2008-06-05. An inter-species eulogy.
2008-05-05. An appreciation of several dead prophets and their living communicants.
2008-04-28. How do we write for the ages as they leave us behind?
2008-04-21. An awkward wobble, arms akimbo.
2008-04-11. With apologies to William Carlos Williams. And our grandchildren.
2008-03-23. He’s got Freedom of Choice.
2008-03-17. I didn’t order this, but I’ll take it anyway.
2008-03-09. Money changes everything.
2008-03-05. Nor yesterday, either.
2008-02-25. One of my favorite forms of literature.
2008-02-02. Morality, economics and prison sex.
2008-01-24. The second part of a series tracing the history of one of the world’s oldest prepared foods.
2008-01-23. Villon was a villain.
2008-01-21. The first part of a series tracing the history of one of the world’s oldest prepared foods.
2008-01-20. Negotiating with the tribe of animals.
2008-01-18. Long before he was Don Fernando.
2008-01-17. Welcome, Don Fernando.
2008-01-16. Farewell, Don Fernando.
2008-01-14. The seasons change, and so do we.
2008-01-13. Observing the sabbath. From afar.
2008-01-12. Just keep looking, you’ll find it.
2008-01-11. A short dialogue on the afterlife, interlinked with the recent readings on the web that inspired it.
2008-01-10. All words are equal, but some are more equal than others.
This essay was originally published March 24th, 2004. I have re-worked it because it is one of the most popular landing pages on this site.
2008-01-09. Watch where you walk.
2008-01-08. The problems with a short fable about an island.
2008-01-07. The cycle of life.
2008-01-06. Ecclesiastical advice for the lost.
2008-01-04. Patch work: spit and baling wire.
2008-01-03. Fire and brimstone.
2008-01-02. A page from Ezekiel’s diary.
This piece was jointly inspired by a short piece at Distorte called Apples are the Only Fruit and the remarkable photography of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.
2008-01-01. A tale of three strays.
2007-10-25. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, like Hieronymus Bosch, was several centuries ahead of his time.
The first version of this article was published June 22nd, 2003. This update includes information recently gleaned at an exhibition of Arcimboldo’s work at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, France.
2007-08-06. Waking up after far too long.
2007-03-20. An unusual museum in Rome.
2007-01-09. Everything has a price.
2007-01-08. Answers.
2006-10-31. In the beginning the market was without currency and there were lambs and wheat and barley upon the scales.
This essays leans heavily on Fritz Heichelheim’s An ancient economic history; from the palaeolithic age to the migrations of the Germanic, Slavic and Arabic nations, Karl Polanyi’s The Livelihood of Man, Morris Silver’s Economic Structures of the Ancient Near East, and various articles by I. J. Gelb in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.
2006-10-12. A quotation that could serve as a workable position statement for the author.
2006-09-27. A humanistic guide to our digital laborers, part 4. See also parts one, two and three.
2006-09-22. The Nonist asked a question that reminded me of previous observations I'd made on the same topic. This is my reply, which turned out too long to post to his comment system. I will almost certainly break this into smaller essays later.
2006-09-19. A humanistic guide to our digital laborers, part 3. See also parts one, two and four.
2006-09-15. A humanistic guide to our digital laborers, part 2. See also parts one, three and four.
2006-09-13. A humanistic exploration of our digital helpers. See also parts two, three and four.
2006-09-11. The plan, such as it is, for the future of this device.
2006-08-15. Mining for narrative gold in AOL’s dung-heap.
2006-08-14. The song of songs.
2006-07-03. There’s no way to know, but there are many ways to believe.
2006-01-31. Silence can be a blessing.
2006-01-14. A story written to a theme suggested by one of my confreres in the Januaryists. I was unable to perform as well as I would have liked, falling back on jokes, literary references and classical allusions because the topic was more than I could face head-on. (Also: short by 300 words).
2006-01-06. Another manifesto.
2005-07-19. Everything in its right place.
2005-07-06. Love is a strange beast.
2005-03-23. On the globalization of game play.
2005-02-19. A small man tries to make a big world laugh.
2005-02-11. The diary of Timothy Richards, a thirty-six year old teller at Sycamore Savings and Trust who traded a receding hairline for an advancing one.
2005-02-10. A weekend in the life of a Bourgeois family.
2005-02-08. A new folk tale about coping with change.
2005-02-04. “Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature. It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate. Silence is the only Voice of our God.” — Melville
2005-02-03. A pitch made to an American television network that, for legal reasons, must remain nameless, but which we will refer to as Marmot. The presentation should be read aloud with the unbridled enthusiasm of a Mexican wrestling commentator.
2005-02-02. It’ll be easy, like a jog along the beach.
2005-02-01. We play the games we know.
2004-12-01. Get a move on.
2004-11-01. I was, for one day, the Devil.
2004-10-14. Rhetorical Device’s crack team of fact checkers debunk a statement made by Bush at the last debate.
2004-10-04. Some old wisdom for the new empire.
2004-09-24. A musicological analysis of why I’ll never be a famous rock guitar hero.
2004-09-07. A photograph of Mammon’s summer home.
2004-09-01. Distance is relative.
2004-08-31. I found these on the wall.
2004-08-30. We made some noise, would you like some?
2004-08-15. When boy meets dog.
2004-08-01. An essay on the nature of the novel as defined by three great twentieth-century novelists born between 1929 and 1936.
2004-07-26. Strangers on a train.
2004-07-17. An old acquaintance re-discovered.
2004-07-12. On the dangers of inadequate preparation.
2004-05-19. A Lovecraftian horror novel in the round, co-written by my friends at Brokentype, FTrain and Logodrome. The other chapters are located, in order, here, here, here, and here.
2004-05-17. A more talented writer than I has demanded homage in the form of a piece containing the words squab, origami, hemlock, Caracas, and spats.
2004-05-13. Words fail me.
2004-05-05. A confessional concerning my nature and motivations, please excuse the deplorable self indulgence inherent herein.
2004-04-16. A traditional Irish melody.
2004-04-13. A Lovecraftian horror novel in the round, written by my friends at Brokentype, FTrain, Logodrome, and myself. The succeeding chapters are located, in order, here, here, here, and here.
2004-04-06. A wake-up call.
2004-04-02. Another in the growing series of pieces written by reader request. In this case the words were: guerilla, maudlin, vulture, buxom, and rogue.
2004-03-17. A night spent waiting in vain.
2004-03-15. A conversation.
2004-03-10. The beginnings of an article for Modern Gypsy magazine.
2004-03-05. This story was written based on a reader request for a piece “about a person called Arun Sarin, a maelstrom, a cheese wheel, parking tickets, and death.”
2004-02-29. The previous entry, God Only Knows, was written to a reader request. I requested reciprocity, stipulating that his story must contain references to Peru, elephants, skyscrapers, tea and prostitution.
2004-02-27. God only knows what I’d be without you.
2004-02-23. A morning in the life of Max.
2004-02-16. On the importance of communication.
2004-02-11. A perfect match.
2004-02-06. The diary of a satisfied consumer.
2004-02-03. Of mice and men.
2004-01-31. The end of a month of mayhem.
2004-01-30. A wet dream from which I hope never to awake.
2004-01-27. Tuesday night at my local.
2004-01-24. The reason why.
2004-01-21. Loose connections sometimes persist beyond reasonable boundaries.
2004-01-19. From an essay in the Irish language literary journal ClóIar-Chonnachta. Translated by Jack Rusher.
2004-01-18. Stop me before I read again.
2004-01-17. A bit of whining about the housing market.
2004-01-16. The first in a series of letters to a son I don’t have. He is, perhaps cruelly, named for the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal.
2004-01-15. It wasn’t really voodoo, it was Santeria.
2004-01-13. The irresistible pull of failure.
2004-01-12. The things people say.
2004-01-11. We both tried, but it didn’t work out.
2004-01-09. I read the label, but I probably shouldn’t have.
2004-01-07. A story about choices.
2004-01-06. Ce n’est pas une poésie politique.
2004-01-04. Spam, spam, everywhere.
2004-01-03. A brief dialogue on adversity.
2004-01-02. Continuity within the human condition.
2004-01-01. A benighted meditation on the nature of art and science.
2003-12-09. An ode to feline beauty.
2003-12-06. A brief biographical summary in which I confess my love for machines.
2003-12-03. My first brush with true love.
2003-11-17. In which the author learns yet another valuable life lesson.
2003-11-05. The Six Mistakes of Man.
2003-11-02. A short and somewhat formal description of the Radar Networks Triple Store, which is the system that handles the semantic metadata for this website.
2003-10-25. The most common disasters in the world.
2003-10-24. A “trust horizon”-based routing scheme for use in peer to peer overlay networks.
2003-09-19. My beer Shangri-La is situated at 167 Chrystie Street, New York, New York, and is called New Beer Distributors.
2003-09-11. The morbid practice of re-living tragedy and the answer to half of the email I’ve received this week.
2003-08-16. Someone turned out the lights. All of them.
2003-08-13. I attended my first Pho List gathering last evening. Lawyers argued music technology policy late into the evening over sake and snacks. I listened with some interest and, in classic esprit d’escalier, here are my rebuttals to the various suggestions put forth.
2003-07-19. Tell ’em Jack sent you.
2003-07-01. A man can be the country from whence he comes.
2003-06-28. A drunken crossing between countries and languages.
2003-06-17. Una poca música para el cuarto de “chill.”
2003-06-07. Thirteen seconds of orchestral gypsy music.
2003-06-02. A meditation on the power of absence.
2003-05-30. Certain words and expressions have what seems the best possible emotional and semantic content — the perfect prosody. Unfortunately, I am in love with many that aren’t native to my native English.
2003-05-27. A pangram contains every letter of the alphabet. The word comes from the Greek words pan (all) and gramma (letter).
2003-05-26. Strange bedfellows.
2003-05-19. Accèpimus panem, fructum terrae.
2003-05-12. The games despots play.
2003-02-04. Two great tastes, [...]
2003-01-08. A small instrumental soundscape that’s somewhat reminiscent of Pink Floyd, Radiohead or Four Tet.
2003-01-03. Our New Year celebrations started at lunch. We had French galettes with melted gruyere and shredded turkey, a small salad and a bottle of red wine (sadly, there was no cidre to be had). The galettes were accomplished thusly.
2002-12-11. Group theory applied to groups of persons.
2002-11-22. A rose by any other name.
2002-11-18. Some homes resist improvement.
2002-11-08. Smuggling food into prison.
2002-10-17. The view from the train window.
2002-10-17. A melancholy vocal, written and reorded in forty-five minutes.
2002-10-16. Three men making noise.
2002-10-14. The diary of a former rock star.
2002-09-17. A gastronomic adventure.
2001-12-09. The birth of the anti-hero.
1998-10-04. A proposed solution to some of the problems that plague our email infrastructure.