Now that we've been here over a year I'm noticing the little events and arrivals that signify the changing of the seasons -- you can't really rely on the weather or temperature here to tell you anything so you have to look elsewhere. And the appearence of Hatch pepper scones at Central Market is certainly one of the yummiest. So it's chili season! Next Sunday is the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival, which despite being an outdoor event at the hottest time of the year still gets 12,000 attendees happy to stuff themselves with mind-alteringly hot sauces. Last year it was too hot for us even to think of attending but this year we'll see if we're not made of stronger stuff.

SIX MARTINIS LATER....
I don't really know why they -- the Pitchforkians -- bothered to calibrate and briefly annotate their top 100 albums of the eighties. No-one appreciates that kind of thing, not here in blogland, anyhoo. There's always someone who'll say it's not merely invalid but indicative of all that's wrong with people over 25/ Americans/ students/ indie-pop geeks/ anyone who doesn't sleep with their copy of Dizzie Rascal's CD/cretins in general because it puts the Sticky Grandmothers' 1982 debut Etudes and Variations and Songs about Joan Simms at number 54 instead of 47 where anyone who deserves to go on living knows it ought to go. No-one should ever promulgate a list again, not even me. It just makes people grudgeful, if you'll pardon my allusion to my 14th favorite Fall song of the 90s.

Not, of course, that I go along with Daydream Nation being the best album of the 80s, even if I did believe in lists. Which I don't. Not even my own. Making lists is the 6th least cool thing you can do. It wasn't even the band's best. Sure, it was pleasant enough and conjured up a state of mind that a million lesser bands will be striving for until the electric guitar goes the way of the sackbut but after Sister -- which I think was their best, focused but still perpetually on the verge of all kinds of derangement -- it just seemed like a warm bath, an album to smile wistfully through, a cosy nod to rock traditions, something to luxuriate lazily in compared to the scalp-tightening beatitude of what came before. What came before included the best gig ever, when Thurston Moore was playing the guitar so frenzidly that he slashed his hand open and the blood shorted out his guitar -- and Iggy Pop came on during their encore of "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and no-one realized it was him because for those few minutes he wasn't the learing, cockflashing parody he's been since the mid-70s but a howling encapsulation of everything Lester Bangs saw in Funhouse and and and and I think I'm drunk right now and maybe I should write more blog entries when I've had six martinis....

But hey. The Pitchfork Top Twenty from the Eighties. Part 1a: 20 - 15. Maybe....

#20 -- This Heat, Deceit (1981). I hate to admit it but I've never heard this. I've never knowingly heard anything by This Heat, which you'd think would require some wilful act of deafness or refusal going by their current reputation, but I just never heard them. I must had temporarily had a life those nights that Peel played them. It's seems a bit late to seek them out now, especially after I heard some terrible Charles Hayward stuff on Mixing It a few years ago which consisted of him growling "The information rich.... the information poor" for an indefinite period. I did like "Rongwrong" on the Quiet Sun album though, but that was the mid-70s....

#19 -- PIL, Metal Box (1980). No-one calls it Second Edition. It was, is and always will be Metal Box. Rubbish review, by the way, although entirely understandable because no-one, not even Marcello, has ever managed to explain this record, especially not in the context of what the members of PIL have done since. And Wobble's bass was never "rubbery", not even if you were Benny Hill doing a non-PC Japanese accent. I remember seeing him -- Wobble, not Benny Hill -- back when he had dropped out of music after PIL and those amusing squibs he put out in the early 80s and was working as a guard on the London Underground. How do you think that felt -- for me, I mean, hungover, heading to the office, handing my crumpled ticket to someone who had made one of the greatest records ever?

#18 -- De La Soul, Three Feet Tall and Rising (1989). I don't remember any of the records I bought that year. My turntable died and I took it as a sign that my youth was over and it was time to get a CD player and start listening to Bill Evans and Alfred Schnittke. I know I bought this, but that's all I remember.

#17 -- Minutemen, Double Nickle on the Dime (1984). I've bought this twice, first time on imported cassette when I first moved to London in 1986 and Tower had just opened and I only had a nasty paint-blue JVC tape-player and the gal I shared a flat in Pudney with came in and said, "Hey, Bruce Sterling was playing this when I was staying with him in Austin". I lent it to her when we went our seperate ways (Wandsworth/Harringey). She married some Army chappie and moved to some semi-mythical middle England village with a name like Lower Toffington-on-the-Chesnut Parva... and I ended up living around the corner from Sterling. Which just goes to show. Second time I bought it on CD and drowned in all sorts of memories when I played it. I never saw the Minutemen live, which was a shame. I did see fIREHOSE, the band they became after D. Boon died, and that was a bigger shame as Mike Watt and the other guy were basically playing support to some Peter Frampton wannabe who I think was called Ed From Ohio. That was the Sonic Youth gig mentioned above, I think. Great album, incidentally. I'll probably buy it in several more format before I'm through.

#16 and #15 omitted for religious reasons and a psychological inability to deal with reviews that mention "cymbal washes" or "the amiable eccentricity of The Beatles and Beach Boys"....

POWER OUTAGE TRACED TO DIM BULB IN WHITE HOUSE --- The Tale of The Brits Who Swiped 800 Jobs From New York, Carted Off $90 Million, Then Tonight, Turned Off Our Lights....

Greg Palast points the finger by candlelight, as do the Slashdot boys. And did you catch George Pataki's nothing-to-do-with-me-gov(ernor) act? He's well in with... well, read Palast and this about the National Grid's acquisition of Niagara Mohawk. Don't count on Pataki getting to the bottom of this in a hurry....

This is just plain scary. The Midwich Cuckoos -- gone wild!

Sorry if I seem to have nodded off lately. This working-for-a-living malarky that I've got myself involved with once again isn't at all condusive to a slow-thinking and even slower-writing blogger like me. Not having been privileged to get one of those high-paying jobs where you do whatever it is you do in the brief moments when you can't find anything worth reading, writing about or just linking to online, I come home in the evening with the intention of reeling off some dense, provocative posts about the usual heartbreakingly tantalizing somethingness of something but end up eating Texas-shaped tortilla chips in front of the TV.

And worse than not blogging, I'm not hitting the gym and my weight is edging upwards. The seven pounds I announced I was going to lose a few days or weeks ago has now turned into ten and it does seem to have all gone entirely to my face. It's all very well to lose the weight from my big fat arse but for it to come back on my upper checks is a bad joke indeed. Something must be done. Salads must be eaten.

So what have I been doing lately, you all cry? Well, I dunno. Can't really help you with your investigations there. The days slips by, congeal into weeks, then months... Go to work, come home, try not to fall asleep or get entrapped by the idiot TV, pick up a book, try to focus my mind on... um... what... no it's gone. Is it already August? Mid-August? Please, time, slow down, give me a moment to unwind, get my thoughts in order, or at least less befuddled or maybe even deranged in a useful manner. I want to write, to be able to sit down, blank out the distractions and gush wordy parenchyma as this blog seems to be the last creative opportunity left to me....

But anyroad-up, as they say in a magical, far-off kingdom....

Fourth week of work's now drawing to a close and the company has only been sold once in that time. Nineteen years they've ploughed their own course, one of the genuine garage startups except they never took a loan or investment from anyone, never went cap-in-hand to venture capitalists or the banks or over-extended themselves... but on Monday, a mere three weeks after I joined, the three founders did a multi-million dollar deal with another Austin computer company and will soon become a "wholy owned subsiduary" of a slightly bigger but public company. I think it was a merger, although I'm not sure how these things work. We had it all explained to us over a curious selection of chicken nuggets, kebabs, nachos, baguettes and strawberries in an upmarket sports bar but all the enthusiastic acronyms have already blurred. It may well turn out to be a good thing. All the benefits of joining a big company without the tiresome multi-part interview process and having to have my wee-wee tested. We will be moving, of course -- it's inevitable that any company I go to work for will relocate to the bleakest hinterlands before I have a chance to get comfortable. My three mile bus ride will become an eleven mile trek. I know I was travelling over ten times that distance each morning when I was working in Newcastle but things are diffferent and this is another country altogether, where public transport is considered a shameful throwback, something of a crime against nature in the land of the Hummer and the SUV. But I think I can still get there by bus, intractable deviant that I am, and if it take an extra hour it'll give me the chance to catch up on my reading....

Brief title change for a few days while I join in the fun.

A 12,812 worder -- you don't methodically count the wordage of every blog post? What kind of uncritical skimmer are you? -- from Marcello this morning, detailing every entry into the UK singles chart of 1982 and bringing him closer to what I suspect to be his Borgesian goal: to write about every piece of music ever recorded or performed in a single blog entry. Lots to chew over, for me especially, 1982 being a particularly poignant and poptastic year for me. I often suspect that much of my mental activity in the last two decades has been little more than a series of footnotes to the things I read, listened to and watched in the first three years of the eighties.

My only real quibble is with his uncritical enthusiasm for ABC, particularly "The Look of Love". Even at the time it struck me as overbaked, a towering edifice of everything the pop theorists of the time had decreed a perfect pop record ought to be, from the singer's haircut to the font on the record sleeve. It was the hymnal soul of Smokey Robinson crossed with the nonchalent heartbreak of Capitol era Sinatra with Blade Runner in the background. The shiny perfection of the record brought out my inner curmudgeonly TV cop, the crumpled old smoker who mutters "yes, it's perfect... perhaps a little too perfect" when everyone else is ready to call it day. The record was all structure, layered and versioned, self-contained in its own mythos of love and loss and yearning -- but at the center, once you got through the gorgeous strapwork and drapes there really wasn't anything there. The arrangement was overly busy like a MIDI keyboard's demo tune, dropping in all the standard Trevor Horne romantic curlicues of sax, piano and orchestral stabs, everything aligned and powered up but... but the song itself was a string of smart-ass jabs and cod-significance, willing itself to break your heart, daring you to declare yourself cold enough to see its inner void. It wasn't a cynical construction, everyone's goals were laudable, but it was just too knowing, too sure if its own totality -- taking its place in the post-romantic pop empyrean for granted. It was like having someone wink at you from start to finish. And the lyrics? "If you judge a book by the cover/then you judge a look by the lover/I hope you soon recover/Me, I go from one extreme to the other...." I was a romantic idiot searching for meaning in song lyrics and I always felt betrayed by lines that sounded elegant, sophisticated and able to guide my shabby spirit onward and upward but that crumbled to ponderous wordplay on examination....

$46,950,000.00 and counting.... That's how much has currently been contributed to the George W. Bush re-election campaign according to whitehouseforsale.org. Early days yet of course and plenty of time for patriotic Pioneers and Rangers to reach into their pockets and get it up to the essential $200,000,000 mark needed to ensure that the good work continues. Power to the people....

I was going to say "...but you don't have to be Johnny Morris to read something like..." back there regarding the overheated squirrels, but realized it probably wouldn't mean anything to 95% of the people reading this. (There is a Johnny Morris Road here in Austin, but I can't believe it's named after to the lugubrious zookeeper forever immortalized on the Bonzo's "Mr Slater's Parrot".) My references and metaphors are so last-century, so 1960's children's TV. Same with a reference I was going to make to Madonna's new version of "Into the Groove" in her Gap Ad reminding me of Peter Glaze in a Crackerjack musical finale, in which the poor old geezer had to struggle through a couple of then-current chart-toppers rewritten to fit in with the dreadful sketch he and Leslie Crowther would be performing. Hey, it seemed to make sense at the time.

PHEW WOT A SCORCHER!
Yesterday was the second hottest on record in Austin, so that's my excuse for not blogging. (That and collecting our new car -- it might be a boringly dependable family saloon meant for Bryan Adams fans to polish on a Sunday afternoon but it has air conditioning, a ceiling that doesn't sag, can get more than 10 miles out of town without the engine overheating and doesn't lose parts like a clown's car, so let's have none of you Alan Partridge types flexing your driving gloves and telling us what Extreme Motorist Monthly has to say about the "bland stylings" of the Camry, okay?) It got to 110F (43C), the highest for August here since records began, and only two degrees below the higher temperature ever recorded. The squirrels don't like it -- saw a few sprawled in the shadiest trees, arms and legs out, staring off into space. Animals may not be capable of facial expressions but you could read something like "Jeez, enough already" in these little guys' eyes. Spectacular lightning storms all around after dark when we were driving back from Alborz, our new favorite Persian restaurant out in the strip mall limbo of W. Anderson. We tipped our waitress big for talking us into having the ice cream when we hadn't intended to have dessert. Have you ever had ice cream made with saffron, rosewater, cardamon and pistachios? You have not lived. A shame they didn't have the belly dancer (apparently she's considered a little too raunchy for the family atmosphere the owner has built up so she only dances on certain nights) but we'll be back. With a credit card that doesn't get refused -- thank you very much, Royal bloody Bank of Scotland....

BUT WE'LL SEE
But we'll see.

TITLES
See, I'm thinking of giving each entry a title -- it seems to work for most other people.

THE NEW INTERLUDE
So I'm working again and it isn't shelfstacking at some ghastly, overlighted outpost of EvilCo as I was begining to fear might be my fate, but it still feels like a step toward How Things Should Be rather than that blessed state itself.

I'm glad XYZ isn't a dotcom startup and has been around for almost 20 years as it means the directors and old-times are at least as old as me and I don't feel entirely out of place, but it does feel very odd. my position is pretty much identical to the one I had a decade and a half ago in 1988 and allowing for inflation the pay is probably the same.

My career path has not been a smooth ever-upward rise to greatness as you may have noticed. It had taken me over ten years to get to that lowly 1988 position, including several false starts and plenty of genuines ends as I struggled to figure out that "what do I want to do with my life?" wasn't a question that could be answered with "drift aimlessly, read, sleep, listen to Confusion is Sex and what's it to you, anyway, mush?"

XYZ is a better company than the muppets I went to work for in 1988, however. They're not around anymore. I tried to find them on the web recently when I had one of those ridiculously thorough application forms to fill in and needed their postcode -- but the only thing Google could find was my own online resume. That was spooky and had me wonder if they had every really existed. I don't have any evidence that I worked for them. I've forgotten the exact dates. I sold a brief humorous article about working from them to a computing magazine -- but that magazine shut down a few years ago.

I don't know even remember why I went to work for them. The company I had been working for was prior to that was based in Clerkenwell, within walking distance or a couple of tube stops of everything that made London the place to be. Company meetings were usually held in a nearby champagne bar with smoked salmon canapes for nibbles. The people were cool, fun, smart. And I left that place to go work in a tower block in Tolworth....

I'm happy with my life now and much of the last decade and a half has been interesting and oh, much, much more, but I'm sure that was one of those crucial moments in time when the universe split in two -- in one I stayed at the software house in Clerkenwell, in the other I went to Tolworth. I'd like to know what happened in that other universe, get a postcard from the me who stayed in London, settled down there and is maybe now a fat, rich, unlovable manager or director, spending all his money on CDs and records in Berwick Street and solitary curries....

I lost the thread of that. I'll try again tomorrow.

I didn't want to mention that Madonna and Missy Eliot sparkly Gap jeans commercial as seeing it almost made me physically ill. (You'll be getting it in England in two weeks time so get the sickbags ready.) But it begs the question: What is Madonna for? What use is she now she's demonstrated how even the iconic and briefly superhuman can plunge headfirst and of their own volition into the pit of useless mediocrity? As a grim warning, I suppose, her role from now on to be our generation's Ozymandias, set in the wastes of celebrity self-regard, evidence that it isn't necessarily public fickleness that makes or breaks a star and her status.

I know I keep on saying I won't mention her again, but then she goes and pulls a stunt like this and it's hard to let it go by without railing and tearing out my remaining hairs, especially at the way she's dragging down one of her finest songs with her. It might all be fodder to her, the last thing she hasn't poluted, but her back catalog still matters -- and "Into the Groove" was everything that was sweet, catchy, positive and joyous not just about Madonna herself around that time but the vivid, optimistic world of danceable epiphanies she seemed to represent. You didn't really need Ciccone Youth to amplify that goosebump-inducing tagline of "Now I know you're mine!" at the end but it was cool that they recognised it and proclaimed it as one of the great moments of pop.

Madonna's own reworking of it for the Gap commercial is just a smouldering bag of poo, turning what was an ode to joy into a shill for tatty pants, a song that lifted the spirits into a jingle that deadens them. And for what? Glittery chainstore cords, the sort even Mariah Carey probably wouldn't be seen dead in... Oh, has it really come to this? Geri Halliwell wasn't available? WalMart weren't hiring?

Missy Elliot's role in this infamy doesn't trouble me. She just breezes through, like on all those so-so records she guests on. And it isn't as if it's "Work it" that's being shat on.

Maddy, Maddy, what are we going to do with you? With another 40 years lifespan left and maybe 30 seconds of credibility and talent remaining the rest ought to be silence....

I don't know what to make of this from today's Statesman:

Better watch out, Dick Cheney, President Bush keeps puckering up to polished pates....

Possibly the only article you'll read today that mentions George W. Bush, Benny Hill and William Blake in the same paragraph. (And feel free to insert a joke about how he's different to Tony Blair because he only kisses.... oh finish it yourself...)

Bought a car tonight. It had to happen. It reached about 104 degrees effing F outside (dipped to 99F at 8pm, the lovely Weather Pixie tells me) and the heap we had doesn't have anything resembling air conditioning. We've got a gently pre-owned (as they say here) Toyota Something-beginning-with-C waiting for us up in North Austin tomorrow.

Anyway, one of the salesman at the dealership was called Richard Tull. Just a literary reference for those of us who didn't give up on Martin Amis until after The Information....

I've been feeling both angry and defeated over the last week or so as I make my way through Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. I keep going online to check things that he's written, not sure if I want to believe them, half-hoping that the plots, scams and just plain arrogant shittiness of politicians, businessmen and crooks -- if you'll pardon the tautology -- he's uncovered are paranoid fantasies. And then when I find out they're true and discover more details about them I feel angrier and even more stymied. Angry at myself for knowing about half the stuff the book discusses but not really paying attention to what it meant. Stymied because... well, what can anyone do about it? It's impossible to keep up with what's going on, let alone take a stand. And when the alternatives to the bad guys turn out to only be less bad because they haven't had the opportunity to be worse....

Yeah, I got the work "haecceity" from k-punk. But it's the sort of word I used to know, although never got to use in conversation, when I was a young whippersnapper set on increasing my wordpower in non-Readers' Digestable ways. (I was an autodidact with all the associated problems. Do you know how old I was before I discovered that the Goethe I'd read -- Part One of Faust, anyway, while pushing a trolley around a warehouse --was the same geezer as the "Gurter" I heard about on Radio 3?) It means "the quality that makes a thing describable as 'this'," according to the SOED, and I'm sure you've all been looking for a word like does that. Slip it into the conversation with your boss tomorrow when he sez something about "sexing up the client-facing market-offerings" and see him cower at your superior logodaedaly.

Oh deary me. Has Martin Amis finally lost it? Tibor Fischer gets a sneak peek at his forthcoming novel and can't bring himself to say how bad it is. It's a sad day but it's been on the cards for a while -- when a novelist puts out five non-novel duds (Night Train was barely more than a short story) in a row, you can't help but suspect he and the muse aren't as cosy as they used to be. I don't care what revisionists, self-publicists and bloggers who've read too much Lacan say -- from The Rachel Papers to The Information, he was the kiddie and his novels caught the warp and weave of the times, even if they did view them from a repeated, specific location (posh boy slumming it in NW8), but something is -- ha, ha -- amiss. The Amazon synopsis of Yellow Dog bodes even worse than Fischer's saddened report. (Via Splinters, Maud Newton and other fine emporiums of literary stuff.)

Each time William Gibson comes out with a new book and everyone sez it's his best yet I tell myself that I'm not going to bother reading it because I know I'll be disappointed. But I keep on telling myself that he's bound to get it right one day and manage to either pull together some believable characters and a plot that holds all the way to the end or else discard traditional novelistic devices all together and return to something impressionistic and mindblowing like The Difference Engine. So I end up reading each one as it comes out and find myself even more pissed off and annoyed at the end.

Pattern Recognition is his most vapid yet, starting off like watered-down DeLillo and ending up as a bog-standard post-glasnov espionnage thriller only without any thrills. The fevered, hallucinogenic haecceity that made Neuromancer so much more than just a glorious blend of Jack Vance and Robert Stone is little more than a hint in the first half and fades away entirely by the end. The book feels old, like picking up a five year old copy of Wired. I wanted to like it, really, and the middle section, where it just seems to drop the rather weedy main plotline and just ambles about in Camden and Toyko with moderately engaging nerds of all nations has a directionless Douglas Coupland-like charm, but the ending is so flat and mundane it renders the whole story entirely pointless and blah. Oh well, Bill... maybe next time -- but probably not.

Talking of the Mallard Fillmore of the ursine set, it was fun to see him gulp back the tears and try to rephrase George Bush's pronouncement about gay marriage...

I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman. And I think we ought to codify that one way or the other. And we've got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.

...in order to tell us what the Commander-in-Chief of the Free World really meant. Lesser souls might have taken the Resident's words as a cruel kick in the pants, but after all the swoony mash-notes he's sent his way, Sullivan really has no choice but to press on with his unrequited love. And as yet Bush hasn't said anything about getting lawyers to look into that.

But there is someone who knows even less about economics than I do, of course: Andrew "wars are good for economies" Sullivan.

Whoever came up with the term Perrymandering deserves a drink and a kiss.

Off the Kuff has a special Texas Redistricting and associated fiascos section for all your Governor Goodhair Vs the Killer D needs. Useful stuff when your new job doesn't give you time to browse the editorials in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal....

I wish I understood economics -- but at the same time I wish economists did too. Reading this piece in today's New York Times, Job Losses in July Add to Mixed Economic Signs leads me to believe that what most economists do is produce vast swathes of figures each month and then ignore them in favor of what that they "feel" the economy is up to.

The economy grew at an average annual rate of 2.4 percent in the second quarter, and economists guessed that it might have accelerated to a pace of 4 percent by the end of June. Such a rate, if sustained, is considered strong enough to spur hiring. Yet in July, the jobs did not appear.

"Guessed"? "Might"? "If?" It must be pretty cool to have a well-paid job in the city where half your time is spent guessing and the other half making up excuses for why you were wrong.

Robert V. DiClemente, "chief United States economist" at Citigroup is probably a hoot at the office party:

"These large declines across the board in all these factory industries — it doesn't ring true," he said. "The fact that they're so uniformly depressed is what raises the flag. Maybe there's something here in the summertime seasonal patterns that eluded a good read."

What? "It doesn't ring true" is the kind of statement that only Quincy could get away with and at least he'd back it up each week by shouting at his boss, putting his "job on the line" and risking his career by getting the results that escaped the regular cops. Economists just sit back and hope everyone forgets what they said last month or last quarter or blame it on "confusing" figures and "unusual seasonal factors" if anyone does want to know why they're so hopelessly wrong.

And "unusual seasonal factors"? Correct me if I'm wrong but haven't we been having seasons for quite a while now? Shouldn't these guys be prepared for these annual fluxuations and factor them into their calculations? Even a dumb piece of software adjusts my computer's clock for summertime every year without any fuss -- it doesn't launch a popup saying "My internal clock appears to be wrong, if we assume that every other computer in the world is right -- and the fact that they're all uniformly right raises a flag -- but as this might have something to do with unusual seasonal factors I'm going to ignore it...."

Opera 7 has built-in pop-up protection but I've only just noticed that instead of refusing all pop-ups you can set it so it only refuses automatic pop-ups. If you click on links that cause pop-ups they work as normal. This means you can turn off all the crappy ads but still open comment boxes and the like. This is a good thing, although the fact that it has taken me so long to find the option (under File|Quick Preferences -- it isn't like they were hiding it) makes me wonder what other goodies there might be. Now I have no excuse not to comment on every blog I read -- or take heed of the comments in mine....

Suddenly being without music all day is a drag. Hearing the sound of office chatter in its place is a novelty, especially as I'm surrounded by hyperactive brainy computer experts who all seem to know more about every database and data format than the human mind is surely meant to know. Of course, they're all about 80 years younger than me, so they haven't had to learn and unlearn as much as me, they haven't got so much useless padding in their brains, stuff that will only ever get used by freakish mischance. I suspect that nothing I learned in the first three quarters of my life, except of the basic breathing and "don't eat anything bigger than your head" variety, is of any use to anyone anymore except for maybe nostalgia purposes. I'm sure I could get instant respect if I played the old fart act and regaled them with tales of punched cards, teletype machines and disc drives the size of washing machines.... and did I tell you about the day I punched Charles Babbage?

I am old... but I wish I felt wise, sage and contented, mellow like some avuncular geezer with his pipe an slippers and Werther toffees. I just feel horribly aware that each day I know less and wish I understood more.

I managed to enchant Stacey a few nights ago by telling her about the X-Ray machines they used to have in shoe shops. Halfway through telling here I found myself wondering if it were true, if such an insane misuse of dangerous technology could really have been commonplace in the late 60s and had to go online to find evidence at the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. There was even one for auction on e-bay. I was glad I found it, although the sight of it reminded me of ducking stools and pillories and all the historical stuff we like to keep around to show how far we've moved on. Hee hee, you young us don't know you're born! Back in my day we used to blast yer tootsies with radiation just for fun! The one on e-bay only fetched a couple of hundred bucks. If we had a house, a proper American sitcom sized house, it's the sort of curiousity I'd love to have around. And I'm sure with a few modifications and a step-up transformer you could have some real fun on Halloween....

This is the Tex-Mex I don't intend to try: Barbacoa de Cabeza. I've eaten some weird stuff in my time but the words "removing eyes, ears, etc" never bode well in a recipe. Or anywhere else for that matter, except maybe instructions for putting Mr Potatohead away. Although I have to admit that any breakfast recipe that involves digging a two foot deep hole in the ground has to be admired for sheer effort.

Well, the temperature hit 100F today and everything in Austin melted into one big pool of shiny gloop. This is the sort of weather that makes me glad I lost all that weight last year -- and haven't put too much of it back on despite pigging out lately and feeling a bit jowly as a result. When we first came here we'd share something when we went out for a meal and sometimes it was only an apetizer. We would feel most righteous doing this. But now we've started to admit the existence of the desert menu. We fell entirely off the wagon and shared a piece of pecan fudge pie -- with a touch of chili, for some reason-- a la mode last week at Z-Tejas to celebrate my first week of work and I woke up the next day weighing seven pounds more than I did a couple of weeks before.

I don't want to be a fat man again. I want to lose the weight I put back on and maybe three more pounds after that to bring me to a healthy 160 pounds. (I'd say "a nice round figure" but you'd only split your sides laughing.) That will put me at 47 pounds lighter than my maximum trouser-damaging, ping!-there-goes-my-collar-button bulk. And then I want to stay between 160 and 165. But I want to do that by eating healthily and exercising, not by dieting. I don't want to have to spend the rest of my life watching my weight and skipping anything fried and covered in mayonaisse, but I suspect my sluggish metabolism means I'll have to. Every morning I will have to get on the scales and my food intake for the day will depend on what I see.

After I lost a lot of weight the first time (about ten years ago) and started to put it back on (About nine years and ten months ago) I took drastic action -- I removed the scales not from my eyes but from the bathroom and hurled them into the attic. I can remember doing this, thinking I can either admit that I'm getting fat again or I can throw away the bathroom scales. It was a rational decision, calmly undertaken. Logic prevailed. The scales had made me 13 pounds fatter so they had to be punished and put where they could not be so mean to me again.

That must never happen again. I keep hearing people say how much harder it is to lose weight and get into shape as you get older and it's usually people who are ten years younger than me who are saying it. I didn't have much problem losing this last lot of weight but next time could be the time when it stays, when the big belly winks back up at me and sez "I'm here for good, pal".