Man. Myth. Morland.

We begin in the Autumn of 1991. The television show In Living Color enters its golden age, fans of alcoholic lechers everywhere continue to mourn Serge Gainsbourg's passing, and the Warsaw Pact states resemble more of a block party than Eastern Bloc. Somewhere amongst a sprawling social mass of industry name-dropping and precocious ivy-league ambitions an impressionable twelve-year-old and newly-christened seventh-grader is presented with a seemingly innocuous choice: shall he spend sixth period studying French, Latin, Russian, or Spanish?

The superhighway to hell is paved with good intentions. The on-ramp is paved with paternal advice about which language to pursue. And the on-ramp's high-speed carpool lane is paved with the recommendation of "French", despite seven years of elementary school study lending weight to "Spanish" as the logical choice.

Now I won't disparage the French language. Maybe some types of suffering mutate into wistfulness as years pass, but I have no grudge against the language of love. I never though, had a French teacher I could call anything less than uncomfortably tolerable. They, and to an equal extent the general composition of institutionalized secondary school language instruction, convinced me to issue a restraining order against any and all step-mother tongues. When, senior year of high school, language study went from obligatory to optional (my own personal Bastille Day), I and a few cronies celebrated with some "minor" vandalism which resulted in some "minor" suspension. It was far from my finest hour, but this was the extent to which I was driven mad.

Thankfully the incident was withheld from my permanent record, and along came college, with its lax distribution requirements and succulent electives. No departments enticed me less than those vile foreign languages, requiring five lecture hours and two of "laboratory" per week. They were dead to me (Latin, actually, was and is dead to everyone, but still, people sometimes use Latin phrases to sound smart, so in that sense it's on life-support). They were lingua non grata (see?).

Then I graduated, went out into the world to stake my claim, and realized that I would not be utilizing much of what I'd learned ever again. Sure, I knew about the anterior cingulate cortex, Pareto optimality versus a Nash equilibrium, and how much Ritalin to snort before an exam (10mg before noon, 5mg after - you don't want a major buzz, just enough to focus - cut most of it up very fine but leave a line or two coarse for that time-release effect) but I had no applicable skills to aid me in my rise to fame. Sure, I wasn't attending a trade school - I didn't go to college as an exercise in job training - but knowing I wasn't headed for a life in academia, I could have balanced out all this esoteric learning with some practical knowledge. And what practical knowledge would be better, more widely-applicable to a variety of industries, than foreign language proficiency? For the first time, regrets surfaced of linguistic opportunities lost. As time passed, they grew.

So now I and three coworkers will venture along a path that would have paralyzed me with trepidation not long ago. Starting Monday, I'll be studying Japanese for seven weeks at the very un-private-university-like rate of $15.35 per hour. It's either a genuine act of self-improvement or, given that I now work for an American subsidiary of a Japanese corporation, the most expensive exercise in sycophancy of my life.

Communicating with customer support teams is inherently demeaning to both parties, a fact which technology, with its ability to dehumanize through multi-tasking, doesn't help to counteract. Just when you think representatives' attention spans could not be stretched any thinner, along comes a way to shock the efficiency-service curve juuuuust a little more. Enter instant messaging.

The new medium is not, however, entirely without its benefits. It caters better to idle nonsense, for instance, even if it also makes such babble far easier to ignore. Being a pompous ass is easy when you can't see your interlocutor's face. It's even easier when you can't hear their voice.

Thank you for contacting SECURECORP. My name is Jen. How may I help you today?
Jen: Hello Morland
Morland: hello
Morland: did Angela forward you our corespondence?
Morland: or should I copy-paste it in?
Jen: Yes, one moment please
Jen: We are still looking into this for you.
Morland: Ok. I'll sit here and gaze longingly out the window at the rain, contemplating the oppresive ennui of corporate life
Morland: Now I have oatmeal, orange juice, and a banana. This alleviates some of the ennui, as well as my hunger. My hunger for a sunny day alas, has not yet been satiated.
Jen: Can I please have your organization name or order number?

The United States Department of Homeland Security is buying an entire town in the south-west US for use in its anti-terror training.

Playas, in the state of New Mexico, will be bought for $5m from the Phelps Dodge mining company, which built it from scratch in the 1970s.

:: A short poem about a mosquito, being harried thereby, and the hollow regret of interspecies conquest

Deciding to feast on my dozing head
Meant waking me up, and winding up dead
My standard reaction when bit on the noggin'
Is to retaliate with a vigorous flogging
Upset, disoriented, near-sighted, and sore
Crouched in my underwear at a quarter to four
If you hadn't buzzed about my ear
I'd still be asleep and you'd still be here

Littlewood's Law of Miracles. How else can you explain seeing an otherwise non-descript white sedan dive by with a license plate reading "LeChaim" on Yom Kippur?

I have 17 vacation days remaining this year. 17. That's greater than the number of times I've left my own borough this year. In fact, it's more vacation than I'm allotted on a yearly basis - I rolled over five days from last year.

Now I'm not trying to boast: for you types out there lucky (or cursed) enough to remain in academia, this number is a pittance, and I've known some even in the corporate world who've received more time off than this by a significant margin. But the fact remains: there are three months remaining in the year, and I'm entitled, counting holidays, to take off a full one. I am now faced with an onus of choice. Last year the decision was a "no-brainer" (in the sense that it took little thought to make, not in the sense that it lobotomized me): I had a local guide with replete travel knowledge of a country I'd always wanted to visit. Off I went to Japan. This year, I have no such good fortune.

Initial vacation brainstorming has produced only one feeble idea: Branson, MO. Technically though, this would be more of a pilgrimage than a vacation per se, as the journey would be undertaken exclusively to visit Yakov Smirnoff's new theater (picture) and stage revue.

I'd never realized just how much blood mosquitoes siphon away until waking up at 2:30 in the morning and smacking one against my lily-white wall, creating a permanent - and disturbingly large - iron-tinted Rorschach stain.

Every once in a while I'll fall back on a well-worn but steady amusement technique: run text through Babelfish, bouncing it around between several languages before ultimately returning to English, and chuckle to myself at the results. For the most part it's uninteresting, but every time there's at least one oddly poetic phrase which impresses me with its sheer incomprehensibility or randomness (usually both). Past examples include "break room" morphing logically into "space of the rupture" and "the remnant survives and testifies to the graciousness of God" somehow transforming into "the remainder revives but and elegantly the shoes it provides evidence the exit". The key seems to be mixing multiple language families, e.g. German and French or Korean and Portuguese. Here's an example using this paragraph as the input text:

All now and then back part of the case of I'll of threadbare in a constant technology of the maintenance however: the text for functioned thumbs Babelfish and for it some languages enter, before you definitively reduce/it stop reverse English o, and laugh me around the battle in the results go. In the majority of cases it's uninteresting, but each time that there's to a little rare poetic cliche, which me presses with its immutability or naked unforeseen event (normally both). Behind the examples you close room" of "break; ; logically seen morphing in rupture" of "space; e remains of "the survives and testifies to graciousness of God" in remain of animated "the and how elegant the low shoes in one or other manner become another time, which the exit" test; sources. The key seems, repeated families of the language, to mix Korea and Portugueses for example the German and the French man or the inhabitant of. Here's an example with this point as a text of the entrance:

Mostly garbage, but you have to admit it part of it presses you with its immutability or naked unforeseen event.

The caption for the picture of Avril Lavigne associated with this article from the BBC reads:

Some viruses masquerade as images of pop singers

I know in the context of the story it loses some trenchancy, but I'd like to think the caption-writer was being deliberately (and delightfully) subversive.

Mobile phone manufacturers have begun to incorporate advanced MP3 playback capabilities onto some next-generation handsets. This should come as no surprise, since low-power decoding technology has been around for years now, and with the development of miniature hard drives (one model with 1.5GB of storage and a form factor no larger than average is about to sell in Korea) this is a natural step forward in consumer electronics. But, according to the music industry and wireless carriers, setting a song you've copied to your phone to play as your ringer is dangerous.

BMG director of digital Jon Davis agreed handset manufacturers could damage the business. 'People will just take the CDs they buy from Woolworths, rip them to MP3 and transfer them to their devices,' he said. 'For the handset to then pop up a text offering to convert it to a ringtone is a real danger.'

So let me get this straight: if someone spends $15 to purchase an entire album from your company - partially because they know they can transfer their favorite song onto their phone and use it as a ringtone - it's a "real danger"? What if they just bought that one track online, giving your company a disproportionate amount of revenue for a single tune, and copied it over? Would that be acceptable?

Universal, BMG, Vodafone and Orange have warned that moves by handset manufacturers to let consumers put songs they've bought online onto MP3 phones will damage the development of a legitimate mobile music market.

Ok, apparently not (delicious irony here stems from the major labels' historical sloth-like pace in setting up digital music stores, decrying consumers unwillingness to purchase music online - and now counting on it).

What I can infer from this article and elsewhere is that the music industry believes the purchase of music is not categorical. That is, buying a CD with a certain song on it does not equal ownership of its MP3 equivalent on your computer, nor the right to use it on your phone - at least, not without an additional fee. You do not buy a copy of the artwork, you merely lease it for a specific use on a specific device.

It really would be better (i.e. more profitable) for the labels if they could charge fans thrice for a single track (or more: how often will you upgrade your phone in the upcoming decade, and what are the chances they will let you copy your old mobile music to your new device?), but, to put it bluntly, it's insane.

While I don't entirely agree with the carriers on this subject*, I understand why they are going along with this: they don't get a single cent if users copy songs directly from their computers to their phones. The labels' perspective just reeks of ignorance and avarice.

*I think an unrestricted MP3-playing phone would sell like hotcakes and being the first to offer one would lure millions of subscribers from competitors. The carriers fear this would be a point of no return - once any one of them offered such a device, all would have to follow suit, depriving the entire industry of direct-to-mobile sales. To them, as they are immensely paranoid of becoming simply "dumb pipes" (the industry term for what happened to ISPs in the 90's as it became clear that proprietary content services ["walled gardens"] were less important to users than access to the far more comprehensive internet, relegating providers to compete as commodities solely on the basis of price), this ceding of control (receiving no remuneration for something transferred to the handset) is the equivalent of a nuclear holocaust, so they operate according to the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction: none of them make the slightest move in that direction, for fear that it will precipitate a full-scale war which will decimate them all. My personal opinion is that it's an inevitability, and while they can forestall it a better plan - from an individual carrier's perspective - would be to position the company to take advantage of the upcoming commodification of the marketplace (build the most robust, least costly-to-maintain network) and then spearhead the transformation to 1) capitalize on your superiority within the new paradigm and 2) reap the full rewards of the first-mover advantage.

:: A eulogic haiku regarding the disposal of the two remaining bean-bag chairs in my office

New economy
Green felt dots of .com fame -
Say "sayonara"

Get it? Because we were acquired by a Japanese company, and it's so sad, because everyone has to grow up, but not really, because everyone bemoans it more than it deserves, and we talk about it all the time, and bean-bag chairs are symbols of creative freedom and wacky antics and...

This past March I read a week-long journal in Slate which coalesced all my fears about mortality. While scary, the diary of a double-lung-transplant was ultimately hopeful and comforting.

Awash in a sea of reserved, approving nods last night at a certain after-party / show (oh, perhaps you heard of it? that's right, yours truly found a foolproof tactic for avoiding pesky "guest lists": "purchase" a ticket ahead of time and show up "three hours early") there stood out a sore thumb of a girl, face unscarred by jaded wrinkles and slightly slack with inebriation. Her pig tails bobbed in time with the vivacious gyrations of her plump innocence. Like pedophilic moths to a nubile flame, so came the bumpers and/or grinders.

"I go to NYU - I'm a first-year. I just got here two weeks ago," she slurred in the direction of her first suitor. "First-year"? Is that what the kids are calling it these days? Why not "thirteenth grade"? Bah humbug.

Minutes later staccato kisses punctuated a free-form dance duet bucking and swaying to a rhythm quite apart from the Jamaican dance-hall reggae on the PA and the energetic Futureheads performance that followed. It was the rhythm of love. Specifically, it was the rhythm of oblivious, drunken, horny, 19 year-old, college fresh-naïf love. And this love is blind, or at least severely astigmatic. Thankfully, it's also amnesic.

I started becoming vicariously embarrassed for her and her barely-elder partner, which was a peculiar sensation seeing as they themselves displayed not even the slightest sign of shame. This precipitated a review of my own youthfully indiscrete antics. There were far more than I cared to think about. And those were only the ones I could remember. How many precociously-cantankerous twentysomething office-drones had I discomforted?

My unease dissipated. There was nothing of which to be ashamed. It was... natural, like some grand ecological cycle immortalized in a schlocky animated epic with music by Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice. I would nod and reflect upon this youthful exuberance, and acceptance would come. They would one day do the same with others, as my predecessors had with me.

Fortunately I awoke this morning to a stunningly nice day, to the kind of weather that subjugated any supposed aged wisdom and reverted me to a bubbling idiot.

This is an advertisement for Ave Maria Mutual Funds, whom I won't link to directly (so that they can't tell from their referrer logs that I'm making fun of them), but have a web site at www.avemariafund.com. They "eliminate those companies connected with abortion or pornography, or that offer their employees non-marital partner 'benefits'" from their investment portfolio. This elimination is overseen by an advisory board (www.avemariafund.com/advisory_board.htm) that includes a former commissioner of Major League Baseball and the founder/CEO of Domino's Pizza.

Now abortion, ok, I could see how that's not a real bread-winner, but pornography? That's like a license to print money. Profitable bottoms equal profitable bottom lines. And in the wake of corporate accounting scandals let's not forget all the focus on "transparency".

Seriously though, trying to mix ethics and finance is just wrong. Are they trying to put Eliot Spitzer out of a job?

When giving a presentation, here are two songs that, as I found out today, will absolutely guarantee that no one listens to a word you say because they are either:

One: I'm not going to hop on the Google-bashing train. Whatever ills have befallen them, brought about by their own hubris or not, they still run one heck of a search engine. It's important to remember this in times of confusion and frustration. When trying to search the internet to find a bible belt, an elongated strap literally composed of bibles / depicting biblical scenes / etched with scripture and meant to be worn about the waist to keep one's pants in place, the majority of the search results will not be pertinent. Don't blame Google - it's not their fault.

Two: It seems I was one of the few commuters not affected by the torrential downpour wreaking chaos upon this fair city's mass transit system this morning, but I'd heard from others that havoc and mayhem were in full effect city-wide. These claims were corroborated as I entered my office and saw our building's resident bum, "Red", passed-out with his face resting on the sidewalk as usual, but wearing a clear plastic rain poncho.

If I could travel back in time just some three years, oh the lambasting I would give the younger me.
"Cool shoes," I, the younger, would say.
"Thank you," I, the elder would bashfully reply.
"And you've managed to become more handsome than I possibly imagin-" at this point I would cut him off with a firm backhand about the face, bloodying him and letting the dual tastes of iron and respect linger in his impudent mouth. Then I would impart to him some pearls of wisdom, amongst which would be this: summer vacation doesn't fade with academic pursuits, it merely atrophies and shifts its shape.

"You see, young lad, August has some terrible power to suck the energy out of even the staunchest type-A workaholic. Weekends become bloated, the hours of the business day dwindle to Francophonic levels, and vacations - holidays, sabbaticals, walkabouts, and rehabilitations (here I would too have inserted the plural form of 'hiatus', but it turns out to be 'hiatuses' and that's just not as sexy as 'hiati', which I was hoping for [in a cactus/cacti kind of way, which is sexy], but that's probably for the best since it would be confused with 'Haiti' and unsuspecting tourists might be lured to that infamous island nation beset by poverty and internal political turmoil only to find out that it is not as cathartic as their subconscious word association had led them to believe) - go forth and multiply.

"And this may shock you, you acolyte of sloth: you will loathe it. You will curse the thick cloud of lethargy as it saps the productivity of you and your coworkers. You will be mentally inert, a giant blemish on whatever your hard work, talent, and intellect may have gained you in the past, even neglecting your "blog" - don't ask, you'll find out what it means eventually. It will be your own personal Godfather Part III (from a production standpoint, not in terms of the plot)."

I'd leave it at that, and move on to discussing the coolest bands of the next three years (so that the younger me could bask in perpetual ahead-of-the-curveness) and then maybe where to find those killer kicks he liked so much (Zappos.com, btw). I would also counsel against losing the nicest umbrella he/I'd ever owned.

Left unspoken: how nice it is to return to an office alive again with clattering fingers and prattling lips. The joy of the resurgence of Something To Do.

I'm using my last "summer Friday" tomorrow so it doesn't go to waste. This means I have a four-day weekend spanning a stretch of consistently good weather unseen (at least, on a weekend) in months. The RNC wooed me into telecommuting for a couple of days, so I'm well-rested and, despite coming in to the office today, itching to stay away from the apartment for as long as possible.

Then along came this commentary-cum-onanism about, from what I can gather, how Rilo Kiley can be none more awesome, and a font of bitchiness was unleashed. Now far be it for me impugn pedantry, but this is just off the charts.

Everything else depends on Lewis's singing, always lean and lissome (she was principal backup for the Postal Service), but now also big and textured, breathy and kind and emotive, live-er, acted with a grasp of the permeable boundary between persona and character. The melodies are beefed up with the kind of simple handclaps-to-horns touches puritans know to be mammon's work.

A friend of mine once pointed out how inherently silly it was to intellectualize beyond moderation about something so visceral as the way sounds happen to strike each and every one of our ears. Lyrics, now those are for thesis papers, but dropping biblical terms and describing the nature of someone's singing as "live-er" just leaves me perplexed. Should someone decipher the rest of this indefinable wordiness, please inform me.