I’ve been moving numbers from one database to another for the past week and a half, and I’m approximately halfway done. I have no idea what these numbers mean, and am actually trying to stay in the dark for as long as I can. Right now, there’s a 0.001% chance that these numbers represent something other than wireless phone sales figures. I could be squaring payment accounts for legions of incredibly undervalued hitmen, or unwittingly parsing top secret data for project Carnivore. I could be commanding a new, spreadsheet-based army, like a latter-day Ender. I have what the industry calls “five nines of confidence” that I’m not, but it’s that last 0.001% that keeps me coming back every morning, and it’s that last 0.001% that has kept me from asking my supervisor what exactly it is that we do here.

And the sad truth is that this entire three week project could probably be automated in 15 minutes, if I knew the first thing about database programming, which I don’t, and which pretty much every other Lowensohn male born after The Great War has spent the last 15+ years learning how to do in their sleep. Confidentiality prevents me from subcontracting the work out to a confederate, and special relativity now prevents me from taking CS classes at Harvey Mudd when I had the chance.

So I sit, and I parse, and I copy, and I may have even started concatenating. Who knows? I stopped paying attention around Groundhog Day. The only thing I can do, between batches, is drown my mounting sorrows in the low-alcohol lager that is filtered corporate internet. And here, dear reader, are the more interesting gobs of informational foam that I’ve caught in my metaphorical moustache:

The ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus was allegedly killed by a vulture, who mistook his bald head for a shiny rock and dropped a tortoise on it.

e-Gold.com is a website where you can open an online bank account with holdings stored as actual gold bullion. Pros: Webcam lets you look at your gold in realtime, 2.5 million users can’t be wrong. Cons: No external audits, irreversible transactions, and anyone who actually uses this is totally insane.

“Set The Ray To Jerry” is the best song the Smashing Pumpkins ever recorded.

In the past 72 hours, every referee from Super Bowl XL has been killed or seriously injured by mysterious, unidentified assailants. Just kidding, but I think we can all agree that the officiating was crap and those guys should seriously consider getting Lasik before the season starts up again in September.

The Apple Computer logo may or may not be a veiled reference to Alan Turing’s infamous fruicide, although the timing on the rainbow is all wrong and early versions seem to point more to Newton.

String theory? I try and I try and I try, but it’s still way beyond my comprehension and is giving me a headache just typing about it.

One liter of bottled water costs more than one liter of gasoline. (Note: I think this is a fairly stupid statistic.)

In pre-colonial Aztec society, getting drunk before the age of 60 was illegal, with the second offense punishable by death. If you were a slave, you were generally treated pretty well and could win your freedom on market day by bolting from your master and running until you were outside the market walls and had placed your foot firmly in human feces.

Ken Blackwood is an excellent critic. The thinking man’s Cliff Yablonski.

Ken Blackwell, on the other hand, is a prick. To the point where it’s almost hard to believe how much of a prick he really is. Then it hits you, and you’re like, “Oh my God – this guy is a total prick.”

And that’s The Dave Report for Wednesday, February 8th, 2006.

Well, it’s February again, and that means fundraising time for the Speechwriters. The good news? You, the listeners, are for once exempt from our mad quest for cash. Winter is the closest thing our industry has to an “off season,” and February is traditionally the month where we dust off our fancy clothes and try to tease as much meat as we can from the impeccably manicured hand of The Man.

What this means in real terms is that I am currently sitting at a computer, behind enemy lines and bored out of my mind, and I’m going to try my damnedest not to let this get in the way of my real job, which is entertaining and educating the fans of this band while receiving payment from an unspecified third source.

So stay tuned – I’m going to try to get back in the habit of updating this thing every couple of days.

Last night I went to my friend Mike’s dirty 30th birthday party at Seattle’s venerable Rendezvous bar and restaurant. (Editor’s note: It probably isn’t venerable at all, I just have a soft spot for the place since they let us throw a small festival there with little advance notice, and the sound guy brought us a case of Ranier for the backstage fridge, which I found touching. My friend Brady hates the place and would happily tell you why for the price of a Miller High Life and several minutes of what’s left of your twenties.)

This in itself is hardly newsworthy, but Mike is a man with an asterisk, and his asterisk says: “I grew up in Ketchikan.” To most people, this means nothing, but to the rest of us, this speaks volumes. Years ago, Misha and I first fell in with the Ketchikanian diaspora, and we haven’t been the same since. Our first album was nearly called “Alaskan Ethics” in their honor.

For readers of Raymond Feist, the Ketchikanians are essentially the Valheru, timeless dragon-backed conquerors of the stars, men who eat deserts, shit glass, and don’t even register this kind of behaviour as unusual. For the rest of us, they are simply Hard Men, a la Vinnie Jones, but with Carhartts and scars and tattoos in places the rest of us are hesitant to soap.

Mike is the man who first turned me on to The Alphabets, a progressive Seattle hip-hop duo that is both brilliant and absurd, a band that I believe every man, woman and child in America should experience at least once. Said Alphabets were, in fact, there at the party last night, and we got to talking, and one thing led to another, and suddenly I’m playing a show with them two weeks hence, where they’re going to debut their FIRST EVER MUSIC VIDEO, and the part of me that still gets excited about music independent of careerism is so excited it can barely think straight.

I’ve decided, on a whim, that I’m going to do a full-on iPod set, inspired in part by Alex Greenwald’s bringing down the house at this past year’s Gimme Shelter concert, thanks to nothing but an iPod and a totally ridiculous Hiawatha getup. I know this is a dangerous move, professionally; me developing solo material while the band is on vague geographical hiatus. But you have to understand: we as a band had thousands of dollars worth of gear stolen from us back in November, and we as men are individually scrambling to re-earn the income necessary to keep this band afloat. There are probably going to be a lot of “independent side projects” coming up in the next couple of months – THIS IS NO CAUSE FOR ALARM. We are all happy, healthy, and as in love with each other as four heterosexual men can be – we’re just really fucking far away from each other right now, and desperate times call for desperate measures. This is why I have written a song called “Sexual Professional.”

In any event, it’s going to be an insanely fun show, and I’d advise anyone who can come to do so, if only because the Alphabets are the greatest hip hop crew in America and you’ll be kicking yourself for the next 30 years if you live in Seattle and somehow miss them.

Cheers,

Dave