It was a while since I’ve been to his house. As I enter I record everything that has changed: the new piano by the library and the table pushed next to the wall, abd the fresh flowers in the vase, and the new, pretty woman in the foyer.

“Where is he?” I ask. She wears a black dress that doesn’t become her. But she’s pretty; enviably pretty. She doesn’t answer at first, just gives me a frosty look that accents the distance between us: me at the door, she by the table next to the wall. Her hair is red. He always had a taste for bizarre women, I think, and then she answers: “don’t you know?”

“No,” I say, “I don’t”. I suddenly notice how sombre everything is: her black dress, the white flowers, the darkness in the house. She looks away and then at me.

“Hurt?” I say. She nods: no. “He’s gone now.”

The room is now colder, darker; I say, “surely…”
(more…)

“I,” says the man who stands by the pilot, “am unlucky in love”.

They nod and mumble in appreciation: they are all holding now-empty glasses. The bottle they left on the ground, and it is growing steadily far in its carafe, swimming in a bed of ice water. Just the thought of it growing so far away — a meter a minute — is enough to give you motion sickness. Above them the engine roars a muffled roar in the thin, windy air.

“And I am unlucky,” says an obese man, well-dressed in his wheelchair, “in health”.

“I’m unlucky all around on Mondays and on Thursday nights,” says another man. The airship sails, up, up, up; the men all whisked away in its shaky embrace.

“I am unlucky in my sciences,” says the man who invited them all. He wears a white suite and a monocle, the staple of a scientist. “Yet I am positive we shall succeed. I know not all of you have faith. But the best researchers are all united in agreeing in the theraputic effect of high altitudes on the Fortune gland beneath the cortex…”

Somewhere on the ship, a man in his shirtsleeves says, “I am unlucky with my children.” The man he talks to says his investments all started to falter the year previous, after he had fallen from an apricot tree. Then there’s a sudden wind that blows hard and rocks the airship, sending wine glasses overboard, and it exhausts all conversation — the confessions, the stories, the science lectures.

“I,” whispers the pilot, but they all hear anyway, “am unlucky in sailing”.

Won’t you please
observe this photo, taken at the turn of the century. It depicts an unknown early American football team, and I found it at Wikipedia. Look how lean these tiny guys look.
Next, peak at defensive lineman Michael Strahan from the the aptly-named New York Giants. (Link fixed. Thanks, Yoni!)
Yes.

I swear to god, this is a post about brain power, not football, and let me be the first to draw a line from one to the other. Via Boing Boing we learn that Sharpbrains, who manufacture those brain-training software, report that 2007 was a phenomenal year for what they call Brain Fitness software. These programs grossed over 225 million dollars in the US. Real dollars. Not Canadian.

Now, I don’t mind people working hard to get ahead of others. That’s how it’s supposed to be. And as the internet turns knowledge useless and learning abilities crucial, we all expected that sooner or later people will want to do whatever they can to sharpen their minds. It’s the euphemisms I can’t stand. Brain Fitness. Brain Fitness. Fitness is what you do when you want to get leaner or prevent heart disease: you don’t get on the NFL for being lean. No. You get puffed up. You get engineered from early age to be huge. Huge! We’re saying brain fitness here, but what we mean is Giant Heads.

Not everybody wants to play defense for the New York Giants, but everybody wants a big mind. Pretty soon it’ll be a race we will all have to run in. Giant craniums all around. Let me say this: I wouldn’t be opposed to having my brain be a little leaner. Those slopes of abstract thought are getting steeper, and I for one wouldn’t mind scaling them with a little less huffing and puffing. But soon enough, I swear to god, all around you, in the street, on the line to the bank, sitting next to you when you’re waiting for a job interview, all these guys with bulbous craniums. People with portly heads testifying, just as muscular men do today, that they took no brain enhancing drugs. Giant heads, perhaps with USB 3.0 ports right behind the left ear. And I, for one, I don’t think that’s fair. I want to retain the right to be lazy and unexercised and still be considered smart. After all, that’s what being a geek is all about.

How D&D is a gateway drug to every flavor of nerdiness. This is absolutely true.

So I guess the secret is out: I have a new blog at digitali.st. This one will have to do with internet and technology from angles similar to those I pursue in my writing for the newspapers. Fear not: everything poetic or strange will still be here at Quotendquote, which I also plan to update much more frequently now. Also, my new email is a (at) digitali.st.