It's been a few weeks since tax day, and that means my time is short. In a very little while my knowledge of and attention to my finances will transform back into a pumpkin, returning to its default state: quarterly comparisons of my checking balance and bar tabs to determine whether I should be drinking less, more, or much more (there are some discontinuities in the function).

I really, really hate dealing with money. It stresses me out, leaving me irritable and petty. Online bill payments have made my life significantly better, so much so that I've completely surrendered myself to them. For a while I insisted on manually responding to electronic bills. Then I automated known outgoing payments like rent. Then I set things up to automatically pay incoming bills. These days I'm perfectly happy to hand my SSN and a cheek swab over to even the shadiest vendor's auto-payment system. So what if they route payments through a Nigerian goldenpalace.com subsidiary with an expired SSL certificate? I don't care. I just want to be left alone until someone tells me I'm supposed to appear in court.

But like I said, I'm still in the midst of one of my financial waking periods, and I should probably seize the moment. I know it's uncouth to complain about not knowing what to do alllll one's vast estates and holdings. But, like a musician who can't help recording a sophomore album about how there's a downside to fame (man), I can't resist. The fact is that once, a long time ago, I was capable of saving money. For a while, I did so. The result was not a princely sum by any means, but enough that I should probably figure out something to do with it: partly because I may someday have expenses beyond electronics, beer and rent; but mostly because I'm tired of Bank of America employees stifling laughs and avoiding eye contact whenever I walk by one of their branches.

The obvious answer is to invest it somewhere. But where? And how? It's tempting to fritter it all away on hand-picked stocks, but a long-gone intern's incessant prattling about his portfolio convinced me that E*Trade's potential for turning me into an insufferable ass makes it an undesirable investment vehicle.

Besides, I remember the lesson taught to me by my ECON101 instructor (author of economic mystery novel The Fatal Equilibrium — yes, really): no matter what you think you know, the market already knows it and has priced itself to reflect it. Got a hunch? The market's on to you. Heard a hot tip? The market did, too. Did you just invent a cheap & effective robot bride at a secret facility buried deep within the earth's crust? Sorry weirdo, the market was hiding in the ductwork and has already radioed the news back to the trading floor. Even if you caught it, it'd just crush the cyanide-filled false molar implanted in its jaw before you could get any information from it.

So the thing to do, apparently, is to find an index fund, which lets you spread your investment across the top 500 or 1000 stocks in various segments of the market. This strategy gets around the problem of your not being very good at picking stocks AND the problem of professional stock-pickers not being very good at picking stocks.

All I really have to do is find somebody who's willing to sell me one of these things, then pick one. Figuring out which business to hire has proven unusually difficult, however. My tried & true method for this sort of thing is to find the firm with the best cartoon mascot. For example, if I was still in the market for car insurance I'd obviously have to give my business to the creators of sexy cartoon minx Erin, who periodically fights robotic menaces with an unnamed animated lummox (can't you see he's all wrong for you, Erin!?).

But things aren't as clear-cut in the financial arena. The closest thing to a cartoon that I can think of are these Charles Schwab commercials that rip off Waking Life:

Counteraguments aside, I decided to give it a shot. But it's hopelessly confusing. There are tons of funds. And although they're rated with a varying number of stars along just a few axes (in order to assist stupid people like myself), the overall risk/reward relationship doesn't appear to be zero-sum. This leaves me wondering why anyone wouldn't just pick the one with the best combination of stars — and why it's so hard to use the interface to find that one (maybe this is why investment bankers are so well-paid). Until I figure out the answers to these questions I'm too terrified to do anything.

Pretty pathetic:

Emily's signed up for the Club For Growth's email list and seems to really enjoy it. I didn't really understand why, and instead simply chalked it up to the Norquistian charisma that some of my other friends have fallen for.

But now I've got my own Club For Growth equivalent, and I think I understand the perverse pleasure she gets from reading awful emails. Particularly when they're obsessed with perversity.

To wit, let me highly recommend the American Family Association's Action Alerts list. It's been delivering hilariously homophobic gems to my inbox ever since Amanda's post got me to sign their survey in support of the gay agenda. I don't think I'm ready to give them my real email address, but last night's amusingly terrified list of sexual orientations convinced me to re-up their SpamGourmet bucket. Heed the words of founder and chairman Donald E. Wildmon says, "Warning! This listing is offensive."

Still, to their credit and my immense surprise, Google seems to think that the term telephone scatalogia isn't an AFA creation. Might be time to add Latin to the required coursework for a degree in Gender & Sexuality Studies, academy — if you ask me, T.S. is considerably stupider-sounding than the faux-Latin in the Harry Potter books. Trust me, it's much easier to cow people into intellectual submission if they can't understand what the hell you're talking about. Why do you think we geeks come up with so many acronyms?

Travis Morrison talks to Stereogum about music, programming, and working for the Post. Interesting to see that he's a Javascript/ASP guy. I wonder if he's worked on anything with Adrian Holovaty (probably not, given their locations, departments and languages).

Ed Felten has an interesting post up this morning discussing the 09-f9 HD-DVD key and why the net has been replicating it so enthusiastically. He has a number of explanations for why people are showing such antipathy toward the AACS LA's efforts to suppress the key. I'm most interested in the second one, because it's pretty widespread and very, very silly:

...the content in question is an integer — an ordinary number, in other words. The number is often written in geeky alphanumeric format, but it can be written equivalently in a more user-friendly form like 790,815,794,162,126,871,771,506,399,625. Giving a private party ownership of a number seems deeply wrong to people versed in mathematics and computer science. Letting a private group pick out many millions of numbers (like the AACS secret keys), and then simply declare ownership of them, seems even worse

While it’s obvious why the creator of a movie or a song might deserve some special claim over the use of their creation, it’s hard to see why anyone should be able to pick a number at random and unilaterally declare ownership of it. There is nothing creative about this number — indeed, it was chosen by a method designed to ensure that the resulting number was in no way special. It’s just a number they picked out of a hat. And now they own it?

As if that’s not weird enough, there are actually millions of other numbers (other keys used in AACS) that AACS LA claims to own, and we don’t know what they are. When I wrote the thirty-digit number that appears above, I carefully avoided writing the real 09F9 number, so as to avoid the possibility of mind-bending lawsuits over integer ownership. But there is still a nonzero probability that AACS LA thinks it owns the number I wrote.

When the great mathematician Leopold Kronecker wrote his famous dictum, “God created the integers; all else is the work of man”, he meant that the basic structure of mathematics is part of the design of the universe. What God created, AACS LA now wants to take away.

Okay, so it's a little melodramatic. But you can see his point. He's not alone in this, either: BoingBoing has been petulantly maintaining that if we all just pretend the number is being used for other purposes, it'll be just dandy to redistribute it.

I'm no fan of DRM, and I think the AACS LA's actions are pointless and stupid. But Doctorow and Felten are being disingenuous — they're simply too smart not to see the problem with this argument. Namely, that any type of data, sampled at a chosen level of precision, can be represented as a number. Consequently, if you believe that one or more types of information deserve legal protection — as Felten seems to, when he refers to songs & movies — then the argument that "it's just a number!" becomes ridiculous.

Sixteen bytes is probably too short to merit a copyright. But that's not the right that the AACS LA is asserting: they're calling the code a "circumvention device" under the DMCA. And even if you don't recognize the DMCA's validity, there are other forms of intellectual property protection that may apply — there are laws related to trade secrets, for example. If you just think about it a little, it should be obvious that even a very short piece of data can enjoy some kinds of legal protection. Sixteen bytes is more that enough room to encode the words "Coca-Cola", after all.

The thing is, geeks like to pretend that the legal system is some sort of Rube Goldberg contraption, easily foiled by their unparalleled cleverness. Sadly, this isn't the case. All the IANAL-prefixed prattling on Slashdot about quick & easy ways to make yourself legally bulletproof when the cops/MPAA/interpol come knocking are little more than wishful thinking. It's like holding your finger an inch from your sibling's face and yelling, "I'm not touching you!" over and over. Your parents weren't dumb enough to fall for that, and neither is the legal system.

So yes, if you accidentally used these colors in a design, I doubt you'd be breaking the law. If you wrote this terrible poem by chance, you'd be fine. But if you provided either intentionally, as a way of transmitting a "circumvention device", then you broke the law. It's entirely possible for a judge to make reasonable inferences about what you probably intended to do. I don't know where people got the idea that courtrooms are run by robots that'll start spewing sparks & smoke if you feed them a logical paradox. It just ain't so.

Most of all, I'm surprised by Felten saying that making a number protected will irk "people versed in mathematics and computer science" most of all. In fact, the people who don't understand why a number could deserve protection are the ones who sat through their CS and information theory classes but emerged without actually understanding the point of it all. Information is information. The fact that it can be encoded in many different ways is neat — it's nearly magical, in fact, and the very essence of why digital technology is so amazingly powerful — but doesn't change its essential nature. Refusing to admit that numbers are only protected in context reveals either ignorance of these ideas or simple denial of them.

crossposted at EchoDitto Labs

No HDTV for me.

Oh well. It's nice to have been named a finalist. Mostly I'm disappointed to be listed right next to a Second Life mashup (ugh).

But Catherine's right — Friday's Arcade Fire show wasn't a particularly great one. Don't get me wrong: it was very good — amazingly so, given the terrible venue. But it wasn't up to the standard they had set during their shows at the Black Cat and 9:30 club. There wasn't much improvisation; the three-song encore was short; Regine really can't sing while drumming; and they generally seemed less-committed to the performance than they have in the past.

I got my money's worth, but this is a band whose live act I typically rank behind only Springsteen and the Flaming Lips. The performance at DAR wasn't nearly that good. The Saturday show in Philadelphia was considerably better despite having a nearly-identical setlist (this was partially a function of the venue being less than godawful, though).

It makes me happy to see that a lot of people enjoyed the show, and I certainly don't want to take away from that. But trust me: this band is capable of even more.

ALSO: It might be worth noting that Joel, who knows a band member, reported that Winn went home immediately after the Philly show. They cancelled the final part of their European tour due to illness, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were just getting a little tired of being on the road.

Big congratulations to Sommer! This is going to be great.

As you may recall, I have something of an ongoing quest to amass as many unpleasantly geeky traits as possible, in order to get a head start on horrifying any teenage offspring that my distant future may hold. A selection from the current list of accomplishments:

• extensive soldering iron evangelism
• familiarity with both Palladium and TSR roleplaying game systems, including the ability to ruminate at length on the relative utility of twelve-sided die versus a d100
• computers: I like 'em!
• near-total incompetence at all team sports
• and of course, the backgrounds in videogames and comics that are de rigeur for a male of my generation

There are a few glaring omissions: I've never played a collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering; I've never been to a sci-fi convention or Renaissance Faire (although I think I deserve partial credit for attending multiple computer shows); and I have, in fact, seen a girl naked (not sure what to do about that one).

Still, I'm pleased to announce additional progress. Yesterday I received a package containing the first truly dorky board game that I've owned. And when I say truly dorky, I mean it — this isn't some Risk bullshit. Captains of football teams play Risk! No, this is a different sort of thing all together.

Jeff introduced me to the genre when he came home for Christmas, bringing the game Puerto Rico with him. I found it immediately appealing: its tendency to facilitate offensive jokes about colonialism and capacity for screwing over your fellow man made it a lot of fun. Then when I visited Jeff in California this spring we played Power Grid, which I liked even more (and which, with its economically-oriented gameplay elements, seemed like it would be enjoyable to a lot of people I know).

But Jeff convinced me that I'd be better served by starting off with a simpler game. So I bought Carcassonne, which is considered a prototypical example of this so-called German-style board game (presumably because the game revolves around divvying up real estate in France).

Some of you have probably heard of or even played it before — the only game from this genre that's better-known is Settlers of Catan, which is popular enough to have shown up on Xbox Live. But Carcassonne was new to me when Charles and I gave it a try last night. The verdict: pretty fun!

But I can already feel the hunger growing — this one won't keep me satisfied for long. I need more tiles! More complex rules! More numerous and varied bits of varnished wood to lose under the couch! Things could get ugly before it's all over.

Has Barry Gibb always sounded kind of like Sean Connery? Or is the S » SH transition just a natural byproduct of the inevitable jowlification process?

My friend & coworker Phil has started a Facebook group about the DMCA abuse du jour. I'm trying to get through this life without joining any Facebook groups, but if you care about this sort of of thing and have already succumbed, you should go round out Phil's numbers.

Canadiafy Twitter

There are some little kids playing music in front of the school at 16th and L and you know what? They aren't that bad — definitely better than some Ft. Reno acts I've seen. And with their aggressive & lousy drumming; dreamy feedback; dreary, meandering keyboards; and singing that sort of recalls Tom Morello (until you see the vocalist is, like, 8), I think they'd fit right in.

Until yesterday I hadn't realized that my auto-flash-mp3-player thingamajig was among the casualties of getting hacked. Sorry about that — it should be all fixed now.

This morning Slashdot linked to a piece over at Ars Technica quoting Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Harvard's Kennedy School (whew!) on the subject of digital forgetfulness. The problem, he says, is that anyone participating in online society will accumulate an ever-larger tail of embarrassing cruft. It'll be trivially easy for us to confront one another with beer-belt pictures and Inuyasha fanfic written at age fourteen. "Gotcha!" will move out of the realm of politics and into the office.

I can already see my friends' concern over this manifesting itself. I think that their (partial) blogospheric exodus toward Facebook is motivated, to some extent, by these sorts of worries. Clients and coworkers read their sites, and they don't like the constraints that imposes. No offense to the clients and coworkers reading this, but I don't always like it either — it's disappointing to feel like there are limits on your personal writing. I'm unwilling to flee to Facebook, but that's just my own hangup — if your online creative output includes technology, it feels like a straightjacket (and, of course, its founder is a thief, which makes my web-developer self loathe to endorse it in any way). But I can understand why others would want to.

Still, fleeing to proprietary communities is just a stopgap measure. My completely-neglected Facebook profile currently has at least one friend request from a client waiting. Of course I could decline to approve it, or grant limited access to my profile (so I'm told, anyway). But what are the social implications of doing that? Is it considered a snub? If it isn't, how long until it will be? No, it seems inevitable that your activity in any given online community will eventually become part of your publicly-known personal history, limiting the sorts of ways that you can comfortably express yourself.

Admittedly, all of this is sort of peripheral to Mayer-Schönberger's point. Social circles will no doubt continue to flee across the internet as the grown-ups (so to speak) encroach on them. Staying one step ahead of your professional contacts is, by and large, a viable strategy for not poisoning your work relationships by exposing your horrible true self.

Mayer-Schönberger doesn't seem concerned with these ongoing public/private struggles. Rather, he's worried about the potential for finding embarrassing information about a person's history at a single given point in the future. It's bound to happen: there's real utility to be had by, say, exposing Facebook information to a search engine. If Google refuses to do it, someone else will. And of course there are plenty of other sources of potentially embarrassing information out there (http://www.flickr.com/photos/YOUR-NAME-HERE/tags/drunk). If anyone dug up digitized copies of the short stories I wrote for my high school literary journal, I'd fully expect to be penniless and living on the streets by nightfall (it would be well-deserved, I assure you).

M-S (if I can call him that) suggests a legally mandated technological system that would, by default, cause data to be deleted after a period of time. I'm sure his heart is in the right place, but this is dumb for all the same reasons that DRM is dumb. You really, really can't control the spread or persistence of publicly available digital information. Efforts to do so are a waste of everyone's time.

But it's a real problem nonetheless. I see two likely solutions: first, increased adoption of Darknets, invite-only communities and largely-anonymous forums like Unfogged (although the protective namelessness of that community is pretty much gone). But that's not a complete solution, for the reasons listed above.

The real answer is just for us, as a society, to get over ourselves: to stop pretending that no one ever gets drunk in college, ever says things they don't mean, or has a sex drive. It's wildly optimistic, I know. But we've gotten over needing our politicians to be undivorced teetotalers who never say anything dumb (and how!). Maybe the generations that have been online their entire adult lives will have a diminished capacity for puritanical self-deception. I hope so, anyway.

The beginning of the end.

Both via BoingBoing.

There's still time for you to quit your job, steal a car, drive to Philly and consume beer, pretzels and bowling all night long. I'm just sayin'.

Some guy had been wandering through my neighborhood for the last 20 minutes or so yelling what I assume is the name of his dog. It's sad, and I wish him luck. But seriously: "Anton"? I can't say I blame it.

In other news, I'm kind of exhausted. This weekend has involved 450 miles of travel (spread over four legs) and a grand total of seven scheduled events. All but one of those involved drinking, so I suppose I shouldn't really complain. Yet I'm clearly doing it anyway — sorry about that.

But right now I have an hour to myself, a sunny couch to lie on, and the presumably-excellent Chronicles of Riddick on TV. Time to upload some photos and begin the process of forgetting to do my timesheet. Ahh, Sunday.

Teo has put up an interesting post discussing the use of a/an and how it evolved along with pronunciation (complete with bonus UVA tie-in!). Misuse of a/an is a pet peeve of mine — when I come across "an university" or a similar formulation I immediately know that what I'm reading is going to become terrible, if it isn't already. It's a great tip-off that the author hasn't made a connection between writing and speaking, and that spells trouble — a stream of "whilst"s is rarely far behind.

On the other end of the spectrum, of course, is Yglesias's neverending cavalcade of homophones — a case where speaking and writing are so tightly connected that all kinds of amusing minor typos result (see also: my constant overuse of colons, semicolons, emdashes and commas). I suppose you can err too far in either direction, but Matt's is by far the more readable option.

Of course, none of this explains the dismayingly frequent "an historic" formulation. I can't account for that one at all, except to say that I think our species is probably doomed.

Wow. Friday night was incredibly impressive. Josh, Emily and Lee decided to throw a party at a bowling alley in the basement of a church community center. They acquired large amounts of beer, pretzels and DJs, were written up on some Philly blogs, and had a ton of people show up to bowl, drink and have a great time. There's a less-biased writeup here (some photos, too).

I don't know if it's just a lingering effect of my Big Lebowski ascii art project, but it seems that I really enjoy taking photos of silhouetted figures bowling. So, uh, sorry about that. I think this photo makes up for it, though.

Via YANP, I see that the Polyphonic Spree is coming to DC after all (in late June, to be exact). Cool. Between this and Wolf Parade, it's already shaping up to be a good summer for concerts.

1. I need to wriggle out of my T-Mobile contract. Well, one of them: I long ago escaped the one associated with my Sidekick, but I bought a separate number for DCist's LastCall service. LastCall's currently shut down due to some technical problems, and if I resurrect it I'd want to use a different SMS gateway. But I've still got over a year left on the contract.
   
   Of course, there's a $200 early termination fee associated with quitting now. Bad. But T-Mobile has announced an SMS rate increase, which constitutes a contract change, which lets customers quit for free! Good! But I have unlimited SMS, so I don't qualify. Back to bad. Now I have to keep calling their CSRs until I get one that's especially sweet and/or confused.
   
   I suppose I should feel guilty about my planned deceit, but I didn't get a handset when I signed up, and the ETF is largely in place to ensure that people don't get subsidized phones and then quit the service before the money's earned back. So my conscience is clear — it's just the sweet-talking that I'm dreading. Sage advice on this point would be appreciated.
2. I'm with Julian on this: two dollars per cocktail seems very high. I am, I know, out of the mainstream when it comes to bar tipping: I've never really understood why bartenders are the best-compensated wait staff in a bar or restaurant when their jobs also seem to be the easiest and most fun. Besides, applying the same percentage (or higher) tip as when dining makes no sense: for drinks, the amount of effort the server has to invest in serving you is much smaller relative to the value of the total transaction (and therefore the tip) — the customer has to line up and wait to be served, there's generally no follow-up attention paid by the bartender, and less knowledge of the menu is required.
   
   I suppose I feel this way because I prefer to drink cheap beer in dive bars. At Southwark a dollar tip per drink seems low — the gentleman on the other side of the bar prepared the beverage with such diligence, made such friendly, intelligent conversation and generally took such good care of me that it'd be incredibly crass not to tip generously in gratitude. But being expected to cough up a dollar per popped-top on $4 cans of Schlitz at DC9? I donno, man. Seems kinda dumb.

Thanks to the Nabob for alerting me to this week's high levels of Express inclusion. It's very flattering, and I couldn't be more pleased about the world knowing I begrudge service employees their livings as I peer down upon them from my white-collar internet playground.

The only problem is that the Express misspelled the site's URL both times. If this delays this blog's acquisition by Yahoo or Google, I'm gonna be pissed.

What happens when economists stop being nice and start being real? I end up terrified that my retirement is going to be spent pushing carts of rocks in a Chinese coal mine. We're all doomed, people! (Via Kevin Drum.)

AND here's a bonus link to the Economist's View (your source for getting into flame-wars with Paul Krugman), courtesy of Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry Blog: why John Stossel is a moron. See also: this.

Another solid DC band! Color me pleased. Check out their attractively-designed site here or their MySpace page here. And if you're sad to be limited to the three songs... well, there's practically nothing that the command line can't solve these days...

for((i=1;i<=10;i+=1)); do
printf "%02d" $i | xargs -I {} wget http://leloupmusic.net/BIRDS/music/{}.mp3
done

Be forewarned: it's only 64kbps.

Last week I used Viktor Mayer-Schönberger's "Useful Void" proposal (PDF) as a jumping-off point to ruminate about Facebook, the work/personal divide and darknets over here. Along the way I casually dismissed Mayer-Schönberger's proposal:

I'm sure his heart is in the right place, but this is dumb for all the same reasons that DRM is dumb. You really, really can't control the spread or persistence of publicly available digital information. Efforts to do so are a waste of everyone's time.

But then, much to my surprise, the man himself popped up in comments, leaving this polite note:

You seem to suggest that my proposal is similar to IP secured by DRM. It seems that you haven't actually looked at my paper. In the paper I suggest that a DRM-like approach (as Lessig has made in Code 2.0) would be overkill. What I desire is not perfect solution, just a shift in defaults that makes users think again about the choice of forgetting.

I encourage you to read the paper - it's a free download, including from my website, and I think addresses some of the concerns you seem to have.

In contrast your solution (cognitively accepting the fact that we are transparent and thus weigh things differently) depends on our brains ability to adapt - not something that cognitive scientists have much hope in I am afraid, espcially since biologically we are wired to forget.

Kind regards,
VMS

Well, guilty as charged — I hadn't read his proposal. But now I have, and I'm afraid that I still arrive at much the same conclusion: I think that it probably isn't workable, and it definitely wouldn't be wise.

Philadelphia's alt-weeklies are awash in she-males.

You only need to open up the Weekly or City Paper classifieds to find them. You might not see them at first, but they're right in front of your nose: it's just that there are so many of them that you might not notice. In fact, the default setting for prostitutes in these pages is ambidrogenous. Ladies of the night offering boring ol' hetero sex are compelled to add "100% Female!" to their ads so that customers know what they're getting.

Of course there's nothing wrong with this sort of thing, aside from the basic illegality of prostitution. Your sex life is your own business in a properly enlightened, liberal society. Still, it seems as though the market's interest in these strangely half-gendered individuals hints at a deeply repressed or conflicted sexuality that must be fairly widespread.

Besides which, it seems clear that the services on offer are particularly filthy. Most of the ads include a line saying there are "X reasons you should call me", where X is a number ranging from around 7 to well over a dozen. Presumably this refers to the menu of sexual acts on offer. But my laughably naive schoolboy mind struggles to fill it out with monetizable sex acts. I can only complete the list by including services that are either deeply unwise or thoroughly implausible.

All in all, it paints a seedy picture of the city — one that must be embarrassing to its residents.

Still, it could be worse.

FIRST I've started receiving comment spam directing me to order sausage pizza, apparently from Russia. Who am I to refuse?

Note: this constitutes further proof that phpBB is some of the worst software in the world. It's what got my credit card number stolen, after all.

SECOND EchoDitto had its big three year anniversary party on the Odyssey dinner cruise thingy, and it was as great a time as you would expect of an event with an open bar. Lots of photos here. But the most striking image of the night was this:

It's a poster by Jason Goad that Nicco commissioned to mark the occasion, and it's fairly completely awesome.

Tonight! Charles, Aaron, Adam and Spencer! The Red and the Black! With The Daybreak Line! Quickly now — agree to come before my tolerance for exclamation points falters!

I really am looking forward to this. These guys have been playing together for a while now — it'll be interesting to see the evolution from their Velvet Lounge debut to tonight. Plus, Adam says they have a bunch of new material. Even if they didn't, the stuff from their band-creating LP sounds newly great since being rerecorded. I particularly like this one:

The City Veins – Toe The Line

I think it's one of the best songs (and most tastefully restrained performances) I've ever heard from these guys in any of the various band incarnations they've been in. You can find more of the rerecorded album here.

Oh, and if anyone feels like joining us for dinner on H Street before the show, send me an email. Otherwise, I hope to see you at the show.

Looks like this has been around for a little while. I hadn't seen it, though; maybe you haven't either.

I am, let's face it, a little hungover. The City Veins show last night was a lot of fun, but the accompanying revelry has left me a little worse for wear. I've already consumed a number of pills of some sort and waited patiently for someone to make me some coffee, but it appears that too many of my coworkers are off doing less important things (e.g. meeting with clients) for this to happen on its own. I still feel lousy.

This leaves food as the only possible solution. But my office staples of corn muffins, yogurt and fruit are at a calculated pre-beach ebb. I would have to get up and leave the office.

But there is this:

I could do it. I could drink this recently-acquired bottle of maple syrup.

It's really sugary — it'd probably even work.

...

I do really like maple syrup.

...

Cause I'm at the beach, see. So it's, like, appropriate.

I'm sure bloggable hijinks will ensue by and by. First, we all need to drink a lot more alcohol.

Alright, so there haven't been any particularly noteworthy hijinks so far. That's okay. I feel relaxed, loaded up on vitamin D, and as if creativity is beginning to seep back into my brain. Or perhaps that's just the sensation of the juniper deposits left by all the gin.

Either way, things are going great. My only complaint so far: deadly sea creatures.

It's a little hard to see, but this is a dead pufferfish. Evolution has graced him with highly effective camouflage, allowing him to trick his prey into stepping on him, then cursing.

The fact that he's A) too small to eat me and B) dead brings the effectiveness of this hunting technique into question, but I'm sure nature will iron things out in another eon or two. In the meantime, he did manage to draw some blood:

But between my vacationmates' sunburns and other miscellaneous ailments, I'm still doing relatively well at dealing with the beach's terrible toll.

Tonight we play miniature golf. This has been on the beach-agenda every year, but this year's staying-the-whole-week innovation makes it look like it's finally going to happen. I'm pretty excited; I consider mini-golf to be an important part of the beach experience.

Still, there is a looming question that must be answered before we can take to the astroturf and do battle:

Dinosaur or Pirate Ship?

Don't mistake zaniness for a lack of profundity. This isn't just about which family fun center would make for the better putt-putt experience. This is about what society and human fellowship mean to you — what you hope they could mean.

Dinosaur or Pirate Ship?

Keep saying it until it's almost a zen koan. Dinosaur or Pirate Ship? There may not be an answer, but this does not excuse you from seeking one.

Dinosaur or Pirate Ship.

UPDATE: Pirate Ship.