'Bred Crumbs

Non-prescription Sleep Aids

A Web trail of attempts* to read Moby-Dick reminds me of a current, misguided commercial for a hotel chain. At the end of the ad, the man in it settles into his bed and falls immediately to sleep. The announcer is trying to convince us the traveler's welcome narcolepsy is the work of the hotel's comfort, niceness, and all-around superior hotelibility.

Meanwhile, though, the camera is zooming toward the side of the bed, toward the book our hero couldn't read much of because of his sudden drowsiness.

The book is Ulysses.

Hotel, shmotel. No wonder he fled consciousness so easy.

Moby-Dick. Ulysses. Never read 'em, don't plan to. They are the vegetables of literature. I don't care how good for me they might be; I'm not eating them.

Unless you smother them in cheese ...

I watched, every optic nerve afire, as the strapping young longshoreman hauled high his cable-knit sweater, revealing a God-hewn knot of muscles that invigorated my baser humours as no one had before ...

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* This link is to Defective Yeti, where I except you'll see, in a couple days' time, a fine collecton of blistering critics' comments about American Wedding and, as I insist on calling it, Giggly. (Who the hell greenlighted that unpronouncable title? Among other things?)

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Fun with Small Joysticks

CrossWalk made its world premiere yesterday at a friend's annual film-festival party. Through the twin miracles of a video projector and a big white wall, films and videos made by hosts, guests, and friends of hosts and guests were shown, including newly made things such as CrossWalk (coming to the Web soon, we swear).

But probably the biggest hit of all was more than twenty years old ...

... the original Atari 2600 still owned by one of the party hosts, along with all the key games: Pitfall, Pac-Man, Frogger, Donkey Kong, even the infamous E.T. And just when anyone was about to observe how quaint it was that this antique device (with a button for TV TYPE – COLOR or B-W) entertained us all back then, he'd get sucked deep into a game of River Raid and be lost forever.

With the Atari and the films and the food and the booze, it was a great party for man, woman, or beast. And in nature as in the human kingdom, inevitable connections were made:

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