Of course, I never made those photographs for the usual reason, sloth. In fact, merely coming up with the title of the work may have constituted the completion of the work. (Conceptual art is a slippery, slippery slope indeed.)

And then there’s the commercial consideration: who needs money?

And finally, I haven’t met the right model for the project. That may be a corollary to sloth, since I have yet to ask any of my friends if she’d like to pose for some high-cholesterol nude photographs. It’s just one of those questions that rarely comes up in casual conversation.

I was reminded of my procrastination through the thoughtful intervention of Land o’ Lakes Butter, an agribusiness corporation that published a huge billboard advertisement near my laboratory showing an attractive young woman with dripping butter.

How considerate!

I shall use certainly use LoL butter when and if should I ever get around to making Bread and Butter Nudes.

“When you’re doing nothing,” Thad theorized, “then at least you’re doing something.”

On one level, Thad’s argument is not unlike positing Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot, and Ronald Reagan weren’t very compassionate politicians. Still, I’m impressed. Anyone who can introduce the concept of “less than nothing” into a discussion of popular culture is steering the debate in the right direction.

And then the actor delivered a brilliant non-sequitur when he said his father died “a slow death by comfort.”

What a line!

I love my radio!

Fortunately for Jacques and me, view cameras are easy to use. All I needed to do was repeat what my late mentor Wayne Brill told me soon after I bought my first view camera.

“What do I do now?” I asked.

He pointed out that this knob did this, and this knob did that, and that this moved this way, and that this moves that way, and so on.

“What do I do now?” I asked.

“Just move everything until things look right,” he explained. And that was that.

And that’s how to use a view camera.

Our team was trailing behind the Red Herring Demons, an anomaly we attributed to our opponents’ connections with the underworld.

But then our left linebacker Erik shared, “my vision of the game, as dictated from above.”

It turns out that “voices” had told Erik to swing his mighty bat, “with all force, at the third opportunity, at, again, the third opportunity.”

And when Erik did just that, he hit a grand-slam home run that vanquished our evil foes.

Hoo-ray!

It wasn’t until I’d concluded hours of celebratory libations that I developed my film from the game and discovered empirical evidence of alien spacecraft that was apparently controlling young Erik.

Wiffle ball is a great game, any way you slice it.

Age forty-nine. (For anyone reading this who may be, for whatever reason, under the age of forty-nine, forty-nine is too young to die. So there.)

Douglas Noel Adams seemed like an extraordinarily perceptive, smart, and creative hombre. Beats me why he’d waste any of his finite heartbeats in a gym. I guess the cautionary tale of Florence Griffith Joyner was one that he didn’t read.

So it goes.

Julian again asked me what I as doing. If Julian couldn’t figure out the obvious nature of my mission, I wasn’t going to tell him.

“I fear the enemy may already have launched air-to-air missiles against our forces,” I lied. “I’m throwing out bits of paper in order to baffle our foes’ radar.”

Julian nodded, and that was that.

Well, it turns out that actors aren’t completely useless after all. I have proof.

Listen to an American radio station’s broadcast over the public airwaves, then listen to that same station’s Internet transmission. And then, as Ms. Elber was overly fond of advising, contrast and compare.

Both broadcasts feature equally spineless and predicable music, but there’s something missing from the Internet version: advertisements. And for that we can thank the actors.

Union actors negotiated new contracts that provide them with much higher payments—perhaps three hundred percent more—should their voiceovers appear on the Internet in addition to the normal radio broadcasts. That’s why broadcasters have all but banned radio advertisements from the Internet.

My hat’s off to actors for once, and perhaps forever.