(This piece is also available in the PDF format; that TLA (three letter acronym) and others are explained in the technical notes.)

Some of the urinals at the Amsterdam airport have an image of a fly silkscreened (?) on the porcelain. Very nice.

She went on babbling until I interrupted her pleasant corporate drone to ask what KLM meant. She replied with an annoying giggle, "Why, Kinky Love Motions, of course."

Of course.

I don't think I'm going to join the Kinky Love Motions Flying Dutchman program soon; I haven't been in San Francisco long enough to even think about anything that athletic.

From now on I will never drink alcohol within ten kilometers of Earth during the first two weeks of every quarter except on religious occasions. I don't have to explain why; it's my game. But I'm bored so I will.

Morrie and Lynn invited me to their seder tonight, which will of course involve drinking wine. And I've decided if I ever go into orbit I'll certainly enjoy some low-gravity whisky, even if it's during the first two weeks of the quarter.

That's all there is to it.

I learned that potatoes are considered peasant food, and, as a result they're almost never offered to guests. It sounds like offering someone potatoes is a social faux pas on the order of giving someone an American Budweiser weasel water beverage when they were hoping for a real beer. I can't believe there isn't a Chinese restaurant that doesn't serve "Authentic Hunan Potatoes" for twenty dollars a plate; I bet that would be very popular with Americans.

Logorrheic: that's me!

"Eternity in hell is about our most charitable option," the demon explained. "We let the people we really want to torture escape periodically; it's worth all the paperwork to see how crushed they are when they're sent back to the very same hell from which they thought they'd escaped."

I have to admit that hell sounds like quite a well run organization.

"There's a difference" he explained.

I'm not sure if I believe in putting truth before art and ego, I've always been more enamored of the latter.

One thing that struck me as curious was that his age of death was included in the obituary. An obituary always has the age of the deceased on it, but it's exactly that ubiquity that prevented me from ever noticing it before. How many physical years one lived seems largely irrelevant; some people live more in thirty years than others do in ninety. I believe the real reason lifespans are an unquestioned component of an obituary is because of the undeniable entertainment value.

Famous Hollywood movie stars are hard to fathom, even if you waste a lot of money to be in the same room with them.

I can't believe scientists get paid to verify a priori knowledge.

The Brothers Kuffner scared the hell out of people by sending local government and news media offices the four-page manifesto Violent Acts of Consciousness Have Only Begun. Their diatribe was an attempt to call attention to popular ignorance of poetry and suggest positive solutions, such as having all state inaugural speeches written in iambic pentameter.

I don't think Aaron and Geoffrey Kuffner got much sympathy. Who could argue with locking up poets?

At the formal presentation, the client was accidentally sent to my site and was appalled by my work; he called it "coarse, vulgar, and offensive."

I can't imagine that some shit-for-brains corporate twit was too fucked up to recognize contemporary aesthetic values when he saw them.

I don't go to the International Whaling Commission to behold the sad spectacle of self-important whalers and even more self-important environmentalists presenting their case to pasty government bureaucrats with expensive haircuts, although that can be amusing at times. I go to the International Whaling Commission to be somewhere I've never been before. You see, the IWC meets in a different place every year; this year it's in Oman.

But I'm not going to Oman, and that brings up the other reason I go to the International Whaling Commission: the parties! There are the regional drinks at the local pubs or bars, the fancy government and embassy receptions with good champagne--plus barrels and troughs of tasty hors d'oeuvres, the hotel bars, and then there's my temporary office where the people who hire me keep yet another bar.

And that's why I'm not going to the International Whaling Commission meeting in Oman: there are no pubs or bars there, just the odd bottle of Scotch smuggled in by Westerners. And so it was that tonight I saved the whales, in advance, over North Beach pizza and Anchor Steam beer. As a result, I will remain embarrassingly ignorant of Arab cultures and besotted with mine.

Fiends!

Bang!

The end.

"You can openers are hilarious!" said the Maine Coon.

"Can openers?"

"From what I can see, that's about all you humans are good for," said the cat.

When I first read it, I thought is was an imbecilic line from a copywriter on bad drugs. After rereading it, I still think it's an imbecilic line from a copywriter on bad drugs, but I also think it's great advertising. Anyone stupid enough to think "Enhance the eye for it is the camera of the poet" is pretty deep and insightful stuff is probably also stupid enough to pay much too much for glasses vaguely associated the sad pop musician who, as Keith Richards so uncharitably put it, has made a career of "writing songs for dead blondes."

"Gravity."

"Gravity?"

"We only employ brilliant people, although some are admittedly more brilliant than others. I am frankly the most brilliant person here, which is why I am CEO. One of my duties is to share my brilliance with the people who are literally my underlings. The junior executives on the seventeenth floor are quite brilliant in their own right, so my wisdom need only trickle down to be absorbed. We keep our least brilliant people in the maintenance department, loading dock, security detail, mail room, et cetera on the first and second floors. By the time my brilliance has reached the bottom of the tower, gravity has accelerated it to such a degree that it gets through the thick head of even our least brilliant employee."

I asked her what affect her brilliance had on other people on the eighteenth floor.

"In your case, very little."

These CEOs really are quite smart; I now understand why they get paid a lot.

"Why don't you buy the juice in more economical large containers?" I asked.

"It's political," he replied. "If I don't buy all these cans I won't have anything to recycle, and that would lose me points where I work."

No one ever said saving the planet would be easy or inexpensive.

"What's all the hubbub about?" I inquired.

"It's Cinco de Mayo, Señor!"

"And what's Cinco de Mayo?"

"It's the fifth of May, Señor!"

"And what's the fifth of May?"

"It's Cinco de Mayo, Señor!"

I had a good burrito, with habañeros.

I heard that statement attributed to the leader of the Shade Tree Boys, but from now on I'm going to tell everyone it's my line. Since no one's ever heard of the Shade Tree Boys let alone the organization's leader, I figure I should be able to steal it with impunity.

"The idiot television weather forecaster said it wasn't going to rain, but if he'd just stuck his hand out the window he would have known it's been pouring all day."

Susan proposed "educating the moron" by going to the television studio and forcing the inept weather forecaster to stick his hand out the window. At gunpoint, if necessary.

"Just think of the possibilities! Not only will we get better weather forecasts, since the TV cameras are already there it will also be great entertainment value!"

How can you make a noose with a towel? I suppose you could cut it into thin strips, but that still doesn't address the larger mystery: how can you hang yourself from a doorknob? Was the doorknob on a very very tall door? Was Mr. Matsumoto very very short? And why do the Japanese appear so very very inscrutable?

Here's the logic: the men who would otherwise go out to impregnate other females stay at home with their mates to prevent them from being impregnated by other men. If women weren't flirtatious, men might feel free to leave home to become foreign impregnators rather than the preventers of foreign impregnation.

Anyone who thinks artists are weird has never met a scientist.

"Using a drummer is like using a condom," Alan explained. "It's safer but less pleasant."

"Creating from a Sacred Space" and "Heart Storming" are two of the new seminars that appear to be new age seminars. (As a linguistic aside, "sewage" is the only word I can find in the English language that rhymes with "new age.") Both of these seminars are presented by someone named Ian Summers, who advertises that he will "teach participants how to develop a 'sacred space' that will foster creativity by helping them build such a space in the seminar room itself." Oh dear. He also promises to "demonstrate how to inject dye into your field of vision."

Ow! Ian Summers' seminars sound like they're every kind of painful.

"Excuse me," she said, "but I think that's my bottle."

"No," I replied, "I'm sure it's mine."

"How can you be so sure?" she asked; "they both look the same."

"It's easy," I explained, "my beer is always the one that's fullest and coldest."

"Ah, but that also describes my beer."

We had a pleasant conversation.

"Why so glum, chum?" I asked.

"I'm old."

"Forty ain't old if you're a tree!" I said helpfully.

Stephen remained wooden and glum.

(I wouldn't presume to call anything pornography, but I might start after hearing Steinberg's explanation. "Does anyone know the difference between erotica and pornography? In erotica you use a feather; in pornography you use the whole chicken.")

I saw more pornography tonight than I have in the rest of my life, and it was anything but erotic. Most of it was fairly predictable (except for the bits with the kielbasa and the toothbrush); but Steinberg's running commentary on her various roles made the tedious anatomical shots bearable if not entertaining.

Ellen Steinberg aka Annie Sprinkle saved the disturbing images for the end of the evening. Seven years ago Steinberg decided she was a lesbian. I love lesbians except for those of Steinberg's persuasion: she's a new age lesbian! She showed lesbians having sex in space with cosmic lights, lesbians double exposed with dolphins ("that was a whale of an orgasm!"), et cetera. That was way too kinky for me.

Despite what appear to be her later lapses in aesthetic judgment, I had to admire Steinberg's monomania. "Why anyone would like to make a movie about anything but sex, I don't know."

Sinatra's death wasn't the one Brad's been anticipating; he's been waiting for Bob Hope to die.

"Why Bob Hope?"

"I just want to walk around the city looking at all the HOPE IS DEAD headlines."

Mañana, maybe.

Those aren't archival storage conditions, those aren't even good storage conditions. Right now some nasty chemicals from somewhere are probably damaging the negatives, slowly and perhaps irrevocably. I don't worry about the irreparable damage too much. First, I can always feed the remnants of the images into a computer and clean them up to something approaching the original, maybe even better than the original. The main reason for my lack of concern is that I'll probably never get around to printing them. Never ever.

Imagine, all that work, all those images, just sitting in the dark going nowhere. That's art for you.

I thought people were only getting half of the story on oral sex until a friend told me about watching a mainstream network television show with his nine year old daughter in which the following joke was told ...

So anyway, there two fleas were in Miami for the winter, and one of the fleas was shivering.

"Why are you so cold?"

"I rode down here in the mustache of a guy on a motorcycle; I thought I was going to freeze to death."

"That's not the way to get to Miami! You wanna go to an airport bar, have a few drinks, then climb up the leg of a stewardess headed to Miami. Find a nice warm spot, take a nap and you'll wake up in Florida!"

So anyway, the next year the two fleas were again in Miami for the winter, and one of the fleas was still shivering.

"Why are you so cold, why didn't you take my advice?"

"I did what you said, but it didn't work!"

"Whadda you mean it didn't work?"

"Well I did what you said. I went to the airport bar, had a few drinks, then climbed up the leg of a stewardess headed to Miami. I found a nice warm spot, took a nap, then the next thing I knew I was in the mustache of a guy on a motorcycle!"

In looking through my archives, I found a letter I wrote seven years ago to a dictionary editor.

8 January 1991

R.E. Allen
Oxford University Press
Walton Street
Oxford
OX2 6DP
England


Dear R.E. Allen,

Recently I returned from a visit to England with The Oxford Dictionary of Current English. I noted that the volume you edited had a definition for fellatio but no definition for cunnilingus.

Why?

Sincerely,

D.A. Guerre

13 February 1991

Dear Mr/Ms Guerre,

Thank you very much for your letter of 8 January about the inclusion of fellatio in The Oxford Dictionary of Current English but the omission of cunnilingus. Although this could be justified on the grounds that, according to our sources, fellatio is more frequently found in print, we have decided to include both words in the next edition of the dictionary. In the words of another correspondent on the subject, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Yours sincerely,

Della Thompson
Editor
Oxford Dictionary of Current English

British Airways is unbearable. The cabin crew are a bizarre mix of domineering and repressed, kind of like a school headmaster at the hands and whips of a dominatrix. And they're stingy with the drinks, meaner than even the dour Dutch blondes on KLM. The flight crew felt obliged to talk like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, complete with "jolly good!" and "cheerio!" And the flight's late, too.

Since I feel sorry for the poor British Airways sky serfs, I decide to do a favor and point out a glaring typographical error.

"Hey, pal, there ain't no 'u' in 'colorful!' "

"I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about, sir."

It figures.

I suppose now TWA will have to change its name, since it's no longer The Worst Airline (even though its 747s spontaneously combust more often than most).

Cheerio!