Today I discovered a beer garden in the industrial part of town. It turns out the gardeners weren't successful at growing beer, but it didn't matter. The whole endeavor was a scam run by unscrupulous merchants to get lucrative government agricultural subsidies.

So much for stewardesses.

I hate to stay in hotels, although sometimes there aren't any practical alternatives. There are a number of economic and social reasons for my aversion to hotels, but the main reason I dislike hotels is that I hate the idea of having servants.

My parents taught me to take care of myself and to clean up the messes I left in my wake. That seemed like sensible advice at the time and it still does. And thus I dislike the premise that booking a hotel room involves employing some poor woman (and it usually is a poor woman) to clean up after me by replacing sheets that aren't dirty, towels that have only been used once, et cetera. I generally make a point of asking for my room not to cleaned; although that may be a bad idea. If the poor cleaning woman is being paid by the room, my well-intentioned move may result in reducing her wages to even less than the eighty-six cents an hour she normally receives.

It's a common problem.

In 1995, police in Halifax, Massachusetts charged Robert Brinson with assembling a fertilizer bomb to blow up his former girlfriend and her family. Police said one bomb was found in the woman's bathroom and another in a doghouse outside, both consisting of turpentine and nails in cans with a battery and timer. However, police said the bombs were not explosive: Brinson had mistakenly used potting soil instead of fertilizer.

I suppose the complexities of explosives are a good thing.

That was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the work of Podunk; the artists' shipping container environments were more or less what I've had in mind for years. I've seen other examples of the same idea, but none were implemented as well as the Podunk artists' work.

Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!

I'm glad I learned something from the show, because I watched it for all the wrong reasons. The program's description said "experiments involving copulating mice in space currently present scientists with some of their most taxing questions." I didn't see any risqué footage of amorous orbiting mice; it seems that the rodents can't figure out how to couple without the benefit of gravity.

And so I'll say it:

Lassie was played by a male dog named Pal, who wore a wig to cover his, er, reproductive bits.

That's the last thing I will ever write about genital wigs. Ever. So there.

I went to the only four-story pub I could find, bought many many pints, walked up and down the stairs, but then failed to note whatever it was I discovered.

I fear Dr. Wahlberg has laid a clever and potentially lethal intellectual trap. Seventeen pints is frequently cited as the LD₅₀ level, but seventeen pints may not be enough to form a significant statistical base.

Is she amazed at the science-fiction projection on the wall or the gargantuan phallic speaker that's almost as tall as she is? I can only speculate; I will never know how exciting life is in the Sharp digital age.

Today I discovered a building that was cut in half; I found it much more visually satisfying than a cabbage.

At first I liked the idea of getting the gist of an article without having to trudge through the whole thing. But then I discovered that the summaries were as dreadful at the articles themselves. In a way, I suppose that's a compliment to the reviewers, since they did such a good job of condensing without any loss to the original content.

Take, for example, the summary of Shaheen Merali's "Under different skies," a piece from Third Text. "The author suggests that the site of a converted slaughterhouse [for an exhibit] conveyed a sense of the vulnerability the artistic community feels in the face of cuts in funding ..."

Poor pitiful artists!

Jerry Cullums' article in Art Papers showed more promise; at least it had an amusing title: "On cultural ownership and the migration of symbols: an essay containing only one quotation from Homi Bhabha." It turned out to be one of those impenetrable treatises with phrases like "explores the notions of syncretism and hybridity ..."

"Syncretism and hybridity," indeed!

A.D. Coleman, one of those rare people who can write well about art, and not writing some dreadful, little summary, had an interesting explanation for such (un)aesthetic verbosity: "How my colleagues have managed to go on and on about the stuff can only be explained by the demonstrable fact that many of my colleagues love to go on and on."

We were both wrong.

It turned out that "Look! Listen! VIBRATE! SMILE!" was promoting some sort of new age travel agency that urged its customers to appreciate the visual and aural differences between traveling by plane, train, bus and ship.

It was yummy!

We decided to find out more about Chateau Dipsomania, but couldn't. It wasn't because we were perhaps a bit tipsy; Chateau Dipsomania wasn't listed in any of Richard's many wine guides. We then turned to the Internet, and found some interesting and alarming news. Dipsomania is defined as "an insatiable, often periodic craving for alcoholic beverages." And Stichting Chateau Dipsomania is a Rotterdam-based industrial wine wholesaler.

Bottoms up!

And now, years later, I realized I've missed Maia's birthday. And as if that wasn't bad enough, I just learned that, as of today, Art is 1,000,025.75 years old. I know this because I just read that Robert Filliou declared art to be a million years old on 17 January 1963. It's a shame I never heard about it at the time; I enjoyed birthdays much more when I was seven.

Happy birthday Art, Happy birthday Maia!

Initially golf balls had 365 dimples, one for each day of the year. Gentlemen golfers would keep a special calendar ball, and mark a dimple for each golf game. Marking the last dimple on new year's eve was considered to be the culmination of a perfect year. (My research materials don't indicate how leap years were handled.) Frank Macnamara, a stern and dour Presbyterian minister, introduced a ball with 312 dimples based on the principle that no one should play golf on Sunday. Macnamara's design was rejected as sacrilegious by most golfers.

Calum MacPherson introduced the 336-dimple ball on the premise that "a gentleman should enjoy four weeks on holiday to retain his vitality and vigour." Golfers didn't buy the argument since most of them played golf on vacation, but they did buy the balls. With a 336-dimple ball, even a relatively unambitious golfer could have a "perfect" year.

I've seen stupidity and incompetence before, but this hateful campaign demonstrates staggering incompetence and monumental stupidity on a scale that even I thought was improbable.

Chris Myant, a commission spokesman, said "It's a campaign designed to provoke discussions." I wonder if the Commission for Racial Equality's next "discussion-provoking" campaign will show a Chinese chef chopping up live puppies or a Nazi flag flying over Auschwitz?

This is the first time I've disagreed with Jean Cocteau's observation, "Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become." This advertising is extraordinarily stupid, and quite depressing. The Commission for Racial Equality seems to be the English version of the Ku Klux Klan.

Franz took me out to dinner at an expensive restaurant; he said he could afford it since he'd just received a huge fee for serving as an expert witness in a court case. Franz said he had to give evidence that the deceased lied about his age, and that he did so conclusively.

I asked him how he proved his point. (Everyone likes to talk about their work.)

"By counting the rings, of course."

"What rings?"

"The cranial rings."

"What cranial rings?"

"Well, they're not really cranial rings as such," he explained; "they're the rings on the cranial bones. You put on a new layer of bone in your head every year; that's why old people have such thick heads."

I waited for the punch line to Franz's joke but there wasn't one. He turned away to order another bottle of champagne. When he returned to the conversation, he asked me what I'd forged recently.

Everyone likes to talk about their work, so I told him. He interrupted my narrative to tell me I'd given him an idea that would pay for two more dinners.

I forgot to ask him more about the cranial rings. I think he was joking, but his argument did make a certain amount of sense. Perhaps that's just because I seem to be getting an increasingly thick head.

The bottles of Rosso Di Puglia were the catalyst for a lovely evening; I shall avoid inferior corked bottles of wine for the immediate future.

A lot of the pundits were surprised that she died from a heart seizure before her fortieth birthday; I wasn't. Years ago I read an interview with an old man who attributed his longevity to his lack of exercise. He theorized that the heart was only good for a finite number of beats, so why spend more than necessary?

I've been rather miserly with my heartbeats even when climbing mountains; I hope I still have a lot of heartbeats in reserve. I suppose it doesn't really matter: when they run out it shouldn't be a problem for more than a few minutes.

But I didn't cite the late painter for reasons best expressed by Jeremy Hardy: "It is always perilous to use quotations, because few people are consistently wise, and a person's other sayings can be quoted back at us to our embarrassment. It is quite possible for a man to say something like: 'The beauty and grace of humanity shall never be crushed by the oppressor's boot,' and later spoil it by saying, 'All women are slags.' "

Here's what I did say. Everything in these notebooks is true; if something I've described hasn't happened it will.