-Not that Vertical After All-

My most recent trio of books in the current affairs category includes:

The Horizontal Society, by Lawrence M. Friedman. Creative Destruction, by Tyler Cowen Free Agent Nation, by Daniel H. Pink

They're all connected, I promise. That these books help me win friends and influence garage bands in vegan coffee houses is an added bonus.

So nice of the vegan coffee house, to be open on Memorial Day. If it hadn't been, I might have gotten desperate enough to scale my way to the upper patio of the University Club. So tantalizing, that hotel, with its fifth floor open-air dining facility. Even on a rainy day like today, it would be a simple matter to reach the roof of the adjacent Urban Studies building, soda-tab chain in tow, and then...

We are a horizontal society.

-Bouche Bois?-

Finally, a way for air-trafffic controllers to enjoy the night before the morning after. I am speaking, of course, of Chaser and other dietary supplements intended to prevent (not treat) hangovers. According to the press kit, Chaser pills absorb the inflamatory congeners used to give alcoholic beverages flavor, color and aroma, keeping them safely in the digestive track.

Here's a reliable review.

I cannot speak for everyone in my family, but I do know from college that my brother and I tend not to get hangovers. Many a Sunday morning we cooked breakfast and collected bottles and cans while the rest of the household groaned where they had fallen.

-Burnt Hombre-

Want potential employers to start calling you? Go out of town for a week. Messages on your machine, I guarantee.

-Fence Post-

My father and I replaced a section of the fence today. It was a two person job; one person to hammer in the pins, the other to prevent the neighbor's curious horse from getting brained with the mallet.

-Masterscript-



Writers had encountered the masterscript theory before. In 1934, Ring Lardner and Robert Benchley reported sighting crumpled wads of paper in Alexander Wollcott's "Wit's End" apartment, which, based on their independent descriptions, resembles the first, second and third seasons of "Three's Company."

The Manhattan project brain trust committed the masterscript to paper a decade later, in the summer of 1944. It contained every possible television plot, sans proper names, and the mathematic formula used to separate, structure and arrange episodes for proper use. It was just over 12,000 words long.

Television producers initially panicked at the brevity of the masterscript, fearing a swift exhaustion of creative resources. But behavioral scientists quickly pointed to early studies of television viewers.

Take a picture of an actor with a neutral expression. Juxtapose the image with an image of another object, perhaps a bowl of gazpacho soup. Two slides, taken at different times, at different locations. But seen together.. Viewers connected the two as cause and effect. "He looks hungry."

The viewers can always be trusted to compensate for a lack of content. As a result, the same plots can be stretched, repeated and reapplied, ad infinitum. On one channel, three, or a thousand. A renewable resource -

- Unless you've seen the masterscript. Because once you've read it, once you've seen the plots laid end to end, compensation for content is impossible. No more reruns, not ever.

At least, that's the story. Let's find it, shall we? Disseminate the script, disarm the glowing box - live in a post-television age.

-The genie is out of the box-



New Media is Unveiled

RCA introduced a glowing box to a distracted international audience at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. World War II soon pulled those ur-audiences from the television sets; the first, last and only time international events took the human race away from the self-advertising medium.

Why? Not for lack of interest. The technology was there, and promoters recognized the addictive nature of the box the moment they saw it penetrating the minds of passersby - passesby, it should be mentioned, representing every niche of society. Clearly, the twin shortages in content and distribution were the only barriers in these early years.

To solve the distribution problem, profiteers needed only peacetime and a war-economy. Creating content would require a more active role for all parties involved. Convinced of television's eventual success long before the end of the war was regarded as inevitable in Europe or the Pacific, the media magnates assembled a secret amalgam of writers representing theatre, radio and book publishing. Later, a filing error led historians to believe the think tank was known in secret government circles as the Los Alamos project. If participants had given the project a title, it almost certainly is derived from the site where the writers met to conduct their early info-tainment research. It was located on the island of Manhattan.

The Real Manhattan Project

Fueled by nicotine, caffeine, alcohol and other creative fuels, the writers experimented with various formats and genres. Absolute secrecy was necessary at this stage, for while most of their tricks were routine in their former professions, the effect of laugh-tracks, star-powered comedies and vaudvillian sight-gags on television was only theoretical. In those early days, there was a very real fear that the first pixels scattered at the end of the countdown could set off a chain reaction that would ignite the air-waves worldwide and change life as we know it.

But first, the writers needed to develop a MASTER SCRIPT.

-Sounds less macho that way-

Another term for "pimp" might well be "professional cuckhold."

-The Temp's Tale, Part Two-

One tiny cone cup of water later, and I'm ready to tell the mechanics the second part of the story.

-The Temp's Tale-

Four mechanics in coveralls - two of them full time, two of them part time - put down their tools and tires at 4 PM and raced each other up the cramped stripmall stairs. Once they'd reached the office with two Benedicts - one permanent, one (me) temporary - the four mechanics lined up like naughty children who cannot make eye contact.

"Um.." they began.

"Is it quitting time already?" I asked.

"We worked through lunch..."
"..and several coffee breaks..."
"..so you'd have more time for the story."

The edge city congestion outside is about as seductive as a last call regular. So my reluctance, as it was, was wholly feigned.
"Very well." I conceded.

"Hot dog!" the mechanics sat cross-legged on the once-shag carpet, shhing each other as they got as comfortable as their bulk allows. The other Benedict made no pretence at work; he quietly swiveled his chair.

-Maybe all three?-

Three days ago the sun was browning my skin between the sandal straps when one of my apartment mates - it doesn't matter which, they're all in musical theatre - skipped past me two porch steps at a time. She was talking overloud on a cell phone as she paced up and down the street in front of the stoop. Her topics for discussion: graduation, the hotel room she and her boyfriend are getting for the night, and the summer play.

"Congratulations" I said, after she closed her cell phone.
"For what?" was her confused reply.

-!-

Regurgitating the most current news with commentary is not a Monk specialty, although I do appreciate it in others, when it is done well. What has struck me so, that I can't keep from typing out? News of the humiliations inflicted by U.S. and British troops on prisoners taken in Iraq, as captured by the tormentors themselves on film.

Memory Hole has the pictures.

If the torturers sneered, grimaced, or conveyed a fear of getting caught, these pictures would not move me as much. That would mean they knew how wrong it is, and flout orders and the common practices of prisoner detention - an exception to the rule.

But the ignorant audacity in the expressions of those captors suggests that at the time the pictures were taken, no one raised any objection. Nobody talked consequences. This event is not merely bad P.R., and it is not merely bad spelling. It is a sign of an institutional defect.

And now many more will die for their stupid cruelty.