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Rabbit, rabbit. July is going to be, uh, involved.

What's the deal with those SubTalk house adverts the MTA puts up in the subways? Is the ridiculous grammar intentional? I transcribed the one I saw in the 2 train today: Litter gets on the tracks and catches fire and that causes train delays that make you late aside from making trains and stations untidy because a little litter goes a long way. I think they might be using font colour as a grammatical construct, which if you could do that, I'm screwed.

Just as the rattling caused by the loose plastic casing around my box fan cancels out the low drone of Adam's air conditioner, I'm hoping that somehow the big bugs that crawled up the vines and through the hole in my window screen will cancel out the little bugs that did the same. I wish I remembered more about Physics. I know that bugs can be considered both repulsive particles and squirmy waves, and I think if the interference pattern produced by the squirmy waves is just right, they all blink into nothingness.

So I don't know how much you think about metaphysics. Probably not that much, which is all right. Me, I think about metaphysics quite a bit. Specifically, the implications of the laws of physics on reality (old-skool "meta" physics). And some neurobiology, and cognitive psychology, and other good stuff, but it all follows necessarily from physics. Unless you're some weird spiritualist (one who believes in the spirit, or incorporeal soul, or whatever) and you think that there's something out there that doesn't obey the laws of physics. Let's deal with that now, actually, looking at two alternatives: 1a) everything in the universe obeys the laws of physics (including quantum physics) 1b) there are some things in the universe to which the laws of physics need not apply (like the Irish, only weirder) Now, you know, I'd tend to go with 1a). But I really don't know. Maybe everything we know about the universality of physics is a sham. Maybe the universe

I went down to Barnes & Noble during lunch because there aren't any more music stores in Brooklyn Heights (now that the one on Montague St. closed), looking for Wilco's A Ghost is Born . They didn't have it. They did have, in their discount aisle, a copy of Winning Poker Advice . The picture on the front cover was a closeup of someone holding a royal flush in spades. This is obviously good advices. Adam ended up picking up the Wilco at Target in White Plains. I've been listening to the low-fi version they put on their official website for a while now, and it's wonderful. I think we're going to seriously have to reconsider the ever-important "Best Three Consecutive Albums in the Past 20 Years" question, with R.E.M. ( Automatic for the People , Monster , New Adventures in Hi-fi ) previously coming out on top, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers ( Californication , By the Way ) a likely challenger even if the next album that they release is rubbish (though

I kind of wish I did this . Or something in information theory. Or something in metaphysics. Or anything meta. But I'll stick to multimedia collaboration software for the time being.

Bowing to popular demand, and to commemorate the blessèd event, here's the toast I gave at Dave and Sharon's wedding. I also do bar mitzvahs. I've known Dave for a while now–going on six years, dating back to our freshman year together living on Carman 11 at Columbia. And I'm proud to have called him my friend since then. You know, we loved Dave and all, but for whatever reason, things usually didn't go Dave's way back then–which was par for the course for being a Boston sports fan at the time. Years and years of watching the Red Sox and the Patriots and for the most part the Celtics, raise your hopes and then come crashing down must do something to a person. And you get to the point–I'm not from Boston or anything, but you get to the point where you start rooting for the Red Sox or the Patriots or the Celtics because of people like Dave, because you believe that the world can be fair sometimes. So on the last Sunday in January, 2002, somehow the New England

Times quote of the day , if the day were Wednesday, which it's not, which makes me think about time: "It actually takes five years for this root to grow," said a philosophically inclined server. "Then I grate it in one night. This makes me think about time."

This reminded me of "Little Expressionless Animals" from David Foster Wallace's mostly excellent Girl With Curious Hair , which reminded me that it's probably in everyone's interest if I only read books I find enjoyable, which is why I'm not going to make it past page five of Ulysses . We'll check in on that again on the bicentennial. Anyone have suggestions on wham to read next? The first twenty pages of Ada is always a kick.

Jeez, you'd think there would be someone else around here who knew how/was willing to change the bottle in the water cooler. We are a fairly large investment bank.

Jamba Juice (something told me they had a website) makes great fruit shakes and whatnots. I had some of them when I was out in Davis. They've come to the East Coast, if the 5 people dancing around Times Square in banana (not Banana) costumes and screaming out "Jamba Juice!" is any indication. Though really, seeing that sort of thing in Times Square could be an indication of any number of things. What was interesting though was that they were dancing at the corner of Broadway and 50th, and right smack in the middle of their banana dance circle was a huge canister marked "Nitrogen", with a rubber tubing leading from the canister to a manhole. Which, I'm basically an idiot, but is that a good thing to be doing? Pumping nitrogen into the sewers? I was with Tommy and he suggested that perhaps they were extracting nitrogen from the sewers, which they obviously weren't doing, but it would kind of make some sense if you're not too particular about entropy.

Okay. Foucault's Pendulum is done. It was good enough, which is to say I don't particularly recommend it. So I was trying to figure wham to read next, and then I realized that I'd been discussing Bloomsday with Bananas, referencing a Bloomsday party she threw four years ago. And it's the centennial Bloomsday today, as the Times has risked their reputation and asserted . So yessir, it's going to be Ulysses . That should be fucking good , muthafucka. They all curse in Ulysses , right? I don't know. I actually read about four chapters a while back, but I guess it's the sort of thing I need to begin the begin.

I actually didn't know that the Army did birthday parties . I guess there's not much else going on to keep them busy, right? Now that all of the Army's buglists are done with their tours of duty at the Reagan internment, they've got to pass the time somehow. Graph of some distinction: "We were concerned the president possibly could get lost in a cloud and we don't want him to do that," said Lt. Col. David Standridge, commander of the Golden Knights. Nice. I think I read about the Golden Knights in Foucault's Pendulum (which I still haven't finished...).

I'm pretty sure Michael Young is my favourite baseball player right now, and he's doing a wonderful job for both my fantasy team and my reality team (the Rangers) of making people forget about A-Rod. There's a nice little piece on him on ESPN.com. They mention that he's reading an actual novel, then mention that it's The Da Vinci Code . I think I might have to stop making fun of The Da Vinci Code though, because I still haven't finished Foucault's Pendulum , and it really is getting unreadable. I have another hundred pages or so to go and will probably finish it up before poker this evening, at which point, good riddance.

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When you have a natural monopoly, as you do with telephone service, some sort of regulation is often necessary to introduce competition into the market. It happened when the government broke up AT&T into the regional Bells under the Gipper, and it happened with the Telecommunications Act under Clinton, which opened up local telephone service to companies other than the regional Bells. Now local telephone deregulation isn't the biggest issue in the world, but it has saved consumers some money . So the fact that the Bush government has basically reversed its course and sided with the regional Bells against cheap access to local lines is a move that will almost certainly hurt the average consumer--and obviously, hurt consumers who don't have a lot of money to begin with disproportionately more than others. This paragraph caught my eye: The administration's announcement followed fierce lobbying and aggressive tactics; each side has raised millions of dollars in campaign co

It's ridiculously hot--I'm afraid to move away from the fan for fear of meltage--I'm in a bad mood and I'm coming down with some whack-ass summer cold that I picked up at work. How are you?

With Adam gone off vacationing with Josh at their upstate estate, I'm alone in the apartment for the week. Major goals include making a dent in the stored TiVo-age. I had Vanilla Sky saved, never having seen it, and I guess I still haven't seen it as I erased it after 20 minutes. The 30 seconds of Radiohead and then 30 seconds of R.E.M. near the start were undoubtedly the best thing about the movie, so I don't feel like I missed much. But then, ah, but then I watched All the Real Girls , which is like some kind of wonderful movie. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed that. Even the Southern accents didn't bother me. You don't usually see those kind of stories about love from a male perspective, and I guess it struck a nerve.

Reagan, the ex-President, died the other day. Best know for presiding over the release of The Goonies , Big * , and the good Back to the Future and Indiana Jones movies, Reagan proved that having a movie star in elected office isn't always a bad thing. Also, somehow, I think I get the day off from work on Friday . *Okay, I think Big might have been released under Bush the Elder, but I'm sure it was filmed whilst the Gipper was still in office.

Those folks in the New Yorker circulation department have me pegged: As a Professional Subscriber to THE NEW YORKER, now you can extend you subscription at outstanding savings: two years for only $79.95 In other news, the new double issue appears to be a pop-up book.

This is why I get upset at Josh when he says he reads the Post every morning.

Well, I had the right general idea , but I was obviously off. I guess you pay someone like Steve Buscemi for the season.

Somehow I completely failed to mention 34 's one year anniversary . It's now the fourth-oldest thing on the Internet, ever.

Ryan's ad hoc self-assemblage this morning at the Wagner-McCoy's provided us all with empirical proof that while it might be ph balanced for a woman, it's definitely not strong enough for a man. Also, all my friends really kick ass. Hooray for Peteys!

I don't know. I'm sitting in the subway (3 train, listening to A Ghost is Born ; heading uptown to meet Ryan and Meitav and Scotter to go get tuxedos for YAW [Yet Another Wedding]) and there's an advert for the New Gillette M^3 Power razing implement. This is all I know about shaving: I do it twice a week (staying "rugged" most of the time), Adam does it every morning, and it leads to our sink getting hopelessly clogged. In the advert the razor has these concentric circles of Power eminating from its shaft. I guess that differentiates it from the Mach3 and the Mach3 Turbo and whatever Schtik ( sic , but who cares?) has and Apple's G5 cheese grater. This device allows one to shave via ecolocution. Instead of devloping technologies to allow bats to get a closer, smoother shave in the darkness of their cavern bathrooms, I wish these companies would devote some research money to unclogging my damn sink.

I'm pretty sure that I came up with this sort of thing first . Still, it's pretty funny. On a related note, you've probably seen Get Your War On already, but there are new strips coming out every so often, and other things to look at in the meantime.