BROOKS INTERFERENCE

David Brooks, in his role of The New York Times’ reasonable conservative columnist, showed again today that he’s just playing a role. In assessing the results and reasoning behind the Bush administration’s tax cuts, he writes:

Their first answer, not surprisingly, is that you have to understand the reality that confronted them when they took office in 2001. Business leaders were calling in to say that economic activity was falling off a cliff. The dot-com bubble was over, manufacturing was getting hit, business confidence was plummeting. Before it became a general concern in the papers, administration folks were worrying that the U.S. might go through a Japanese-style stagnation. Deflation was an unlikely but scary possibility.

They decided to do what was necessary to head off any immediate catastrophe. As Stephen Friedman, director of the National Economic Council, sums it up, “We didn't want to err on the light side when it comes to stimulus.” Hence, the large tax cuts.

Brooks’ aw-shucks pose ignores that there were three rounds of tax cuts. It also, improbably, tries to suggest he isn’t aware that the tax cuts were planned long before Bush took office and that there were no circumstances in which tax cuts wouldn’t have been proposed. (I’m looking at a clipping from a Jan. 6, 2000, Washington Post that ran under the heading “Campaign 2000.” The lead of the story, by Terry M. Neal, says: “Confronted with an unexpectedly strong challenge from Arizona Sen. John McCain, George W. Bush has narrowed his message almost exclusively to the need for a broad-based tax cut.” So it wasn’t calls to the White House that sparked the idea to cut taxes, although calls to the Times could spark the idea to cut the disingenuous Brooks.)

It was my intention to post solely on this topic today, but I had the misfortune to visit Talking Points Memo to find, tragically, a far better posting than I could do on this very topic. So I may as well refer you to the Memo and wander on a bit to a new thought:

How, exactly, does the extravagantly incompetent Bush administration get away with this stuff? Their bluff on tax cuts has been called several times, in prominent places and by prominent voices, including:

By The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, who noted on Jan. 11, 2000, that Bush “can’t imagine circumstances in which he wouldn’t cut taxes ... After a few economic cycles, the government wouldn’t have a dime. Maybe that’s the point.”

By the Financial Times in 2003, in its much-quoted indictment that “The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum ... a fiscal crisis offers the tantalizing prospect of forcing [social services] cuts through the back door.”

By New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on May 27, 2003, when he notes the cost of the tax cuts “are so large that the nation can’t possibly afford it while keeping its other promises ... the people now running America aren’t conservatives: they’re radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need.”

It is astounding that Brooks has the guts to pass on the Bush administration line without pause or qualification. But it is more astounding that the Bush administration can speak it at all, and that’s not Brooks’ fault. It’s ours.

A RHODE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Providence presents itself well, at least in spring and summer, when brilliant landscapes and dramatic Waterfire events make one forget its ongoing corruption problems and the crack habit nibbling at the edges of its downtown.

But in keeping with my tradition of critiquing saplings to avoid the grandeur of a forest, I found one thing worth ribbing the city about (that is, aside from the cutesy references to being “downcity” as opposed to “downtown”): Where Westminster and Eddy streets meet, visitors will be thrilled to find a store conveniently combining the wares of Dress Barn and Dress Barn Woman -- which implies what? That plain ol’ Dress Barn is for men?

Actually, Dress Barn is for females and Dress Barn Woman is a coy way of marketing to the “plus-size market,” or females wearing sizes 14 to 24. But this doesn’t impress me, because I have a tendency to sneer at any commerce that sells the delicate and precious by transplanting it into the cold and industrial: The Cheesecake Factory. Lingerie Mart Warehouse. The Dress Barn.

It’s like, why not eat tonight at, you know, The Souffle Sweatshop?

NOT MUCH MATERIAL TO WORK WITH

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has put Adam Yahiye Gadahn, 25, at the top of its list of people suspected of helping terrorists commit mayhem around the world.

Gadahn is one of those lost boys who found himself in Islam -- that most gentle of religions, which he celebrated by, according to Orange County police, punching a mosque elder when he critiqued the kid’s work skills. An even better contradiction is from today’s New York Times, which passes on an image of Gadahn as “seeking a simpler and less materialistic life than he had found in California.”

That life was as a child of a goat farmer and carpenter who “lived an isolated life ... ‘off the grid,’ relatives said, seldom watching television or using a telephone.”

Kids! Never satisfied.

THE HARVARDER THEY COME, THE HARVARDER THEY FALL

Ah, academia. Thine contradictions shine down from thine ivory towers.

In this case, it’s about the Internet, where a Harvard employee’s blog has caused a bit of executive panic -- or is it just payback? -- with its cartoonish threats of violence. (“I am one shade lighter than homicidal today. I am 2 snotty emails from professors away from bombing the entire Harvard campus” being one of the suddenly more infamous postings of the employee, Amy Norah Burch.)

It’s hard to take such threats seriously, especially when you catch the tone of the fun Web site -- annoyyourfriends.com -- through which the blog is reached.

Since it’s unlikely even the most literal-minded Harvard academic could take the threats seriously, payback is the obvious motivation behind Burch’s firing. Check out this extended, and hilarious, rant:

I Officially despise my stupid job now. I hate it more than anything. It is driving me crazy. I just don't give a shit about it on any level. I've been looking for a new job for a while now, but I'm going to triple my search efforts. I cannot work for those losers anymore. Anya with her random freaking out, Sarah with her anal retentive control freakishness, the stupid professors who think they are so important there is no need to follow little simple instructions to make my life easier... I swear, someday I'm going to find every single Senior Faculty member and force them to take a test-- one that in all their learned, educated smartness, they will be sure to fail. It will involve loading a stapler, following some simple instructions, like writing 5 sentences about something, printing it out, and putting their name on it. I bet none of them would be able to do it. Just FOLLOW THE GODDAMN INSTRUCTIONS, PEOPLE! IT'S REALLY NOT THAT HARD! Oh yeah. The clincher is that they'd have to do it all by a certain deadline, and they would get points deducted for every minute it was late.

Grrr. My stupid job makes me want to club baby seals to death with severed pony legs.

Burch advertised her blog, so it was inevitable this stuff would get out, but there’s a long and honored history of people hating their bosses -- and bosses knowing it. Burch’s blog is being used as an excuse to fire her, and one no less dishonorable than reading someone’s diary, even if it’s left lying around.

It is sad to see an institution such as Harvard seize upon dubious threats of violence as cause for firing, considering the school’s combined intellectual capacity. But there’s an oddly funny coda to the story in its appearance in The Harvard Crimson, a daily newspaper with a good Web presence put out by the technology-savvy young geniuses at the school.

The tech-savvy young geniuses used the headline “Online Weblog Leads To Firing” -- you know, as opposed to all the Weblogs being created somewhere other than the World Wide Web.

CHANNELING THEIR ANGER

Christian groups are predictably freaking out over MTV’s plans to start a cable-television channel for gays and lesbians. The Traditional Values Coalition is mounting a boycott of anyone who might advertise on the channel, which will be called Logo, The New York Times reports.

“Madison Avenue has gone amok,” said the coalition’s leader, the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, and some person over at Focus on the Family warned, also predictably, that Logo will seduce children into the gay lifestyle. “I really am sad and fearful for these kids who are going to want to be as happy and as happy-go-lucky as Will is on ‘Will and Grace,’” said the guy, Mike Healey.

Healey, who says he was gay for 12 years, did not disclose what television show it was he watched that made him so.

As sad and fearful as anyone is when faced with the possibility that kids will want to be happy or even happy-go-lucky, it is difficult to take the Christians’ consternation seriously. Logo will be on cable, for one thing, and religious programming — primarily Christian — has long had a home in most markets on free TV.

Frequently, religious programming is one of the few channels to come in without an antenna, so anyone can watch its tedious tales of redemption and miracles, and usually for 24 hours a day. Yet you rarely hear atheists, or gays, for that matter, getting worked up over children being seduced by TV into a Christian lifestyle.

Healey’s full quote, for the record, includes fears for “a kid who is looking to fit in, and here you have a network that looks very inviting, very accepting, and this young kid is going to get a false representation of what homosexuality has to offer.”

Any kid who becomes gay because he wants to fit in pretty much gets what he deserves.

The same goes for any kid who becomes a Christian for the same reason. But isn’t it odd that Christians consider the gay lifestyle to be so much more seductive than theirs?

MILITARY GENIUS

From the speech President Bush gave last night at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.:

The swift removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime last spring had an unintended effect. Instead of being killed or captured on the battlefield, some of Saddam’s elite guards shed their uniforms and melted into the civilian population.

These elements of Saddam’s repressive regime and secret police have reorganized, rearmed and adopted sophisticated terrorist tactics. They’ve linked up with foreign fighters and terrorists. In a few cities, extremists have tried to sow chaos and seize regional power for themselves.

Unintended? It’s like saying a loud noise is an unintended effect of blowing something up.

STIFFED

Back trouble has frozen my body into an unnatural shape, bent at the spine, and, horrifyingly, I can feel it protesting. There is growing tension midback on the left, just below the shoulder blade. The lower back on the right is creased with dull pain.

Fortunately, Tufts-New England Medical Center has sprung to my aid, immediately setting up an appointment with the doctor who will save me from this.

For two weeks from now.

In the meantime, I have giant ibuprofen to shrink whatever it is putting pressure on my nerve and a muscle relaxant to take when I go to sleep. Since I don’t like taking drugs, though, I couldn’t resist sneaking up to my future doctor’s office to petition for an earlier visit. Like, today. Like, now.

But the receptionists were like, no way.

“Two weeks is good,” they told me. “Usually people have to wait a month to get seen.”

“A month?” I asked bitterly, picturing myself gnarled and palsied. “What happens to the patients during that month?”

The good news is that the receptionists called a couple of hours later to offer me time with another doctor -- tomorrow. (Mysteriously, this doctor had two openings in one day, which repeats an experience I had last time I was medically needy: It’s absolutely, without question, impossible to get you in quickly. But we happen to have times available now and now and now and now and now and now.)

HEALTH SCARE INDUSTRY

My back has sent me into what I hope is a health crisis, because crises are short by nature, and I can’t take too much of this -- partly because back problems bring interaction with doctors, which brings doctor problems. These started immediately.

The receptionist asked me whether I was calling for a “physical or a follow-up.”

I told her I didn’t understand the question. So of course she repeated it.

“It’s not a physical or a follow-up,” I said. “This is a new emergency, a new problem.”

She explained that “anything that’s not a physical is a follow-up.”

To her credit, she sounded slightly embarrassed saying it, but to me the explanation was the sound of doom -- the same prolonged, harrying buzz that accompanied the 30-second diagnosis giving me arthritis when I really had flat feet, or that sent me off to a pain-management center that tried to delay treating my pain as long as possible.

I’m not looking forward to this.

WAISTED ON THE YOUNG

So teenagers are having less unprotected sex and drinking and smoking less. Good for them, right? But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say those risky behaviors have been replaced by “obesity, poor diet and a lack of exercise.”

For God’s sake, kids. That’s no tradeoff. Get with it.

POORER SQUARE

Work began this week on improvements to street-level elements of the Porter Square T stop, the beginning of not-dramatic-enough changes to the square itself. Typical of Porter (which is also getting -- brace yourself -- a Radio Shack), the changes are more about traffic patterns than making Porter a destination rather than an efficient way to run errands. The thought must be: Why bother, when Davis and Harvard are so close?

To get a sense of the tragic low expectations of Porter Square, my home, compare its Web site with that of Harvard Square or even Central Square.

Oh, God, it’s so embarrassing. The last update appears to be from some time last summer.

FUNK OFF

Cambridge has been annexed by The Improper Bostonian in its “30 Reasons Why We Love Boston,” a list that includes Harvard Square.

Before you start whining that Harvard Square is in Cambridge, not Boston, the piece reads, let’s get one thing straight: Cambridge is just an outcropping of Boston. In fact, when Harvard was founded, the area surrounding it was referred to simply as “the new land” until -- lacking a sense of urgency or originality -- our forefathers named the land for an English university town and were done with it.

Having spent about a third of the text justifying their decision, the Improper editors go on to extol the delights of the square, summing up that “It’s still got the funk.”

Thanks. But the compliments are backhanded and inspire biting, especially since the Improper is abusing history in its desperation to justify the inclusion. Cambridge had the name “Newtowne,” not the general description “the new land,” when Harvard was founded, so there was no urgency to change it. It’s not like the villagers were just moping around for eight years, fitfully trying to come up with a name but failing through lack of stick-to-itiveness.

Further, the city was not and is not an outcropping of Boston (which was eight miles away when Cambridge was founded, so even the geological metaphor doesn’t work) and calling it one is about as meaningful as calling Somerville an outcropping of Cambridge.

If pointing out a geographical or historical inaccuracy is “whining,” certainly the editors of The Improper Bostonian would reject this philosophical objection as well. So be it. But if they’re going to hang out in Boston’s Harvard Square, I’m going to abandon it for Cambridge’s Davis Square.

If that keeps up, pretty soon they’ll find themselves not so welcome in Quincy’s Copley Square.

OBSERVED

In the parking lot of the CVS in Belmont’s Cushing Square. Eleven in the morning. A dark green Mitsubishi Eclipse -- flashy, low to the ground. A look-at-me car. A bumper sticker, white on black: HONK TWICE IF YOU WANT TO FUCK! Parked in a handicapped space.

Getting a ticket.

IT'S THE STUPID, ECONOMY

Now that the stock market is generally rising and there's been several months of job creation, the country is finally pessimistic about the economy, even panicking at the first hint of inflation.

Bizarre, I thought, until reminded that the price of gasoline is well above $2 a gallon -- and suddenly this seems to be the only factor that counts. I was slow to catch on because I don't drive; while I notice the high prices, it's with the same distant alarm with which I notice cigarette smokers coughing.

The timing is still counterintuitive, as there are certainly other economic indicators to be considered. By now, everyone knows that when gas prices rise, it's possible to beat it back through conservation. For instance, buying something other than a sport utility vehicle to drive. Indeed, although most media reports on gas costs show drivers plan to keep buying, The New York Times has reported that sales of the Hummer are lagging badly.

It's a start, I suppose, but there's no getting around the fact that when the economy picks up is a stupid time to start getting cynical. Numbers on Iraq are only dropping now that things are obviously bad, so why the divergence in reaction on the nation's fiscal health?

Probably the same wrong-headed groupthink that has the nation terrified of tax-and-spend liberals and believing that Republicans are strict guardians of the public pocketbook.

That's why, depressingly, as President Bush's numbers on the economy and Iraq plummet, I grow increasingly convinced that the idiot will be re-elected. This is not an electorate on which one can count for sound reasoning.

OFFSHORE THING

Cambridge’s Forrester Research says the offshoring of jobs to lower-wage countries is accelerating -- 830,000 jobs gone by 2005, a 40 percent jump from its projections last year.

The jobs are no longer just technology related, but growing to include white-collar stuff: research and accounting and such.

But the long-term numbers haven’t changed significantly, the company points out. About 3.4 million jobs will be gone to India and such counties by 2016, rather than the 3.3 million it predicted in its last report.

That is a relief. Regardless, it may make sense to move to India, China, Brazil and whatnot to look for work after 2015. You won’t get paid as much as you would working in the states, but at least you’ll be working.

FURTHER, FATHER

The cliche is that if you’re not a liberal when you’re 20, you have no heart, but if you’re still a liberal when you’re 50, you have no brain.

Nonsense. Today I celebrate my father, who remains a thoughtful and brainy liberal despite having just turned 71.

When I was a child he experimented with alternative lifestyles in a 1970s way and lived social justice in a 1960s way, and he led us to nudist parks as well as kept us on our block in Gardena when all the other white families had fled.

Now he quietly blasts the conservatives and votes accordingly, resisting the urges that lead the comfortable to ensure their own comfort at, inevitably, the cost of others. His retirement (from aerospace, of all illiberal things) brought him back to performing magic, but instead of hanging around at The Magic Castle swilling cocktails he drives weekly to a hospital to do magic as therapy for patients -- getting neurons to fire and synapses connect in the heads of the hurt and recovering.

Instead of calcifying, my father’s getting more flexible. He recently healed tremendous personal rifts through tremendous effort, which surely demanded him to question and modify deeply ingrained behavior. His appetites, including an addiction to smoking, threatened his life decades ago, but only recently he beat those, too. These things needed strength and a willingness to question the order of things, include others and see behind emotional traps that I think of as being, in the best sense, liberal traits.

As a child, of course, I was unable to appreciate those traits, or at least their precursors, as I had no context. As an adult, I appreciate those things immensely, with no shortage of envy.

AH, RELIGION

A line I still can’t shake from yesterday’s New York Times:

As Mr. Berg screamed, the man believed to be Mr. Zarqawi put a knife to his neck as others yelled, “God is Great!”

Because God loves a beheading. Especially of an innocent.

YOU ARE OBSESSED WITH MINUTIAE.

Recent visits to Chinese restaurants present great mysteries:

First, what happened to hot mustard? I remember quite clearly visiting fancier Chinese restaurants in my youth (fancier meaning a stab at exoticism, overwhelming red, thick menus with tassels and gaudy, gold-plated decor) and being served delicate little platters of a sweet red sauce and hot mustard arranged in a culinary yin-yang. The red sauce was a waste; our table would lunge for the mustard, quickly depleting it and just as quickly asking for more. This was given grudgingly, again with the red sauce, throughout the meal until the waiters finally gave up and brought an entire dish or two of the yellow. Inevitably, we would be finishing by then and leave the small platters virtually untouched, which surely had them gnashing their teeth at the servers’ station.

The mustard still comes with dim sum, and they still are stingy with it. But it has been years since I’ve been treated to the more-mustard-please ritual at lunch and dinner, although almost everything else about these sumptuous Chinese restaurants remains. (Except for those red-speckled almond cookies, but I shrug off their disappearance as an economic consideration. I’m guessing fortune cookies are cheaper and more, um, fun. But there was a time, children, when at the end of a Chinese meal you got both kinds of cookies!)

The second mystery involves white rice. It’s parceled out with such stinginess at Asian restaurants that one would almost suspect it was worth something, rather than being the staple food of 67 percent of the Earth’s population, much of it impoverished. Dinner a few hours ago was $26 for a single plate of food (honey-glazed walnut jumbo shrimp), a glass of merlot and rice for two, and I suspect it was the rice that was priced obscenely. If the shrimp hadn’t been so good, perhaps I’d have been paying more attention to the fact that my wallet was being raped.

I’ve been told that in Asian nations, rice is the main dish and the meats, sauces, vegetables and so on are frills offered to soften the hard fact that you’re having rice again, as you have every day, for every meal, for your entire life. Here it’s the other way around, in an insupportably frustrating way, but it points out far removed from China our Chinese food is.

Fortune cookies were invented in Los Angeles in the early 1900s and apparently are still unpopular in China. (A wise people.) General Tso’s chicken was probably invented in the 1970s in New York. Chop suey at least stretches back to the 1800s, but was still first made in the United States.

I’d give them all up for some damn rice. And some hot mustard.

And maybe some more honey-glazed walnut jumbo shrimp.

Hmm. I’m hungry again.

SERIOUS LIKE A FOX

I could have sworn that a few minutes ago FOX-25 flashed an ad onscreen for its nightly news that said, among other things, it had “serious reporting.”

This is kind of sad, like a restaurant offering “edible food,” and not the first time Fox has gotten a little silly with its commercials. The last time I paid attention, which is admittedly years ago, the ads were touting “Fox undercover,” with images of reporter Michael Beaudet (a fellow Emersonian!) chasing after people with camera and microphone and asking incisive questions. (“When did you stop beating your wife?” being the tone.)

When the Boston Herald had a union demonstration and a Fox camera crew showed up to cover it, I asked its members, in a manner full of fellowship and good cheer, whether they would speak to their higher-ups about the ads. They were unsure what I meant.

“Well, you see him running around with a microphone,” I said. “That’s not undercover.”

“It’s investigative reporting,” they said, a little testily.

“Sure, but investigative, undercover — not synonymous,” I said.

I can’t remember where the conversation went from there. It went nowhere good.

But it proves one thing: Fox really does have “serious reporting.” Very serious, indeed. No sense of humor at all.

AT&T SUCKS!

This is what I’ve been trying to tell everyone.

LIGHT CONVERSATION

The tanning salon in the Porter Exchange advertises its services, at least on one poster, as “heliotherapy” -- which is used to treat what? Morbid lack of skin cancer? But this self-serving pseudoscientific phrase is used all over by the tanning industry.

“Of course you love the way you look with a beautiful tan, but did you know that regular exposure to UV light could help you live a longer, healthier life?” one Web site asks. “It is recognized that sunburn and long-term UV-overexposure can cause premature aging of the skin and skin cancer. However, there is no proof that moderate tanning is harmful.”

Nor is there, unfortunately, proof that there is such a thing as moderate tanning.

Still, better heliotherapy than paleontology, right?

GUARD DAMN

The abuses at Abu Ghraib reminded my brother of the experiment in which subjects were randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards. The experiment, held at Stanford University in 1973, became so brutal and ugly so quickly that it was called off after six days, rather than the two weeks it was intended to last.

The lead scientist, Philip Zimbardo, said “it had passed beyond the point of being an experiment -- it had, in fact, become a prison for all of the participants, even the experimenters,” according to Raven & Rubin’s second-edition Social Psychology text.

Here’s an overview of the experiment. Here’s Zimbardo’s own, lengthier account.

IT’S NECK AND NECK

The Methodists who want to split the church over gay rights must work harder. The church’s General Conference voted 869-41 yesterday against splitting, The New York Times says, but the conservatives are going to keep trying for divorce.

“They say the church is so deeply divided over homosexuality that the ‘covenant’ that holds it together has already been broken,” the Times reports.

Deeply divided, yes. Like a pitcher’s mound in Kansas towers over the rest of the state.

METHODISTINCTIONS

The United Methodist Church is looking a little less united, The New York Times says, with conservative members gathering votes for an eventual split over the inclusion of homosexual parishioners.

The last time the church split was “over slavery in 1844, but [it] reunited in 1939.” One would think that would tell the conservatives something, but it means nothing to such members as the Rev. Dr. William Hinson, who wants the schism.

“There is a great gulf fixed between those of us who are centered on Scripture and our friends who are of another persuasion. Repeatedly they have spoken of the need to get our church in step with our culture. We, on the other hand, have no desire to be the chaplain to an increasingly godless society,” he said.

The first comment is interesting, considering he’s talking about fellow church members and worshipers. The second is odd, considering he appears to be closing the door to Methodism.

BEATING US

Who could believe we were God’s chosen? Those swarthy heathens in Iraq seem to be besting us in public relations as well as in the battle over Iraq and its people’s hearts and minds. While the world recoils at U.S. and British treatment of Iraqi and Afghan prisoners, the Iraqis prove themselves more clever. Compare the Army’s investigation of prisoner abuse, for instance, with this text from The Associated Press about Thomas Hamill, the American held hostage for about a month in Iraq and recently found in good health:

Hamill was shot in the arm and struck in the head with a rifle butt when his convoy was ambushed on April 9. He underwent surgery that cleaned away dead tissue after about a week in captivity, though it’s unclear whether he was taken to a clinic or a doctor came to him, [a U.S. doctor] told reporters. His bandages were changed daily and he got antibiotics.

His English-speaking captors initially “left him with some water and a couple packages of cookies,” [the doctor] said. “He did say he was fed regularly.”

No beatings reported. No sexual humiliation. No torture -- even though it’s doubtful the Iraqi captors had extensive training in the rules of the Geneva Convention, which so far has been the primary lame excuse offered by this country for the actions of its soldiers.

ON BROADWAY

The Broadway T stop isn’t striking in art or architecture and only notable geographically because it’s the gateway to South Boston -- area Irish flock to it annually to provide a harbinger of spring: slightly skanky girls underdressed for persistent cold in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. Figuring illicit beer will keep them warm.

Behind an anonymous side door in the unremarkable station, though, a hint of horror: On the dark far wall of an access tunnel, an unprettified, ill-lit area of dank concrete, someone has painted in rough white: “YOU’VE BEEN RAPED.”

The ramp’s ugliness is mildly disturbing, revealing the white-tiled walls and efficient escalators as a facade. But the painted message is oddly powerful, and I would not want to walk into darkness to be confronted by it. The rape could be metaphorical, certainly, even a union complaint, but its anger is obvious.

These reminders keep popping up. The “Stop rape” spray painted on Porter Square construction, now poorly painted over, or the “Rape happens at Harvard” button on a purse seen whisked into the crowd at the Harvard Square T stop. Jarring, briskly tragic hints. Fury imposed on functionality, behind a facade.

“COUPLE” RUNNETH OVER

To ease back into blogging, I’ll see whether everyone followed my advice about using the Misanthropicity links. If not, go back and read a bit of Waterbones, which has been brilliant lately, albeit for tragic reasons, and 3Jake, which continues to delight and surprise. For purposes of illustration, I’ll even steal some 3Jake on her job as high school guidance counselor and source of cheap candy:

When boys get dumped it hits hard. Really hard. Even though the girls are the ones that cry the loudest and the longest -- the boys just sit and look at you. They feel utterly alone and have no idea what to do. They don’t understand why. They don’t understand how. They don’t eat candy. They just stare. Until at some point, they just nod and leave your office. I wish that I knew how to help the boys more. I wish they would eat more candy.

The best thing I can post now is this orange line sign seen Sunday returning from a party in Jamaica Plain. (The party included a trip to Triple D’s bar that was notably bookended by one person carrying in a contraband can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and another, acting independently, carrying out a glass of merlot.) Having been taken in twice in the recent past by viral marketing cons about the paranormal, this is all the more remarkable for being real:

Harvard brain study at the VA Medical Center

Do you believe you have ESP, telepathy, or a “sixth sense”? Do you have anxiety or discomfort in situations with unfamiliar people? Do you have few close friends? Do you mistake noises for voices?

A Harvard Medical School study seeks right-handed people, ages 18-55, fitting this description for a study concerned with personality traits and brain function. For more information, call (617) 232-9500 x 5621.

Right-handed?

OFF THE AIR

Misanthropicity is going on hiatus for a couple of weeks. In the duration, I recommend you check out the links to the right. While you’re at it, feed and clothe the homeless and, for God’s sake, clean the bathroom.

CRUMBLING COLUMNIST

The egregious William Safire complains today that “we obsessively review catastrophes past when we should be looking ahead” and, amazingly, means this as a critique of the commission looking into why we let the 9/11 terrorist attacks happen.

He calls discussion of this pointless, “history almost as ancient as whether F.D.R. did enough to avert Pearl Harbor” and acts as though the United States cannot multitask on future threats while assessing past behavior.

Oh, good lord, Safire. This kind of transparency is embarrassing for one such as yourself -- an egotist with pretensions to policy setting.

President Bush is campaigning on his record as a soldier, as a battler of terrorism. He’s running advertisements with images of 9/11 victims. He’s sauntering around on aircraft carriers in a flight suit. He’s joking about being unable to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction while U.S. citizens are being roasted alive in Falluja -- and he put us there by insisting Iraq was part of the war on terrorism.

Shameful, Safire. Although you may be right about one thing: This administration may be less able to tackle future problems because of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, but by all rights it should be because the commission helps put it out of office.

THE SIMPLE THINGS

A surprisingly satisfying “Zen antidote to road rage” can be found at honku.org. Haiku about driving, which is exactly what this site features, are almost certain to fall into the same tedious categories, and these do. But the content surpasses expectations in part because of the predictability of the form -- like those “Jim’s Journal” cartoons floating around about 10 years ago, in which people with no expressions take four poorly drawn panels to do very little, and it’s brilliant nonetheless. Well, some were.

AFGHAN BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

The evolution of Porter Square continues in intriguingly repetitive ways. Hoity-toity kitchen gear shop Arclinea is gone, replaced by custom handbag shop Anna Williams. The Porter Square Cafe, to which I went once, is gone, replaced by sports bar Spirit, to which I suspect I will never go again. The popular Cafe International is gone, replaced by Thai restaurant Sugar & Spice, which is also very popular -- implying that its owners should watch out before they’re replaced by a third popular business. Now Maharajah, the Indian restaurant, is gone, to be replaced by ...

An Afghan restaurant, Buzkashi.

Buzkashi is the national sport of Afghanistan, a horsey game that owes more to raping and pillaging than does polo or dressage. Diners can expect the food to have as much to do with horses as the predecessor restaurant did with maharajahs; what’s interesting about the coming of Buzkashi is that it’s the second Afghan restaurant in Cambridge, after the Helmand, down by the Cambridgeside Galleria. The Helmand is an upscale casual chain with sites in San Francisco and Baltimore and the distinction of being run by family members of Hamid Karzai, the interim president of Afghanistan.

Afghan food is good -- savory in ways that are somewhat similar to Indian food, for geographically obvious reasons, but let’s hope the similarities end there. Maharajah was, briefly, the best Indian food around. It took a turn for the overpriced and cartoonish years ago, and Porter Squarians were justified in switching allegiance to Passage to India or even traveling to Davis Square for Diva, the Indian, ugh, Bistro, which features the same food with a nicer atmosphere and pretentious name.

Buzkashi looks to be less fancy than the Helmand, which is good, since one should always have options on the fanciness scale (especially if it’s across the street from you and you hope to eat there a lot). It also appears to be about the 80th Afghan restaurant in the United States, barring some pocket hidden from the folks at Afghanrestaurants.com.

WORKING FOR THE WEEKEND

Yesterday’s failed welfare bill at least shoves our face in a cruel fact about America, one easy to forget sometimes: The U.S. minimum wage is $5.15 an hour and has been since 1997. Someone working full-time for minimum wage earns $206 a week, or $10,712 a year.

Realistically, the wage is more like $4.41 an hour, because the consumer price index has risen 17 percent since 1997. So figure working full time gives a minimum-wage worker $176.40 a week, or $9,172 a year.

A main reason the bill failed -- it’s not dead, just shelved until the Senate decides to pick it up again -- is that Democrats wanted to add a minimum-wage increase, and the Republicans, the party in charge, denied them a vote on it. Instead of increasing the wage, the new version of the bill would (among other things) follow through on President Bush’s request to spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting “healthy” marriages.

Ostensibly, because they would be paid for by the government, the healthy-marriage sessions could become free entertainment for minimum-wage couples, obviating the need for movie tickets (which cost about $10, or twice what a minimum-wage worker will earn in an hour). If the government set out doughnuts and coffee, these couples could save even more money that would otherwise be spent on food (say, a large burger and fries combo at a fast-food joint for about $6, or slightly more than what a minimum-wage worker earns in an hour). A couple could attend a session a week and save themselves $32, or a theoretical $1,664 a year!

Of course, the Democratic proposal would raise the minimum wage to $7 an hour over two years, for about $4,500 more a year.

FUNNY BECAUSE IT’S TRUE

The atrocities in Iraq yesterday have contributed to a remarkable accomplishment by President Bush: They made his jokes about the war in Iraq, which were not funny at all, somehow even less funny.

The jokes came at the March 24 annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association, at which guest President Bush made a speech typical for the event: filled with what was supposed to be self-deprecating humor. David Corn, of the Nation, described the worst part of Bush’s speech:

Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.”

The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn’t the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. “Nope,” he said. “No weapons over there.” More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: “Maybe under here.” Laughter again.

Many defended this as being exactly what the speech called for, self-deprecating humor, but the humor is lost on those who disagree that this war of choice was worth the thousands of deaths in Iraq, included those of more than 500 U.S. soldiers. With the latest batch of brutality, surely it’s time to reassess the wit.

So here’s some text from Jeffrey Gettleman in today’s New York Times. Give it a read, then imagine Bush’s presentation again.

After [the men] were shot, the scene turned grisly. A crowd of more than 300 people flooded into the streets. Men swarmed around the vehicles. Some witnesses said the Americans were still alive when one boy came running up with a jug of gasoline. Soon, both vehicles were fireballs.

“Everybody here is happy with this,” [an Iraqi] said. “There is no question.”

After the fires cooled, a group of boys tore the corpses out of the vehicles. The crowd cheered them on. The boys dragged the blackened bodies to the iron bridge over the Euphrates River, about a mile away. Some people said they saw four bodies hanging over the water, some said only two. At sunset, nurses from a nearby hospital tried to take the bodies away.

Men with guns threatened to kill the nurses. The nurses left. The bodies remained.

SAN FRANCISCO TREATS

The Associated Press article I ran yesterday in lieu of putting any actual work into my blog may or may not have been garbled, depending on what operating system, Internet browser or form of political or economic theory readers are using. What was garbled to some readers, then, was my comment that the text was garbled.

Interesting word, “garbled.”

My latest way to avoid serious effort on the blog front, while still doing a good deed and paying lip service to posting daily, will be to add a link: 3jake gets the honor this time, a production of my friend, one Jake, a Northern Californian like the folks behind Radio Free Mike and Waterbones. Although she cannot be induced to use a spell-check program consistently, she is funny and insightful and worth reading ... every time she can rouse herself to post.

In fact, although it’s worth it to scroll down to find an item about the male equivalent of Valentine’s Day, I’ll start you off with a discussion of how much is enough when it comes to blogging. I’d delayed linking because I wasn’t sure what to call Jake’s blog or even if she intended to do it regularly. She trumped my concerns by asserting her right to call it whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, and to post when she bloody well pleased. Anyone who makes unreliability such a virtue, well, attention must be paid.

(By the way, speaking of Northern California and specifically the San Francisco area, everyone going “Eh!” at the greeting card assortment at your local chain pharmacy or grocer should check out the assortment at Girlywhirly.com. The proprietor is in San Francisco, if that matters, and the cards are a lot of fun and quite cool, which certainly does matter.)

JOBS APLENTY!

Finally, some numbers on offshoring. This garbled text (sorry) comes from The Associated Press:

Outsourcing technology jobs strengthens U.S. economy, study says

By RACHEL KONRAD
AP Business Writer

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Outsourcing white-collar jobs to low-wage countries
such as India and China has thrown some Americans out of work, but a new report
predicts that the trend will ultimately lower inflation, create jobs and boost
productivity in the United States.

The Information Technology Association of America, in a survey set for release
Tuesday, acknowledges that the migration of tech jobs to low-paid foreigners
has eliminated 104,000 American jobs so far, nearly 3 percent of the positions
in the U.S. tech industry.

Software engineers have been particularly hard hit. Researchers at Global
Insight Inc., which prepared the report for the ITAA, predicted that demand for
U.S. software engineers would shrink through 2008.

But ITAA leaders emphasized that outsourcing has damaged the job market far
less than the dot-com meltdown of early 2000, when Internet startups, telecom
companies and other companies eliminated as many as 268,000 positions.

“The myth is that we’ve started this long decline into the midnight of the
technology work force,” ITAA president Harris Miller said. “This report shows
that, assuming the recovery continues, the number of IT jobs will actually
increase.”

Indian programmers earn roughly one-sixth the $60,000 U.S. average, and Chinese
engineers earn even less.

Outsourcing dramatically reduces labor costs, allowing companies to sell goods
ranging from software to tax-preparation services at lower costs or higher
profit margins. Greater profits theoretically allow companies to buy new
equipment, build laboratories and conduct scientific experiments — even in
expensive Silicon Valley and other U.S. tech hubs.

Savings from outsourcing allowed companies to create 90,000 new jobs in 2003,
with more than one in 10 of them in Silicon Valley or elsewhere in California,
researchers said. The report predicts that in 2008, outsourcing will create
317,000 jobs — 34,000 in California.

Companies spent $10 billion last year to outsource jobs ranging from medical
transcription to nanotechnology research. The ITAA predicted the companies
would spend $31 billion in 2008.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry introduced economic proposals
Friday that he said would reduce the sting for outsourced workers. More than
two dozen states are considering bans on outsourcing government contracts.
Such legislation would be “protectionist” and “unwise,” according to the ITAA,
whose 500 members include Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Corp. and
Amazon.com.

But Cynthia Kroll, senior regional economist at the University of California,
Berkeley, said policy makers can’t afford to ignore outsourcing.

“If R&D is coming out of India, will the next wave of growth bypass us
entirely?” Kroll asked. “We need to pay attention to what India and China and
these other countries are doing to get these new rounds of investment.”

DISORDER ORDER

It is bad enough that the U.S. military has closed its second newspaper in Iraq -- a dubious step in the quest to bring democracy to the Middle East.

But what was mentioned only briefly in The New York Times today, and is even worse, is that “under a law passed by the occupying authorities in June, a news media organization must be licensed, and that license can be revoked if the organization publishes or broadcasts material that incites violence or civil disorder or ‘advocates alterations to Iraq's borders by violent means.’ ”

Violence is, to be sure, bad, and all right-thinking people everywhere should smile upon this paternalistic, fascistic censoring of media if it keeps the Iraqis in line -- uh, safe. If only the British had done a better job in the 1700s, fewer of our boys would have died during that awful Revolutionary War.

“Civil disorder,” though, is a concept that invites less enthusiasm in suppression (as is the licensing of media, something that would not fly here). It encompasses everything from public protests to labor strikes and hardly seems the kind of thing the United States would clamp down on -- had its public relations efforts abroad not been so abysmal.

If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, censorship is frequently, and in this case, the last refuge of the incompetent.

VITAMIN SEE

Au Bon Pain has long been weak on ergonomics, leaving customers bumbling around their shops like rats in a maze -- but like rats in a maze who sometimes turn to each other and ask “Where are the trays?” -- and now have proven themselves weak on advertising skills.

These days, as everyone but the faux French know, subtlety in advertising is saved for bad news. Anything construed as good (“New look!” “Crunchier!” and, inexplicably, “All the sugar and twice the caffeine!”) is presented in all-caps in a jagged explosion of red. It’s the bad news that gets arrayed in modest type, shrunken and shunted away like an unloved child. They can stay in the room, but they can’t talk, and they have to clean up afterward. This is how it is with grudging admissions such as those found on Diet Coke: “Contains phenylalanines.”

This is why it’s funny when Au Bon Pains brag that their Peach Iced Tea and Home Style Lemonade “Contains Vitamin C.” The boast is in simple type beneath the names of the drinks, so it comes off as a warning -- something to watch out for. You can drink the Peach Iced Tea, you know, but you must face the consequences.

CELEBRITY ABUSE

Some man in Arizona intends to sue Richard Simmons for bitch-slapping him -- he made fun of Simmons’ exercise videos -- although the violence of such an encounter is obviously like the bite of a kitten after it’s been antagonized with playful wrestling.

My friend Mike was once told to “fuck off” by a drunken, disoriented Elliott Gould and didn’t go off crying about it, because it’s a badge of honor to share a moment with a celebrity that rises above, or sinks below, the usual “Love your work, can you sign this for my daughter?” moment. I rode on a plane with Jeff Goldblum once and would give just about anything to be able to boast that he’d maliciously tripped me as I lurched my way toward the restroom. In reality, because he was in first and I was in coach, I didn’t even know he was on the plane until after we’d landed.

It’s all part of our grotesque fascination with celebrities, which manifests itself in our increasing consumption of gossip and patience with celebrity profiles -- the ones in which no-names write themselves into the stories pretending they know what a star is like after hanging out with them for a few hours. They say or ask daring things to elicit an unplanned response, portraying themselves as heroes that dare to mock the gods. (“Naomi, clad in blue sweatpants and a Nascar T-shirt with a 2-inch blue stain near the neck, held her orange juice with her left hand. I made a comment about menstruation. She switched the glass to her other hand, smiled like a goddess and began stroking my thigh. The clock ticked.”)

We now have this model to follow when meeting a celebrity ourselves. So insulting Richard Simmons is a cheap thrill, and getting face-spanked by him is a gratifying response.

Suing is taking it too far. Go back to your ordinary, humble life, sir; your cameo is over.

ELUSIVE ADVERSARIES

There’s a bizarre disconnect between Donald Rumsfeld’s long-established goals for the U.S. military and what he told the commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Rumsfeld, the Bush administration’s secretary of defense, boasted even before he was sworn into office that he intended to transform the military, in the words of The Washington Post, “from a heavy, industrial-age force designed in the Cold War to an agile, information-age force capable of defeating more elusive adversaries anywhere on the globe.” One reason that the United States went lighter on forces in Iraq than our generals wanted is that Rumsfeld wants more done with less and insists it be done faster and more efficiently. He told the military so early on, and has been consistent on the matter.

But earlier this week he testified to the commission that before 9/11 he resisted sending military forces into Afghanistan for Osama bin Laden because “it didn’t have a lot of targets ... Afghanistan was something like 8,000 miles from the United States ... You can pound the rubble in an Al Qaeda training camp 15 times and not do much damage; they can put tents right back up.”

This is exactly as Richard A. Clarke, the former antiterrorism expert for presidents Clinton and Bush, described Rumsfeld’s objections, and one would think it would be yet another topic on which a White House adviser would be evasive. But Rumsfeld walks right into the contradiction -- all credit to him for being honest.

HOW TO WIN AT MONOPOLY

Microsoft Corp. has worked hard at earning all its troubles -- about all it’s worked hard at, it seems, but how nice that it’s paid off. The European Union is demanding the equivalent of $613 million for Microsoft’s monopolistic approach to business, and a class-action lawsuit in Minnesota is further bedeviling the software goliath.

The Minnesota case is bringing forward some interesting documents, including some showing that Microsoft essentially blackmailed Intel Corp. into dropping support for a company called Go Corp., which was focused on creating an operating system for personal digital assistants.

Hedging its bets, Microsoft began work on a similar system, called PenWindows, work that may have been eased by the fact that it had Go technical documents it shouldn’t have. In addition to what looks a lot like extortion and theft, the company committed a final insult, according to yesterday’s New York Times:

In late 1993, Go was sold to AT&T where it was ultimately merged into the company’s portable computer subsidiary. In 1994 the phone company shut down the effort in portable computing. Three months later Microsoft canceled its PenWindows project.

THE UNQUESTION

Among the stock phrases littering the conversation of Massachusetts -- including various uses of “all set” and the injunction to “Have a good one” -- the most troublesome is that question that is not a question: “How ya doin’?” or “How’s it goin’?” or “How are ya?”

In Massachusetts, these are used in passing, literally, to show the speaker truly cares about the other person, but not enough to stop and talk. Oddly, a simple greeting such as “Hello” creates more awkwardness than dismissive inquiries into another’s well-being because it’s generally too short to fill the time in which two people see each other, enter each other’s personal space and pass. “Hello” creates awkward silence, whereas by the time both parties have tossed out a “How ya doin’?” their back are to each other and they’re on to fresh challenges.

The implication is that if there’d just been more time, they could have shared much information and many pleasantries. Alas, there wasn’t enough time.

There are few people who’d be pleased if their question was taken seriously, and, indeed, anyone who does so is running the risk of being considered tedious or intrusive: “I asked how he was doing and the guy started telling me about his surgery and divorce, fer Chrissake.” Fortunately, few are that gauche.

The question-as-shield is so effective that I’ve consciously used it to escape conversations when I’m in a hurry, dazzling some unwitting victim blocking me from, say, getting to work. By the time they’ve formulated a response -- usually they’re “fine” -- I’m down the hallway, halfway to the stairs. But at least they know I cared enough to ask.

The downside is that when I’m asked how I am, it’s begun to make me bristle. If they really cared, I tell myself, they wouldn’t have asked. This became more acute when my Czech girlfriend acknowledged the phenomenon of the unquestion to the point that, in fact, when I ask her how she is, I usually have to stress that I’m actually interested in knowing.

OBLIVIOUS TO THE OBVIOUS

Denying the obvious shouldn’t be a successful political technique, but it works for the Bush administration.

The most recent example of the “What is this air you talk about? I see no air” tactic is in effect now with Richard A. Clarke, a terrorism expert who worked for presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton and Bush Jr. Clarke is under attack for claiming the Bush administration focused on Iraq instead of Al Qaeda -- a provocation that would seem to give the White House its choice of targets.

Other recent examples were the assaults on candidate for president John Kerry for daring to say Secretary of State Colin Powell had been been on the sidelines of some recent policy debates and -- although the wording and context are in some dispute -- that many foreign leaders would be pleased to get Bush out of office.

The media have been referring for years to Powell’s alienation from the Bush mainstream. He’s been portrayed as a moderate among fanatics, with a recurring result being his need to correct quotes. In other words, he speaks freely on day one, but by day two he’s rephrasing in a fashion closer to the White House staff party line.

As to the foreign-leader issue, well, it’s no secret that tensions with U.S. allies began early, with Bush rejecting involvement on issues such as global warming and an international criminal court, and rose during the leadup to the Iraq war. Starting with France and Germany, how many foreign leaders equal a lot?

It certainly undercuts the administration’s arguments when Spain elects a leader on the record as hoping that “First we win here, we change this government, and then the Americans will do it.”

The Bush administration, though, can always claim Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero never said that. Just because he said it on radio and it was widely reported doesn’t mean it happened.

COLLARED

Read closely as news coverage of the “offshoring” of U.S. jobs to lower-wage countries goes through the second stage, denial, after reaching a political climax in the first stage, alarm. Notice the denials are rich in generic economic wisdom and scant on details.

Alarm was easy. College-educated people losing jobs could cite Gartner Inc. and Forrester Research on the scope of the problem (one out of 10 tech jobs by the end of this year, Gartner says; at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages by 2015, Forrester says), motivating politicians to speak out.

It’s not that the millions of lost blue-collar jobs weren’t alarming on their own. It’s just we’d been told laborers would be retrained to take tech jobs.

Denial began with tech-industry leaders gathering in early January to say retraining was still, somehow, the case, and the line stuck. By March 16, The New York Times said, Secretary of State Colin Powell was still reassuring Indian business leaders that the heat would come off them as “the Bush administration would work to train people for new jobs.”

Now all the world’s second-stage. The media are falling over themselves to be fair and balanced, meaning giving space to experts who want to say there’s no problem -- or at least that everything will, ultimately, be okay. The latest examples of this were in the Times yesterday and in the Boston Herald today, arguing offshoring will help the U.S. economy by creating jobs.

What you will never see in these second-stage articles: how many jobs will be created here; and for what kind of jobs Americans will be retrained.

This is because there are no such figures, or such retraining plans.

For instance, Herald reporter Jon Chesto quotes Amit Maheshwari, of Cambridge’s i-Vantage offshoring shop, as saying he “expects his firm, which is largely backed by an Indian steel and
construction company, to add jobs here to help manage the overseas work his firm does for future clients.” Chesto also points out that Maheshwari employs 10 people in the United States and 290 in India. Is this the kind of job creation we can expect from offshoring? It is unlikely many higher-paid managerial jobs will be created in the United States when the work being managed is in lower-paid India.

In the Times, outsourcer extraordinaire Azim Premji -- the lead in a piece called “Outsourcing giant fights back” -- gives the standard line about benefits to the United States: “Offshore outsourcing is another example of U.S. innovativeness to stay competitive by reducing costs and cycle times.” His example of how this is so is that “the United States financial services sector alone has saved $8 billion in the last four years by outsourcing to India.”

This is a disingenuous reply, because the answer is the question. The U.S. Department of Labor reports that the sector also sent 10,787 jobs overseas in 2000 and, according to Forrester Research, will be sending 61,252 jobs overseas through next year. In 2015, the number of banking jobs lost is estimated to be 348,028. The satisfaction we can take in the billions of dollars being saved is tempered by the hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs.

A good example of how job creation is supposed to work was published by the Times Feb. 15:

If an Indian software programmer is paid a tenth of an American’s salary, a company that develops software in India will save money and -- provided competitors do the same -- the price of its software will fall, productivity will rise, the technology will spread, and new jobs will be
created to adapt and improve it.

Take cellphones, which 20 years ago were luxury items with the size and weight of a brick. Today -- thanks to competition and inexpensive, globalized production -- they are cheap, ubiquitous, tiny and packed with a mind-boggling complement of ancillary functions. The industry and the number of jobs have only increased. Global outsourcing also played a big role in the information technology boom of the late 1990’s. Personal computers were imported from abroad. Chip companies shipped production overseas. But this outsourcing prompted the creation of new jobs here, on the higher end of the technological spectrum.

The problem? Moving jobs overseas creates middle classes where there were none, which provides further educations and produces business and technological infrastructures that decreases reliance on the United States. What worked in the 1990s won’t necessarily work now. In fact, note that the above examples are of production, meaning blue-collar jobs, while the complaints now are increasingly of lost white-collar jobs. Australia’s Sunday Age noted Feb. 29 that “The speed of the development of third-world telecommunication skills and the wounds it has caused to [information technology] industries elsewhere, have turned what was, only two or three years ago, a quaint oddity, into a major issue throughout the world.”

American workers would feel more secure if there were a color of collar to move up to, but there isn’t.

Instead, the media will probably move to the third stages of coverage for the topic, boredom and resignation, and the topic will disappear for a while. Then comes the fourth stage: death, and the media will have an opportunity to write searching obituaries on what went wrong.

COMPLAINT CRAZINESS

I have a problem with the “March Madness” basketball tourney, which is, of course, the name itself. Why is it such madness? It’s the furthest thing from anarchy. They have those brackets displaying the orderly weeding out of college basketball teams until one is named champion, and it’s not as though players are suddenly encouraged to foul each other (or themselves, in quite a different way).

It’s like those objectionable “Wacky Wednesdays” that big chain gas stations used to have, on which the price of a gallon of premium would be discounted five cents. What’s wacky about that?

Google finds 8,690 references to various wacky Wednesdays, including a project that “runs every Wednesday between 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and involves activities such as swimming, arts and crafts, outdoor games and bowling.” Elsewhere is a wacky Wednesday with “drawings for exciting prizes of merchandise and cash ... the prizes grew progressively more valuable. Early winners received televisions while the final three each Wednesday received a cash award of $5,000.”

Cash awards of $5,000? Color televisions? Bowling? Wacky!

There are fewer thrilling Thursdays, but not by many, and they include such events as “bowling morning,” “The Art of Fen Shui: Beyond the Basics” and “Parenting & Power Struggles.” Unaccountably thrilling!

Terrific Tuesdays, for some reason, top the Googling charts, with 23,300 references -- all too dull to mention. But terrificness is subjective.

Freakiness is subjective, as well, but the 12,500 freaky Fridays found in Google tend to strain the definition of “subjective,” much less “freaky.” They include bowling events that apparently edge over the line from wacky and thrilling to freaky by running every Friday from 3:30 to 5 p.m. (freaky!) and costing $5 per person (freaky!) and allowing for the free use of rental shoes (freaky!) but requiring three bowlers per lane (freakiest of all!) although management reserves the right to put six bowlers on a lane (beyond freaky!).

Alliteration. Can’t we move on?

YEE FREE

All charges against Capt. James J. Yee are bring dropped, The New York Times says today, in a case that “had become a lingering embarrassment for the Pentagon.”

Yee, who was the Muslim chaplain for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was arrested Sept. 10. The military’s case of espionage has fallen apart, and there seems little interest in pursuing Yee for pornography found on his laptop and the extramarital affair discovered by investigators. So the military will have done its best to wreck a man for no particular reason.

In the meantime, the Times notes, the prisoners in Cuba have been without a chaplain for more than six months. Again, for no particular reason.

UNDER THE AFGHAN RUG

Being terribly busy, I’m forced again to do something terribly lame -- but a good deed, nonetheless: link to Christina Lamb’s “The Return of the Taliban” from the New Statesmen, just as Brian at my.bicycle did today, on the off chance that someone may see the link here but not there.

Watch out for the pay requirements, which can take you from article to subscription form, which is less well written and far less informative.

TALKING “TALKING POINTS MEMO”

Joshua Micah Marshall’s blog, Talking Points Memo, is so incredibly and consistently good that I must expend today’s posting just to link to it, although the site is already one of the more linked to on the Web -- and I feel a little late to the party talking about it.

Read down a bit. Marshall has a keen eye, and he’s definitely on a roll. The blog’s so good that reading it almost makes me giddy.

RUNNING ON HIS RECORD

I must take my break here at work to ask a question that’s been bothering me for weeks:

What’s so impressive about President Bush’s leadership in the war on terrorism?

Touting it is a key Bush campaign strategy, with today’s New York Times quoting Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, boasting:

The American people have etched in their minds the president’s leadership in a time of crisis. That’s something voters find comfort in going into an election. Whether it has to be emphasized or not, we’ve made clear that one of the most important issues is how the two candidates would conduct the war on terror and protect America. There’s a clear choice.

It’s not clear what steps Bush took or did not take before Sept. 11, 2001, to protect the United States and fight terrorism. But crediting Bush for fighting a war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, after intelligence sources fingered them as responsible, begs the question of how any other president would have acted. Does anyone seriously believe Al Qaeda and the Taliban would have gotten a pass from President Gore or, more to the point, President Kerry -- who talks about his Vietnam war heroics at the drop of a medal?

Al Qaeda is still around, even in Afghanistan, and the Taliban is said to control about a third of the country.

Bush has since created the Department of Homeland Security, but only after great resistance to what was, after all, a Democratic proposal.

He also took us into a war in Iraq, which has had a minimal role in exported terrorism and, based on a complete lack of evidence admitted even by Bush, no role in 9/11. There is evidence, however, that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has riled terrorists further, or at least that they are using it is a recruitment and rallying tool.

So much for the notion that U.S. efforts there will eventually create a democratic paradise and paradigm in the Middle East; it has become clear we could have achieved the same result through ongoing sanctions and political isolation.

It adds up to a record against terrorism that ranges from the obvious to the reluctant to the pointless.

DOING OUR PARTS

Czech correspondent Martina Roidlova noticed this message lurking in plain sight on our T cars:

“Your tax dollars pay to clean this vehicle. Please do your part by removing your belongings upon departure. Thank you!”

What’s funny here is that we’re being told our money cleans the T, yet the T also wants us to clean up after ourselves. So we’re really “doing our part” twice -- or three times, if you include the cost of riding and fare increases.

Perhaps the T could have advised us: “To avoid higher costs, please do your part by removing your belongings upon departure. Thank you!”

NEW GROUND FOR THE DIG

Our little weekly is growing up, and we’re all just so proud ...

The Weekly Dig is like a smaller, surlier Boston Phoenix. The main difference has been that the Phoenix continues to look like several pages worth of printer errors, whereas the Dig looks as though someone actually designed it -- sober.

But the current Dig issue breaks exciting ground by featuring Hollywood’s next hot-new-thing-until-the-next-one, Elisha Cuthbert, on the cover and in an interview inside.

This is nothing new for many publications. Cover space is traded for content all the time. It is notable, however, at an alternative weekly that only recently started having cover photos at all, or even covers that related at all to what was going on inside. In other words, what was once more like the New Yorker is now more like the kind of crap magazines and casually cynical backroom deals that alternative weeklies make fun of.

It’s possible, of course, that the Dig is actually not an alternative weekly -- although its own marketing positions it as a challenger to the Phoenix. Instead, the Dig may evolve into a kind of weekly styles publication, an Improper Bostonian, Stuff or Stuff@Night for the kind of people who read the Boston Phoenix but whose lifestyles are more about PBR then crantinis. Alterna-pluggers.

The Dig shouldn’t automatically be faulted for doing what it can to stay in business. But soon its readers will be able to shake their tattooed hands at it and say, “You changed, man. You changed.”

NEWS FROM THE FRONT

More good news on the war against baldness, as a kind of stem cells indicate they “have the ability to generate hair when taken from one animal and put into another,” according to a scientist quoted today in an Associated Press article.

Perhaps if we stopped screwing around with curing diseases and such we might finally make some real progress on this problem.

YEE GODS

Capt. James J. Yee was front-page news in September when thought part of an espionage operation involving Qaeda members at Guantanamo Bay. Typically, he was a paragraph on page A19 of yesterday’s News York Times as the military weighs dropping all charges and “allowing him to leave the Army with an honorable discharge.”

This is all tentative, revealed because a copy of the proposed settlement was “inadvertently” sent to the media by one of Yee’s lawyers, The Associated Press says. But it’s still striking that after 76 days in military custody and months of effort to make something stick, military prosecutors are left trying to make something of “mishandling classified material, failing to obey an order, making a false official statement, adultery and conduct unbecoming an officer for allegedly downloading pornography on his government laptop,” as the news agency notes.

If the settlement is rejected, Yee could still be prosecuted for the adultery and pornography, facing such punishments as “duty restriction or a temporary pay cut.” The government, obviously, should drop all charges.

Media such as The New York Times, just as obviously, should return this story to page A1 if the settlement is accepted -- and perhaps run a sidebar describing what this hysterical lashing out has done to an innocent man’s life and marriage.

THE SETTING

Cambridge, while not heaven on earth, can be intoxicating in its own little way. Part of feeling that way about where you live is feeling that where you live matters, somehow, and plays a role in shaping the world. In Cambridge, especially with Necco having moved to Revere, much of that comes from having Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology down the street. If it’s not enough that Alan Dershowitz lives here, well, this year the Hasty Pudding awards brought Sandra Bullock and Robert Downey Jr. here.

What also helps, and it’s the reason this comes up, is flipping through The New York Times’ Weekend section and noticing that “Spartan,” the new film by David Mamet -- who lives and works in Cambridge -- concerns spy Robert Scott, played by Val Kilmer and that “Late one night, Scott is summoned to Cambridge, Mass.” (There’s more to the plot, of course, but that’s a high point.)

This is, admittedly, no big deal, but only a few pages away, there’s a review of Craig Lucas’ new play, “Small Tragedy,” which is about “two exotic figures of monumental gravity in the midst of a fretful theater company in a rehearsal hall in Cambridge, Mass.”

Following the Radio Free Mike discussion of places worthy for fiction, it’s nice to see some ongoing votes for Cambridge. Even when failing to be the perfect place to live in reality, it can still be worth visiting in fantasy.

MISSHAPEN IDENTITY

Why, it’s a South Bay kind of a week. In an odd bit of coincidence, there’s a story in today’s New York Times about those monstrous McMansions springing up in Manhattan Beach.

But it’s the namesake of my hometown the Times is writing about, meaning Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, not my hometown of Manhattan Beach, Calif., although it would be easy to mistake the two in this context.

“Two years ago, [Alex Puzaitzer] bought a run-down stucco house in Manhattan Beach, tore it down, and built himself a stately beige Mediterranean -- with a veranda, tall metal gates and terra cotta-colored roof tiles -- a house that reminded him of houses he had seen on visits to the Riviera,” the Times article says. “The new houses that Mr. Puzaitzer and other prospering immigrants have put up are at odds with their neighborhood's unassuming character -- bulkier, ritzier and sometimes considerably more flamboyant than surrounding houses.”

It goes on. And it’s be downright eerie, if it weren’t that exactly the same thing is going on throughout the United States.

LOGROLLING

I must engage in the practice most loathed by blog critics: logrolling, in the sense of a mutual appreciation society, back to the Radio Free Mike and My.Bicycle sites.

The first has a terrific collection of excerpts of great writers on the topic of my hometowns and the setting for Radio Free Mike Moore’s novel, “Too Much of Nothing.” That’s California’s lower South Bay, meaning the beach communities (and those immediately inland) in Los Angeles County, not those in the San Francisco area. Vapid and unworthy of great literature? Judge for yourself; you may have to scroll down a bit.

Brian over at My.Bicycle is tremendously skilled at mining the Web for stories and pictures from the technology and fetish underworld, which can merge in Brian’s home, Japan, to often creepy and compelling effect. In this case, the link is to something a little more lighthearted -- a new Microsoft keyboard. Again, scroll down.

MY DINNER WITH SPALDING

I keep thinking about Spalding Gray, heartfelt banalities that actually lapse into the embarrassing: I want to see “Swimming to Cambodia” again, and maybe buy it, and I keep thinking of the horror and tragedy of his body drifting cold and alone in the East River for two months, and I think endlessly to myself, “What a waste, what a waste,” and I imagine him making that last phone call home, already on the way to his death, already dead in his own mind, and I fantasize that it is me talking him down from the bridge in Long Island during a prior suicide attempt, and that somehow I keep him safe.

But the ludicrously personal nature of my feelings about Gray are natural in that he spent much of his life telling me -- and undoubtedly millions of others -- things about himself he surely would only tell someone he trusted implicitly. Someone who wouldn’t tell anyone else. Very personal things.

This is why we pick up People magazine, and why we stalk celebrities, because it’s difficult to remember that the intimate connection celebrities create with us only go one way. I remember at Emerson College, also Gray’s college, seeing a fellow student in a play on Saturday and seeing them in the dining hall on Monday and having to remind myself that I couldn’t just go over and sit down with them to eat. I didn’t know them. I’d just sat in a room while they performed a scripted role, and that created the illusion of a connection.

I knew Gray, though, to the extent that I met him and shared a meal with him. Him and me. My one, true celebrity experience.

As a freshman working for the school newspaper, I went to the theater shortly before Gray was to perform “Monster in a Box,” I believe, and arrogantly asked for and miraculously got an interview with him. We went to get Chinese food around the corner at a restaurant where management crammed us in the back next to the kitchen and the clangs and clanks of pots and swinging doors. We smiled over it. At first I think it made him anxious, but I also remember his sly, aggrieved smile, a relief because I was underprepared and he seemed a bit serious.

I interviewed him as he ate -- I ate very little -- and at the end, tried to pay. He refused, pointing out that he surely made far more money than I did. I relented.

I don’t remember a single thing we spoke about. I don’t even remember where the tape of that interview is. I probably recorded over it immediately because I needed it for other interviews and this one was, after all, unintelligible over kitchen noise, in that frustrating way microcassette recorders have of capturing incidental noise better than the noise you want.

Gray got me in to his show that night, in the front row, where I could look up at him and watch the spit fly as he spoke with his classic reserved passion: that trick of holding everyone’s attention while sitting behind a desk talking for an hour and a half.

I would go on reading and watching and exalting Gray over the years, picking up a copy of his novel, “Endless Vacation” and rewatching “Swimming to Cambodia” and “The Paper” occasionally and contemplating going to New York to see him in “Our Town” and relishing, especially, when my parents would send me books of his latest monologues.

The last one was “Morning, Noon and Night,” a glorious ode to domesticity, a life in a day, like the early work of Nicholson Baker, but with all the action implied by being a husband, father, stepfather, nanny and chauffeur. Still acerbic and clever, but so warm and charming. Gray was, of all things, happy.

It promised a long life into gentle patriarchy, Gray the grandfather, Gray the great-grandfather, Gray the eminence grise. For everyone who’d been told by their friend of his mother’s suicide at 52 and his own terrors, “Morning, Noon and Night” meant knowing that everything would be okay.

But we didn’t really know that. We didn’t know Spalding Gray. We knew a lot about him, and not enough.

DAMNIT.

Spalding Gray’s body has been pulled from the East River in New York. He was 62.

IF YOU WANT SOMETHING QUESTIONABLE

If the hiring of Mike Barnicle turns out to be true, perhaps it’s time for the Boston Herald to move on from the “If you want something sugarcoated, buy a doughnut” campaign (if it hasn’t already).

Among the reasons are hiring Virginia Buckingham as an editorial writer and columnist, despite her roles in state politics, the Massport disaster around 9/11 and her penchant for making leaps of logic previously only attempted by Don Feder; the increase in sleaze and celebrity news and decrease in story length; and the return of Wingo, of which publisher Pat Purcell, with candor and good humor, said he’d “be the first to admit this is a bad drug. Stick the Wingo needle in your arm and you’re hooked.”

If Barnicle comes aboard, with his reputation for repetitious melodrama and plagiarism, perhaps we should switch our advertising slogan to something new, but just as in-your-face. Something like “We don’t care what people think” or maybe “Go ahead: Laugh.”

BILL'S MOEBIUS TRIP

Before the topic -- and the link -- fades too far into the past, it’s worth making an addendum to an earlier post about the economic trap of “offshoring” jobs to countries where people will work more cheaply than in the United States.

As some may recall from a Jan. 8 post, U.S. industrial leaders say the nation has to keep up in “innovation and education” to battle the outsourcing trend. In other words, we need more math and science education.

But the Bill Gates tour of our Meccas of math and science reported March 1 showed that students are increasingly rejecting these fields because they doubt when they graduate they’ll have jobs. Back to you, industry.

SPORT UTILITY THOUGHT

There’s no competition. The most important story in The New York Times today is not the Iraqi constitution, U.S. job growth, a retrial for a 9/11 suspect or the president’s political ads. It’s not even in the news section. It’s waaaaaaaaaaaaay in the back of the generally worthless Escapes section.

It’s about Leigh Hyan, 16, of Yorba Linda, Calif., whose daddy gave her a 2004 Cadillac Escalade EXT for her birthday. The base price is $53,240, and it weighs 5,572 pounds (Leigh looks like she weighs about 90), but it’s really the thought that counts.

“Some people may think my dad spoils me,” Leigh says, “but he knows how happy it makes me to drive.”

Touching. What does Leigh get for graduation?

NAY, NAY, NADER

Two reactions to the news that Ralph Nader is polling 6 percent:

No, no, no.

Then a more reasonable response, that it’s ridiculous to get too worried by a poll this early. Why, pay too much attention to the polls now and you’d believe President Bush will be voted out of office in November.

EXCESS

U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine seems excited to the point of irrational exuberance about a John Kerry presidency.

Bloomberg News is quoting Corzine -- a former bond trader and co-chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. -- as saying that Kerry “is going to put our fiscal house in order. I think that will underlie improvement in the investment climate for the long run that I think will create wealth, not unlike what we had seen in the growth in the 1990s.”

It seems like a bad way to stump for a favored candidate. The decade, it’s generally agreed, was full of poor business models hurting vulnerable people because investment firms lied to make money. It was a decade of vulgar excess that, long term, led to a damaging lack of confidence in our economy.

Not to slam Kerry or Corzine; it’s just not an image to throw about recklessly, and it seems the only reason Corzine did so was to counter the enormous amount of good will, and money, flowing between Wall Street and President Bush.

“The president, who has raised more than $130.8 million for this year’s campaign, has broad financial support from the financial sector. Among his corps of 350 elite six-figure fund-raisers, one of every five comes from the financial sector, including several top Wall Street executives,” The New York Times said on Jan. 9, quoting a Center for Public Integrity report:

Mr. Bush has championed several initiatives that were applauded by the financial community, including cuts in dividend and capital gains taxes.

One subject the study focused on was Mr. Bush’s interest in introducing private investment accounts into the Social Security system. Many financial companies support the idea because the boom in investment accounts from any such change “could generate untold billions of dollars in annual fees and commissions for Wall Street firms,” the study said.

Kerry may consider Wall Street a lost cause, but he and his supporters may need to engage the voters on the topic. Just not by waxing nostalgic on the 1990s, eh?

CLAIM: SUN TO RISE

The media does silly things, including reporting things people say even when they’re not saying anything, so long as they’re, you know, special people. For instance, if Heidi Perlman, of Brighton, told an Associated Press reporter that she believed interest rates would eventually rise, chances are it wouldn’t be considered news in major metropolitan daily newspapers such as the Boston Herald.

But because Fed head Alan Greenspan says it, and The Associated Press reports it, well, there it is ... in tomorrow’s Herald, San Diego Union-Tribune and God knows how many other papers across the United States and world:

WASHINGTON -- Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Tuesday that extra-low short-term interest rates eventually will have to go up. He gave no clue when.

“The federal funds rate is accommodative ... but at some point, it will have to rise to a more neutral state,” Greenspan said as he fielded questions at an economic gathering in New York. He didn’t discuss the timing of any such move to raise rates.

Stop the presses! Interest rates will rise some day!

STARK RAVING REVIEW

I rented “Stark Raving Mad” last weekend, largely because it’s chock full o’ Emersonians, and it’s fun to see their names offscreen and faces onscreen.

But it’s also a fun movie, worth the rental and certainly worth the release into theaters denied it by Newmarket and its other distributors. Several nations got to see it on the big screen; the United States got it straight to video and DVD. An insider -- meaning Marichelle Daywalt, wife of a co-writer/director -- gave me the whole story long ago, but the details were too esoteric and arbitrary to sink in. It may as well boil down to “Well, ‘Gigli’ got U.S. showings and ‘Stark Raving Mad’ didn’t.”

The movie is standard heist fare with a few twists, one being that Seann William Scott plays his role straight. As much as the movie plays with the genre conventions, though, including some great moments with Emersonian Paul Hungerford as a helpful Chinese-food delivery boy, enough comes standard that surprises are few and gentle. Probably the most sadly predictable moment accompanies the teenage sex kitten and the FBI agent played by Dave Foley. But why ruin the lack of surprise?

IMDB.com has no information on what the writer-directors are doing next, which is unfortunate considering “Stark Raving Mad” was made more than a year ago. They’ve certainly proved they can handle a big movie with big stars and deliver a fast-paced, stylish and skillful 103 minutes of entertainment.

Go Lions!

ADD IT UP

This outsourcing stuff is exasperating, and there’s a lot out there to be exasperated by.

Among the latest wrinkles: a class on outsourcing rushed together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to answer student demand; and more wrongheaded justifications from New York Times weirdo Thomas L. Friedman, who says it’s “inevitable in a networked world that our economy is going to shed certain low-wage, low-prestige jobs.”

Friedman ignores the fact that the whole reason the topic is so explosive right now is that higher-wage, higher-prestige jobs are also heading overseas. Forrester Research, of Cambridge, says the United States can wave goodbye to a minimum of 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages by 2015. They’re off to their new home in lower-wage countries such as India.

The cover story used to be that low-wage jobs would go overseas and free the newly unemployed for higher-wage jobs. The story now is that as our higher-wage jobs go overseas, it will free all of the newly unemployed folks to take on even better jobs. Nonsense. Does anyone really think all those unemployed low-wage workers climbed the ladder, especially in a nation with about 4 million jobs less than needed for full employment, even far enough to lose their jobs again to outsourcing?

Most defenders of “offshoring” say it will eventually benefit the United States, because it creates markets for our goods. This, too, is nonsense: Foreign workers earning less money than U.S. workers may be buying more U.S. products, but also more products from everywhere else in the world, and with less money, because they have less earning power. The money they spend will go back to companies whose work forces have been outsourced around the world, anyway. And U.S. workers -- who had more earning power -- will have less money to spend. How does that math work out?

It probably doesn’t, which means it comes from the same math textbook as the argument behind the Bush tax cuts: Giving money to the richest means more business investment.

But where will the investment money go? (Overseas, apparently.) Why hasn’t it meant a surge in U.S. jobs? (Because they’re going overseas.)

Furthermore, how does the effort differ from the failed trickle-down policies of the Reagan years? And why give money to the wealthy when it’s been consumer spending propping up the economy for three years? Especially since the effect of the Bush tax cuts would be the same, as Cambridge’s Dollars & Sense says, if “instead of cutting taxes, the government spent $1.5 trillion on highways or national defense or schools or, for that matter, if it trimmed $1.5 trillion from the tax liability of low- and middle-income households. All tax cuts become income, are re-spent, and taxed.”

Madness. Nonsense and madness.

HISTORY LESSON

Being comfortable calling the Catholic sexual abuse scandal “history” may be a mixed blessing for a church facing enormous guilt and legal culpability. As wonderful that it is that the church is now free of priests abusing children, well ... it wasn’t so difficult, was it? The speed and ease with which the church seems to have eliminated the problem may come back to haunt it when people seeking damages ask why it wasn’t done before.

BAD, BAD MARKETING

I’ve been conned: The flier I described so long ago was an example of guerilla marketing for the Sci Fi Channel reality show “Mad, Mad House,” in which average joes move in with a modern primitive, nudist, Wiccan, vampire and voodoo priestess.

(I was informed of this almost immediately. All the time since has been wasted waiting for the Sci Fi Channel people to return my phone calls, but I’m giving up.)

Guerilla marketing, or viral marketing, is advertising on the cheap that sneaks past people’s defenses. Handing out T-shirts, holding conversations meant to be overheard, posting intriguing fliers -- all are examples, although such hardcore techniques are all but ignored in available media on marketing. Jay Conrad Levinson’s “Guerilla Marketing for Free” has next to nothing to say on bait-and-switch fliers, for instance, and it’s the No. 1 book on the topic listed at Amazon.com.

One wonders if the fliers work. Although I was fooled into talking about them in a more or less public forum, the trail they started faltered immediately: The telephone number listed wasn’t in service. A Google search for the person last connected with that number brought up nothing useful.

Then a couple of weeks passed and new fliers appeared, with a different phone number. Call it and you get a recording of a woman saying the room has been taken -- and a suggestion to watch the TV show. So those wily Sci Fi guerillas give it up immediately, or even faster, if such a thing is possible: The new phone number is 617.206.30124, and the extra digit is an immediate tip-off that the flier isn’t what it appears to be.

Travelocity did much better with its 26-city “missing garden gnome” fliers, which brought people to what was ostensibly some poor guy’s Web site but was actually part of an $80 million advertising campaign. And the “Blair Witch” site, the guiding light for guerilla marketing, never gave up that it was fake, which contrasts with “Mad, Mad House” like a Baked Alaska compares with an off-brand candy bar.

This may help explain why the Sci Fi Channel goes to 78 million households in the United States but “Mad, Mad House” is having so little impact. If it’s the idea of guerilla marketing to create street-level buzz around a product, the show’s mysterious fliers hit a little low. They’re being kicked around winter-ugly asphalt, winding up in gutters with discarded fast-food wrappers.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE COMEDY STYLINGS OF BILL GATES

Bill Gates visited Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today, prognosticating and pontificating. (Electronic paper was one of the key technologies he plugged, which must have been an attempt to ingratiate himself further at MIT, home of the Media Laboratory that gave it birth. Cambridge is also home to the company E-Ink, which seems to be basing its future entirely on the product.)

Oh, and amusing.

Among the funniest things the Microsoft founder said, found in tomorrow’s report by the Boston Herald’s Jon Chesto, was in response to a question about the company’s role as an investor in Comcast, which wants to buy Disney.

“We’ve always been clear that we’re a software company,” Gates said of Microsoft. “You won’t see us buying a movie studio or some big communications asset or those kinds of things.”

Really, Bill. The words -- if they count as words -- Xbox, Slate and iLoo come to mind. As does MSNBC. Oh, and here’s a link to Microsoft’s hardware page.

STERN WARNING

Is nothing sacred? In the latest fallout from the Janet Jackson breast-baring at the Super Bowl, radio superstar Howard Stern has been suspended from broadcast by Clear Channel Radio.

What with the release of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” a move toward a constitutional amendment against gay marriage and now this, I can actually feel this country growing closer to God -- well, a Christian God, anyway.

But I’m confused as to why God made Stern and his show -- with its regularly “indecent content” that is just as regularly “vulgar, offensive, and insulting, not just to women and African Americans but to anyone with a sense of common decency” -- so popular, though.