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If you have the July 14 & 21 issue of the New Yorker handy, look at the top advert on page 40. Brilliant.

(My second-favouritest banana, Dave Form-Bartel, has passed this along for blogification. It's enough to make me nostalgic for my publishing days, when I could just sit back and print other people's cleverness instead of having to devise cleverness of my own.) You know that new Mercedes-Benz ad campaign? The one where they encourage you to tie a string around your finger, so you do not forget the Mercedes-Benz summer event. They have those ads on TV as the various people from the Hamptons crowd do Hamptons like activities (grilling on Sharper Image stainless steel BBQ, eating "reviewed by food network" gourmet ice cream on a cone, frolicking by themselves on dreary beach in J Crew clothing) with a string around their finger. Well the whole ad campaign seemed somewhat meaningless and ridiculous until I figure out what it was getting at.... THEIR TARGET MARKET ARE RICH PEOPLE, SO ATROCIOUSLY RICH THAT THEY MIGHT FORGET TO BUY A MERCEDES!! Who has so much disposable

On the off chance that the incomparably lovely young lady with whom I rode the 1 and 3 trains from Houston to Atlantic (and then depressingly transferred to the N/R and not the Q) is reading this--would you like to get some coffee sometime, you know, or something? Actually, I guess that offer applies to any incomparably lovely young ladies who are reading this, whether or not we've shared a silent subway ride.

For a while, the urinal on my floor would flush anytime someone looked at it. Now it won't flush at all. I guess that kind of unexpectedness is to be expected from quantum urinals.

No matter how many times they implore me, I will not use all available doors. I will use one available door, or maybe two if I'm feeling spry, and you can suck it, MTA.

Whilst wheedling the Ticketmaster.com site for some concert tickets yesterday, I was presented with a few different screens in which one is instructed to read a word printed askew on a grid in a strange font, and type it in a little box. (This is actually a really neat technological solution to the problem of automated scripts repeatedly hammering Ticketmaster in order to get the best tickets available, since pattern recognition of obscured text is one of the few things that computers do poorly and humans do well.) Anyway, I first had to type in "cream," followed by "spurt." The next word was "fornix," which I had never heard before, but it sounded dirty, too. I've concluded that in addition to being an evil monopoly, Ticketmaster is obviously into smut (c.f. the Christina Aguilera tour), forcing unsuspecting users to participate in some manner of pornographic Mad Libs experiment. But I have R.E.M. tickets now, so I'm happy.

(My favouritest banana, Banana Gordon-Cash-Mirer, has volunteered the following film review. Many thanks go out to her!) I accept that we live in an uncertain and changing world, but there are a few things I have trusted to be my anchors, and until I saw The Matrix Reloaded, one of those anchors was Harold Perrineau. From his paraplegic prisoner on Oz to his drag queen in Woman on Top to his incomparable Mercutio in Romeo + Juliet, Perrineau's characters become intense, sympathetic and wise in spite of their obvious crimes, inevitably stealing the show. But now, thanks to directors Andy and Larry Wachowski, I am once again at sea, because as the programmer Link, Perrineau has finally turned in a mediocre performance in a silly movie. These are the same wastrels that cost me my love for Hugo Weaving by casting him as an evil robot named Mr. Smith. I am more angry at them for my lost faith than for my having sat through 138 minutes of incomprehensible CGI and 5th grade French. In

Man, if your band isn't Pearl Jam, then your band doesn't rock. They put on an incredible show at Madison Square Garden last night. They're also selling (official) bootlegs of each show they do at Pearl Jam Bootlegs for those of you interested...

Man, this is funny.

FYI, my old website is still floating around, somewhere.

I took the easy way out and used an automated HTML-generator, and I didn't put any effort into the captions, but I doubt the interested parties will mind. For your viewing pleasure, here are the Cali photos .

In case you were wondering about those (creepy, I think) Dr. and Mrs. Zizmor ads in the subway, here's the scoop .