I seem to make pizzelles every time I have a half-dozen eggs that need to be used before their expiration date.

Here’s where my workday gets bogged down. I’m preparing my review of Flipboard, the iPad news/Twitter/Facebook/magazine app which has caused much excitement since its release a few days ago. I’ve seen the next “Billboard” rankings and I can now announce that Flipboard has knocked “Come On Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners from its #1 position after six weeks at the top of the chart.

“But does the app follow every embedded link in the designated Twitter stream,” I wondered, “or just a few specifically-supported kinds?”

I’m in communication with Flipboard Central but as I prepared to ask that very question via email I thought “…Or I could just post a series of tweets with various kinds of links to the same page, and see what happens.”

(Or, I could do both.)

Thus requiring A Page Wot To Link To, and thus Content For That Page Wot I’m Linking To.

Viz: this.

Sorry to have troubled you. There really wasn’t much to this post, was there? Hang on, perhaps a bit of snark will make this whole enterprise worthwhile?

Your box of seething hate.

This was so ghastly that I had to take a photo. Kashi: this is 2010, not 1947. We all know that your company image is just a marketing angle. I see a box like this and I picture an alcoholic marketing executive barking at his team.

“The fiber cereal…the name ‘Two Friends’ got the best response with the focus group. Put two faces, you know, friends, on the front of the box. What? No, not guys, you ****ing moron!!! Broads. If it’s two guys people will think it’s a gay cereal or something. And make ‘em different races. The hippies will eat that s*** up. I don’t give a **** which race. Whatever. Just make sure one of them’s white. But I want to see the polaroids first to make sure you idiots don’t go ****ing crazy and use a fat chick or something.”

I mean, honestly. You can air as many commercials you want with chirpy, enthusiastic Kashi Food Researchers traveling far and wide and respecting local cultures and it just reinforces the image of a company run by men who keep trying to see if they can get the company to sponsor a Kashi Spokesmodel Bikini Team.

(Not for promotional purposes. Just for the office.)

Advertisers hope that their ad will cause me to make an irrational, emotion-driven purchasing decision. But every single time they succeed, my decision is “never give this company any of my business.”

The Andy Ihnatko 10,000th Tweet Live Video Spectacular from Andy Ihnatko on Vimeo.

After three years, 10,000 Tweets, and being followed by more than 35,000 people, I still don’t have a good answer to the question “But what’s the point of Twitter?” I’ve come up with two responses that work.

Apparently, Twitter is either a boat or a sliver of soap, depending on who’s asking me and who’s listening.

If my audience sincerely and earnestly wants to understand Twitter, I tell them “It’s like a boat. Anybody can use a Twitter account just for fun. A much smaller percentage are leading the kind of lives in which it’s actually useful. And a tiny, tiny fraction are making money with the thing.” If it’s a conversational kind of request, I say “Think of that sliver of soap left in the dish. That’s a single Tweet. All by itself, it’s worthless. Squeeze lots of them together, and you’ll eventually have something with weight and substance.”

But I guess Twitter is like my iPhone 4. Sometimes the best endorsement you can make — and the only endorsement that really matters — is the simple fact that you use the hell out of this thing, and that your week would be very, very different without it.

I got a taste of that over the past few days. For the past couple of weeks, I’d been aware that I was nearing my 10,000th Tweet. I knew I wanted to do something a little bit special for #10,000. Eventually I got to #9998, which meant that I had just enough shots left to announce what I was going to do and then to do it…which also meant that I couldn’t Tweet anything at all until I figured out what those things were going to be.

Behold, The Answer: I did my 10,000th Tweet on Ustream. Click away, but I should warn you that there’s an Anthony Newley impression coming.

“What should my 10,000th Tweet be?” I wondered. I came up with a halfway decent “140-character novel.” Naw. I thought about just being sincere and sweet and thanking the folks who’ve supported my work in various ways. Mmm…naah. When the right idea came, I instantly recognized that there could be no more appropriate way to crystallize my previous 9,999 Tweets.

But yes, these Big Plans meant that I had to stop Twittering for a few days, to preserve the #10,000 slot. Going without Twitter for 72 hours served to remind me about the things I most enjoy about the service.

I missed the ongoing communication with the people who read my columns and listen to my podcasts. There’s an immediacy and a conversational tone to the Twitter timeline that doesn’t exist in any other medium. I like responding to questions and I also like hearing good and bad reactions. Either way, comments are usually to the point, and valuable.

I missed those little moments of time with my friends. If I could afford to send each of my friends one of those baskets of fresh fruit cut into flowery shapes a few times a week, I could. Commenting on a particularly cool of interesting tweet of theirs is close enough, though it really does next to nothing to combat the spread of scurvy and The Ghost Disease among the geek populace.

Not Tweeting has been a little like watching milk go bad in my fridge. Little things pop into my head and maybe they’re of no use to anybody, but they’re fun little strings of words. Twitter is the only place where I can post them, really, and if I try to “save them up” for a later date, they go completely stale after sitting in my head for so long. “I was acting on impulse” isn’t a great explanation for why you did something stupid, but it’s still a hell of a lot better than having to admit that yes, you thought about it for two or three days and it still seemed like a solid idea. This admission is often the precursor to a fiancee maintaining her composure just long enough to twist the engagement ring from her finger and fling it at you with enough force that you’re going to want to apply a little Bactine to the wound.

I don’t feel like I’ve done all I can for something I’ve just written and published until I’ve Tweeted a link. And here we get to the Business end of Twitter. I was looking through my Flickr feed the other day, specifically looking for “orphan” photos that haven’t been organized into any existing photoset before. It’s not hard to figure out why some of these have received just four or five hundred views over the course of a year and another one got 2,000 in just a week: I Tweeted a link to one of them.

I create and publish things for many different reasons and they vary from item to item but yes, somewhere in the back of my mind “I’d like people to see this” is always on the list. I can come up with what I think is an interesting idea, research and write it well, edit it carefully, and publish it. But I’ve got this list of 35,000 people who at some point clicked a button to indicate that they’re somewhat interested in the stuff I post. Until I’ve posted a link to Twitter, I feel like the job is only partially-complete. If it fails to catch on, it fails to catch on…but just like sending a kid off to school with a good, hot breakfast in his or her belly, I feel as though I gave this piece every reasonable advantage.

And Twitter just keeps getting more and more important. Yesterday, I downloaded the sort of app that gets all of my Nerd Parts tingling. Within the first ten minutes of using Flipboard and linking it to my Twitter account, it seemed as though writing a review of it became the most important thing that I would ever do. Phrases like “From now on, instead of vaguely talking about the future of magazines and newspapers, we should just point to Flipboard and then break into discussion groups” and “This free app will justify at least $150 of the money you spend for your iPad” came straight to mind.

(When I feel this exuberant about something…yeah, I quickly realize that I need to calm down and see how I feel after a few more days.)

Flipboard: it really feels like the way I'll be getting 80% of my news from now on.

Still! What a brilliant idea. I follow about 250 people on Twitter. This is, exclusively, a list of people and institutions whose opinions matter to me (actual friends, and writers or publications who regularly write things that I want to read). Their Tweets are of interest to me. These people also often Tweet links to articles and other content that they think is valuable.

Flipboard strip-mines your Twitter follows for content and links, and assembles it all into a beautiful digital magazine of fresh content. I’d say it’s almost “suspiciously” beautiful. Like the Mechanical Turk, it’s hard to imagine that this on-the-fly design and layout is the result of an automaton working without human intervention.

It’s not a Twitter client, really. But yes, you can reply to Tweets and Star the original posts and whatnot.

The app was just released a day ago, so details are still a little sketchy. In addition to linking to Twitter and Facebook, there are “curated” channels whose sources are managed by the Flipboard team…and other social-media sources are coming soon. I almost wore out some of the glass on my iPad tapping and searching for a way to add my Flickr feeds to FlipBoard; a “National Geographic”-style viewer for all of my friends’ photos is going to be a killer feature.

When I first tried Twitter (let’s see: “March 22, 2007″ — oh, my…were we ever that young?) I dismissed it as just a useless micro-trend. Then my friends started to join, and it became entertaining. Then, it somehow became important. I truly value the Twitter infrastructure. I’ve never been interested in playing the Numbers Game; having a certain number of Followers doesn’t motivate me. It’s the connections represented by the 282 people whom I follow and the 35,589 people who follow me that I rely upon. It’s not something that can be engineered. It has to be grown over time.

I had an awareness of the value of the unique shape of this thing called “my peculiar use of Twitter” before Flipboard was released. Flipboard is just the first app that makes that value so tangible.

Well, then. The next milestone, I think, will be 50,000 Twitter followers. I have at least a couple of years to think about how I’m going to mark that occasion. I hope to do something big but even so: expect a cash bar.

There were lots of neat replies to my previous post. There were so many good comments — not all of them positive — that I thought I’d elaborate:

I certainly have nothing against LeBron James, and I certainly don’t fault basketball fans for being interested in his announcement. You should be interested; following basketball is one of those things that gives you joy. It’s a favored pastime, it engages your intellect and your enthusiasm, and you like talking about this stuff with your friends.

I’m just as interested in news about the tech world (because that’s my job as well as a personal interest) and the comix world (because I’m simply a fan). I’m just as interested in news about Gail Simone’s next job or the poor bastard at Microsoft who greenlit the Kin as a basketball fan is in news about LeBron James’ next job. There’s nothing wrong with that; nothing at all.

The point is that there are certain stories — like “what’s LeBron’s next move?” — that somehow start off as news stories and become news products…and the electronic media sells (say) the Tiger Woods infidelity story just as competitively and aggressively as Coke and Pepsi sell colas. It’s something that news producers who work for TV and the Web have to struggle with. Viewer attention is both (a) fleeting and (b) very, very valuable. I think segment producers at CNN and FOX are just as sick of the latest Lindsay Lohan story as anybody else. But they know that if they don’t spend six minutes of every hour talking about it, viewers are going to turn to another channel that will.

Result: over-marketed stories that will follow you wherever you go for news.

There was a point when I simply became aware of how much time I was spending learning about stories that I had no interest in, and which couldn’t possibly influence my life in any way. I resented that I was being force-fed this useless information. If I wanted to watch a half-hour news program, I had to see three minutes of interviews with the judges at JonBenet Ramsey’s final beauty pageant and hear their opinions about how well she posed to “Achy-Breaky Heart.” That was the deal, it seemed.

The Buttafuoco shooting was the first time I sort of blinked hard and realized that I’m an idiot.

(Well, yes: I already knew I was an idiot, of course. Many people had been helpful enough to point that out to me. I just mean this was the first time I realized I was an idiot about this particular thing.)

As we so often do, I’d forgotten that (oh…right) I’m actually in control of my life. Instead of passively sitting through the next four minutes of speculation about Gary Coleman’s will, and complaining about how pointless it is, I could change the channel. It’s a pain in the butt, because the story’s only a few minutes’ long and the story after it might have been interesting and relevant to me. But it’s something that I can do.

Instead of thinking “I’m really not particularly interested in hearing about Mel Gibson’s latest Really Stupid Drunken Comment…but I’ve already read every other article in this copy of ‘People’, and the captain hasn’t said it’s OK for me to turn on my iPad yet,” I can choose to close the magazine and enjoy five minutes of peaceful thinking, without any distraction or visual stimulation.

The amount of background data noise that surrounds us has increased and intensified every year since the Buttafuoco Days. Can you remember a moment in the past 24 hours when you were completely free from outside stimulation? Is constant immersion in this kind of information like living under high-voltage power lines? Maybe we’ll have no idea of the damage this is doing to us until the damage becomes irreparable.

Redefine all of this unnecessary information as “distraction” and then ask yourself the question again. If you’re spending every waking moment distracting yourself…what are you distracting yourself from? What is your brain clamoring to tell you, if it were ever to get your full and complete attention?

An experiment: The next time you have a little time to kill and you instinctively go to your phone to launch your email client or your Twitter app or the web browser, launch the Clock app instead. Set a countdown timer for the amount of time you were going to spend in any of those activities (or ten minutes, whichever is shorter).

And then, put the phone in your pocket and do nothing until you hear the chime.

The thoughts that will come to you will probably be very surprising. Often, it’ll include thoughts that have been clamoring for your attention for days. And I’m not talking about reminders to pick up your dry cleaning, either.

I openly admit that when I was a lad and first I defined the Buttafuoco Point, it was a somewhat smug response to the inundation of needless media and noise. But at this point, I think of it as one of the most valuable user-installed upgrades to my life software.

I benefit far more from three minutes spent listening to my ceiling fan with my eyes closed than I do from the same amount of time spent reading about Lindsay Lohan’s dad’s reaction to her prison sentence.

Allow me to explain. Back in the Eighties, there was this doughy-looking guy by the name of Joey Buttafuoco and he was all over the news for, like, ever. He was cheating on his wife with a teenage girl, and the girl showed up at his house and shot his his wife, wounding her severely.

It was a terrible story. But there came a point when I realized that I kept getting more and more information about these people and their personal lives, despite the fact that I wasn’t seeking it out and I wasn’t the least bit interested.

I wasn’t pleased by this.

I came to define this phenomenon as the “Buttafuoco Point.” Name a huge national news story of little or zero national importance that’s taken place since the mid-Eighties. Chances are that I know the broad strokes of the story (a little girl was brutally murdered in her home; apparently she used to participate in beauty pageants) but little else.

Why? Because I made it a priority, and an admittedly childish point of pride, to try very hard to know next to nothing about stories like that one. This story doesn’t affect my life in any way and that’s never, ever going to change. It involves the personal lives of complete strangers, and, as the media outlets get more desperate to keep the story in play, an ever-widening circle of peripheral individuals. The only reason why the story even endures through news cycle after news cycle is because…

Okay, I’ve no earthly idea. Whatever: I’m not going to waste my time learning anything about this. I already know way too much about the lives of a bunch of total strangers and I won’t learn more, if I have any say in the matter. I’m going to just sit tight and hope that news outlets eventually stop wasting their time trying to cover it.

So LeBron James reached the Buttafuoco Point earlier today. I was vaguely aware of the name and started seeing it everywhere. Automatic defenses kicked in and any further knowledge of who the man is and why he’s in the news has been pre-emptively obliterated from my consciousness.

Here’s everything I know about him:

1) He’s a basketball player.

2) For some reason, he’s signing with a new team.

And I honestly don’t know why he’s doing that, or why it’s big news. In the back of my mind, I’m wondering if he’s that pro athlete who went to jail for being caught with an unlicensed handgun jammed in his pants. Has he just been released or something?

That’s all I can tell you. At some point, he’ll be appointed to a Cabinet post or design a new Android phone or I’ll develop an interest in basketball and maybe then I’ll willingly read more about him.

But until any of those things happen: BUTTAFUOCO’ed!!!! 

If this catches on, I’m turning the concept into a reality game show  for the FX channel. We’ll have a panel of contestants and the one who answers a series of trivia questions about Buttafuoco-style news stories the least-correctly wins the jackpot. 

(Currently seeking producing partners.)

Yes, it’s a massive undertaking. Well, so was the building of the pyramids, right? And yet, if you visit Giza you’ll see these monuments to human determination, standing tall and proud. You’ll also find hundreds of vendors, hucksters and scammers and they’ll hound and pummel you so relentlessly that you’ll wish you never bothered to come at all…which indicates that the “eliminate all common courtesy” campaign already has found passionate international support. Yay, us!

For today’s project update, I point you to this piece in Lifehacker: “The Worst Email Habits and Annoyances You Should Avoid (or At Least Be Aware Of).” In it, selected Lifehacker readers nominate Bad Email Habits and indicate severe disapproval of the following:

1) Expressing “thanks” and/or embracing a generally friendly tone;

2) Not switching off a mobile mail client’s default signature, which indicates that this message was sent from a mobile phone;

3) Boilerplate legalese inserted by a workplace mailserver, usually when the sender’s employer is a law firm, accountancy firm, et cetera.

I fully agree with the fine, sensible findings of Lifehacker’s commentators. When someone says “thank you,” it’s clearly a brush-off and a pointed statement that you’re not worth their time. “Sent from my iPhone” means the sender is a pretentious jerk and that they don’t think you’re worth the time or effort of an office reply. And I’m not exactly sure why the commenters were offended by the concept of legal boilerplate, but I’m willing to have the sender shot just on principle, as a show of my solidarity.

Remember, everyone: we must stand firm against irrational and pathetically defensive responses to these sensible complaints. Be prepared to hear such claptrap as:

1) “Well, I wanted to convey that I was aware that reading and answering my email would take up the recipient’s time, and that I was grateful to the recipient for their effort. Besides, what could be wrong with saying ‘thank you’ to someone?”

or

2) “I just want the sender to know that if my reply is short, it’s ony because I have this tiny iPhone screen and keyboard to work with. I don’t want them to mistake my brevity for hostility, or lack of thought. I think sending them a short reply immediately while I’m on my way to work is more courteous than a longer reply in an hour when I get to my desk.”

3) “I really can’t do anything about that. I don’t run the mailserver.”

I know. What a bunch of d***s! How sad that these folks lack the character to hold themselves accountable for behavior which technically harms no one but of which we, personally, don’t approve.

Remember the Prime Directives of our glorious “no civility” undertaking:

• You, personally, aren’t the most important person in the universe. You are the only important person in the universe.
• There can be no excuse for anybody failing to adhere to your privately-held and poorly-defined expectations.
• Never consider what life is like for anybody else. Filter everything that everybody else does through your own experiences and judge it against your random, ill-defined expectations of human behavior.
• Remember: as the recipient of the right eye of Odin, you have all knowledge of all things, instinctively; trying to see something from another perspective is just a waste of your valuable time and patience.
• If one of these idiots attempts to (oh for ****’s sake) defend their actions, you must react with either indifferent disdain or (better yet) outright hostility. Their so-called “explanation” can only be an attempt to bulls**t you. You’re too smart to let them trick you into double-guessing the validity of your immediate reaction to their choices; take immediate and violent offense that they even suggest that you’re not on to them.
• By steering the discussion away from the topic at hand, and onto the subject of how much they offended you and how they must now make amends, you’re putting the focus right back where it belongs. See point one.
• Above all: if this person wasn’t a total ass, then he or she wouldn’t have done that thing that you disapproved of.

Hold firm, everybody: we can have Hell on earth well ahead of schedule! Never doubt that a large group of thoughtless and selfish people can ruin the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Also, I’d like to post a reminder that the big annual Death To Common Courtesy Summer Mixer is a week from Thursday, in the Great Hall of the Museum of Modern Art, during regular Museum hours. Vuvuzuelas are mandatory this time. No shirkers!

Dammit.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

I’ve just written a 2000-word post that I think is good, funny stuff. I have rewritten it and edited it. I don’t know that it’s brilliant, but it’s something I’m happy with.

Annnnnd now I’ve filed it away for good.

See, the problem is that it’s a parody of an Apple press release for the next iPhone. Shortly after I woke up this morning, I had a picture in my mind of someone at Apple getting sick and tired of all of the complaints about the iPhone and finally saying what’s on his or her mind.

So I started writing.

All writing is a selfish act. You write for your own pleasure. You write because you’ve teased out the first thread of an idea and you can’t help but to pull on that thread carefully and see how far it goes.

On that basis: those two or three hours were well-spent.

No, Andy. NO. Stop it.

(Shut up.)

NO. You can’t post this.

Why not? Because every time I’ve written a parody, I’ve exercised a lot of common sense. “Make sure that nobody could possibly confuse this for the real thing,” I determined. And then through a second draft and then a third draft, I undermine the credibility as far as I think I can stretch it without explicitly writing “By the way, this is just something I made up. It’s a bit of fun and nothing more.”

I post or publish the piece, thinking that nothing can possibly go wrong. Annnnnd then it all goes horribly wrong.

Oh, it’s not your intelligence that concerns me, dear reader. It’s the intelligence of the Dumbest Person On The Internet.

Aha. Yes, now you see my problem. This Dumbest Person On The Internet goes and puts excerpts on their blog, or Twitters a quote or two. And then it’s allll over the internet that [topic redacted]. Which is obvious rubbish within the context of the original piece, but it has a certain vague credibility when taken out of context.

Plus, I keep forgetting that there are some people out there who think I’m some kind of respected journalist. I can’t say whether that’s deserved or not, but still: put rubbish on the right plate and some people will consider it Haute Cuisine.

(Andy reads the piece again.)

NO, Andy. Put it AWAY.

Sorry to jerk you people around with A Post Explaining Why I’m Not Releasing A Post. But I spent a few hours on that original piece. If I can’t post the post, at least I can post a story about the post.

Okay.

(checking again…)

Okay. It seems as though I’ve successfully nuked the whole site and reinstalled everything. I’ve downloaded fresh copies of WordPress and a couple of templates, and restored all of the site’s existing content.

So I think that should take care of the spamlink hack. I’d tried a couple of other tricks last week to avoid all of this work. If nuking it from orbit doesn’t fix this problem for good — given that I’ve changed all of my passwords — then this becomes what is known in tech circles as A Whole ‘Nother Thing.

This was quite a typical 2010 sort of procedure. I’m not a day-to-day WordPress admin, so I needed to spend some time refreshing my knowledge on how to do all of this properly. A couple of days ago I did all of the advance work (prepping for disasters).

All I needed to do this morning was delete my existing WordPress directory on the server and reinstall everything. It should have been about twenty minutes’ worth of work, all told, including making a few edits to some key files so that WP can find my databases. And indeed, that’s all it really took.

Aha. But instead, Ihnatko.com was down for nearly two hours.

First, I decided that I wanted there to be some sort of “Ihnatko.com is down but it’ll be back up shortly” page in place of my WordPress blog. That took all of five minutes. It’s simple HTML. Then I decided that I wanted it to be in a little CSS box. Then I decided that I wanted a pretty little picture from my photo library (but which one?) Then I wanted to center it all (and CSS is simply not on board with the concept of “let me enter a simple command; it’s your job to figure out how to center this inside whatever boundaries this element happens to appear in”).

Then I thought it’d be cool to have the text overlap the photo a little.

Then I thought I should identify the photo. I Googled for the name of the town and did a little research just in case anybody asked me any questions about it.

Oh, and the dumbest move of them all: I was Twittering as I went. My hostility against CSS inspired snarky, 140-character comments, and on ongoing dialogue with my 35,000 Followers.

But hey, it’s back up now, and…

(let me just check one more time…)

Yes, the invisible spam links have vanished. So either I’ve eliminated the redundant PHP scripts that the hack deposited in my WordPress directory, or it’s A Whole ‘Nother Thing and it’ll take a day or two for some bit of code to realize “Hey…Ihnatko.com doesn’t contain spam links” and do that thing that it does to inject the code into the site again.

(Which shouldn’t happen, because I’ve changed all of the passwords.)

Welcome to Stage One of the cleanup. I’ve fixed…

(checking)

…I’ve fixed the site at my end. It’ll take about a month before Google’s spiders are convinced that my blog is no longer trying to game the ranking system, and ihnatko.com resumes its rightful place in search results.

In the meantime, if any of your office or home NetNanny-type apps are blocking Ihnatko.com because it’s a spamlink farm…please click whatever link the app provides and tell the service to reconsider its position.

(checking)

Ok. Good. I don’t need to keep checking. Whatever happens now, happens.

…

(checking…)

Another Sunday, another office day. There’s a certain point when I pack myself a digital lunch bag and relocate to someplace very public to continue my work.

Nearby, I have The Bagel Place With The Free WiFi. I reckon that a wheat bagel and a can of soda buys me at least two hours of guilt-free office time. If I’m going to make it a full four, I either order a full lunch or just stick a couple of bucks into the tip jar. The employees have been told by the shop’s absentee owner “Remember, people with laptops aren’t allowed to stay unless they’re buying things.” I choose to buy the good will of the poorly-paid hourly wage-earners.

It’s a good system and it seems to work very well for all parties.

The BPwtFW closes at 6. If I’m not done working, but I’m not ready to go home yet, I’ll move on to the Panera Bread up the street. Their prices are fairly atrocious, but I make it all back on the free soda refills.

At the moment, I’m set up at the Chipotle (way) up the street. The staff is friendly. The food is cheap, healthy, and tasty. The soda spills carelessly from an ever-replenishing font, just like Wonka’s chocolate waterfall.

I limit myself to just iPad work here, though. The joint has only enough tables to handle normal eat-and-go customer traffic. Setting up a virtual office — complete with MiFi base station — seems like a showboaty and ungrateful gesture. It gets the job done, though: I can finish editing a piece that I copied into my Dropbox from home, or get to the end of the chapter of the book I’m reading, or relentlessly refresh a bunch of news pages in hopes that I’ll find one more thing that I need to research or follow up on before regretfully pulling up stakes, getting one last soda refill, and finally heading home.

Alien field operatives are sent to this planet with what seems like a very simple mission. It doesn’t take long before the new agent understands why there’s such a rapid burnout rate for Sol-3 field agents, or why the veteran agent he relieved had such a harrowed look on his face.

“Understanding the Humans” is a deceptively complex goal. We’re a maddeningly confusing and contradictory species.

My advice to these aliens: focus on just one thing. If you can figure out the human need to occasionally be all alone but surrounded by people, you’ll understand everything there is to know about us.

Yeah, I’m pretty furious.

Oh, right: “Ihnatko.com will be going up and down over the next day or three as I nuke the whole installation and reinstall the original content.”

There.

Moving on.

What pisses me off is the fact that this is just a cold and mechanical system for gaming Google’s pagerank system and driving traffic to sites that have subscribed to some sort of service powered by hacked sites. The sites being linked to “look” more important by virtue of the fact that so many sites are linking to them, which means that they’ll appear higher in search results. The site owners might even possibly be naive enough not to know that the “consultant” promising to get them higher rankings is actually responsible for infecting hundreds of thousands of sites with spamlinks.

I hate that I have to take my site offline and that I now have a BIG project on my hands. But what pisses me off is the statement that these people are making about their relationship with the rest of Humanity.

I’m suddenly thinking of an old SNL sketch. It was a talk show in which all three of the day’s guests had “ruined things for everyone.” In possibly the last funny thing he ever did, Jim Belushi played the guy who had ruined hitchhiking.

“For those of you who don’t know what ‘hitchhiking’ was,” the host explained, “for the first five or six decades of this century, if you needed a ride and didn’t have a car, you could just stand by the side of the road and hold your arm out with your thumb pointing up, like this. Drivers would actually stop, pick you up, and let you ride along with them for free.”

“Yeah, it was pretty sweet,” the guest said. “Well, so one day I’ve just been picked up — nice guy and everything — and I don’t know why, but it suddenly occurred to me: ‘I could kill him right now, and nobody would ever know it was me’. You know? There was nobody around, I was a complete stranger…it was awesome! I’d always wanted to kill people, but I never could figure out how to do it and get away with it.”

“So you killed him.”

“Right, stabbed him to death with my pocket knife. Anyway, so I dumped the body and now I’m driving around in his car. And I see a hitchhiker up ahead in the road. I realized that the same thing could work for the people who get picked up, too! No witnesses, no connection between you and the victim…I couldn’t believe nobody had thought of it! It was great; I bet I killed maybe 200, 300 people over the next five years. At some point, though, I couldn’t get any more rides. Even when I switched roles, I couldn’t find any people to pick up and kill.”

“Because word had spread that hitchhikers and people who picked up hitchhikers were getting brutally murdered.”

“Right.”

“You ruined hitchhiking for everybody.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Well, what are you up to these days?”

“You know that thing where every day, a man walks right up to your house and hand-delivers your mail? Don’t get too attached to it.”

You know what I’m saying here? I swatted my first mosquito of the season today. Mosquitoes are a colossal nuisance. But what can you do about them? It’s just Nature.

Spam and these kinds of hacks get me pissed because they’re a completely man-made nuisance. We could live in a world in which email and blogs and all kinds of other services just plain work. Unfortunately, that’s not good enough for many people, I guess.

I was having dinner with a friend when we started talking about that recent movie in which a mysterious man with half a face offers a Big Red Button to a couple in dire financial straits. “Push this button, and you will receive one million dollars,” he says, through an open cheek. “But somewhere in the world, a complete stranger will die.”

I said that under no circumstances could any moral person press the button.

My friend is way smarter than I am. She said “I’d accept the deal…only so I could grab the button away from him and make sure he couldn’t give it to anybody else.”

There are so many people out there who wouldn’t think twice about hitting that button. The larger lesson is that the Button exists in so many shapes and forms and it’s being slid towards us every day.

The shady contractor who charges a homeowner $50 for appliance removal and just dumps the old fridge or stove in an unguarded vacant lot on his way home. The financier who willfully dismantles the foundations of his own bank so he can clean up on a bet he made that its investments would fail; the idiot at the public library last week who decided that the Quiet Room — yes, even within the context of a library, a room with a big sign that says “QUIET ROOM” — was the perfect place to rip open, process, and crumple up a pile of 100 cellophane-windowed envelopes…these people need to be nailed up inside wooden boxes and shipped off to an island populated solely with like-minded individuals. Then they’ll know the true definition of Hell.

Hell isn’t a place where you’re tormented by the Devil. Hell isn’t even (as the Catholic Church defines it, I think) the simple absence of God. Hell is a closed community in which everybody thinks selfishly 100% of the time. And I can’t imagine a worse curse than to be unable to empathize with other people’s needs, or appreciate the effects your behavior can have — positively and negatively — on others.

At least the idiot with the envelopes responded to a quiet, but firm, “you can’t do that in here.” He can stay, I suppose. I’m going to yak-yak-yak about the need to be thoughtful and sensitive, I suppose it’s all meaningless if I don’t put it into actual practice.

But I really wanted to take him outside and smash a dozen raw eggs over his head, one at a time. What can I say. I am but an imperfect vessel for the Universe’s perfection.