(An aside: I once recall reading in A Child's Garden of Grass that toilet paper rolls are called "derders." The name comes from the sound made by placing one end of the toilet paper roll over the mouth then capping and uncapping the other end with a hand while saying der der der der der der ...)

"I've got another bunch of them, maybe a thousand, and I still don't know what to do with them."

What a challenge! If anyone can figure out what to do with derders, though, Stephen can.

Men who urinate on the eighth floor of the west tower may read creative writing placed at eye level above the urinals, but the male executives on the top floor have only plain tiles and caulking to examine. Linnea Lundquist took me into the women's toilet so that I could photograph the work in there. I'm not sure whether a women's toilet is really a pissoir; I prefer the British acronym UC, or urination chambre.

4 TO 6 LBS.
MOISTEN NEEDLE
BEFORE INSERTING
THAILAND

Unfortunately, almost no babes know that Hasselblads are babe magnets. Every woman I thought might be somewhat impressed by my beautiful camera just thought I was a pretentious twit, which of course was and is true. The closest I ever came to impressing a beautiful woman with my camera was when I told Vivia I wanted to photograph her wrists with my Hasselblad.

"House of blood?" she asked. She said it sounded like a weird proposal, but she smiled when she said it. She's like that.

This Halloween, Marge, BJ, et al, decided to dress up as penguins. The effect was stunning, especially when we went to the zoo. The penguins there got very excited when they saw their giant relatives; perhaps they thought they were being rescued.

I thought the giant penguins should be preserved on film, so I did. With my House of Blood. And so, after fifteen years, I finally pulled birds with my Hasselblad.

The only recordings I have of her were made when she was more or less a teenager, but a teenager who would sing with a depth, sing with an edge, and, most importantly, sing with the old punk band, "The Avengers."

But that was a very long time ago. I'd heard that she'd abandoned the rough, hard music for some sort of folksy mandolin and fiddle and accordion crap; later I heard she'd abandoned that too. I didn't know what to expect when I went to the show tonight, but I got my hopes up when I saw that her new recording was titled SCUM. I was soon disappointed to discover that the title had nothing to do with the Society for Cutting Up Men.

The lyrics to the title song went something like:

You're the scum of the earth
You're the worst God ever made
You're the one that I hate
Blah blah blah ...

It's completely unfair to compare the teenage Penelope to the middle-aged Penelope, but I did anyway. I walked out of the performance as she was singing, "You used to make me feel so high ..."

(With apologies to the real Mrs. Peel.)

He came back to my laboratory after a walk and asked me what "Late Nights" were, although it seemed pretty obvious to him that they had to be some sort of stimulant that would keep the user up all night. He was both disappointed and relieved to discover that "Late Nights" weren't an illicit drug; "Late Nights" are bus and train passes that allow one to ride free until dawn.

MUNI, the San Francisco public transportation agency, is famously and fabulously corrupt. MUNI's perfidious employees sell the Late Nights to their friends, who in turn sell them to people in the streets. Everyone makes money except for MUNI, which is sinking into a sea of red ink. No one gets anywhere; everyone's happy; welcome to San Francisco.

It seems that my plagiarism has come to a bad end, again. I recently copied the work of someone almost no one is familiar with then passed it off as my own. We'll call the author in question "Mark" since that's his name. I showed him how I'd made his piece mine by changing a couple of words here and there, a theft he applauded.

"That's great," he said. "I stole about a fourth of that from a Monty Python sketch!"

Oh dear.

No one except Joy would know if I stole anything from Mark, but half the adolescents in the world--young and old alike--can recognize any and all Monty Python lines.

It's going to be hard to get to sleep tonight; I'll be waiting for the knock of the plagiarism police on my reinforced steel door.

Oh dear.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Here's the description from the program," I replied. "Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again."

"I'll pass," said Eva. "Let's just go out drinking instead."

I agreed. After all, how many times can a person watch The Wizard of Oz?

(And now a note from the next millennium. It’s 28 March 2001, and I just received a note from “Rick Polito, That TV Guy, Universal Press Syndicate.” Mr. Guy kindly informed me that he was the author of the line describing the film. He added, “I don’t mind the line being repeated but I must insist on some kind of attribution.” Who am I to decline a reasonable request from That TV Guy?)

From what I can decipher from the advertisement in a photographic trade publication, the product on sale is a set of cards depicting popular poses a model might assume. Or, to be more precise, the popular poses a female model might assume.

I can only think of two probable reasons this product exists. First, some models might not be able to understand the complexity of a request such as "clasp your hands behind your neck to make your breasts protrude as far as possible." The more likely explanation is that these cards save the would-be glamour photographer the embarrassment of saying something as silly as "clasp your hands behind your neck to make your breasts protrude as far as possible" when he could instead just pass the poor woman a card and say, "Do number seventeen."

Bud has nine silos. They used to be grain silos, then they were missile silos, and now they're something else: Bud's bud silos. Bud's a marijuana grower; he grows nine pot plants at the bottom of every silo ... enough to cover his overhead for the whole year.

Bud's silos are empty after the autumn harvest, so that seemed like a safe place to watch the meteors fall. All the experts said the meteors were too small to hurt anyone or anything except satellites, but I wasn't so sure. I figured that any meteorites headed for me that didn't burn up in the atmosphere would simply bounce off the sides of the silo several times before reaching the bottom.

It turns out I was right. Although I never saw a single shooting star, I wasn't killed by one either.

I was hiking, and the only source of water was described by an overly polite local as "potable, but many people like to filter it." The water wasn't water at all; it was some foul discharge from a previously unknown foul orifice of Beelzebub that oozed to the surface of the Earth near my camp site. It smelled like sulfur, battery acid and decomposing cockroaches and it tasted even worse.

Nevertheless, I thought I could use it to cook macaroni then bury the hideous taste under greasy "cheese-flavored" chemicals, but I was wrong. As I cooked the noodles, the water turned to a gelatinous mass that was almost impossible to separate from the macaroni. Even after adding everything I could find to mask the taste, I could only manage to eat one hideous spoonful before abandoning the wretched concoction.

With any luck at all, it will be another forty years before I again find something I can't eat.

Mouths can be very accommodating when necessary.

Then what?

It looked like the brains grew when exposed to the radiation from a heat lamp. Or maybe the brains grew on command from ultrasonic radio waves from an orbiting space ship. In the picture it looks like one of the old Apollo command modules is doing the broadcasting. It's hard to tell, though; I don't think the artist was very accomplished. In any case, it doesn't look at all like the alien space vessels with which I am familiar.

There's another possibility, a more sinister interpretation. Could it be that the alien vessel is actually sucking the brains out of the human? And what's even scarier is that the model in the illustration has an amputated right index finger just like mine. I don't think this is anything my aliens would give me, at least not without some explanation. I wonder if the different aliens are after me?

Not the other way around?! The camera should control the Man? The Woman should control the camera? The camera should control the Woman?

Leica Camera AG uses the advertising slogan "Fascination and Precision," a fascination and precision that doesn't seem to extend to the corporation's use of English.

Leica über alles!

As I hadn't had my first cup of coffee yet, I had to go to another coffee shop, a move that annoyed my walking companions. After I had my coffee, they decided to run, not walk. They seemed amused when their tugs on the leashes soaked me with hot coffee. Oh well, at least the painful episode yielded a handsomely strained paper cup.

I suggested that forgetting might be one of The Seven Secrets of Highly Inebriated People. He said I just might be right. That cheered him up for a while, but not for long.

I never did.

Honest's Thanksgiving toast was lovely: "Genetics pick our relatives, but we pick our friends."

Honest.

I'm not a big fan of consumerism, but it's nice to hear the word "black" used positively instead of as a pejorative.

It could in theory, but, except for rare cases like Eric Clapton on heroin, it almost never does in practice. Having kept my eyes wide open for a quarter of a century or so, I know better than to fall into the art-through-suffering trap. Usually.

Or maybe it still is Clive Staples Lewis's one hundredth birthday today. I wonder if you can still have birthdays after you're dead, or if you're only entitled to deathdays?

"I bet Clive had some firm opinion on the subject, but this was the most definitive statement of his that I could find after five minutes of extensive research:

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter."

His music was grippingly trite; he pounded the keyboard as the orchestra musicians sawed away dutifully in the background. The people backing up The Swedish King of the Keyboard may once have been musicians, but in this recording they were, to use Frank Zappa's definitive description, mechanics.

Rhapsody in Wretch!

I can't understand why Playboy didn't go out of business. I suppose there are new third-graders every year.