The Squirrel Technologist

...since this is my soapbox...

This Wall Street bailout is not, despite what the talking empty heads keep saying, socialist. They just call it that to draw attention away from the fact that there's nothing remotely conservative about it.

• Conservatives would let the meltdown happen. Let the speculators go bust. They made their bet, now let them lie under it.

• Socialists would nationalize the companies involved, confiscating all their assets rather than buying up the worthless ones.

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Getting back to more traditional topics: for those following the Notebox Disorganizer III saga...progress is being made, although I underestimated the size of the endeavor. I have a transitional project called HPLWriter which I think will see the light of day somewhere around the start of NaNoWriMo.

One of the lesser known aspects of Jon Ashkanter's creative life was the time he spent as script editor for Steven Spielberg's cartoon series, WHINY GLOOM ADVENTURES. The series, which lasted three episodes and did not do well on DVD — it is the only known video release ever to be shipped directly to a recycling plant — is perhaps best remembered for its Ashkanter-written theme song, which begins:

We're whiny, we're gloomy, we're also kind of doomy
and just like Billy Mumy we're all lost in outer space
Our art is pretentious, the critics want to bench us
a nihilistic stench is what we spray around like Mace

and goes downhill from there.

The never-aired fourth episode is typical, featuring a musical number with lyrics by Ashkanter set to music by Arnold Schoenberg. The skit is performed, if that is the word, by the show's mascots, a pair of sixteen-ton weights named Angst and Weltschmerz.

ANGST
Living dead ballast goes down to a terminal sea,
exterminated Venus waiting for God; emotion abates in ice.

WELTSCHMERZ
The astronomer's calculation lost in uranium's end,
aligned with blood, lightning fast the unbred to break.

CHORUS
Opposites subtract and add up to mud, in the black mark lies the end of man
unfathomed; only the meek survive him. Doom cast fore and wide,
going, going, gone in circles of shell, the undead disclaimed and the anchor defined away.

ANGST
Sea blooms devoured in spiral dependency,
uncertain survivors, undecided variety, unfiled, unseen, lost and unfound.

WELTSCHMERZ
Black mark's is the victory, a maze of disease, only scattered flowers escape the flensing,
and the grass returns alone, for we could not cry enough to salt the ocean.

(REPEAT CHORUS)

Omitted from the above are copious directions by Ashkanter for appropriate visual accompaniment, rendered superflous when the South Korean legislature, responding to a desperate request from the animation company, unanimously passed a bill forbidding the importation of the script. As the negatives of this episode were destroyed by Steven Spielberg, and the positives never meaningfully existed, the actual visual background used is unknown. Trey Parker and Matt Stone have uncharacteristically denied involvement, while reports of copyright suits brought by Alain Resnais (Night And Fog; Last Year At Marienbad) and Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal; Scary Movie 6) remain unsubstantiated. Ashkanter, speaking on condition of anonymity to PELLICLE: The International Journal of Film and Other Membraneous Coatings, stated that he neither knew nor cared. "Whatever I came up with," he said, "I'm sure you can think of something worse. Oh crap, the milk just boiled over."

One of the most challenging works in the Ashkanter oeuvre was found written in chalk on the inside of a toilet tank in the Ashkanter House in South Rhode Island. As it is unsigned its provenance has long been controversial; however, a recent IRS ruling has placed it de facto in the property of the Ashkanter Estate if nothing else. The case for its canonicity was recently buoyed by the discovery only last year (2009), on the back of the packaging of a wax seal in Ashkanter's hallway closet, of the following note, conclusively in Ashkanter's handwriting:

SPECULATIVE ZOOLOGY: the taxonomy of species possible yet undiscovered, or indeed undiscoverable.

The poem itself is untitled, and has been assigned an Ashkanter Opus Code of 1391401-A. The text:

In a watery cage I know a prisoner dumb but honest,
wading an eon with pyramidly patience, an unlit millennium of memory
unretrieved. Outside the gates of shell the jailers debate,
their trap satisfied in detachment.

Science is a dark blade, and time
collapsed, crushed and empty; God!
Scylla, seaflowers and grass ungardened,
an uncrimely demise unobserved; et tu, Charybdis?

Blood is too salty for this ocean, thus sea an enemy;
behold the bird-turtle at last. Poised on feathery fins
and awaiting a niche, all rivers at last run to the sea,
let us overturn Lethe anew.

Of this work, Wilhelm Dienst, Associate Professor of Poesy at Contamiski County College, writes as follows: "What more can one add?" Wrimo Bean of the University of the Cayman Islands (Florida) concurs, appending only an additional, parenthetical interrogation mark. Mr. Tommy Vig could not be reached for comment. Le mot juste is perhaps Ashkanter's own, for chalked at the very bottom of the tank was the single line "So what did you expect?"

Twenty years ago tomorrow, Jon Ashkanter won an all-expense-paid trip for one to Kokomo. It would prove to be the most fateful trip of his life, however inauspiciously it began.

"I mutiny of this bounty," wrote Ashkanter to his friend upon arriving. "I cannot endure this paradise, and would fain return to McDonald's."

But the very next morning, Ashkanter discovered a slug in his bathroom. In some men this would have inspired no more than a simple "yech", but in Ashkanter it triggered an unprecedented burst of creativity. Visitors to the Ashkanter House in South Rhode Island can see the fruits of his labor in the form of a file folder of complimentary soap wrappers, each one covered in microscopic writing. The first of these — the chronology was determined by trademark registration date — is, appropriately enough, a Lava® wrapper containing the following:

O wonder-winded island
beset in a perfect sea,
take arms against a host of troubles
and bring back my body to me.
Sloth or slug, bird or bug,
flinch and winch, rack and crack,
rule by fool in manner cruel,
and yet reasonably priced in the off season.

At this point Ashkanter digressed, and began to take notes for a screenplay, in storyline similar to Godzilla but for the substitution of a giant snail. Why a snail and not a slug? We may never know, especially since the bulk of these notes perished in the Midsummer Night bonfire that marked Ashkanter's return to the mainland. We can only speculate based on these tempting remnants:

Steam engine time — maladapted memes — Rudy Vallee
that most insidious of social diseases, enthusiasm

In an interview for "Malaise" magazine, Ashkanter had this to say: "Few poets have embraced snails. Gerard de Nerval had a lobster fetish. You spend your childhood collecting bottle-caps and then one day apparently you're a poet. Why not a snail?"

And indeed, Ashkanter pursued the theme over the course of another Lava® wrapper, two Dial® wrappers, and several sheets of Scottissue®. The fully assembled work, titled "Snails In Eclipse" by an unknown academic, is as follows:

Nearly twelve labors accomplished I,
in awe of the sun and shade:
all in an age of understatement; objective comment lies here.
Steamship ports, cutter and canoe,
horses in the water-deep streams of the forest,
the voyage of the monograph a pleasure acknowledged.
Uncountable minutes, immeasurable weeks, all bound into a single line of text:
I am an uncalculated machine.

To disassemble this text requires less a work of critical analysis than literary paleontology: a great deal of drudgery, but oh! the reward that small fossils of meaning can bring! Various forms of evidence indicate that Ashkanter spent nearly twenty years revising these lines before abandoning them completely; can we spend less on determining their meaning? He wrote them in Kokomo; can we understand them without vacationing there? If we fail to at least make the attempt, should we not call ourselves dilettantes and litterateurs manques? To judge the work merely on the basis of having read it is to dismiss the opinions of our future selves out of hand.

Arthur Adams, Johnson Psmith and Admiral Brian Doily — all formerly of the University of Hawaii — made perhaps the most impressive inroads on interpreting Ashkanter's masterwork; theirs was the creation of the heuristic literotextual analysis program CATLITER, whose fractal desynthesis routines have uncovered the unbelievable depths therein. Wry allusions to Herb Alpert's "Tijuana Taxi", the reproductive strategies of garden slugs in a biological commentary on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a study of the transition from the gold standard to floating currency on the economy of Kokomo — all just beneath the surface of the text.

Not to be outdone, however, Gordon B. Driven of Contamiski County College, South Rhode Island, has in the last three weeks determined through consonant-vowel reconfiguration that the poem contains a hitherto unguessed addition to the corpus of Ashkanter's work, which we reproduce here for the first time:

Snails survive but a little hour,
small and delicate, ignorant of power;
Man's proportions make our world
while molluscs sleep, antennae furled.

This is of course highly controversial, as Ashkanter rarely employed so many overt end rhymes, and many students of the master's work call it apocryphal, especially since to date Mr Driven has not seen fit to show his own work. We will therefore leave Jon Ashkanter himself the final word, as found on the wrapper of a bar of Zest®:

Banana.

(From the introduction to EIGHT POOKAS OUT: The Notebooks of Jon Ashkanter)

It is difficult, and yet unwise, to underestimate Jon Ashkanter, both as a man and a poet. Even Joe Shlabotnik never had a completely hitless season, and yet Jon Ashkanter over the course of his career accumulated no fewer than 286 notebooks — all empty.

In an e-mail to a inquirer, Ashkanter wrote: "I keep my pencils in the refrigerator; I drop them in fresh cement. I once loaned my favorite fountain pen to my favorite nephew, who lost it while kayaking down Niagara Falls. I also left one in San Francisco. Does this answer your question?" Sadly, no record of the question exists, but in its impenetrable possibility we can see light. We must unask the question to obtain the answer; we must study these blank pages with the greatest of intensity and then look away suddenly to a blank wall: we invert the poet's lack of direction and interest and see what might have been.

It is known that Ashkanter intended several volumes; an admittedly hypothetical development follows:

The first volume would establish the basics of his philosophy; the sequel would consist of errata and corrections, retractions, amplifications and explanations. The third would recapitulate the first, but with greater deliberate commerciality. (This is a new interpretation of the so-called "ewok" notebooks. For many years students of the oeuvre believed that these notebooks were purchased at a liquidation sale in 1989, but the recent discovery, in Ashkanter's recently unsealed dishwasher, of a Wicket W. Warrick® jelly glass has dealt this hypothesis a potentially fatal blow.) The fourth would start with an exploration of the whimsical theme "Did the dinosaurs have adenoids?" and then digress wildly into a thousand-page epic of deep philosolology. The fifth would falter for lack of inspiration but in the end would resolve into a masterful synthesis of previous themes. The sixth would go (deliberately) unwritten.

As Robert Benchley said, any amount of work can be done, provided one is meant to be doing something else. In these empty notebooks lies the explanation of Ashkanter's legacy. Brigadoon. Caterpillars. Gilbert & Sullivan. The timely peculiarities of the finger, with a disquisition on the heroism of simulated dogs. The lack of professionalism in nature, and inhuman literature. This and all else above all; welcome to the world of Jon Ashkanter.

THE SIMPLE ART OF BUSINESS, MY SWEET
A Quasi-Alarming Story -- Part One

1.
It was the summer of 2009. I was fresh out of journalism school. And no free refills.
"Now what?" I said. I didn't get an answer. I slapped myself around a while but I still wouldn't talk. "Think you're tough, eh?" I said -- and didn't get an answer.
So I did what I always do when I have an insoluble problem: I went to the Answer Shack, over on Pi Street. It's run by Clement J. Bogus, former Misinformation Officer for the United States Department of Abstraction. I like him. I like the way he never looks up when I ask him a question.
"I've got a problem," I said.
"Don`t solve it, eliminate it," he said, not looking up. He was reading a copy of SPOONS magazine, the journal of the International Association of Silverware Collectors.
"I haven't specified it yet," I said.
"Doesn't matter," he said. "What do you think about plastic-coated china?"
"I try not to."
"Good man. Here."
He handed me a business card. It was completely blank, but I knew it by the shape. And I knew I was done with Bogus when he handed me a bill.
"Fifty bucks?" I said. "Thanks." I tucked the half-Benjamin into my wallet along with the business card and set out into the summer heat.

2.
Mr. Drake, who taught me everything he knew and a lot he didn't about the theory and practice of investigative journalism, once told me there was nothing more important when getting experience and building up a knowledge base than pounding a beet. So I bought one and smacked it around a while.
"Won't talk, eh?" I said. "You're a tough guy. I know how to handle tough guys."
And I reached out and began to crush it slowly between my hands.
It still didn't say anything, but it slowly lost its purple color and turned a sickly white.
The same color as the business card!

3.
"No doubt about it," I said, "You're food for thought."
I whipped the business card out of my wallet and ran it through the pulpy remains of the beet.
"I like the cut of your jibe," murmured the beet -- but it was too late for compliments. The card was coated with plastic except for certain areas, which absorbed the beet juice and spelled out a message.
"Huh," I said, and read it again.
Then I stuck it on my corkboard and settled down behind my desk to think.
I didn't get a chance. There was an enormous crash as my front door was battered in. Whoever was behind it was now through it.

4.
It was the cops -- four of them. They surrounded my desk. They loomed over me and sighed.
"Yeah?" I said.
They sighed again.
"Yeah?" I said. "What can I do for you?"
They sighed again.
"If you're not going to say or do anything," I said, "you might as well leave."
And they turned and left.
Or rather they tried. Because to reach the door they had to cover half the distance to the door first. And to get that far they had to cover half that distance. And so on and so on. In no time they were caught in one of Zeno's motion paradoxes.
I took the card off the corkboard and left by the door. They were big policemen (you could tell by their sighs) and all Zeno could handle.

5.
I went to jail. I went straight to jail, did not pass Go, did not collect $200. I already had a fifty, so I didn't care.
Inside the jail, posted next to the admissions desk, was a list of seventy-five prohibited arts. Everything from macrame and gouache to macaroni and cheese was off the table. I helped the attendant clean up and then asked him a few questions.
"What is human?" I asked. "What is real? and what does this card say?"
"Human is as human does," he said. "Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. And I'm pretty sure that card says 'There Is No Secret Message'."
"That's what I thought it said," I said, "and now I know."
I knew I was wrong.
"So how long have you working here?" I asked, preparing to lunge at him and rip off his rubber mask.
"In the iron prison? A long time, but I'm busting out all over. It's June."
I was true -- his face was emerging from behind the mask.
It was my own.

6.
When I got home I turned off the broken TV and watched the NewsHour. Reality was breaking down all around me. This was an unexpected development. That would save me a trip to One Hour Photo. I applied my saved hour to the NewsHour and it ended 59 minutes early. I tucked the remaining minute into my wallet next to half of Ben Franklin.
"Time is money," he said out of one side of his mouth. "A penny saved is a penny earned."
At $7.25 an hour I had just earned 11.9 cents. That was interesting; I could tell by the way it suddenly turned into 12 cents.
My problem was continuing unabated. I decided to take stock. I bought one share of Applied Gumshoe with my $50.12, and settled back to wait.

Did I mention that I've posted the final chapter of Kitman Versus The Squirrels?

No?

Did I mention posting any of the chapters of...really?

Oh well, in that case you don't have to get impatient waiting and can just go read the whole book, and various other goodies, on my Frothware page.

Squirrels, talking ducks, mystic trash, boy geniuses, what more can you ask for?

("Quality?")

Oh. That.

"I felt a tear in my eye. I asked Derangia to stitch it up immediately. I hate torn eyes."
--Biloxi, Girl Barbarian.

There are two ways to get to the results of the Find Notes function in Notebox Mismanager:

1) the Found Notes display of the grid navigator;
2) the Found Notes display of the Pop menu.

You should note, haha, the second way, as there is a bug in the first. Occasionally notes will be found but will simply not show up.

I suspect this is the result of a very low-level bug in the Qt/Kylix part of the program that bites only if the program happens to be loaded at certain locations in memory -- the phrases "page boundaries" and "index wrapping" are bubbling up out of the back of my mind -- but the upshot is: if the navigator's display fails, try the Pop menu's.

Or of course quit and restart Mismanager.