So, for anyone who's had to delete nested .svn directories from a directory tree (this probably applies to programmers more than anyone else, I now realize):

Use this script to do it.

At the command line, navigate to the folder right above the directory structure you want to recurse into. So if you wanted to delete all the .svn directories inside "jblow/myfiles", you'd navigate to "jblow".

Type "python" (without the quotes, obviously) and hit return.

At the >>> prompt, type "import svndelete". (No quotes, no period).

At the next >>> prompt, type "svndelete.deletesvn('Foldername')". Obviously, you should replace Foldername with the name of the folder you want to recurse into. Make sure you keep the single quotes around the name, though.

I also have an email address.

Um. I'm a game programmer and my name is Peter Balogh but not that Peter Balogh. His stuff is really good, but it is not mine.

As for other differences: I'm also an animator. Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation will be releasing one of my animations, "Remedy," on DVD at some point before the DVD medium is completely outmoded and replaced by the Bubble Format Disc, or BFD. I've got another one I just finished but need to revise but have no more desire to revise, for reasons that may or may not be obvious.

That's right--no catch.*

*Other than the fact that it's completely in beta, is a rather weird port of an utterly outdated 70s game, and has only been compiled for Mac OS X.

That said, it's all in OpenGL (using GLUT for windowing and such, because I'm really that lazy) and I'll be happy to recompile for Windows or any other OS anyone is interested in trying out.

Anyway, please let me know what you think (presumably after you've downloaded it to your Mac and run it):

Pongle

Cancer the Crab knew someone on the committee, so naturally he was in like Flynn. But not everyone was so lucky.

Tetanus the Aardvark
Dysentery the Toilet
Ennui the Token Booth Clerk
Coprophagia the Crap-Eating Poodle
PMS the Badger
Alcoholism the Hyena
and
Depression the Leaper

So a site I worked on is the Macromedia Site of the Day:

http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/showcase/index.cfm

The fun part was writing the shell application that contains all the smaller .swf files, and realizing two things:

1) Thanks to Vineet Choudhary's TweenableMovieClip AS 2.0 class, this thing was going to be easy to do in about 30 lines of code; and
2) The problem of scaling the artwork to exactly 100% of its original size, no matter how scaled up or down the shell is, would be automatically solved if a) every module's normal state in the shell were scaled far down, and b) the shell's magnified state was the reciprocal of the selected module's scale.

In other words, lots of potentially hard things were easy. Also making it easy was collaborating with a bunch of extremely good people who did all the hard work for me (and there was some hard work, to be sure).

Need sleep. Body craves sleep. Brain hurts. Brain needs sleep.

You know that old counterfactual chestnut about married men? The one that says that if a flying saucer piloted by a beautiful female alien were to accost any married man in the privacy of his backyard at night--well, no man alive would be able to turn down a sexual encounter with said alien if he were absolutely sure that no one could ever find out?

Right now I'd be more inclined to steal her saucer and see if the damn thing had a mattress and a way to turn invisible and soundproof for twelve hours straight.

That's right: no sex with aliens. That's a sure sign we're talking serious problems with my neurochemistry.

Not just the usual ones, I mean.

This quite rightly praises a good emulation.

But FWIW, Actionscript was nowhere near the current state it shares with Javascript now when I made these games five years ago:

Star Castle
Asteroids

Of course there's something about DHTML that makes it seem harder to use for game creation than Flash. And the lack of a timelining graphics-and-animation-oriented IDE probably makes it so.

Which raises the question: has anyone created a version of Flash -- the dev application, not the plug-in -- that works more or less the same as Macromedia's version, but exports DHTML and image resources instead of a SWF?

And now that Adobe's bought the company, is there a chance that this looms ahead?

But I do find this funny.

So we're chatting with one of our new neighbors, and she mentions that her great-grandfather built our house single-handedly.

Now, it may not be a big house, but to be able to build any house single-handedly is a bit unusual.

"Well, it came from a kit," she explains. "It's a Sears house. They shipped the kit by train and he built it."

And so, many hours of incredulous Googling later, we've gone through the historical archives on the phenomenon and apparently there's a whole consort of "Sears Modern Homes" experts out there (not just one but two books on the subject). Most excitingly of all, we were able to locate the *actual floor plans to our house* online:

The historic documents

As I say, it's a humble dwelling, but it will serve us well.

Another link to the floor plans--scroll down to "The Crescent" and see an eerily close resemblance between that house and ours.

Not quite as eerie as the fact that I was in the house alone one evening (stripping wallpaper) and someone touched me on the shoulder, and yet was gone when I turned around--but close. That's another story, however, and one I'll think twice about sharing with the rest of the family. Last thing I need in this world is a house full of hysterical shrieking females jumping up on chairs clutching their skirts. I need every available chair for my own jumping-and-skirt-clutching uses.

Apparently these houses were shipped by rail in 30,000-piece deliveries. Sears recommended paying a carpenter $450 to put the entire thing together.

You might have to pay a bit more than that to get a house built today. In fact, you might have to pay more than that to get a couple of bookshelves and a table delivered to your door today, complete with the ubiquitous Allen wrench that so eloquently expresses the sentiment:

"So build it yourself, tightwad."

...is actually leftovers from the roast beef sandwich you forgot to take outside last weekend.
It's certainly good news that you don't have to go Easter egg-hunting for a shocking rodent cadaver. And they're always shocking, aren't they? Paws clutching at the air before them, bodies locked in an impossible frozen twist of agony, mouths agape in a silent eternal scream. Not to mention the critters--the bugs, the ants, the flies, crawling through the matted fur, making it appear both filthier than it already is and somehow, magically, alive in a thousand places at once. Ugh.
So that isn't in your future. But it'll be lurking in your mind the next time you contemplate a roast beef sandwich, that's for sure.

Sincerely,
The Crisp Beige Grass In Your New Yard

Let's face it. There was a time, not very long ago, when you never thought you'd get to own a house. You were deeper in debt than most people emerging from medical school but without any of the mitigating rosy prospects. Your credit report looked like a trainful of CPAs going off the edge of a cliff. Things were ugly and hopeless. Friday you closed on your new house. Don't forget, as you go about the task of tearing out the ancient and fouled carpeting (and rip up your hands on the "tackless" strips holding them in place--the name's an ironic inside joke, schmuck), as you struggle to patch the literally gaping hole in the toilet's outflow pipe, as you weep over the wallpaper removal (which promises to be as easy as chipping barnacles off of water balloons), that the only thing more massive than your mortgage is the debt of gratitude you owe to the many people who helped you reach this point. Having a house is going to cause you much exquisite pain but it's the delightful kind, the gnawing-your-own-tongue kind, and you'll love it even as you hate it. So keep thinking of the folks who extended a hand up, a new chance, a jumpstart in a new programming language, a shot at doing some animation, or a peek inside an unfamiliar technology environment. Also, wear goggles and keep your mouth closed when you work on the sewage pipe. Not saying that anything's going to happen, but just in case.

It's always kinda heartening when a celebrity makes a comeback, isn't it? Think of some star from your childhood, one who hasn't exactly been wearing a hole in the red carpet lately, and then think how nice it would be to see him back in action.

And that's pretty much the kind of warm feeling that swept through me when I saw this:

However, the world can be a difficult place at times, and we all do things we maybe shouldn't do. The path to stardom can involve many detours that are best left unexplored. And many of us experimented in our youth with various types of identities that are now part of a past we wish to renounce.

Show business in particular seems to invite certain forms of abuse and exploitation. Rare is the performer who manages to avoid these pitfalls and walk the razor's edge of legitimate entertainment:



Well, what the hell. You know what? I didn't give up on Pee Wee Herman--and Herbie, I'm not giving up on you either.

This guy makes Jeff Spicoli look like an elder statesman. Seriously, he's so impaired that he can barely speak. His voice trembles like Katherine Hepburn's, his eyelids are more hooded than Robert Mitchum's. Sheer genius, the idea of leaving in his video outtakes--you get a really clear sample of the boy's mien. The one thing you can say about the fog banks of marijuana that have passed into his body is that at least he's in no danger of developing glaucoma anytime soon.

But don't you just love him?

Is it the garlic breath? Or is it the dark particles of matter wedged irretrievably between one's teeth?

I think I'm declaring a personal moratorium on everything bagels until the people behind Roomba invent a robotic equivalent of the dickey birds that sit on crocodiles' heads and peck the rotting detritus out of their mouths like sentient dental floss.

OK, it might be obtrusive to have a robotic bird stationed at the edge of one's jaw all the time. But the world and his wife are going around with a damn iPod plugged into two headholes, and does anyone snicker about that?

So last night I had a rare chance to watch some of the images appearing on the tele-vision device, and I must say I was simply appalled. There I was, minding my own business, and suddenly a Subway commercial commenced--thereby destroying an otherwise lovely evening.

This Jared creature--do they imagine we enjoy looking at it? Are they trying to make us feel better about the closing of the Coney Island Freak Show? Ladies and Gentlemen, witness if you dare the incredible fish-faced shill. Yes, it resembles the Creature From the Black Lagoon, and yet its dead, dead eyes betray no emotion whatsoever.

Listen, liverlips, don't tell me you're going to wax candid about chicken and then stare at the camera like John Wayne Gacy envisioning his next clown painting. Your eyes are flickering back and forth along the teleprompter's text, and you have the nerve to read aloud a bunch of lines that implicitly suggest that you're speaking from the heart? From personal experience? What kind of a mental defective can't speak extemporaneously about chicken, anyway? By all means, you slimy refugee from the deep, gird your flaccid loins with a prepared speech on this important occasion.

So at least I learned something. Namely, that aquatic man-monsters make lousy product endorsers. Do you think this nightmare, this Jared Fogle, makes the round of inspirational speakers? Because I'd rather hear Stephen Hawking any day. Better material AND better delivery.

Is this a new trend in corporate mascots--repulsive fussbudgets with annoying mannerisms and all the soulfulness of a Soviet apparatchik? The bastard makes Norman Bates seem like James Brown. I'm normally opposed to the death penalty, but in his case, I'm willing to make* an exception.**

*swing
**axe into his neck with my own hands

This is a quotation from the website that has pushed this website from being the #1 Google result for "Peter Balogh."

Legal Philosophy

When someone comes to me with a problem, my first goal is to determine what is the simplest, most beneficial and least expensive means to solve the problem.

If all possible means have been taken to resolve the problem without success, litigation may be necessary. If so, I can pursue a matter with great commitment and aggressiveness. I always attempt to meet my clients needs in a cost effective and ethical manner.

"If all possible means have been taken to resolve the problem without success, litigation may be necessary. " Remember how Bush & Co. swore up and down that they'd rather not invade Iraq? Hell, they'd rather eat a mile of dead possum off a hot country road; it's just that, y'see, he's got those WMD sitting all over the place, liable to go off, and that means we just can't sit back and wait for them ol' inspectors to finish.

Or something like that.

"I always attempt to meet my clients needs in a cost effective and ethical manner."

Hope he's less sloppy about how he bills his time than he is about his punctuation.

All other things aside, can I tell you how creepy it feels for me to criticize someone who has my name? Hello, me--meet the real me! What's that I say? I say that I should stop making fun of I?

It reminds me a bit of when Gollum lost his final crumb of sanity and began arguing with himself as Smeagol. Only in this case I'm not saying which of us is which.

Eva's new favorite pastime: crawling over to the coffee table and tearing off the pipe insulation that her parents have naively put around the sharp corners and edges. Zip--she's there. Rip--the pipe insulation is off. Grrrowl. She's gnawed off a chunk of it. And the insulation is made of this godawful porous urethane foam that looks like igneous rock and smells like a cross between an outhouse and Chernobyl, so she gets a good chuckle while mom and dad panic and struggle to extract it from her twin-toothed maw.

Otherwise, the world abides. This morning on the way to work I saw a well-dressed woman leaning against the side of the Giraffe Hotel and throwing up voluminously. Can't shake the feeling that I should have offered to help, but then it's hard to say what I could have contributed to the situation in any case. It's not like laying a coat across a mud puddle or holding a door open. Walking away is just about the only thing you can do at such times, unless you really feel like running over and pushing hard on her stomach and telling her to keep breathing.

Today is the fifth day in row that has seen the men's room here on the fifth floor flooded with water. From the urinals. Specifically, from the first urinal.

I'm not one to complain. I'm one to bitch endlessly. And the management of this office should either fix the damn plumbing or else start planting rice and/or cranberries in the grouting, since it's pretty obvious that the problem isn't going to go away on its own.

In psychotherapy, paradoxical intention is the deliberate practice of a neurotic habit or thought, undertaken in order to identify and remove it.

A quote from "Psychotherapy and Existentialism":

A young doctor had severe hydrophobia. One day, meeting his chief on the street, as he extended his hand in greeting, he noticed that he was perspiring more than usual. The next time he was in a similar situation he expected to perspire again, and this anticipatory anxiety precipitated excessive sweating. It was a vicious circle … We advised our patient, in the event that his anticipatory anxiety should recur, to resolve deliberately to show the people whom he confronted at the time just how much he could really sweat.A week later he returned to report that whenever he met anyone who triggered his anxiety, he said to himself, "I only sweated out a litre before, but now I'm going to pour out at least ten litres !" What was the result of this paradoxical resolution ? After suffering from his phobia for four years, he was quickly able, after only one session, to free himself of it for good.

That's good news for all of us--or at least, for all of us who morbidly imagine every single aspect of our daily lives going wrong. Yes, in our minds, we make every mistake, we say and do everything wrong, and we offend everyone in every possible way.

And, yes, we imagine ourselves slipping down the stairs with the baby every single time we carry her.

This is good news, isn't it? Because according to Victor Frankl, it means we can beat this thing! That's right: we'll achieve a wonderful life of, of, of--of not imagining horrible stuff except when we consciously make ourselves do it! Which is a whole hell of a lot better than doing it anyway!

Hmm. This seemed a lot more convincing five minutes ago.

When you're working on an interactive project that's connected with a certain erectile dysfunction medication, there are times when every word out of everyone's mouth sounds like a double entendre. Oh, you want the font bigger? I'll just *bet* you want it bigger. And you want it higher? I've heard that about you.

The fact that's it's co-branded with an automotive racing concern makes it even better. He threw a rod, did he? In the first lap? Problem with his cylinder? Bent his drive shaft?

And then you wind up working until after midnight a few nights in a row and your head is spinning. You can't complain, because you get paid by the hour (and time and a half overtime), so you'll put up with almost anything. Putting a down payment on a house does that to you: no opportunity to make money can possibly be unwelcome. Plus, this job also gives you the chance to tell people that you've had more than a few all-nighters thanks to Viagra.

We were in a meeting the other day, in a rather well-designed and futuristic kitchen area (conference rooms were all taken), when someone rushed over to the snack machines in a hurry. He grabbed a paper coffee cup and went to one of the old gumball machines that have been repurposed as snack dispensers (and have had their coin slots altered to accept quarters instead of pennies).

Bam, bam, bam--the guy kept popping in quarters, turning the crank, and dumping peanut M&M's into the paper cup. He did it until the cup was full, and then ran out of the dining area--and this wasn't the kind of guy you'd ordinarily see running anywhere.

You've just got to wonder what the hell is going on when you see something like that, right?

Cut to: the client, weeping with gratitude as he struggles to a sitting position on the carpeted floor. "You... you saved my life. Your instant diagnosis of my hypoglycemia is the most brilliant piece of medical work I've seen in all my life. Thank you. Thank you for your quick thinking and fast action. On behalf of my children and all of my loved ones, I thank you."

Eva's always loved that little baby doll. You know the type: rubberized plastic head, almost life-sized, long-lashed eyes that flutter open like roller blinds when her head is raised. Yes, Eva's always been awestruck by that doll, reaching for it with a distant look of fondness and fascination that's always amused us. After all, the doll and the baby side by side could almost be twins.

Well, tonight we finally saw the darker side.

Eva's gotten better at reaching for things and, more notably, picking them up. Trial and error? No obstacle. She'll spend five minutes practicing how to lift a rubber ducky off the armrest of a chair, and then once she's got it, she'll spend some time polishing her moves. All part of the game, as they say.

So tonight I sat the baby doll across from her, and Eva tried out some of her new skills. She reached over with a beatific look in her eyes, stretching both arms out for an all-encompassing embrace.

And then decided to jam both her thumbs in the doll's eyes instead.

Of course, once you've hooked a fish it's time to reel it in. So Eva leaned over and opened her mouth wide before chomping down on the doll's eerily bald head as though it were an apple. Albeit an apple with more than a passing resemblance to the late Yul Brynner.

Gasping and slavering with satisfaction, Eva gnawed on that doll's head until we couldn't take it any more. It was a bit alarming, not just in its own right but because Eva's always expressed an interest in socializing with other babies. Now, however, we've got an inkling as to just what sorts of games Eva would like to be playing with her wee peers, and it doesn't bode well.

"Excuse me, but your toothless daughter just tried to tear out my son's tongue. And her pulse never rose above 70 beats per minute the entire time."

http://www.atari.com/us/games/atari_flashback/7800

If they didn't already know about it, that is.

One beef: playing Warlords without those paddles will suck.

I wonder if these "7800-inspired" joysticks will actually plug into my miraculously-still-functional Atari 400?

And I wonder if I get wrench my ass into motion long enough to get back into doing 6502 assembly programming on that dinosaur? Player-missile graphics, anyone?

http://christiandebtremovers.org/

Their tagline:

"Debt Elimination Services Based on Christian Principles."

Most of the site is disappointingly sane--just a typical help-you-get-out-of-debt site. But here's a howler:

"Learn to Trust God - God knows what you need, and the things you want, before you ask. Begin to trust Him for the things you need but can’t afford - He will provide. Understand that God will always give you what you need if you believe in Him. Make all financial decisions based on the principles of God’s Word, not the "wisdom" of the world. "

I'm not so cynical that I find fault with the general spiritual sentiment of this codswallop. It's just that it's based on the presumption that all of us have some sort of intercom implanted in our heads that allow us to take up God's valuable time with constant requests for financial advice.



Me: God, should I really be buying a house right now? Schiller's new edition of "Irrational Exuberance" makes a great case for the existence of a bubble in the real estate market, and I'm worried that I'll end up buying into the market at the very peak of an historic high.

God: Why do you insist on saying "an historic"? Do you think it makes you sound British or something? Makes you sound like a pretentious jackass, is what it does.

Me: Uh, okay, then what about the mortgage--should I go with the 80-10-10 model, in which I get a home equity loan to cover 10% of the total cost?

God: Hang on, I've got a guy on the other line who's clinging to a frayed clothesline above the churning waters of a flooded river. He's watching the strands of the rope pop one by one, and each time he droops a little lower... a little closer to the muddy death below. You were saying?

Me: Nothing. Nothing. I'll call back later, maybe. When you're less busy.

God: Right. Over 4 billion people in the world, and you think there's going to be a time when your petit bourgeois bitchings are at the top of My priority list? Heh, heh, heh.

Me: Why are you so anthropomorphic? I mean, how come your thought process is as slow as mine? Never mind the fact that your thoughts are so easily restructured into my slow, ambiguous English speech; but shouldn't your stream of consciousness be so blazingly fast and at the same time so great in bandwidth that trying to fit it into a few pithy sentences would be as futile as capturing the Mona Lisa in a single-pixel bitmap?

God: You frigging nerd. How come all your metaphors end up referring to pixels and bandwidth? If you were writing this in the 1920s, you'd be blabbing on about the wax of your Edison cylinders. Get out and experience reality for a change, you petrified little twerp.



And so, you see, religion turns out not to be an appropriate tool for day-to-day financial management issues.

http://www.divorceprep.com/

Check out the photo. Yes, you're the only color layer in a black-and-white comp of a world, you poor, suffering bastard, you. How can you expect a measly 8-bit grayscale layer to understand your deep, 32-bit needs?

Here's what disturbs me (I'm quoting from their site):

Top 10 signs you should order now:

1. You have the urge to start hiding money.
2. You have trouble sleeping.
3. There is constant tension in the house.
4. You don’t just argue, you call each other names.
5. Money is missing.
6. You have spoken to a “friend” about her attitude.
7. She showers before bed...is she cheating?
8. There is less food in the house than normal.
9. No attraction to wife, but attracted to other women.
10. “She doesn’t know what she wants anymore.”

Uh oh.

W-w-wait just a minute. I have trouble sleeping sometimes!

Plus, there IS less food in the house than normal. Last night I ate two bowls of Star Wars cereal, and when I was done, the box was almost empty!

And as for the urge to hide money: the other day I found myself digging a hole in the yard and burying my cufflinks. Does that count?

there seems to be someone out there who has my name but is an "adult film entertainer."

It's one thing to have a Googolganger who's a game programmer. (Bad enough that the guy is, by all indications, better at it than I am.) But to have some guy out there who's acting in porn under my name--well, that's just creepy.

Then again, on more than one occasion I've worked with people who were unfortunate enough to share their last names with those of various totalitarian despots around the globe. You find sentences emerging from your mouth that make it sound like you're asking a mass murderer to use a different font in his layout. If he's not too busy boiling dissidents alive, that is.

As for the porn guy who has my name: it could be worse, I suppose. I could have been born into the name "Ronald Jeremy" or "Jonathan Holmes." Or "Peter North." Or "Lance Anyhole."

Well, I made the last one up, but the point is still valid.

Every day is a gauntlet of hazards for you, an endless tunnel of veiled perils that brush past you and your baby so close that the cold wind makes you shiver each time. Pungent irony, then, that when disaster really does befall you--when danger emerges from the realm of the potential, and the hypothetical becomes all too actual--you'll be in the most relaxed state and in what you perceive to be your safest environment.

In other words, you'll be in shorts and a tee shirt carrying the baby down the carpeted stairs toward the front door.

You'll know, of course, that carpeted stairs are dangerous--know it in the same way you know that you're supposed to wait half an hour after eating before you go back into the surf, or sitting too close to the TV damages your vision. It's an uninteresting fact that you don't quite succeed in pushing out of your consciousness. And that's why you're surprised but also angry at your own naivete when your foot suddenly shoots off a riser and sends your ass up into the air, destined for what is sure to be a terrible crashing ride all the way down to the bottom of the stairs.

And then you find yourself sitting there, staring down at the baby. It's over. Later, you'll realize why it happened so fast, why this moment (unlike every other cataclysm in your life) didn't extend itself in an Einsteinian warp, the single instant elastically yielding to engulf an onslaught of thoughts, regrets, triggered memories, associations, and fears. No, it was a flash, and it's gone, and now there's just the silent baby with her clenched face, and you stare in abject horror as, inevitably, that face opens up black holes where her bright eyes should be and her mouth yields a slow-motion scream.

Is she okay? Dear God, let her be okay, you'll think. With a few very minor variations, that's all you'll be thinking for the next several hours.

You realize that you're sitting on the stairs only a few feet from where you fell. The baby is still wrapped in your hands and arms, and you know, with a sickening sense of foreboding, that when you went down there was some rough contact between her and the posts that hold the banister in place.

The reason you didn't go far, it turns out, is that your right elbow and right knee shot out and wedged themselves into those posts in a kamikaze braking ploy. You'd take credit for it if you'd actually thought of it, but the neurons responsible for the idea are closer to your spinal cord than your frontal lobes, and therefore have little to do with the self-important little narrator sitting in the luxury seats at the top of your skull.

You stand with the baby, trying your damnedest to comfort her without jostling her in any way, and immediately get her into the hands of those who can offer real comfort, real care.

You'll watch her eyes for any sign of glazing, or unfocus, or confusion. Soon she'll be restored from this fever of panic to a more recognizable state of worry, and then she'll be nursing and, soon enough, laughing--still shaken, but herself. Not crippled. Not dead. Not en route to the emergency room.

Someone'll ask if you're okay, which is hilarious and touching--the least relevant question imaginable. Might as well ponder the weather in Pottsdam. But then you see that your hands are shaking, and there are little bits of skin missing from your hand, and elbow, and knee. It's your back that everyone's worried about, but your upholstered ass served its evolutionary purpose well, and the pain will subside to a dull ache by day's end.

The knee will stop bleeding soon enough, but not before it messes up the upholstery on an armchair.

And the reason why everything went so quickly, why your conscious mind was so derelict in its usual philosophical duties during the time of greatest danger?

The best way to describe it is to say that your conscious mind--that relentless narrator threading itself through every moment of your life, waking and asleep--either turned itself off graciously or, more likely, was shoved rudely aside by the primal machinery of survival. The unevolved, brutish primate in your skull took over, in other words, and kept the grip on your baby (without crushing it in an overreactive clench) and decided that sacrificing a knee or an elbow (or, hell, both) was a decent tradeoff for ending the slide down the stairs. And in hindsight, you agree with that decision wholeheartedly. You probably would have sacrificed an entire limb to have spared your daughter any part of the ordeal.

So it turns out there's wisdom in the rough beast that lives below the gossamer sheet of consciousness you consider your mind. A few billion years of persistence and perpetuation just ain't going to happen, after all, unless there's someone in there willing to make the fast, nasty decisions. Thank God, thank God he's on your side.

Jury duty isn't just some onerous chore, of course. It's a privilege and a chance to participate in a fundamental process of the democratic blah, blah, blah. Don't think of all the billable hours that are shooting down the drain as you sit here, unpaid, watching the millstones of bureaucracy grinding away at a speed that makes glaciers look like greyhounds. Tick, tick, tick. Bet you wish you weren't a consultant *now*, eh, boy? No work, no pay. Tick, tick, tick.

But at least there's somebody here who seems to be enjoying himself. There he is, right over there--the enormously tall fellow. Yes, that's him--the one with the crazy mane of unkempt blond hair, and the beard to match. He'd look like a pirate if it weren't for the red plastic glasses. And the tee shirt is a winner, too--it's black and it looks like he's had it freshly silk-screened with slogans of his own devising. Very striking. It's the visual equivalent of a crazy rant: all block letters in stark white and warning yellow, with multiple underlines and exclamation points peppered throughout.

You don't want to be caught staring, so take it easy when you read the shirt. Just quick little glances. Rest assured that this guy is already convinced that he's being watched; the last thing on this earth you need is for him to connect that suspicion with *you*.

But you can't resist jotting down a bit of his shirt's political wisdom.

"Zorg says: I AM NOT!!!!! A POET!!!!"

Hmm. Don't know who Zorg is, but let's agree that he's probably a fictional creation--that is, if we can dignify with the word "fiction" an entity whose existence results from the random discharge of toxified neurotransmitters.

Yes, meet your fellow participant in the justice system: a ranting paranoid who has converted himself into a walking billboard in order to spread a manifesto of paranoia, defiance, and (probably) resistance against an imminent alien invasion. Someone's going to get more than just a jury of his or her peers--they're going to get a juror who is, quite simply, peerless.

But on the positive side, he really does look energized to be here, doesn't he?

She lies there on the mattress, her head cocked to one side, her shoulders rolled back, beefy arms akimbo. Her jaw is set with the satisfaction of someone enjoying a well-earned rest, dammit. She looks for all the world like a bansai gardener's vision of Rod Steiger about to peel off his white tee shirt and show off his tattoos ("ill-oo-stray-shee-owns").

Then you remember that she's so small that you generally carry her around in one hand.

Her physical strength is astonishing. When we're sitting together at the table, and she leans forward with her fingers open to sample some of daddy's food only to grab the plate like a steering wheel and wrench it from its setting (and, were it not for daddy's reflexive actions, onto the floor), my reaction is always, always one of admiration ("and that's a heavy plate!") and pride ("damn, she's already this strong?").

I stand in front of the bathroom door so she can admire herself in the mirror, and she grabs the door and pulls it open/shut. She waves her arms to indicate that she wants me to hold her close to the electric mobile above her crib, and next thing I know she's got it in a death grip while its motor clicks and groans a la the Titanic when its hull ruptured.

And it's just recently that she's begun reaching for things at all. With a baby, it's a Helen Keller breakthrough when they decide that they even have enough interest in people/things to *want* to reach for them, and this development has to coincide with the discovery that her hands are under her dominion in order to result in the act of reaching.

But she's done it, by Jove. She sees her sister, and the hands fly up--she's reaching forward to clutch handfuls of cheek and chin to squeeze like a doting great-aunt. And squeeze she does, with main force and vigor.

I never really thought about it before, but in being a father, I really *do* want my kid to be physically strong. Makes me proud. The fact that she's a daughter has really no bearing on it. Or: it does, and it makes me feel all the more that her vulnerability is best offset with a good throwing arm or a devastating uppercut.

And then I see her with her wide-open face, as innocent as can be, and I realize how foolish it is to think this way. I lean forward to whisper to her. And she grabs my cheek and pulls it away from my face like a long, droopy hank of salt water taffy.

They're like chimpanzees, babies are. They sit there looking all cute, with their little George Burns expressions, and then they attack you with a strength entirely disproportionate to their size and ostensibly adorable nature.

These are wild animals, folks. They're products of billions of years of evolution. We cannot control them. We can only coexist with them. And yes, I mean the chimps too.

In this here office, they keep bins of candy in the bathrooms.

Right there on the countertops, between the sinks. Tidy plastic buckets of cellophane-wrapped hard candies. Butterscotch, those red-and-white pinwheel things, Jolly Rancher clones, etc.

It's a new one on me. As freebies go, it doesn't quite rank up there with the free all-you-can-drink soda fountains in Viacom's offices, but it's better than the usual all-the-paper-clips-you-can-filch deal.

The thing is, and this is something you really can't forget, the candy's in a bathroom.

For a while, small signs were pasted to the mirrors above the candy buckets. These signs read: PLEASE WASH HANDS BEFORE TAKING CANDY.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, marked the last moment on this earth I experienced anything resembling a desire to take candy from a bucket in a bathroom.

There's a dispenser in the men's room in this office--and for some reason it's situated outside all of the stalls--containing those gossamer-thin pieces of paper that are laughably meant to cover the toilet seat in some manner as to reinforce a hygienic Chinese Wall. Anyone who's ever tried to use such a foolish device can attest to their uselessness, but I think the brand name on the dispenser's packaging says a great deal:

Rest Assured ®

A cutesy pun on "restroom" is contained therein, I 'spect. But it's also all about appealing to the kind of joker who can't stop himself from using those things. Rest assured, Mr. Shaking Hands And Clammy Palms, it's okay that you're about to violate your cardinal rule against using a toilet seat that might have come into contact with another human being--rest assured that this three-molecule-thick scrap of wax paper will neutralize bacteria, destroy lingering skin cells, and disintegrate remaining DNA strands pronto. It's like that wedding gift in Medea--slap this on the seat and watch the fireworks start. Whoo! Hot, hot, hot!

Yes, rest assured that you're not deluding yourself horribly into a false sense of security concerning the millions, or rather billions, of filthy bacteria and iffy particulate matter clinging to every tile, countertop, and faucet handle in this sty. How many unwashed hands have passed here before you? How many of them were careless in wiping, scratching, and/or picking all the wrong parts of their owners' unclean bodies?

Rest Assured ®? More like, Maintain Protective Delusion At All Costs®.

Other catchy names:

Spankin' Clean
Pipecloggers
Crinkle-Pants
Waxy Diapers For Adult Babies
Sanit-anus

Any others?

It's the person--usually a guy, in my experience, but whatever--whom you always pass in the halls outside the bathroom. You nod, smile, make a running joke of your paths' crossing, and so forth. Then it happens again. And you begin to notice that he/she is always holding one of those plastic toothbrush cases that people use when they travel.

Only there ain't nobody doing no traveling here.

So then you realize that this isn't an isolated incident. And on some level you begin to keep tally. Once, twice, three--yep, three times yesterday I passed K___ on his way to the bathroom with a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste gripped in his hand.

Now, far be it from me to criticize the pursuit of pristine dental hygiene. My own teeth are a sigh-inducing spectacle, and it's only by the grace of God and some random overdose of fluoride that I haven't had a cavity yet (though you will find plenty of replacement parts and even a root canal, which is part of a characteristically nightmarish chapter of my younger life that falls smack under the category of Please Don't Let My Daughter Mess Up The Way I Did, Often).

So, okay. You really want those choppers to shine into their golden years, you don't want to have a hanging garden of leftover lunch babylon dangling between your teeth for the world to see, and you would prefer to have clean breath. These are all unimpeachable, aren't they?

Sure they are. But you look like a loon with your obsessive trips back and forth, to be frank about it, and you remind us all of that episode of Hill Street Blues where the cop is in the nuthouse with a compulsion to scratch, scratch, scratch at his shins where a dying child clutched him after an errant gunshot.

Only in your case, it's your mouth that'll be abraded into a bloody pulp. You'll be running down the hallway with a funhouse smile, eyes twinkling with the merriment of total insanity, pink foam spouting out of your gory maw as the fist pumps back and forth around a toothbrush that long ago lost its last bristle.

Let's all give a moment of fond contemplation for a young friend of mine who is, at this very moment, sitting in his parents' home with an electronic bracelet on his ankle. He's an extremely gifted programmer whose talents in no way led to his legal predicament, and in fact he's being punished for precisely the sort of youthful hijinks that so many of us are guilty of (though perhaps he can be considered to have unwisely participated in some of them while on probation for others).

Young sir, please post a digital photograph of the electronic bracelet and I will purchase an external hard drive from you. Do you still have them around?

I've worked with more than one mustachioed, burly, heavily-accented studio manager in my life, so I feel comfortable in confiding that one of them--and I'm not saying which one--once told the story of how he knew a woman who breastfed her son for too many years.

All of us who were gathered around shooting the breeze--er, working--sort of trailed off. Surely we had misheard. Too many... years?

Noticing the quizzical looks on our faces, he fumfered a bit. In his country, things were probably a bit different, he reckoned. Americans seemed to be a little averse to breastfeeding, and probably ended it sooner than his people thought necessary.

Um, okay, someone said. But--just how many years did this woman breastfeed her son?

Oh, until he was about eight, the man said calmly.

I can't possibly be the only one whose first thought, slapping back like the echo of footsteps off a concrete wall, was: "That's only a few years too many?"

Depression can be treated effectively with caffeine. It's true! And coffee is a hell of a lot cheaper than Prozac and those other so-called "prescription" so-called "therapies." Also, speaking of therapy, don't bother speaking with a professional about your problems. You'll both wind up bored. Instead, take up a new hobby, like driving really fast and flicking your headlights off in the middle of the night.

Signs of depression: You see a violent car crash and catch yourself murmuring, "Lucky bastard."

Depression Fun Facts: Did you know that you're constantly getting older and will someday be dead? For all eternity?

Here at work there's a sign on the stairwell door that reads:

DO NOT ENTER MEN AT WORK

But what you do at home is your own damn business, nasssssty hobbitses.

I heard someone saying the other day that if gay people are allowed to get married then people will be entitled to marry animals. After all, this Socrates reasoned, what's the difference between gay marriage and bestiality?

I've heard this line of reasoning before, even from various august figures in our federal government. (Willow, weep for me.) To which I can only say: if you can't tell the difference between a consenting adult and an animal, maybe you shouldn't plan on taking any trips to the petting zoo in the near future.

Okay, I'm sure I'm the only one who's petty enough to be bothered about this, but come on. Let's be honest: the word "homophobic" doesn't mean "full of hatred for gay people." It's a clumsily slapped-together word whose parts would mean, if taken literally, "Irrationally afraid of oneself."

Most people who are the one are probably the other, of course.

Remember the comic book hero Captain Marvel? Some kid would force him to appear by shouting "Shazam!" or some such contrivance. And SHAZAM was itself an acronym, standing for Solomon, Hercules, Apollo, Zeus, Athena, and Minerva (or something like that). Each of these Greek Gods is meant to embody a desirable attribute for our hero, and apparently we're supposed to be too thunderously ignorant to recognize that Solomon (the very first one on the list!) is in fact not a Greek God but a judge from the Old Testament. I guess they figured he was lower-profile than, say, Moses or Adam.

Anyhow.

Pity that the whole acronym naming convention didn't catch on the way it ought to have (i.e., like wildfire and hotcake sales combined). We might have seen stories something... like ... this!

FADE IN: The interior of a bank, just outside the vault. Two masked figures are crouched before the safe's tumblers.

BURGLAR #1:
Come on, make it snappy, Yeggs! I'm standing here with ants in my pants. Get that fellow open so we can amscray!

BURGLAR #2
Put a sock in it, why dontcha? I'm cracking as fast as I can.

Just then, a night watchman's flashlight pierces the gloom.

BURGLAR #1
Shiznit! We're cheesed for sure!

BURGLAR #2
(Chuckling) Not so fast, my lily-livered friend. (He raises his hands to the heavens) CoMaDiBoBuHuJ!

*Capone, Milken, Dillinger, Bluebeard, Blackbeard, Hook, Judas

A loud thunderclap and a burst of light obliterate the scene. When the smoke clears--oh, yeah, there was smoke too--we see a huge super-criminal standing with legs akimbo.

NIGHT WATCHMAN (Appearing with flashlight, and trembling with fear) Oh, nerts! I'm doomed! Unless... unless... I summon up the superest lawman of all time.... NiPpoNHaM!

*Ness, Purvis, Nottingham, Hickok, McLuhan

Another loud thunderclap and a giant cop appears

GIANT COP
All right, you goons, I'm not just going to drag you down to the station; I'm going to get you locked up for life on tax evasion!

BURGLAR #1
But how?

GIANT COP
Here's how: PaWocHeRriBus!

*PriceWaterhouseCoopers, H & R Block, Sukman

A giant accountant runs in, drops his pants, and takes a dump all over this foolish idea.

That weird mental state I've been teetering on the verge of? That sense of imminent moral, spiritual, or physical collapse? Turns out it's just the virus that's been going around (and which drove Mary straight to the bathroom in the wee hours this morning).

It's a bit odd--and feels more than a little conspicuous--to adopt a casual air as you rise from your desk, deliberately set off at a casual pace, and make your way breezily toward the men's room. Every five minutes. Bringing along your headphones and radio.

Sometimes you're lucky and there's no one else in there. Sometimes you're not.

In other respects, you're definitely lucky. The radio keeps you decent company, and the new, modern, almost-but-not-quite-middle-aged version of throwing up has almost nothing in common with the nightmarish catastrophes you remember from being sick in eighth grade. For one thing: you didn't drink orange juice this morning, so there's no blindingly sour acid or adhesive little flecks of pulp. Just sweet, mild coffee. And it makes the most amazing nebula patterns in the bowl as you lean over it, hunkered down on one knee, ready to pop the question yet again to that industrial bowl: Will you mrrrrrrragh? Will you be my wwwwrrrrrrruuuuuhhhh?

I hate to be the guy who flakes and goes home early, but this may be the day. Right now the major factor impeding me is the thought that at least right now I'm within striking distance of a bathroom. This description cannot accurately be applied to the subway or the Metro-North Railroad.

A good day, you'd think. I mean, so many things seem to be more or less where they ought to be. A few more dominoes fall, and if I'd like them to fall faster, well, at least they look like they'll knock into a few more on their way down.

But my eyelid won't stop twitching and I feel the tics coursing throughout my entire face. Been up since about 4 AM, which is when Eva's digestive tract began producing like a Saudi oil well (and the similarity doesn't end, I'm afraid, with quantity of production). Disaster was averted but now I feel like HAL with circuit boards sliding free. As I walk around the city, the sidewalk seems too brightly lit and in too sharp a focus. And the sharp focus feels especially out of place with the dreamlike floating effect I'm experiencing. Can't keep up in meetings. Must struggle to pay attention. It's not that I don't care, it's that I don't remember how to care.

And then my iPod pulls up Elvis Costello's "Georgia and her Rival" from Mighty Like a Rose. Damned if I know why--since I never know a damn thing about that guy's fictional world anyway, except that it obviously makes sense to him and merits drama and structure from its chroniclings--but the last verse, the one after the bridge, has exactly the right goddamn tone. And I mean exactly. It's perfect, and I can't find the words to explain why. The piano goes lyrical, into these sparkling arpeggios up in the bright registers, and the bass begins this ascending riff that seems to say, "Yes, I've been spinning this song along, but the playfulness has been hiding something, and this is the beautiful truth behind everything--the real core of not only this song but of the whole damn album, the key that unlocks meaning. Hope you don't mind if I tell it to you cryptically, though..." The bass peaks, steps back to a plateau, and then tumbles down to its usual haunts. Icarus couldn't stay that high forever. And then the usual tonic bass hits are reinforced by superdry woody piano clunks, way down in the leftmost keys of some concert grand where the action gets really loose and thwocky.

It's like finding out that someone's written notes in the margin of your Finnegan's Wake that explain everything perfectly. In vanishing ink.

But then, as I've said, my mind is slithering away from me a bit right now.

Cool*: The deep scars on your wrist from when you put your arm through a plate-glass window and needed a long seam of stitches to keep you alive.

Uncool: The infuriating stab of agony you get every time you turn your head because you fell asleep on Sunday with the baby in your lap and woke up at least forty-five minutes later with your head lolled forward at a goofy angle.


*Why Even Your Cool Injury Is Uncool: Because you were only four years old at the time, nimrod.

Not appropriate for work, but just incredibly funny and rancid:

www.concretetv.com

This guy makes amazing associations between unrelated pop-culture excerpts in a way that's riotous and intoxicating. And he isn't afraid to use exploitation to draw you in before pulling a sudden switch.

Of course, when people come over and ask what's making you laugh yourself into tears, and they see a montage of car crashes, vomit plumes, and aerobicizers in leotards, they're likely to back away from you slowly and with all the wrong conclusions cemented into their perceptions of you.

http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war.html

And now you really can't blame me if you've already seen it.

Got an email from an old friend; we used to be somewhat close.

Now, given all the insane amounts of water that's passed below our mutual bridge in this long interstice, you'd think that there would be plenty to discuss between us, and there is. But all of it went completely unaddressed in his note. In fact, it turned out to be a bulk email (or so I surmise) announcing the launch of his website: www.idisagreewithmaureendowd.com.

You may or may not believe me when I tell you that this guy has always been notoriously laid-back, funny, and full of bizarre pop-culture associations that could spin your head. (When we met, he was working the thankless job of making ads for a large, ruthless rock promoter--you know the one--and I was working an even more thankless job which somehow turned into nonstop debauchery and lasting friendships. So go figure: the rotten gigs can lead to memorable fun, while the good ones dissolve in your brain like sculptures in Krazy Foam.)

As it happens, I don't much care for Maureen Dowd's columns, but more because I think her version of humor is strainingly awkward and likely to miss the mark at least half the time, and less because I have some sort of ideological prong up my ass that inspires me to bite back at her. You decide for yourself which of these noble motive forces is responsible for my friend's website. I'll just say this: when the spastic child next door starts throwing lawn darts over your fence, you should feel no obligation to lob them back in like manner.

On a perhaps unrelated note: www.saddamhusseinkilledlacipeterson.com

PS--Oh, and if you get an email with the subject line "Trojan Love Stories," don't zap it as spam. It's just the USC Alumni Newsletter, clueless as ever as to the borderline vulgarity it unintentionally imparts.

.... since I've been so busy lately and all, what with a freelance gig so intense that I literally dream that I'm working on programming this thing and it somehow manifests itself in physical form and menaces me. Sounds ridiculous, but the other night I woke up yelling because I was freaking out over the Burmese python that the Actionscript 2.0 code had turned into because I hadn't found its bugs fast enough.

So anyway, as I say, not much time for niceties, so here's a quick not-nicety:

On the Metro-North train the other day--and yes, any sentence I write that begins with those words is pretty much destined to contain a sizable portion of negative energy--there was some joker testing out every ring tone on his cell phone. Now, this was the blizzard day, so trains were running once every two hours. Lotta people crammed on, many of whom had been waiting in the cold a long long time. And apparently they still make cell phones with the really annoying ring tones, and I mean not just a-song-you-dislike annoying but holy-mother-of-God-that-shrill-electronic-tweeting-is-like-a-damn-car-alarm annoying.

So at first you figure he's just a normal, commonplace boor who wants to choose a new ring tone and doesn't realize that sitting in a crowded morning train--with sleeping passengers!--isn't exactly the ideal setting for this sort of activity.

Then, after a pause, he cycles through the exact same ring tones again.

After, say, the fourth or fifth time through, I start to detect a pattern here. My heart sinks. I know what I must do. I get up from my seat. I go up to him.

He doesn't look too imposing, which is good, because when I tap him on the shoulder he stares at me with total incomprehension. "Excuse me," I say, "but would you mind turning that down? It's LOUD." And as he stares at me, I realize that he probably doesn't speak English. I palpate my right ear with my index finger to mime the power of his audio waves. I go back to my seat in failure.

But in that misguided effort, the seeds of eventual victory were sown. "Not to mention that there are other people on the train," the guy in front of me mutters, apparently feeling that I left out something important. Well, okay. And then, the next time the phone guy starts a-tweeting, two other passengers pipe up, including the guy ahead of me--who turns out to be an MTA employee. I know this because he leans over to the phone dude and flips open a wallet to show some kind of ID. "There are other people on this train," he says sternly to the phone guy. "You gotta turn that thing off now. I'm serious." He waggles the wallet with its ID face showing. "Turn it off."

So at least I wasn't part of the problem, even if I was only a small part of the solution.

This morning was Eva's ten-week birthday. We sang to her. Well, first we changed her. She'd been sleeping more or less nonstop since yesterday morning, with brief pauses for food, and things had been happening. Dark things. Yellow things. By the time I got the jumper off, her onesie (that's what they call a baby's unitard, the word "unitard" having been apparently reserved for describing mentally disabled people with a single horn growing out of their foreheads) was covering with dark regions that spread out like bruises. So it was time to mop, blot, change diapers (twice, thanks to some timely alimentary activity), and re-outfit the young lass with new duds. And her mood couldn't have been better. I was worried that her day of hibernation was the sign of some lowering illness, or perhaps a delayed reaction to her immunization shots, but she couldn't have been more "up." She unleashed some new squeaks and yodels on me, and said some one-syllable word that I've since forgotten. Oh, yeah--"Ayn." Rhymes with "design." Evidently she's been reading the cranky Russian emigres again. Can't wait to hear her coo "Solzhenitsyn."

So the footie pajamas that Eva's wearing now have cute cartoons all over them of Snoopy hugging Woodstock. It's a great combination: infant human plus adorable cartoon motif, right? Only the cartoons have a little caption: Baby Snoopy.

So then you look closer and you see that, indeed, they've taken Snoopy and babyfied him. That's no mean trick, since he already had a round little belly, short chubby limbs, and an outsized head. It's a challenge to infantilize a character who's already an abstraction along infant lines, but they've done it. (How? By adding a few lines above his eyes to indicate a tufty forelock, that's how. Also by making his head even larger until it dwarfs his body and extremities completely.) And they've done it because that's the big thing to do.

Curse them, the folks who make children's merchandise know how to crank up the cutemeter until it hits the puke point. Muppets? Funny but not saccharine. I know--Muppet Babies! All your favorite muppets but with none of the savvy humor that adults like. There we go! Everyone sing "We're In The Money." Warner Brothers Cartoons? Violent, creative, expressive, rebellious--but now we can have the Baby Looney Tunes sand off all those rough edges and give us cute, cute, cute! Just cute! Recipe: take sugar, add honey and then also a dash of sugar. Repeat.

And curse me, too, because it works. Seeing your baby in a baby-branded getup is affecting. It makes your heart turn into mushy margarine. Your words degenerate into soapy goo-goo nonsense. You can't get enough of that crap.

It gets worse. Other TV properties are following suit. On the History Channel the other day, they had a show in which the Toddler Wermacht was cutting off England's milk and diaper supply lines during the blitz. Baby Werner von Braun was developing a bottle buzz-bomb that would spread rashes all around that sceptered isle.

Forunately, Baby Churchill and Eisenhower, Jr. were able to put the kibosh on the nefarious scheme--and in time for crackers, juice, and a nice nap.

Twenty years from now, how are they going to keep this cycle going? There's only so much younger you can go, after all. How are they going to cannibalize Muppet Babies and Looney Tunes Babies? By coming up with significantly younger versions of the characters--Muppet Blastocysts? Sesame Street Zygotes? Baby Woodstock's Unfertilized Egg Cells?

Good thing we don't think old people are cute, or they'd go in the other direction. Add wrinkles, grey hair, bald patches, and liver spots--voila! Muppethuselahs versus Spongebob Diaperpants.

Are adult diapers made by the same companies who manufacture the infant kind, by the way? If so, you wouldn't even need to change advertising accounts....

Having a baby is like having a tremendous drug addiction--you can't do anything normally. You don't dare to put the baby down because she might miss you and start crying, so you learn to carry her everywhere you go, and that makes her happy, so then you're in a great mood but you never have your hands free, and every few minutes she tries to talk to you, which is the cutest thing in the world but talk about distracting, so you talk back to her, and you take a picture of her or grab the video camera, and then you feel that you're not paying enough attention to her development so you grab a book, or maybe you put her in her activity chair, but either one of these will take about five minutes to bring her to the edge of complete cerebral burnout, which means crying, so you pick her up and walk around holding her this way and that, making different noises--it's like solving a Rubik's cube but one that requires both physical AND psychological manipulation--and you play music for her and you sing along. And so the hands of the clock spin through their cycles like the blades on an electric fan while the rest of your life falls into complete and utter neglect.

They don't really tell you what it's like to get your baby her MMR shots. There's a reason for this, of course. If you knew what it would be like to try to keep up a cheery, comforting demeanor while a massive needle is plunged into each of her tiny little legs, and her face instantly warps into that mask of Total Pain, Anger, and Despair At Having Been Betrayed By Supposedly Trustworthy Loved Ones--you might be a hell of a lot more inclined to take your chances on the measles.

I'm not ungrateful. I know it will possibly save her from all kinds of damage and even death should she ever be exposed to those microbial villains that lurk in the greater world. And it's even our duty to make her immune and thereby give less harbor to those villains.

But, damn, it's not good to be unable to protect her from pain.

I suppose a bit of empathy for helpless and innocent people in pain is long overdue. I heard somewhere that most Americans think we spend too large a percentage of our GDP on humanitarian aid. We also think we spend 25% of our GDP on that aid. In reality, we spend less than one percent on it. Far less than the percentage spent by other industrialized nations, it scarcely needs mentioning.

Most Americans, to our credit, believe that 10% sounds like a decent amount to spend. But since most of us have no idea that we're actually spending less than a tenth of that, we allow our leaders to lie to us with the sort of frictionlessly manipulative back-patting that passes for political discourse in this new culture. Aren't we the best? Aren't we just the most generous in the world? Let's hear it for ourselves!

No wonder we're hurt when we realize no one else is clapping anymore.

Here it is: a New Year that finds me with so much to be thankful for and yet so much to be dismayed at. Mixed feelings? More like pureed.

If you came up with a metric that weighted different "good" and "bad" phenomena based upon their proximity to one's own life--for example, political troubles in a distant country, no matter how bitter, would be downgraded compared to health problems, no matter how piffling, in one's own family--then I'd say 2004 was a slap-bang hootenanny all around with cheers all around. Skol! Mazel tov!

So maybe I'll apply a sort of informal weighting heuristic like that to my own life. Without bothering to work it out to such a degree that it becomes an actual algorithm, naturally, since then the mysteriousness vanishes along with the margin for fudgery. And oh, that's a precious margin sometimes.

I've got some fears about 2005, sure. Uncertainties writ large about various traditional sources of stress. But then I've got backup in places where most people are lucky to find it, and I've got a beautiful family that will grow before my eyes like... well, what's the most majestic thing on earth? Quick, think! Ah: sea monkeys.

As for resolutions: there are two things that have taunted me beyond reach all my life. This year I'm going to succeed at one of them and attempt a stab at the other (with an understanding that even to fail at it is to succeed on some level).

That's as specific as anyone needs to be in talking about stuff, right? Anyway, I've got a decent headstart on the one and a good amount of preparation for the other. And while I wouldn't say I have no other hopes or expectations for the year, meeting those two will give me something to look back upon with satisfaction. Or at least the sense of smug puffery that dances ever out of my grasp.

As for 2004: any year that winds up with a bank account in the black and a beautiful new baby isn't one to complain about. Ever.