Nice tips - gotta hit Joe's next week too, so I'll Czech out the beer and try the Gerolsteiner.. Yeah! all the fizzies-up-nose of a 'Coke'-thing w/o the gut-rotting phosphoric acid n pounds of sugar. Envious of Korea Town.. gentrification here means that the 'Farmers Market' may be inundated with a plague of Designer limousines too.

Maybe this should be in reviews but WTF - we're all programmed together these days, so here's the query: Meeja schizophrenia? The Prisoner | Ben Hur

Psycho-social programming's what it's all about, right?
We were just noticing this evening, a sort of incongruous juxtaposition in the daily the medium is the massage. And trying to relate it to umm The Times.

Earlier today on NPR (Lake Wobegon n'such) Keillor tossed off a nice sardonic ditty, "We're All Republicans Now".. hardly Tom Lehrer grade, but the audience loved it. I couldn't possibly paraphrase; sorry y'all missed it. Then for PM:

Local main PBS (KQED - SF) shows Ben Hur. Natch without a single UAV or truss ad. X-hours. All about Imperial Rome, slave galleys, intrepid hero played by real-life NRA leader and such. A bit of avatar interactions, with muted violins. Is this about accustoming to Empire or.. reminders of what that was like (?) (Imagine though - a Jew choreographing a series of Christian stories, but for Big-$ of course! - OK it was 1959.)

Another PBS station, KTEH in Silly Valley - continued a (non-PBS slate) rerun of The Prisoner series. This perhaps the penultimate one (in Scott Appel's reordering of the sequence). Change of Mind begins with irascible Number 6 finally being labelled unmutual (kinda like Nations which cease pretending to 'play nicely with others?)

He's exposed to a charade in which a sonic beam is supposed to have served as a lobotomizer. Then after switching spiked cups of tea with his 'nurse' and other shenanigans - he talks Number 2 into allowing him to publically encourage the general 'spilling of secrets'. But at the end, led by a now hypnotized nurse - the crowd decides that Number 2 is behaving in an unmutual way and...

Is Number 1 the dwarf? In The Village - even symbols aren't always what they appear. Hmm - just like in Our Village.

Maybe we're being overly sensitive to The Programming and the fact that everything seems an allegory for something Else, especially in view of the saturation of the daily 'other' programming. Besides, why would PBS have an internecine fork in the flow? Shiatsu medium-massage, maybe.

After all - programming is what You All Do, too - no?
Why you even have a Forth-right kind. What could one label ABCBSNBC then, with laugh-tracks and all - Allez Oop? it's certainly Object-oriented..


Ashton, just wondering if anyone else is paying attention to the massage.