highindustrial.

The house across the street, the one inhabited exclusively by statuesque debutantes, their beatnik boyfriends, and bookish friends-who-are-boys: it's also inhabited, or perhaps overseen, by an elderly-but-not-quite-old gentleman whom one of my roommates refers to as "Ronbo," because he apparently resembles the proprietor of some internet porn site. Ronbo's a dirty, lucky man, it seems.

Anyway, Ronbo has been out in front of his doll house all afternoon, tending his terraced garden: sinewy and spry in his lavender short shorts, white tennis shoes and nothing else -- the very picture of AARP moxie.

There ought to be a statute against that. I had to draw the blinds. + 3

Some words on this layout: It's more of an evolution than anything else, mainly conceived to integrate a dynamic side/sub-blog into the scheme of the site. Keeping your suggestions in mind, I've maintained 800x600 safety and a whitespacey central column. The colors in general are not "web-safe," but at this point I sincerely hope no one's still browsing under an 8-bit config. The hues are also sorta dark, possibly glaucomatous if you keep your monitor brightness settings low, so bear that in mind. Let's see ... I vetted it in Mozilla/IE under Mac OS X and Win XP. If you're no doubt browsing under some alternate arrangement, this is still what you should be seeing. Let me know if that's not the case. And be thankful: I was gonna use this image for next month's refresh. (Grins.) + 7

Is. This. A. Joke? + 3

Insane. + 3

All at once the sun has shone and shown itself: slanting through blinds, molten through lowered eyelids; a lancet of light boring into me as I sit at my desk -- filling me with photons, recalling Indy Jones, the Staff of Ra and the Ark of the Covenant.

And there it goes again. Gone. Behind a Maxfield Parrish puff of cloud, whereupon a cooler climate prevails. +

Andy Richter Controls the Universe is pretty darn funny. Which means Fox will probably cancel it in a couple of weeks and fill the time slot with stock footage of Leona Helmsley (she's still alive, right? does it even matter?) boxing a kangaroo on a barge off the coast of Suriname. But still. Enjoy it while it lasts. + 4

So I've been hatefucking around with the previously mentioned redesign, but dag drollet, there's a hitch. See, at some point, I have to put text in the damned thing, and text just fucks everything up. Text doesn't stay put. Text is uneven. Text rushes to fill a vacuum. Text stampedes across chroma plains, tramples jpeg flowers. Text dribbles down your chin. Text is a bitch.

But it's a hellcat in the sack. Can't live with it. Can't kill it. + 2

Some days everything is scrolling marquees and digital zooms. + 3

What excites you? + 7

Bumped up to MT2 ... let me know if anything's awry. +

"A full-size fully functional virtual keyboard that can be projected and touched on any surface...." Very cool. + 4

Cirrus Socrates Particle Decibel Hurricane Dolphin Tulip. + 6

Some of these are pretty ... Farking great. Of course, I still have a sentimental favorite. +

It felt like autumn again yesterday, and I was happy. Sunlight adorned vertical citysurfaces like beaten copper; the cold was not for the faint of heart; and the clouds, verily whipped, were not for the lactose-intolerant.

I remarked to a friend that I should like to live in a place where it's always like this, always falling falling falling flying, and he said I should live in Copenhagen.

I wonder. It would have to be at some point in the middle future, and perhaps only tangentially. I've had my sights set elsewhere lately. Elsewhere and nowhere and everywhere. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. + 2

Absent-mindedness is forgetting to turn on your electric toothbrush when you brush your teeth. + 5

I've watched A.I. four or five times now. I haven't been this hooked on a movie since Aliens and ... A Little Princess. I know, I'm twisted. + 3

Hook (1991) Nothing can be done to fix Hook, the creepiest film in the Spielberg canon. Nothing whatsoever. I mean, I suppose Spielberg could trim the sight gags in which men are shot dead in front of young children. And he could cut the scene in which Captain Hook points a gun at his own head and threatens to commit suicide. And the scene in which a child is stabbed to death by Captain Hook. But Hook's problems are far too deep to be fixed by any digital manipulation. The movie should, instead, be modified to contain, every few minutes, an apology from Steven Spielberg and an explanation of why, exactly, he thought that children might enjoy a 2-hour-and-20-minute retelling of the Peter Pan story that -- instead of being about a boy who never wants to grow up -- is instead about a heartless yuppie's midlife crisis and his loathing of his own children.

Jurassic Park (1993) Ian Malcolm, eyeing a gigantic mount of dinosaur dung, comments, "Now, that's one big pile of shit!" Clearly, a euphemism is called for. Overdub the line with, "Now, that's Hook!" + 2

Andrea Thompson has left the building. So who are they gonna replace her with? Daisy Fuentes? Jessica Rabbit? Fred Savage? I hear Geena Davis is looking for work.

In unrelated news -- Can we please retire the word "swag"? Thanks. + 3

Mitsubishi Motor Sales USA's latest music-themed ad is not only the launch spot for the freshened 2003 Eclipse coupe but also the U.S. debut of a British pop band.

In the 30-second spot, a female passenger in the Eclipse is seen "popping" -- an '80s dance style -- to U.K. band Dirty Vegas. With the ad, Dirty Vegas makes its U.S. debut March 11 on national TV.

The song is "Days Go By." It's synaesthetic, chemokinetic.

Furthermore, that new not-bad Adidas spot (~~"Sneakerfans" or somesuch~~ ClimaCool), the one that ends with Anna Kournikova pulling a Marilyn Monroe over a steam grate? "Beautiful Crazy" by the Space Raiders.

Who loves you? I do. + 2

Via Dark Horizons, regarding the swiftly approaching Clockstoppers: "MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, BET, CMT, MTV2, Nickelodeon's Games & Sports, Noggin, TNN, TV Land, VH1 Classic, VH1 Soul and VH1 Country will all freeze programming at 8 p.m. March 26 for a live two-minute promo-cum-prize giveaway."

Nice to know the Viacom synergy juggernaut has its basic-cable foot soldiers in lockstep on this. + 3

Time and light are slow tonight: pooling on surfaces, accreting in corners, seeping seeping seeping. I wish I could preserve the feeling. +

Ani DiFranco looks like Parker Posey in the photo that accompanies this interview (which I didn't bother reading). + 3

And in an interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper, Professor Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University in New York, commented: "There are millions of people who want Ted Koppel to stay on the air, who think Nightline is one of the last bastions of serious journalism. And then they go home at 11:30 p.m. and they turn on David Letterman."

Well, it beats watching Golden Girls reruns ... or does it? + 3

Undercover Brother: blaxploitation gets the Austin Powers treatment. + 4

Light is, indeed, the mightiest of agencies. +

Damn. I happen to like widescreen televisions. They're the bizness, as anyone on Cribs will tell ya. +

Fortunately, I won't have to accidentally almost watch The X Files just to see the latest Star Wars ~~bluescreen-a-thon~~ teaser. As it happens, George Lucas' crown jewel has never done much for me. Sure, I watch the movies; but it's a socio-autonomic thing -- it's just something that happens. I never come away from them with any distinct impression, save sundry ruminations on bad acting and career mis/management. The franchise is odorless, like carbon monoxide.

Jango Fett looks cool, though. I bet he's a great toy. (Question: why does Yoda look like Greg Kinnear?) + 2

I don't like it when people sneak peanut M&Ms into a container labeled "Almond M&Ms." + 4

Chicago's John Hancock Center strikes again. Recalls an interesting discussion that transpired here some moons ago. + 3

This weekend Scotland's drugs minister has officially declared that the 30-year war on drugs is over. In an exclusive interview with the Sunday Herald, Dr Richard Simpson, also the deputy justice minister, said: "The only time you will hear me use terms such as 'War On Drugs' and 'Just Say No' is to denigrate them."

That's awesome; and my puerile superlative aside, there's some solid rationale behind the decision, as discussed in the article. + 4

I hate it when I haven't gotten enough sleep. The world seems to spin, press in, strobe like a zoetrope. I have to compile the restraint of my twenty-four years on this planet and split the difference with the five-year-old I really want to be. Negotiating the day becomes an exercise in deliberation, the threat of expletives ever-present: a few choice wordz, poisoned Pez, for everyone and every outcome, but nothing to say, really. Nap-time beckons like the last refuge of scoundrels. +

Fark discussions are usually pretty

, but this one's kinda funny. +

Turns out the universe isn't so tacky after all. + 5

Walter was living in an abandoned home on Precinct Road for about a month before a Fort Bend County public works crew called the SPCA on Christmas Eve, said the agency's chief investigator Jim Boller.

The young monkey, he said, probably foraged on his own, but he enjoyed playing with the four puppies and being around them and their mom.

"He had kind of bonded with them," Boller said. +

Memory and cognizance are strange bedfellows. Sometimes I'll flip through the catalog of my mind, idly revisit past happenstance -- an old conversation, say -- and see something anew, or perhaps for the first time. So that's when it started, I might think. Or ended. Or: What was that about? Through the potentially counterfeit clarity of hindsight, mediated through a lens of sentimentality or maturity, or both, or neither, old facts have a way of phosphorescing in a new light. And through and through, the brain records everything, or perhaps every other thing, all the whiles and whiles and whiles we're unaware; performs the countless mnemonic miracles required of a mechanism which must compress the air and care and carelessness of a lifetime into X pounds of the most brilliant pâté. Heady stuff. + 1

Guilty pleasure: this book makes me happy. Page after page after page of annotated diagrams, purchasing-power bar graphs, pictorials of airplane hangar-sized retail spaces -- conjuring visions of an alternate Michael Graves/David LaChapelle/Aldous Huxley/Chuck Jones/Terry Gilliam-powered reality where infants doze beneath corporate-logo mobiles; are indoctrinated in the alphabet by leggy supermodels dressed as European stewardesses; color with Pantone-approved crayons; dream in the syntax of commercial jingles and movie trailers. Where everything is brushed metal and hexachrome and dynamic and a little antiseptic. Mortifying in the Frenchest sense of the word, all sex and postmodern detachment and David Bowie.

I'm kidding. But I really do like the book. +

This is not the first time Mr Ashcroft's subordinates have realised that this attorney general is unlike ordinary politicians. Each time he has been sworn in to political office, he is anointed with cooking oil (in the manner of King David, as he points out in his memoirs Lessons from a Father to His Son).

When Mr Ashcroft was in the Senate, the duty was performed by his father, a senior minister in a church specialising in speaking in tongues, the Pentecostal Assemblies of God. When he became attorney general, Clarence Thomas, a supreme court justice, did the honours. +

Lamb's "Heaven" sounds wintry in a 1997 way. I don't know why; it just does. +

There's an undercurrent, an energy, to this Pacific Standard life I've made for myself these last nine months, a sort of Van der Graaf Generator hum -- a constant low-level awareness that my Eastern Standard upbringing continues to run apace, in parallel, over mountains and across plains, somewhere yonder. A part of me is still complicit, if only by association, in that great plot that unfolds always three hours hence: past the charade of morning-show tape delays, past my sentimental sleeping habits, past the whisper of "retrograde" that insinuates itself not into the laws of physics, but into the hearts of men; and while Bennett and Sinatra may have left their hearts in San Francisco, mine still beats elsewhere, still keeps time to a past-imperfect song. I haven't found the cable car that climbs "halfway to the stars." Yet.

It's funny. Sometimes I don't know my own secrets. + 9

I watched Monica in Black and White on HBO last night and now I keep hearing the Punky Brewster theme song in my head. There's absolutely no correlation. Or is there? + 2

It's been one of those really cloudless, really sunny, really temperate days that I just ... hate. Days like today are the meteorological equivalent of so-called dumb blondes, bereft of character. I'll be walking down the street and a cigar-scented breeze will hit me and I'll start to feel displaced, like I'm in another country.

At the grocery checkout line they were selling these "Child Hunger" calendars for three bucks each. I thought to myself, A new ragamuffin for each month of the year? Who would want that? Then I realized they were for charity. They were sold out. + 4

To my palate, lately accustomed to The Economist's marmalade worldview, reading Newsweek for the first time in ages feels like tucking into Pooh's secret honey stash. A few sugary licks:

It was a great night to be a journalist. After enduring months of the indignity of being barred from the Kabul bar run by the United Nations, Afghanistan's legions of thirsty foreign correspondents finally have a place of their own. Last Friday's grand opening of Club Kabul, the capital's first post-Taliban night spot, was the must-do social event in a town where there isn't a whole lot to do after work. Around 100 foreigners, ranging from journalists to diplomats to peacekeepers, packed into the private club, nicknamed The Kabul-Cabana, to unwind, share stories and seek companionship after another week in what is probably the world's most dangerous work zone.

Shades of Casablanca. Meanwhile:

In Afghanistan these days, when two warlords want to settle an argument, they call upon a phantom in the skies. This is not another medieval superstition common to this rocky, primitive land, which is still dominated by fierce men in turbans and beards who look -- and behave -- much as their ancestors did. The warlords point upward and warn their rivals that "B-52 justice" could soon fall like a curse on their houses -- that Afghans who break the peace will suffer devastation from the stunning assortment of precision-targeted weaponry that destroyed the Taliban. They warn, in short, that the Americans will strike. "This is happening all over the country," says Abdullah Mujahid, a local police commander. "The B-52 is called 'the peacekeeper'."

Charmingly provincial with a twist of totemism and just a hint of native comedy in the Gods Must Be Crazy vein. (Actually, it's a pity both Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are no longer with us, thereby denying us a Grumpy Old Mujaheddin, wherein they would once again vie for the affections of Ann-Margret and Sophia Loren while implicating each other in comical scenarios involving livestock and "B-52 justice." Come to think of it, give Billy Crystal and Robin Williams another decade or two and they'll be able to don the mantle. Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn will round out the cast.)

And finally, hijinks descended from the Austin Powers school of espionage:

"Psychological warfare," all the rage in the early years of the cold war, when capitalism and communism were competing around the globe for "hearts and minds," is making a comeback.... [T]he PR consultants hired by the Pentagon, the Rendon Group, have a history of running "black ops," say intelligence sources. Among them: a rumor campaign after the gulf war to convince Iraqis that Saddam is sexually impotent. (The Rendon Group denies feeding any falsehoods to the media.) ... "Dirty tricks" run by the CIA have a way of backfiring [however]. In the late 1950s the agency hired some porn stars to portray Indonesian President Sukarno having sex with prostitutes. The blue movie was intended to make Sukarno look depraved to his ... followers. CIA officials would later chuckle at their own naivete: many Indonesians cheered their leader's apparent sexual prowess.

That's some sexy stuff. Where do I sign up? + 4

A new video game inspired by the abstract artist Kandinsky aims to overload the senses with its psychedelic visuals and pulsating dance beats.

Rez for the Playstation 2 seeks to create a sense of synaesthesia, literally a crossing of the senses, so that you can "see" sounds or "taste" colours.

And it's getting decent notices; but here's the kicker: "The look of ... Rez brings to mind the neon-charged cyberspace envisaged in William Gibson's bible of cyberpunk fiction, Neuromancer." Oooh. + 4

In his February 24th entry (badass needs to get some permalinks), James is kind enough to provide a zipped archive of a recent Nike commercial (~~also available here, it turns out, to spare J's server~~ fucking Nike took the fucking link down ... fuckers), which he describes as his current favorite. I was thinking about this commercial only yesterday: it's a doozy, just lousy with gorgeous cinematography, Tupperware-tight editing and virtuoso graphic matches. There's one fleeting correspondence in particular, between a long jumper and a toddler, that just ... well, every time I see it, you may as well stick a straw in my chest and suck out my heart, because dog bless corporate America, I'm sold. That single image encapsulates so much so simply, it's just free-market fabulous. + 2

"I see how many puppies go unwanted every week," Harkins said. "I hate to see any life wasted." + 5

This never fails to thrill me. + 4

Appropriately and unmemorably, this site went live on February 29, 2000 -- meaning the actual anniversary of its inception won't come round till 2004. + 13