Zounds! I still have readers. What’s more, I’ve got readers I haven’t even met. How weird. Some of them have actually taken the time to send me messages via this magic medium we call "e-mail", which is, of course, an abbreviated version of the phrase "frightening and possibly criminal messages from total strangers".

Besides the usual deluge of messages about explicit Nigerian teen fisting videos, which I will need a case of Viagra to enjoy, and a new mortgage to afford, all happily provided to me by a bewildering number of online merchants, I found a few legitimate messages from some people who obviously have enough free time on their hands to read this horrible blog. Good Lord! Get to work, you slackers.

If people are kind enough to write me messages that aren’t spam, though, etiquette, the cold, stern, bitch- mistress that she is, demands that I respond.

Somebody named joeboy asks, "So, do you like working for Apple? Which building are you in?" before launching into a minor rant against a group of people occupying a particular spot on the Cupertino campus. Well, joeboy, I do like working for Apple, on the whole, but I’m not travelling aboard Mothership Cupertino. I can relate to your rant, though, which I shall refrain from publishing here, keeping your awful secrets safe from HR, your wife, Apple security, and the soft-drink vendor who services your building. Sweet Jesus, man, remind me to never piss you off. Anyway, like joeboy, I also work upstairs from a couple offices full of complete pricks.

The offices that I work in occupy the entire second floor of our two-story office building.

Downstairs, the floor is shared amongst some sort of real estate/developers, a technology planning firm, and a pair of law offices. I heard that there was once only one law office downstairs, but, left undisturbed in the cool, damp downstairs climate, nourished by a steady supply of the sugary white jism that floats atop their quintuple Columbo-Arabica latté supremo mochette decaf frappucinos, binary fission has taken place, as is the way with all bacteria, and we now have a new set of lawyers.

Basically, all the younger legal eagles are complete tools. Hold a door open for ‘em, and they sail past you as if you were expected to do so. No "thank you", no nothin’. They drive like assholes in the parking lot. They don’t move out of the way if you’re carrying a box down the hall. Sorry about responding with a rant of my own, but my, it’s always cathartic to out somebody else as an asshole, isn’t it? Mmm, catharsis.

Delving further into the mailbag, a fellow by the name of Mike Augspaugh asks: "So, how old are you, anyway?" Well, Mike, with a question like that, you’re obviously some young punk. I’m old enough, that’s how old I am. Old enough to "know better", whatever that means, or so I’ve been repeatedly told. You don’t need to know, anyway. I’m glad you enjoy this humble website, but there’s something creepy about strangers asking for personal information. Nothing personal, dude, but that really freaked me out.

Admonishment was the word of the day when Schpinner wrote in to upbraid me for still having links on the page that don’t go nowhere. Yeah, I know, OK? It’s embarrassing. Someday soon, I swear. Especially the link to buying all kinds of crap with my artwork poorly printed on it by Cafepress. The one that doesn’t exist yet. I’m sure there are loads of people out there just aching to buy a thong with my ugly face on it, or some other such monstrous atrocity against God and nature. As soon as I find out who you all are when you order one, I’ll also be filing restraining orders against you (as soon as the payment clears), but that’s another story. One that I hope never, ever, ever to write.

Lastly, the articulate BashHasher asks, simply, "WTF?". Well, I really can’t say. Mankind has been asking that question for thousands of years. I don’t claim to have all the Fucking answers, or claim to be able to divine, exactly, what the Fuck is going on. I especially don’t know who the Fuck all you people are, but I’m glad to have you all peruse my corner of the Internet. Seriously, though, I thought I had an unlisted URL. I’m gonna have to talk to those Google people.

Tune in next time when I answer the unasked question, "How long does unrefrigerated mustard remain edible?". The answer, my friends, may shock you. Viewer discretion is advised. Especially if you read this over lunch.

A lot of people give soy-based products a bad rap. I am now one of them. The following is a public service announcement.

I made the recent mistake of going to the grocery store hungry. For me, one of the four major food groups is "Crunchy". Chips, crackers, and other snack foods have been known to disappear at alarming rates down my gullet. My appetite for such things is nearly insatiable. To the shock and horror of some of my coworkers, I have been known to repeatedly misprize doughnuts in favor of the 50-pound sack of spicy trail mix I keep under my desk. I wave to each Doritos or Lay’s delivery driver I see on the road. Get the picture? Crunchy things: I likes ‘em. Naturally, I have my favorites, but I’m always willing to try a little somethin’ new. After all, I have to keep up with current crunchy-snack technology.

For some reason, GenSoy’s Soy Crisps looked attractive. I was bored with the usual junk I cram into my gaping maw, and the Soy Crisps were heavily discounted that day. Garlic herb/onion flavor sounded good to me, and I figured I’d take a chance on a bag of soy chips. "What the heck", I figured, "soy must have come a long way since I last had it, and it tasted like crap". Boy, was I wrong. They were crap.

As it turns out, advances have been made in disguising the disgusting flavorlessness of soy chips, but they haven’t come very far. Apparently, all they can do is liberally coat the vile things with an overabundance of flavor powder that makes each chip taste pretty much like a tablespoon of garlic salt, laundry detergent, and talcum, only it’s more harsh on the throat. The things aren’t much to look at, either; strange, thin cookie-like discs, at once nearly perfectly round, but possessing convoluted surfaces not unlike an underdeveloped human brain. The green specks were, I assumed, infitesimally small bits of pulverized garden shrubbery that had been dried out and mixed with the talcum, in order to provide the illusion of herbs that are actually considered comestible.

I say cookie-like, because the inexplicable white blobs that dotted each disc were evocative of white chocolate chips. At first, I thought that the first disc I pulled from the bag was a sport, a freak of the snack world, and that somehow some relatively unprocessed soy bits had found their way into one chip. All the chips were like this, though. It made me wonder what they were. Crushed soy nuggets? Hominy? Bits of brain? Who knows? The only edible thing I expect to find amorphous white blobs in is hot chocolate, not crispy snacks.

I will admit that the things did satisfy the initial requirement of being crunchy, but upon contact with moisture, they quickly dissolved into a gooey, gelatinous mass. It made me think immediately of the "viral glass" in Richard Preston’s book The Cobra Event. Not a good thing. I put up a brave front, trying to get my money’s worth out of this bag of gustatory woe, but I quickly gave up. It was no use. The things were just plain nasty.

The next time I went to the store, I looked closer at the low price marked on the shelf. "Discontinued Item". Huh. Small wonder.

Seriously, it’s mandatory now.

So it seems I needed some information from the federal government. I was filling out a whole bunch of electronic forms for the University regarding tax this and income that and how many hairs (adjusted new growth, Schedule B) were in my left armpit, on and on, ad nauseum. Actually, the nausea arrived rather quickly into the process, but I think you get the idea. At any rate, I get to the end of this whole involved process, and in order to make it all official and give it an authorized electronic "signature", I needed a special PIN that had previously been issued me by the feds.

Naturally, I didn’t have this information at my immediate disposal, the scrap of paper in question being securely locked in a file cabinet at home 65 miles away. "No problem", I thought, "The PIN was originally requested over the Web, so the government site must have some form of electronic retrieval." Lo, I was right! The site did have a quick form to fill out to send me my all-important number, right to my e-mail address. So I filled it out, and waited for it to appear.

And waited… and waited… and…………..waited.

At this point, I was about to chalk it up to some random system failure in a government server farm somewhere, or whatever factors exist that comprise those tiny time/space vortices where e-mails, like socks, car keys, and my company ID badge get sucked out of our universe, never again to appear.

I was just about to close the "send me my PIN" browser window, when I noticed that the form mentioned that, once the electronic request had been processed, they would send further information out in an e-mail telling me where to actually retrieve this PIN. This information would be sent in "1-3 days". My best guess is that once you submit it, somebody has to actually type the request up in triplicate, have each copy stamped by the appropriate departmental supervisor (with the exception of goldenrod copies every third Tuesday in even-numbered months, excepting December), then a request to confirm the request inquiring as to the viability of the user request can be sent out.

Seventy-one and a half hours later, I got a message advising me of a second site I could visit to retrieve the data, so let no man accuse the government of shirking on its promises, no matter how lame. Luckily, I had long since driven the 65 miles to retrieve said information, so my time-sensitive work got completed. Jeez.