This is not a joke!

You are the 1xxth visitor!

Believe it or not (and I know you must), there are e-mail recipients who will take "today" or "yesterday" at face/current value, despite no actual dateline.

I hate spam.  It's a shame the word for e-junk mail is identical (but Scrabble-allowed) to that of a canned WWII hamish product that occupies a fond place in my pre- and in-adolescence.

My brother, an architect and employed more financially-gainfully than I, once made stamped jewelry of Spam cans.  Laura Beemer makes money all over the country making jewelry out of pop lids.

Yes, such is the dross, to use a word from a writer I've just encountered and whose work I find difficult for its inspecificity and poor rhetoric*, though I enjoy art or functionals made of reused materials.  We are so wasteful.

2008, year of the waste.  Of the waist?  Of the oasis?  The aphids?  The AFIS?  The A-list is all I ask for (or, for the G.N.'s, all for which I ask, which sounds stupid).  I want good writers, plain and simple.  No one wants to read B.S.

*You'll allow me the use of a non-word such as inspecificity, won't you, as my recently-retired best-professor of English once said, "you have to know the rules to break them."  I wish I had learned more languages than English as a child.  Sigh.  We have so much capacity and then it gets sucked up into the biology of latency that is synonymous with aging, and we end up spending New Year's Eve playing Wii for hours on end (and eating too much; ugh, why do all holidays make us gain weight?  It is, my guess, that holidays used to represent ritually-enforced indulgent eating, when we used to walk or hoe or hunt all day; now, they are not necessary, as dentists so completely have become.)

This is my usual hour for being awake.  I wonder what it truly suits me for.  (I wonder for what it truly suits me, bleh!)

Then, when I'm supposed to be working:  [guess].

It's like being an insect or even a domesticated pet.  You have these desires and personal rhythms and you fly about and hope to avoid chance encounters with chemicals of death or you shed indoors and meow plaintively and without reasons even the highest primates can discern.

And yet you have to keep playing along with the dominant social group.  They seem to like commuting and being engaged in others' business from sunrise until after sunset, five-sevenths of the time.