My story, Boxes of Prophets, is now online in the new issue of Wanderings magazine.

The other day at work Minor Threat’s “In My Eyes” came on the ipod. While listening I knew I had heard a cover of this song recently but couldn’t remember who. However, I didn’t fret; as James Fallows wrote in the most recent Atlantic Monthly:

“In one way I know of, the Internet has improved my personality. In the olden days, I would get annoyed (and show it) when I heard a song I knew but couldn’t remember who was singing, or when I channel surfed across an old movie and wondered who a familiar-looking character actor was (who is the creepy guy who tussles with Patrick Swayze on the subway in Ghost?). The question would lodge in my brain and make me cranky until the answer popped up hours or days later, or until I forgot about it. Now, if I’m at a computer, I can scratch the mental itch in seconds . . . . The most obvious and unquestionable achievement in Internet “intelligence” is the Jeopardy!-style retrieval of “spot knowledge” . . . . If omnipresent retrieval of spot data means there’s less we have to remember, and if categorization systems do some of the first-stage thinking for us, what will happen to our brains?”

So I knew a quick search (or just sorting everything on the ipod by song name) would get me an answer. Not necessary in this case because later, while in an elevator, I remembered that the cover was by Rage Against the Machine on their cover album Renegades. So does this mean that my brain is still stuck in first-stage (un-evolved) thinking? Is it relegated to mere information-retrieval, while the internets free up the rest of humanity for higher-level thinking?

The answer is that the best song on that album is the version of “Maggie’s Farm”, of course. And that the title of this post was the sender name on some spam I got today.

If I’m listening to music here at work, I’ll naturally take my headphones off when I notice someone entering my cubicle.  There is one woman who, when she enters, waits until she sees that she’s got my attention, then starts talking.  Which is pointless because at that point I’m just taking the headphones off.  I hear a lot of the second half of sentences out of that woman.  She’s kind and not at all obnoxious, but I’m not sure she understands what these contraptions are that the younger folks wear on their heads these days.

Well, I say younger folks, but how much of a younger folks am I any more?  Today my wife turns Thirty-four.  If she’s that long in the tooth, how much the hell older does that make me?

 Happy Birthday, Mrs The Fyd!

 Dahlias as purchased on a walk with the dogs yesterday:

We saw them passing by a house with a large sign in its garden, “Hothouse Dahlias”, and a couple of buckets of cut flowers on the fence, payment by the honor system. So, a present for the Mrs.

Coincidentally the movie The Black Dahlia is now in theaters. I enjoyed the book and would pay to see Aaron Eckhart if he were playing Betty Short herself. The poor reviews might give me pause, but most have the common complaint that the film does not have as much to do with the Dahlia herself, as they had been led to believe. Fair enough, but anyone who is particularly interested in the murder probably is aware of Ellroy’s obsession with the case and his conflation of it with his murdered mother.

Thanks to my sister, Caitlin Morais ,the GIS Queen of Los Angeles, I now have this snazzy website at which to post the inanities which occur to me.  So, henceforth, here it shall all be writ.