Wow there sure are a lot of dishes to be done! What the hell have I been doing with my time this week if I haven’t been blogging? (Nothing good, that’s for damn sure.)

What a beautiful weekend. The light’s somewhat magical the way the last rays break between the monstrous and artless high-rises and I’m almost starting to enjoy the persistent odor from the apartment below, which is a combo of tomato sauce and cigarette smoke (which is surprisingly irritating when you’re not enveloped in it daily, isn’t that funny?). I cooked food, did computery things, saw friends from out of town, and brought the tomato plants inside so that I might slow their inevitable decline. There are six or seven blossoms between the three of them–at this rate, we might have tomatoes by December.

I found a fortune from a cookie I ate at the China Chalet (hard C, soft C) a few years ago, truly the best fortune ever: “A man must be true to himself, even if that self is frightening and strange.”

Speaking of which, I also watched this video, which is the most fucking amazing thing ever:

Perhaps you haven’t yet read this entertaining story (found over at Metafilter, in a thread which is at least as interesting as the piece itself) from the Independent earlier on this week: Masters of illusion: The great management consultancy swindle:

The savvier consultants and their clients understand that the basis of the business is not technological but anthropological – and that this is not always a bad thing. Among human beings, it turns out, the perception of expertise, however unfounded, can sometimes be used to good purpose. As the shamans who poison chickens and the soothsayers who read entrails have long demonstrated, sometimes it is more important to build a consensus around a good decision than to make the best possible decision; sometimes it is more useful to believe that a decision is sanctioned by a higher authority than to acknowledge that it rests on mere conjecture; and sometimes it is better to make a truly random choice than to continue to follow the predictable inclinations of one’s established prejudices. Consultants, following in the footsteps of their pagan forebears, understand that they must adopt the holy mien of a priestly caste.

Other interesting things I read include Zombieology, from this month’s Lost magazine:

Other television projects of mine might see fruition, but Babylon Fields is, sadly, gone forever — 20th Century Fox owns it, lock, stock and barrel, not only for “all eternity” (according to the contract I signed), but also everywhere “within the known universe,” meaning that if someone wanted to film a new version of Babylon Fields on Mars, the studio could and would sue them. That is, of course, unless they pay for turnaround, the full cost of the dumped pilot, somewhere in the neighborhood of seven million dollars. Outside of “the known universe,” however — in, say, a parallel dimension where the Nazis won WWII — presumably remake rights are free and clear.

Also, Jack Shafer’s typically prickly (yet oh-so-lovable) take on the Annie Le murder:

Had the Le murder happened at, say, Oklahoma State University, you’d have to bribe the night editor of the New York Times with a case of scotch and Hasty Pudding tickets to get him to run a one-inch wire story. Hell, a Stanford murder wouldn’t warrant this sort of coverage!

As for me, personally? I have yet to write much of interest these days, but according to the registrar I apparently graduated with a 3.92 GPA without realizing it–talk about a Great Swindle, folks.