This week’s events would make a great story, but I’m afraid it’s one I cannot repeat. Here’s why: this morning, I received an email message from my mother. She informed me that she’d bought a computer that allowed her to read this notebook daily.

I’m afraid that brings up the subject of censorship. I think censorship is generally a good thing, as did Mae West. “I believe in censorship,” she said. “After all, I made a fortune out of it.”

There are, of course, damaging manifestations of censorship, the worst of which is self-censorship. And so it is that I find myself under the thumb of the most intolerable censor in the world: me. How can I write about smugglers, rides on stolen jets, and harboring fugitives now that I know my mother’s reading this?

I’m not concerned about MI5’s alleged ability to surveil all the Internet traffic sent in and out of England, but my mother’s benign, well-intentioned monitoring is another story.

And that’s another story for another day.

The writer Hunter Davies came out in support of the celebrity mathematician who looks good in a rubber dress. He said he wouldn’t want to have Shakespeare’s works or the bible, even if he was on a desert island. “Boring, boring. Can’t understand why they’ve lasted so long. My theory with Shakespeare is that he got in first with all the clichés about the human condition. Reader’s Digest have done it much better since.”

The seemingly innocuous remark by the celebrity mathematician who looks good in a rubber dress resulted in two distinct strands of vitriol. First, a plethora of pedants launched a variety of semantic attacks involving the relative dullness of ditch water in relationship to other fluids. I must admit that I found it difficult to follow the learned discussions comparing and contrasting the qualities of ditch water and other tedious liquids. Some of the other pedants asked, at great length, whether “ditch water” was an alliteration of and/or simile for “dish water.”

Shakespeare’s disciples defended the author from the celebrity mathematician who looks good in a rubber dress and the friends of the celebrity mathematician who looks good in a rubber dress. John Sutherland, a professor of English at University College, London, wasn’t standing for any of the revisionist nonsense. “In my department, I’m happy to say, you won’t graduate unless you know all thirty-nine [of Shakespeare’s plays] well enough to take a six-hour exam on them—but we’re very old-fashioned.”

As for me, I don’t care. I’m agnostic when it comes to Shakespeare. I do believe, however, that celebrity mathematicians who look good in rubber dresses, bad novelists, and stuffy old professors are entitled to their opinions. Their inane comments are certainly more engaging than anything written several centuries ago.

And what do we have on this May Day? Not much, that’s what. Some kids threw paint on a statue of a dead politician then looted a fast food restaurant, hardly revolutionary behavior.

Since Yevgeny was obviously a bit depressed by this year’s limp imitation of a real May Day celebration, I decided to cheer him up.

“Yevgeny,” I asked, “what’s the difference between capitalism and communism?”

Yevgeny remained silent.

“In capitalism,” I explained, “man takes advantage of his fellow man. In communism, it’s the other way around.”

Yevgeny grunted. There wasn’t much more to say on an uninspired May Day.

I read about the twenty-dollar film at least a decade ago. A professor of filmmaking found his students annoying, which I suppose is normal. All the kids said they couldn’t make a film because they didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars. He told them all they needed was twenty dollars and some good ideas.

Here’s his explanation of how to make a twenty-dollar film. Come up with a good script, then buy a thirty-six exposure roll of color transparency film. Take one photograph to illustrate each scene. After the film is processed, project the images in conjunction with a recording of actors reading the script. That’s it.

The professor reasoned that since any film is just a collection of two- and three-minute scenes, the right words and two or three dozen slides are all a filmmaker needs to make a simple film.

That makes sense to me. But as a would-be minimalist, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

I suppose writing is like almost any other endeavor, creative or not. It always appears that other people manage to do it better, with less of an effort, if any. I found an example of this recently in the most unlikely of places: the documentation for AutoShare, the software I use to manage Internet subscriptions to this notebook. Here’s the paragraph that amazed me:

Are you ready for AutoShare? The highly configurable feature cornucopia puts the sizzle in this razzle-dazzle extravaganza. AutoShare is truly the house of generosity when it comes to features and functionality. And yet at the same time, AutoShare is a jumping jackpot racing to do its thing without asking for much memory, even when your lists have tens of thousands of subscribers. AutoShare is the fun town that never sleeps!

I don’t understand how his mind works. And, sadly, I don’t really know how his software works, either. So it goes.

I mentioned this to Cheryl, who assured me that Thomas Crapper was a famous dead person who was in some way associated with the modern toilets we all enjoy. I asked my piss-poor dictionary to tell me about Thomas Crapper, and all it said was this:

crapper (kràp´er) noun
Vulgar Slang.
A toilet.
[From crap¹.]

Ah, so that’s where the word “crap” comes from!

Well, no.

My crap dictionary—figuratively and literally—told me the word “crap” comes from “Middle English crappe, chaff, from Old French crappe, from Medieval Latin crappa, perhaps of Germanic origin.”

There must be some cause and effect relationship between Thomas Crapper’s name and his most noted achievement, but I can’t imagine what it might be.

“Marbles” news travels very slowly. For one example, I just learned that marbles are called marbles because they were once made from marble. Surprising news. I’ve seen thousands and thousands of marbles, but I’ve never seen a marble marble. That “news” probably took at least a millennium to reach me.

Similarly, but different of course, the news about the British and world championships of marbles took exactly two weeks to reach me. The three-paragraph report I read didn’t explain whether the British and world championships were separate or simultaneous events, but it doesn’t matter. The interesting part of the brief story was the contrast in attitudes between the Americans and the Brits.

The Americans were gung ho, can-do, and very, very serious. The Americans trained for four hours a day before the games. Jeff Kimmell, the team’s manager, said they were demanding Olympic status for the sport.

“Why not?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s a mighty skillful game, and we have two guys in contact right now with the Olympic authorities.”

The name of the British team said all their was to say about their approach to the mighty skillful game. In the end, the Americans lost all the marbles to the new world champions, the Blackdog Boozers from Northgate.

Tonight, I can’t remember to what subject “You’re not doing it well if you’re seen to be doing it well” referred. I suppose it could be anything. In my experience, the ability to do anything well should be hidden behind the thing done well. When the main impact of a dance, a story, or a painting is to demonstrate the virtuosity of the dancer, the author, or the painter, the result is usually tedium.

I think François Duc de La Rochefoucauld was talking about such conceits when he said, “The desire to seem clever often keeps us from being so.” He also observed, “The height of cleverness is being able to conceal it.”

I’ve done so well at cloaking my cleverness that even I can’t spot it anymore.

I was delighted by the names “Dezmona J. Mizelle” and “T. Nieuwenhuijsen”; each sounded like an elegant short poem. Perhaps I should look through the phone book (poem book?) for other brief works, but two poems in one month is more than enough.