Greetings, everyone, and my apologies for again going a couple of days without updating my journal (but more on that below). I have a growing amount of small subjects I've been wanting to talk about, so in usual fashion I've strung them together today and am presenting them all at once. Enjoy.

--So yes, I am indeed still being kept very busy learning Poppy (aka my new Apple G4 desktop, a gift from one of my online readers), and loading in all the 220,000 archived files my computer is telling me that I've generated over the last 14 years of my life, and which used to just be on a series of CDs in a folder on one of my shelves. Man, I'm telling you, after decades now of computers that were never big enough to hold all my archived files at once, it's definitely surreal to be loading them all into Poppy this week and suddenly having immediate access to all of them. Well, and not only that but an entire index existing for them as well (yet another cool feature in OSX - I swear, it just never stops with this thing), which means that I get accurate search results back as fast as I can even type the query. Pow!

The good news is that I've been hard at work this week as well on my latest travel book, Ach Du Heilege Scheisse!, which means it won't be too long now before it'll be on the server and ready for those who prepurchased it last year to download. I decided, in fact, to switch over to Adobe's InDesign for this project, despite 14 years of previously being on Quark XPress, because I keep getting told how InDesign just completely blows Quark out of the water, and of course intuitively handles all the modern bells and whistles of electronic printing projects much better (like adding your own clickable navigation bars right into the PDF document itself, creating active weblinks in an Acrobat document, etc), since InDesign was created by the same people who created Acrobat in the first place.

So that's cool, because that means there will be seven distinct versions of Scheisse when it's all finished, each of them specifically optimized for a different format: a Palm version; a Windows Mobile one; one for sending straight to an American laserprinter; one for European laserprinters; a special version for reading on your desktop/laptop/tablet screen (full-color, 4x3 horizontal layout, with the clickable hyperlinks already mentioned); even American and European versions where the pages are half-sized, for anyone who wants to take the extra step of physically chopping the document in half after it's printed and binding one side like an actual book. (Say for example, all you office workers who can do that stuff on the sly for free. You know who you are.) And then anyone who paid $10 or more last year to send me to Germany in the first place will get all seven versions, in whichever combination they want; or if you pay $10 right now you can get all seven versions too, or prepurchase the seven versions of the next travel book (concerning South Africa), coming out in autumn 2006. So that's all coming...um, very soon, although I still don't have an exact date yet.

--(NERDY SPOILER ALERT! Skip to the end of this alert if you haven't seen this week's Lost yet, or if you couldn't give a fuck about this week's Lost.) Well, it's official - the producers of Lost have very quietly released a second fake website for the show, full of hidden clues and extra expository material about the crazyass plot currently going on. Sneaky motherfuckers! It's named after The Hanso Foundation, the mysterious scientific organization who is funding the Dharma Initiative, which turns out to be the people behind the mysterious bunker in the middle of the island, which of course has opened up this whole new completely mind-fucking set of circumstances about eastern religions and electromagnetism and time travel and the number 108 and, Jesus, how did a show so cool and complicated get so popular, anyway?

I belong to one of those obsessive discussion boards, of course, so have been keeping up with all the crazy-ass shit the TiVo owners have discovered by pausing screens and taking screencaps and all the rest. And for those of you who don't belong to obsessive discussion boards, here are some really interesting tidbits about the storyline this season you might not have caught:

The shark shown two episodes ago had the Dharma Initiative's logo tattooed on its side.

The symbols on the shark and in the second bunker (from this week's episode), found inside the I-Ching logo of the Dharma Initiative, are different from the Swan seen in Station 3. It's generally concluded that the symbol in the second bunker is either an arrow or a crane/goose (we'll have to wait for future episodes to be sure), but no one has any idea what the logo on the shark is. In eastern religions, of course, the swan is considered to be the symbol of knowledge, and more specifically the betterment of the human race through knowledge, while the crane is the symbol of health and longevity.

Notice how those Apollo candy bars are the only items in the entire pantry not made by the Dharma Initiative, or containing the Dharma logo? And how Hurley went out of his way to point them out in the last episode, and even comment that he had never heard of the brand? It's generally thought that this is going to be an important element in the future.

There is lots of new information at that new fake website about Alvar Hanso and his foundation, and all of it is just extremely weird and creepy. Turns out he was this Danish munitions supplier during World War II who spent a lot of time in the Pacific; and something weird happened to him during the war (my guess being that he stumbled across the island himself), to the point that by twenty years later, he was all into eastern religions and had raised billions of dollars to start the Hanso Foundation. And according to the website, the Dharma Initiative (that is, the people behind the creepy bunkers all over the island) is but one of many odd initiatives the Hanso Foundation is currently funding, including ones on genetic engineering, animal cloning, long-range remote viewing via electromagnetism, juxtapositional eugenics (that is, the idea of making the human race collectively better through selective breeding), just all kinds of weird, creepy stuff.

Which, yeah, for those who know their history, sounds an awful lot like the real story of L. Ron Hubbard and the founding of Scientology; he basically believed that he made contact with a UFO on a Pacific island he was stationed at during World War II, and the things he learned from the aliens is what eventually became Scientology. (At least, that's what I've been told.) The story I heard in college, in fact, was that it was actually two guys who reported seeing the UFO, and that the other guy went on to found Jet Propulsion Laboratories. But I don't know if that's true, or if it was my friend Omar just fucking with me in college. (Omar was a major hacker, someone who hung out with RU Serius, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson in the '80s and had the photos to prove it. He was always feeding me a constant line of half-truths and half-bullshits, because he loved the fact that he knew so much weird-ass real stuff that I could never tell which was which.)

(END NERDY SPOILER ALERT!)

--Oh, and I keep meaning to mention that in general I've been really enjoying Threshold, despite its writing being really clunky at times, and its characters sometimes really two-dimensional. It's that plot, man, that keeps driving me through all that stuff, because it's just so mysterious and intriguing and really makes me want to learn more. See, basically space aliens have invaded the earth on Threshold, and the government found out before anyone in the general populace did, and put a plan into motion to try to hide the invasion from the general populace, while simultaneously learning as much about the aliens as possible and trying to figure out how to stop them. And apparently these aliens are so much more advanced than us that they don't actually need to physically invade the planet; they're simply transforming the DNA of us humans into an alien form, and are so advanced that they can trigger the process merely through showing a visual symbol (that glowing, blinking triangle thing you see in the Threshold commercials).

So that's the big overwhelming threat fueling the whole show in general - that one of the people who have been infected will eventually break into a television studio, and broadcast the image over the air and infect millions of people at once. But then this alien signal is also affecting the humans in three different ways, and nobody on the government team understands why: some infected humans are turning into these unstoppable killing machines, who can survive gunshot wounds and can jump off the top of three-story buildings; some people don't seem to be affected at all, but nonetheless turn into these zombies who will immediately follow orders when this specific audio signal is played; and then some people (like the government team themselves) haven't had their DNA itself altered, but for some reason are going through these remarkable physical transformations anyway - bad eyesight clearing on its own, their capacity for logical thought increasing a thousand-fold.

So nobody knows why humans are going through three different sets of reactions to this alien signal, and nobody knows what the purpose of these three transformations are, or what the aliens are or where they're from or what they want or why they've chosen to make contact in such a way. And meanwhile there's a growing amount of affected humans now running around unsupervised, which is causing more and more incidents in the general public that the government is having a harder and harder time keeping under wraps. And it's all this that keeps me watching each week, although admittedly it is certainly not the best-written show in the history of sci-fi television, nor the best-acted. Anyway, new episode tonight if you want to check it out - it's on CBS at 8 pm CST.

--A couple of days ago I was talking about the new visual interface of OSX (Apple's newest operating system, which of course I'm using these days for the first time), and specifically about how nice it was to finally have the chance to simply pick up files with my mouse and drop them on top of an application's icon in order to get them to open. Well, some smartie-pie reader wrote in, pointing out that this ability actually existed in OS9 as well, and that technically this is not my first-ever chance to have this drag-and-drop ability. Well, okay, technically that's true, but it still misses my point - that this drag-and-drop interface still wasn't that powerful until the Dock was invented as well, this physical location where all of one's applications can be found in icon form, and can be shown and hidden and minimized and maximized at will, which is new for OSX. Yes, technically I could've dragged and dropped files to application icons in OS9; but who the hell kept icon logos of all 30 or 40 of their applications on their desktop in OS9? That would've been impossible to easily manage under the old system; which is why I kept aliases for all my apps in the Apple pulldown menu back then, like most other people did, which of course makes you lose the ability to drag-and-drop application files. Anyway, that was my whole point the other day, about how great it now is to have all my applications so instantly available in icon form, which was almost impossible to realistically do in System 9.

--Hey, guess who I ran into at Intelligentsia Coffeehouse the other day? Why, my old friends Franky Vivid and Michelle "Toots" L'Amour, co-founders of the Lavender Cabaret burlesque troupe, which of course I've talked about many times here in the past. The two of them seem to be doing well, based on the short conversation I got to have with them, and they actually have a brand-new revue starting up in the next couple of weeks (once again at the Lakeshore Theatre at Belmont and Broadway), so definitely go check out their website if you want to know more. And if you didn't already know, Michelle actually won this year's Miss Exotic World competition out in California, and also has a new website up just for her, and the things she does away from Lavender Cabaret. Anyway, so that's always nice, to run into the two of them and get to gab for a bit, because they're such a fun and interesting couple.

--And damnit, these have been ready for a week and I keep forgetting to mention it, but all 107 of my September photos are now finally up at my Flickr account. You can click here for shots from my trip out to O'Hare to pick up my German friend Alamar; here for shots from our trip out to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; here for shots of the Mud Queens of Chicago hamming it up at the Around the Coyote arts festival; here for some various goth-related photos during Alamar's trip (including our visit to Gothicfest in Villa Park, as well as our evening at the Neo goth dance club at Fullerton and Clark); here for shots from my latest bike adventure (from Uptown to the northern terminus of the lakefront bicycle path); and here for all the other random photos I took during the month of September. Enjoy!