiosyncratic neighborhood names, body of water, public transportation, apartments, pizza, friends.

Different: cars, apartments with outdoor space, neighborhoods, friends, Vince Vaughn.

Embarassing: riding the NYC subway every day for three years, then looking like a retard trying to enter the wrong side of the turnstile on the El.

I had, once upon a time, been assigned the task of collecting appropriate images for a wallpaper application we were publishing. Here's what I learned:

Today I received "[my] LAST Free Issue" of Photoshop Fix magazine as a result of the third phenomenon above. The cover story is titled "Doll Face" (subtitle: "Smoothing Polish"), but I think a more apt name would have been "Barbie's Underage Sister" (subtitle: "10 Legal Ways to Digitally Indulge Your Pedophilic Urges Under Artistic Pretexts").

Vindigo is hiring. Join us and leave the world of corporate laggards, ne'er-do-wells, and roustabouts behind you.

This announcement may or may not coincide with the reinstatement of our referral bonus policy.

Sometimes I fantasize about getting to the company meeting on time. I make the express train, bound off it, charge up the stairs two at a time, and run into a verdant field replete with dandelions where the meeting and I embrace halfway, locking hands and spinning in centrifugal rapture around a locus of mutual responsibility. Then the meeting and I have a impromptu picnic, where we cuddle and promise each other our undying punctuality. There are no bees.

Obsessive-compulsive politico-dichotomous syndrome is an Indolent Media disorder characterized by the repeated and urgent need to delineate large, highly-heterogeneous groups into two homogenized sub-groups of diametric political affiliation. The determinant(s) for such divisions ranges from the specious and/or fallacious amongst the less afflicted to the downright delusional and perverse in extreme cases.

Specify if:
With Poor insight: if, for most of the time during the current episode the person does not recognize that the obsessions and compulsions are excessive or unreasonable.

:: An excerpt from "The Coming Semantic Ragnarok", a novella by 'Archangel' Coldsmith Briggs III.

M walked into the shop. It was raining. "May I help you?" The shopkeeper, one Mr. B, inquired.

M summoned hellfire. He knew even if the fire came (a 40% probability, or any D20 roll greater than 12) that Mr. B's skin was infused with hardened copper, and would not easily melt. He would have to inflict upwards of 40 mega-damage points for incapacitation.

Nothing happened. M became anxious. A small salty bead of sweat rolled down his temple and onto his oxygen filtration orifice. An audible gurgle ensued.

Mr. B's oily tone filled the room: "No doubt you have attempted to use black magic in my store. You will notice protective runes around the entrance which shall invalidate all such attempts." M's eyes shot from side to side, picking out what were indeed protective inscriptions on every door jamb. One was shaped like a seahorse. Another bore a startling resemblance to a political caricature of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, complete with Frito Bandito mustache and prominently-accentuated chin.

M spoke hesitantly as he began to undress. "I come bearing no ill will. I wish only to alert you that several large packages are en route to this address. I was hoping to brutally and slowly kill you in order to intercept the delivery."

"No offense taken. You are now my benefactor. Have some brie," Mr. B offered.

The two sat and enjoyed the fine cheese. Somewhere in the distance a man won the lottery. It continued to rain.

"Out of curiosity," Mr. B inquired, "how large are these packages? Sometimes, if shipments are too bulky for my store, I will provide an alternate address because my store is small and I have a wicked hernia."

M, now completely nude, laughed heartily, his ample belly shaking with each staccato giggle. "Well, I'd say they were no larger than a magazine or standard-sized unfolded 8.5 by 11 inch envelope."

Mr. B smiled. "Good, good. If they were any larger, I would request that they be delivered to the small Welsh tailor down the road, but since they are not, you may ignore this information."

Just then, the skylight shattered, and a herd of cybernetically-augmented bison fell through the opening. The prophecy was coming true...

I've had a spare binder clip hanging from the power button on my monitor for some time now. It's been utterly useless. I stuck some push-pins in it. Once, I pretended it was an alien hovercraft.

Today, a member of our board of directors, exiting from the large conference room behind my desk, turned and asked me if I had a spare binder clip. Within seconds it was serving its intended purpose, nobly clamping about fifty sheets of paper together tightly.

Was I a yes-man? Maybe. I didn't question his request. I implicitly validated his assertion that a metal clip was the best way to bind those papers together instead of thinking critically and offering possible alternatives.

Was I a sell-out? Absolutely. I saw dollar signs and my morals were defenestrated. That little clip had been with me for over a year. It never complained once and I abandoned it in an instant.

This valuable contribution to the success of my company has been duly noted in my evaluation file.

25 and still drunk. Should be in a band. A band with a clever name, like "Rocket-Propelled Grenada". Nice and emo, bordering on mawkish. Absurdly forthcoming, to the point of having to fabricate drama. Those bands can't really have the lives they claim to, right? Are there hidden disaffection lodes somewhere that they strip-mine?

Corporations don't scale well. Too many little little organizational inefficiencies. Reach a certain mass and face the dilemma of whether to surrender to chaos or batten down like the military. Of course, since most companies are all about hedging their decisions, they choose some meandering compromise.

Societies scale well though. It's damned remarkable that this many people can coexist, conflicts, starvation and other ills be as they may. Aww, how revelatory.

Pap songwriters have a formula they follow, see-sawing from one contrast to another, always hitting the lows before the highs. It sets irrational expectations though. For every life mimicking a Vanessa Williams happy ending, there's a Monkees song with the chorus excised. Actually, "I'm a Believer" doesn’t need that - have you examined the lyrics lately? Dark stuff.

No, you probably haven't re-examined lyrics to Monkees songs lately, have you? Where do you get off? How will you get your recommended daily allowance of maudlin tripe? From the WB? Shannen Doherty and Allysa Milano had a falling out, you know, even though they both should have bonded over spelling their first names "creatively". I haven't even seen Charmed and I know that. Can you believe E! is an entire network devoted to meta-knowledge? It's about entertainment, which in and of itself is about something too.

Short story: the life of metadata. Portray it as a leech, a parasite. No, wait, too harsh, more like a symbiont. Wait, they're the same thing. Not really, you're getting improperly semantic. Anyway it's not a symbiosis, the data can stand on its own. But the meta data adds context. Yeah, but it's not essential - that's the crux of symbiosis. Granted, but it's not parasitism either - like I said, the metadata adds context, adds depth, enriches the understanding of the data. The historical information tied to an invention, for instance, modulates our perception of it. Would Anne Frank's diary be as compelling if you didn't know a) what happened after the entries ceased and b) it were true? These are facts about facts.

Mmmm kettle drum, kettle corn, kettle one. Pot calling the kettle a hack. Pol Pot calling the kennel back. "Where's my lhasa apso jerkoff?" In the spaying fields. Bob Barker's wet dream. Philandering ninny should have neutered himself. Again with the meta-knowledge. The only role The Price is Right plays in my life is to inform me that smarmy octogenarians are more sexually active than I. That and some vague childhood memories of my brother's obsession with game shows. Win lose or beating a dead horse.

I received a birthday card from my grandmother, who lives by herself in a small apartment having outlived her husband and all her siblings. All it said was "years do pass". It's the best card I've ever received.

I have six gmail invites (this totally makes me cooler than you). Contact me if you're interested.

I try to steer clear of political topics with those I don't know too well or those with whom I am obligated to spend vast amounts of time. Family and coworkers fall into this last category.

Sometimes I can't, and respond with "no, actually, I'm not taking the day off. In fact, I'm working extra hard today just to stick it in his dead face [and I don't mean Ray Charles, for two reasons: 1) he's not deserving of having it stuck in his dead face, and 2) being blind, he would most likely not realize it was being stuck there]."

Maybe I should distribute all my snide remarks across the entire day instead of bottling them up inside and erupting. Or perhaps instead I should come up with some bizarre catch-phrase to supplant the eruption entirely. Something like "don't ask me - I'm just endowed with unending bliss! Look, a turtle!"

I wasn't born a storm-chaser, but I remember how my life changed the first time I set my eyes upon a twister. Cousin Arthur had just come back from the fair, and rushed inside our little two-story Victorian country house in the middle of Tornado Alley. He had a panicked look in his eyes, and was breathing heavily through his mouth.

We scrambled to prepare the house - it'd been in our family for three generations - by closing the storm windows and tying down any loose produce. When we'd finished, there wasn't much time left. Huddled in the cellar with the others, singing hymnals quietly, I had a revelation: I was not afraid.

Slowly, but with the infinite confidence of an epiphany, I arose and walked outside. The funnel had touched down on the neighboring farm, and was uprooting corn stalks by the dozens.

"Well, what have we here?" it inquired, in the high-pitched, breathy voice that tornados use when they're trying to be condescending.

"Your worst nightmare," came my reply. "I challenge you to a break-off. Right here." I set my ghetto-blaster down next to me and popped in Kurtis Blow's classic hit "The Breaks". Luckily my large portable radio was equipped with bass-enhancing technology (TM), allowing the synthetic kick drums to resonate off the walls of the house and nearby fields of wheat. I thought about the original days of break-dancing, and momentarily felt pity for those who had neither the money nor the carrying capacity to bring hardware like this to the show. The low-frequency thumping of Mr. Blow's beats had me really amped. I was ready to best this cyclone, and right quick at that.

I started off with a simple six-step pattern, the go-to foundation on which most of the best breakin' moves are constructed. I could tell from its envious atmospheric patterns that the tornado was jealous. I'd spent hours after coming home from the local flan-processing plant practicing my moves in the basement, and my six-step was as technically proficient as it was flashy. I transitioned effortlessly into "the flow", and ended my attack with "the worm".

This was an O.G. twister, I could tell that from the start, and it was not about to be undone by some punk kid from the boonies. Whiling about the tip of its cone, it began a slow, jerky motion, each stiff movement punctuated by brief pauses. I recognized it immediately: the robot. A member of the "pop n' lock" family, the robot was a complicated maneuver which required not only coordination but creativity. One needed to master the technique as well as improvise clever mime-like patterns of self-expression. For all its apparent simplicity, the robot would instantly reveal to even a casual observer who knew their stuff and who was merely a "pretender". It was quite clear this tornado was no pretender. It ended its run with by pretending to "power down" - a well-worn stunt, but executed flawlessly.

I had no choice but to counter immediately with "the windmill". Not only was this one of the hardest moves in break-dancing, but given the current scenario, it carried the extra punch of a double entendre. I began my assault slowly, starting off with more six-step, before taking it up to a high-tempo "Jerry Lewis". Then I dropped the windmill directly on that cyclonic fool like an anvil.

It didn't matter whether it'd been expecting this or not - I hit all my spots and rotated fluidly. My heart was pounding from the palpable excitement of knowing I was pulling off the perfect move. I knew the tornado would have no choice but to concede defeat. It was over.

I spun out of the windmill into a relaxed, head-resting-on-akimbo-elbow position, coming to rest on the dirt facing the point where the twister had been - only to find it absent.

To this day, I do know where it went, but I know why: you don't mess with a breakin' farm boy when his house and family are on the line.

If you answered "nothing", "I hadn't any plans", or "reading the Upanishads in original Sanskrit" then you know what it's like to be in my shoes... normally. But at midnight on the night in question, I'll be exactly one year older than the last time I had a birthday. To celebrate, I'm going to walk to 151 around, say, 10pm and sit down. Then I'm going to start drinking. This being a derivative choice of venue and action, it will be the fitting celebration of a derivative life.

If you're reading this, you're invited to join me. In fact, you're invited even if you're not reading this, you just might not know it yet (translation: tell/bring friends).

151
151 Rivington btw/ Suffolk, Clinton
(downstairs, in the unmarked basement = v. v. hip, hott = just like me)
Sat, >10pm

Pasta Man's been here forever, on the north-west corner of 10st and 1st avenue. There's an entire mural on an adjacent building, to the left of his shop's entrance, dedicated to him. He kept parochial hours, but the food was top-notch. And cheap.

Pasta Man was... decisive. Every time I ever bought anything from him we engaged in a little ritual. The first time I wasn't prepared.

PM: What kind of sauce you gonna put on that?
MO: Um... Marinara?
PM [head shaking slightly, eyes firing daggers of shame]: No.
MO: No?
PM: No. You drizzle some pesto and a little lemon juice - room temperature - on top. Just a little.
MO: Ok.

PM: What kind of sauce you gonna put on that?
MO: Pesto sauce! And a little lemon juice. Just a little.
PM [nodding suspiciously]: Pesto sauce. And a little lemon juice.
MO: Yeah, that's what I, um...
PM [staring]: Just a little.
MO [shuffling feet]: Rightokwellumthanks.

Pasta Man can't afford the rent anymore. Good luck to him. More than just a little.

God, I hate iTunes. Apple is rarely garish, but iTunes is positively gaudy. All that extraneous information. Huge iconic buttons for no good reason. A giant rounded ersatz-minimalist rectangle just to tell you how much time is left on the current track. I can't stand it. I've never found a music player as good as Win/MacAmp version 2. It plays everything. It uses tiny fonts. No space is wasted. It has a billion relevant configurable options, you can skin it to your liking, and there's no proprietary nonsense. Just stick it in the corner of your screen, drag in files to play, and you're off.

Ironically, iLike the iPod as much as iHate iTunes, for the same reason WinAmp is so pleasing to me: it's simple, dedicated, and well thought-out. Apple didn't try to shoehorn in excessive functionality, and the resource constraints imposed by the small form factor and low power-consumption gave birth to an elegant, original solution. iTunes strikes me as bloated.

Microsoft is the worst offender when it comes to this*. Could anything be less integral and more detracting (not to mention bewildering) than a little dancing paperclip getting in your way as you're trying to type a short one-paragraph note or quickly spell-check a blog entry? I've probably opened up Word less than ten times on my laptop since I've owned it (2.5 years now), which is a shame, because Office added a couple hundred dollars to the initial purchase price, essentially paid on the off chance that I might one day have to open a .doc or .xls file at home. Office is an extremely appropriate name. I never use it anywhere else.

This is a very common phenomenon. No one wants to admit that their product is complete and walk away; conventional wisdom dictates that there's always room for improvement. But where does it reasonably end? Adding a spell-checker to your word processor is a valuable feature addition. Adding a grammar-checker is borderline. An obsequious paperclip avatar is out of the question.

One of the reasons I like working where I do is that we don't have the luxury of several decades of industry development behind us, and the devices for which we develop are as resource-constrained as they come**. We're not paring-down a massive feature set, we're creating focused, simple products from the ground up. Haiku is often invoked to analogize the process of being creative within highly-rigorous structure. I prefer ritalin. All those bells and whistles are distractions, nigh-infinite in number, but toss them out and you're left with clarity, focus, and agility. Nullsoft knew that, before AOL bought them, fired everyone, and released Winamp version 3.

Asceticism caught on for a reason you know (hint: not because you pull killer tail).

*I'm straying into some pretty hackneyed territory here, feel free to tune (pun intended) out.

**Not only are they technologically infantile, but users are not - at least for the time being - going to sit and read the newspaper on their 176 x 128 pixel screen (we've painfully seen it born-out). This limits the use-cases dramatically. Of course, all this will change in the future... (cue "in the year 2000" music from Conan). And yes, I realize the hypocrisy of arguing that these things should be simple and dedicated and then talking about cramming software onto a phone.

LA is a city that wears its faults on its sleeve. Ask anyone, especially those who've never been there, to name five things they hate about it in a pinch and they'll rarely be stumped. It takes time and no small amount of effort to coax LA into revealing its more nuanced self, for better or worse; its secrets are tucked away in the canyons, hills, back-alleys, and side-streets. Sometimes, as in The Limey, these hidden happenings are dark, ugly, and destructive. Other times, like in Laurel Canyon (invoking cinematic references to describe LA is perhaps a little too obvious, but I happen to have seen both these films in the past week), it's a unique brand of happy hedonism. In either case, privacy - and don't mistake it for exclusivity, there's a difference, though LA has heaps of that as well - is paramount. This frequently translates into inaccessibility for newcomers.

New York, by contrast, is a slut - and I don’t necessarily mean that pejoratively. All you need to woo NYC, and to be wooed in turn, is a free night out, a bottle of gin, and some good walking shoes. Anything and everything is at your feet, provided you have the financial and moral wherewithal. Yet while there's depth to it, New York shows its hand pretty quickly, and no matter how often you find a new tucked-away speakeasy or Yet Another Magnificent Skyline Panorama, it can recall a broken record.

Often I picture New York as a vain, attention-lusting overachiever who would cease to exist without constant effusive praise in her honor and Los Angeles as the brusque and negligent recluse, terminally solipsistic and distant. One is parasitically needy and dependent, the other couldn't care if you lived or died. Perhaps that's overly harsh. In less acerbic moods, NYC is a wise older brother showing you the ropes and LA a knowing older sister giving you the chance to find them for yourself.

Once you've taken the time to settle down and become familiar, the two places have an overwhelming power to leave you feeling broken-down and alone. They also have an uncanny knack for inspiring devotion, joy, and comfort. In the end, first impressions - LA as laconic, NY as histrionic - amount to naught.

People, as my excessive anthropomorphizing of cities implied, are like this too. And actual persons, not the caricatures of hungover ranting, fall somewhere in between. Except, of course, for me, who could not make a worse first impression. Such circumstances are so alien to me that not a week ago after meeting someone for the first time, I later called him or her "friendly". I meant it as an insult.

Another case in point is last night. In a turn of events showcasing galactic randomness and coincidence, I spied a blogger whom I admired passing by at a loft party in Brooklyn (the only reason I mention the location and type of party is because I'm not some pathetic plebe like you and I only hang out in really hip neighborhoods with hip people. I feel you should know that. I've been wanting to tell you for a while now, but you kept looking at me with those puppy-dog eyes and I just couldn't break it to you) and had just enough liquor in me to introduce myself. Odd types of people make me star-struck. Here's a sample from a conversation in which I once took part:

Friend: Hey, so this week I walked down from my office to see Anna Kournikova and Jeff Bezos doing some PR event at Grand Central. I was like ten feet away from her.
Me: Holy crap! You saw Jeff Bezos?

In addition to entrepreneurial billionaires, bloggers make me nervous. This particular one hasn't even been at it for two months. That doesn't matter. There's some intensely personal material on his blog and I admire that. To some extent I identify with what he's put up there. That doesn't mean though, that I should have said, literally, "I identify with you" or even started a conversation in the first place, seeing as I don't freaking know him at all. I pity those who are pulled into my vortex of social retardation. I swear once you get to know me, I'm as cozy as a Park Slope brownstone or Santa Monica bungalow.

Even though first impressions can be uninformative, or worse, misleading, we still place stock in them. Dammit.

Q: Hey, morland what did you do today?
A: Oh, the usual. Spouted off platitudes like a blowhard.
Q: Were they self-involved and twee?
A: Very.
Q: Did you also implicitly correlate promiscuity with overachieving?
A: Hm... Yeah, I guess I did. Wanna take the train up to Columbia and...
Q: Hey - I'm "Q:". I'll be asking the questions here.
A: But you just made a declarative statement.
Q: You think you're clever don't you?

A large part of maturity and adulthood can be traced to the shift in self-awareness from the frivolous to the relevant. Recognition is a vital precursor to enacting deliberate change, which if the movie Adaptation is to be believed (and let's face it, when your lead actor's past work includes Honeymoon in Vegas and Valley Girl, you make a strong argument for the legitimacy of life lessons imparted by your product) is the crux of human gravitas or something. Re-focusing this recognition - from the awkward self-consciousness of adolescent minutiae to broader behavioral patterns - returns more useful data. Since humans are completely rational decision-makers, basing their actions on the empirical alone, better data equals improved conduct. Always.

Here are two examples of things I noticed this weekend. I realized that Masters of the Universe (starring everyone's favorite Swedish M.I.T. Fulbright scholar / actor, Dolph Lundgren - who appropriately enough holds a "masters" degree in chemical engineering) contains heavy doses of homoerotic subtext, complete with a monomaniacal obsession on the part of Skeletor for He-Man bordering on lust, and even a whipping administered to a half-naked, very sweaty protagonist - "punishment" for his refusal to drop to his knees before the said-same villain (say, where do we usually keep skeletons anyway... oh, yes: in the closet). Also this weekend, I ate 2.5 hot dogs.

The first is an example of a frivolous observation. Aside from this entry and some good cocktail conversation, I will not get much mileage out of it, and it will likely have little bearing on my life. Not so with the second. This is an untenable hot dog consumption rate and out of a rational, prudent concern for my health it will be curtailed. Voila adulthood.

So what did self-awareness bring today? I realized I'm god-awful when it comes to business small-talk. Marketing, sales, business development folks - there are those with the talent to trade effortless platitudes and sundry pleasantries. I've seen them work. They drop laser-guided segues and have light-hearted bantering endurance worthy of a Kenyan marathoner. It's a valuable talent to have, and it eludes me.

Can I act upon this? Perhaps. At the very least, when a business partner casually mentions in the midst of a phone call that her teenager wants to attend NYU, next time I won't respond with, "Oh, really? Just like the Olsen twins. You know they turn 18 in less than two weeks. How about your daughter?".

That's what I call self-improvement. Well, that and setting up a legal defense fund.

THE American version of The Office has been panned by a test audience as "too depressing".

They gave it the worst rating for a sitcom in NBC TV's history. Bosses have now shelved plans to make 22 episodes.

I have two opposing reactions to this Mirror story. First, I'm upset the show's support has been eroded. The reason the humor works so well is exactly because it's just depressing enough to be real - far more real than "reality" shows. For every couple laughs, there's a wince of recognition. But second, maybe this is a good thing, because even with Ricky Gervais as executive producer the law of high remake suckitude potential remains immutable.