Happy saddest day

So most people go with "blue Monday" being the saddest day of the year, but when I read about it, I remembered the "24" instead of "around Jan. 24" and I've decided to go ahead and designate today as the downest day of my year. Heck, it was a piece in the IHT, and ended with this fine proverb, "You can't stop birds of sadness flying over you, but don't let them nest in your hair," which inspired the first doodle I've done in years -- some girl with feathers in her hair. (The two obvious critical interpretations being: 1) the birds flew on, and 2) I can't draw birds.) And I liked that my year's hump day fell on a Wednesday.

No, the curve isn't completely smooth. Yesterday afternoon the first snow of the year began, and when I went out for a walk that evening the flakes became large and slow -- no longer racing for the ground, not quite still in the air. And I thought, if it would only snow every day, I wouldn't mind never smoking another cigarette. Tomorrow I am going to Paris.

I was expecting bad news today and didn't get it. This can still be the saddest day. While I waited I decided to try to draw birds like Tomie dePaola. I don't quite have the hang of it.

Options

So you still can't find it?

No, not only is the invisible potion invisible, it also turns whatever it touches invisible. I don't know why I didn't put the bottle inside of a second container. Never thought I would want to take it again.

And you're still having that problem?

Yeah, I just can't get used to being visible. Any time I notice someone noticing me, I think there's something stuck in my teeth or that my face is dirty. I've started carrying around a little mirror so I can check. Then I notice that my face is really lopsided. Then I start to worry that people think I'm being vain.

Did you have this problem before?

No, not when I was a kid at least. But now being seen just seems abnormal, and abnormal, for some reason, equals bad.

If I were you, I would just imagine that people were staring at me because I looked like the Hoff in a leather speedo. And forgo the mirror.

Grab bag

In my late adolescence I acquired this rather repulsive but endearing habit (if one can find oneself endearing): when cooking I would collect the various bits of vegetable debris in a plastic bag, spit in it (sometimes add a little hair), tie the bag, toss it in the trash, and say to myself, in a billion years, that'll be something.

Paper or plastic

Anyway, according to the BBC, the One Laptop per Child Project may allow the general public to buy their own XO, but only if you sponsor a second for the developing world.

Everybody's talking about the new iPhone.

Divvying up household chores is such a pain. What about having a simple rule: if you see the other person cleaning, you clean too. No nagging. No lists. No "let me do that for you later" BS. And, of course, you could be exempt if you were doing something else to maintain the house, like fixing the computer that is also the television, the stereo, and the DVD player. Of course, if both people are slobs, this rule might not work. Wait. Nevermind, it would work.

And in a billion years you might have something.

Up in the air, but not upsidedown yet

Something about this short item in the local free paper (Le Matin Bleu) caught my eye this morning. Probably the man flying through the air, but possibly the Icarus mention.

Anyway, roughly translated:

A Vaudois achieves the dream of Icarus

Prototype: At 46 years, Yves Rossy, a pilot with Swiss, has succeeded in constructing a true individual flying wing, propelled by four engines. The pilot has obtained authorization from the federal air authorities, that at first accused him of violating air space, to do testing, revealed "Le Matin dimanche". His dream is to take one or two years off to perfect his prototype, which he has been working on for seven years.

It's hard to make out in the picture here, but he advertises his website on the back of the wings. If you go there, you will be asked for money, and learn about his weird thing for Batman. You will also see that he has done a lot of crazy stuff (like "Planes have handles at the end of their wings... Why not hold on to them between 2 planes whilst they are flying..."), and had other slightly less insane people make videos of said crazy stunts.

At the end of the his (long) flight video (set to horrible music) he claims to be working on a model that can take off.

Dare I guess? Detachable wheels? A very long runway? With a near infinite number of pillows at the end?

1. "Stick out your lower lip"

2. "Raise your eyebrows and shoulders simultaneously"

You're doing the Bof like a born Parisian! Now you can say "I don't know," or "I disagree with your idiotic opinion," or "not my fault," without resorting a single solitary French word.

Tourism officials have issued a guide to Parisian gestures as part of a recent ad campaign to convince potential visitors that Paris isn't just a city of museums; it's also a place where you can go and be rude to the locals in order to be like the locals.

My personal favorite? Has to be Les boules:

1. "Hold an imaginary pair of tennis balls, one in each hand"

2. "Put your hands in front of your neck, as if you were holding your lymph nodes"

Now, I've never held my lymph nodes, so I might not get it right the first few times, but I'm going to have to try this one out the next time I go. Les boules, I'm sick of all this art. Les boules, if I have to walk through this beautiful city any longer, I'm just going to puke. Les boules, les boules.

Quite honestly, I've never had any one be rude to me in Paris. Every guy I've ever spoken to has been incredibly tolerant of my horrible broken French. And what's wrong with museums?

I know it's not the case, but I harbor a secret (or not so) hope that this is just a sneaky way to get the obnoxious to keep their mouths shut and blend.

Or Camembert.

To learn more, go here

The next (not so) big thing (and email from the dead)

So, for whatever reason, I was lying on the couch, trying to imagine what the next big internet thing could be. In the last few years services tied to cheap storage on a massive scale (and more recently tagging and the like) have been on the rise -- chock full of your mail and photos and keeping you in contact with your friends and hosting your blog and yada etc yada.

Now, if I had even the foggiest idea what the next big hardware breakthrough would be I might not be writing this right now.

But one thing that could be nifty is a service that would offer "person-alerts", like Google does with the news. Some grand clearing-house attached to Friendster and MySpace and tribe and the rest where you could enter in the details for your lost people and specify a matching threshold and get notified when someone who matched appeared. Hey, what about "Stalkr!" for a name? (Sure sure, people could opt out at the site or it could be part of the user agreement with the networking site or whatever. You say "privacy" and I say, just this once, very softly, "details.")

Okay, catchy name aside, it seems a little skeletal so far as internet ventures go. But then I remembered an idea I had way back when -- Email from the Dead.

"Finally, the last in last words." The premise is the obvious. You sign up with the service and write up your missives to be fired off at the appropriate people when the trigger event (your death) occurs. Why not tie it in to the whole "Stalkr!" thing, so that you can say goodbye, or perhaps piss-off, or, hey, I turned out just fine and then I died, to that first boy/girl/couple who broke your heart, but who you never managed to google and were too cheap to hire a PI to track down. Or, you know, you were just chicken.

The real beauty begins to appear when you imagine the accidents. Because they're going to happen. You won't be there to review the information and say, yeah, that's him/her/them.

So, imagine the accidents are the point. You create a recipient profile, write what you want to say, and then people ten and twenty and twenty-two and 33.3 years (and further) later get this weird message.

But I don't think "Stalkr!" quite works. "Hauntr!"?

Only $100 and a crank battery? I'll take 4!

I'm a sucker for things that fold and/or have wheels (and a crank is a folding wheel), so it was easy for me to find a soft spot for the One Laptop Per Child project. And, if I could buy four, I would of course donate 3 to children who need them. However, "Can I buy one" (for myself or to finance a few machines for a developing country) does not seem to be included in their FAQ. (Well, perhaps obliquely. They plan to sell the machines in bulk directly to governments.)

They are hoping to launch the project in the first half of 2007 and have created a specialized OS, "Sugar," that is supposed to be more child oriented than the standard desktop paradigm. Some of it just seems like calling a garbanzo bean a chickpea, but one interesting change is that they will have a journal instead of the usual system of folders and such. I imagine it's sort of like searching though email for the latest version of that god awful huge word document you were working on (not that I would ever do that), but I could be wrong. Those who are interested in trying it out for themselves can download a copy here.

One small irritant for me, though I'm not sure if I'm irritated with myself or Mr. Negroponte, is when he said it was "criminal" that children be trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Now, I agree PowerPoint

• rots your brain
• rots your brain
• and rots your brain

and that kids should be kids, but I'm afraid that for a lot of the kids in question, knowing stupid office programs could make a big difference in their lives. But I'm still pretty sure I'm irritated with myself. Pragmatism is so dingy sometimes, and for good reason.

Anyway, here's a big XOXOXO for the XO. And maybe we can donate our used USB keychain drives, even if we can't buy one of the laptops.

Read the BBC's article here

Tomato Soup

Tomato Soup
Originally uploaded by Mark and Allegra.

Mark took this picture of several round things at Mövenpick. Little did we know that the rest of our meal wouldn't show up for another hour.