misha is in an undisclosed latin american country, i am at an aging computer in the south of oregon in a robe that is covered in cat hair. can you imagine misha in a robe? i bet it would be funny. it is much more natural for me to be in a robe than for misha to be in one, the basic construction of the garment is designed for men long in torso and short in leg – men such as myself. however, i would never take my robe to an undisclosed latin american country, that would be ridiculous.

so i’ve been listening to the subways recently, their music is raw and catchy and indie and garagey and their lyrics are completely vapid. they will be some degree of huge as a result of this combination. i have been thinking a lot about the implications of this realization about the subways, but i’ve also been watching figure skating and eating ice cream for the last twenty minutes and the sharp, coherent digressions on this topic have sunk to the bottom of my brain.

josh has unwittingly become my consultant in the hunt for a new laptop. i know absolutely nothing about computers and he is a lot smarter than i am in general, so this should be a veritable sitcom partnership. i look in a mirror and i know where my lungs are and why they work and to what end, but i still can’t quite fathom it. computers are -in this way and many others – like lungs. it certainly does not help that i smoked the living hell out of every cigarette i could get my hands on for some 12 years. whatever the hell that means. anyway, josh and i both look good in a robe, and i think i’ll make the move to macintosh.

waiting tables in a quaint, reasonably-priced, romantic italian restaurant that does not take reservations makes valentine’s day even more of a fucking bastard than it already is, but outside of that, work is going well. it is more fun to work on exciting new material for the llc than it is to explain to tourists what gnocchi is, so i am grateful that only so many hours of the day are devoted to the latter.

the new material is awesome.

i miss you guys. i promise to write more. i get to go see the scientists in march. i hope everyone is doing well and taking care of themselves. all right, then.

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.