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Today's trademark article is from Slate, entitled Facebook now believes it owns the English language too. Final sentence of the article: “According to a database search of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Facebook also holds a trademark on the word `like.' ” Thanks, Ms SK of Washington, Columbia. In the back catalog, there's the one where the University of Texas sent a cease-and-desist for a program's use of the word Texas; or the time when McDonald's C&D'ed a Special Olympics fundraiser organized by a 19-year old named McClusky (though McDonald's has lost a couple abroad); or the thing about yoga moves that some thought was about patents or copyright, but was really just a trademark issue over the use of the name Bikram, which is attached to a yoga mogul who explains--and this can't be repeated enough--“I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me.”

Sorry, but I've gotta kill the joke here. Facebook, UT, and even (to the extent that he is capable) Bikram is being entirely rational, and the USPTO is not doing anything very interesting here.

Trademark is supremely simple, especially when compared to the entirely distinct problems of patents and copyrights. The question underlying a claim of a trademark violation is this: will it create confusion in the marketplace?

If I create a product named Acebook, it's pretty clear that I'm referring to Facebook in some way; add in a bluish color scheme and some blocky design and I could get something that really could drive viewers to think that this is somehow related to Facebook, maybe a spinoff or such. Lest you think this is hypothetical, go check that site now--you'll be redirected to a `survey' that really does use Facebook-type graphics as an attempt to mislead you into providing your personal info.

So at its core, trademark is based on the entirely reasonable, entirely un-funny desire to prevent companies from misleading consumers by implying that its products are associated with, endorsed by, or produced by some other company. I'm not even touching dilution today.

This is really fair enough, but then hazy questions crop up, and the lawyers come in. The first to file the trademark gets to put ®s everywhere, but what if a later company becomes better recognized? What if a party failed to register with the US government; do they have any recourse when somebody dishonestly uses their insignia? Can these things be revoked if they turn out to be too broad? Who decides on the breadth to begin with?

The really big question in that offhand list is breadth. Every trademark must have a context: to give a common example, there is no confusion at all between Domino's Pizza and IBM's Domino email system and toy manufacturers who sell games named dominos. If you as a consumer are confused into thinking that the Domino email server is from the pizza company, the USPTO officially rules that it's on you, and they set the breadth of the pizza chain's trademark accordingly. But if somebody sold Domino's pasta, maybe it would confuse a few buyers, and Domino's may have more of a case.

Monster cable. They have a trademark on the name Monster in the context of audio and computer cables. So they might have a reasonable case if they send a cease & desist missive to Monster Cellular store, which seems to exist only as an eBay storefront.

But when they file over 100 trademark complaints against folks who use product namees like Monster Truck Nationals!, Creative Monster Productions, Junk Food Monster, Monster Mini Golf, Mr. Sea Monster, Monster Baby, Boobie Monster, Monster Ballad Tour, and Monster Pup, things start to seem a bit detached from reality.

Now that you hate them, go read this live-blogging of a Monster press conference (OK, maybe skim the middle part).

So when the Obama campaign uses Yes, we can!, the English translation of Cesar Chavez's ¡Si se puede!, and gets sued by the National Canning Center for trademark infringement, you can rest assured that the contexts don't match even though the words do. Anyway, The United Farm Workers has defended Si se puede as their trademark, preventing its use by AeroMexico.

Yes Facebook, Inc, really does have a trademark on the word like--in fourteen different contexts, in fact. A trademark in the narrow context of voting on inane comments from acquaintances that you don't really want to say anything to would be appropriate, and would only be enforceable in the case of other social networking sites that somehow couldn't come up with a synonym for the word like. Valley girls would be unaffected.

Before I got sick of reading all 14 contexts (the trademark search engine is one of those sites that imposes a really short timeout on your session, for no apparent reason) I had already amassed a pretty broad list of contexts in which the word is trademarked by Facebook:

Social introduction, networking and dating services; ... self-improvement, self-fulfillment, charitable, philanthropic, volunteer, public and community services, and humanitarian activities.

Computer services, namely, creating virtual communities for registered users to organize groups and events, participate in discussions, and engage in social, business and community networking; hosting electronic facilities for others for organizing and conducting meetings, events and interactive discussions ... hosting computer software applications of others; ... software to enable or facilitate the uploading, downloading, streaming, posting, displaying, blogging, linking, sharing or otherwise providing electronic media or information over communication networks; ...a web site featuring technology that enables online users to create personal profiles featuring social networking information and to transfer and share such information among multiple websites;... Providing information from searchable indexes and databases of information, including text, electronic documents, databases, graphics and audio visual information, on computer and communication networks; ... non-downloadable software applications for social networking, creating a virtual community, and transmission of audio, video, photographic images, text, graphics and data; ...customized web pages featuring user-defined or specified information, personal profiles, audio, video, photographic images, text, graphics and data...

I cut heavily, because this goes on, for a long time. Effectively, Facebook did get the USPTO to grant them a trademark on the word like for the use of any marker on the web. Valley girls are still, like, exempt, because there's no confusion created and no implied endorsement by Facebook when somebody has that vocal tic. But if you're an online service provider and you have a button labeled like, you're at risk. We don't have Facebook to blame for having the audacity to make such broad claims; we have the Trademark Office to blame for not rejecting those claims and granting Facebook only a more narrow context in which their trademark holds.

This is another one of those corners of law where the only ones who know about it and the only ones who bother to lobby the three branches of goverment about it are the ones who stand to profit from its expansion. The rest of us are satisfied with humorous but indignant articles.

Abandonment

Google's lawyers have a stupendously cute post about Google as a verb. In it, they basically explain if the name Google becomes a generic kleenex/thermos/xerox sort of term, then it becomes an unenforceable (and therefore basically annulled) trademark. So, they ask that you please not do that. I expect that they're asking nicely because they realize that you can't stop becoming a generic term. By definition, it involves a few million parties making frequent, small uses of a name, which is not a situation you can litigate your way out of--not without winding up with a whole lot of megacorp versus the virtuous little guy articles being written about you.

If you don't stop others when they use your trademark, then it is also considered to be abandoned. This creates the perverse problem that lawyers feel that they are compelled to sue every time they perceive something that may be a trademark violation, which in turn leads to that large class of articles about Goliaths suing li'l Davids for their choice of name or the color of their logo.

Starbucks has a legal department that loves to do this, suing a two-shop operation in Michigan with a circular green logo, a shop owned by Ms Sam Buck, the doubleshot coffee company, and everybody else. It doesn't have to be this way: if Etsy.com, a site where folks sell their handmade goods, finds you using their name or logo on your hand-made product, then they will make you fill out a trademark permission application and then grant you permission to use their trademark. Policing requirements fulfilled, nobody sued.

I just went over three abandonment means--non-use, genericization, and failure to police--as if they're on equal legal ground, but they're not. The abandonment of a trademark due to failure to defend is basically a judicially-created rule which, unlike the other two, is not in the definition of an abandoned mark in 15 USC 22 (III) §1127. Some folks in the past lost their trademark suit against a violator because a court had ruled that, because they'd failed to adequately police their trademark in the past, they had implicitly abandoned it, so the current violators got off. Later lawyers learned the lesson that they need to remain vigilant at all times against small and insignificant violations, lest the past slide be brought up as evidence when a serious violation comes up. And so, a law is born. Past judges led us to this position, but future judges could get us out by rejecting the failure-to-vigorously-police defense.

I don't question that the judges who arrived at this law did so via sound legal reasoning. But as a matter of public policy, they've created a monst--they've created a beast, because lawyers absolutely delight in the thought of being required to sue, obligated to threaten to sue, and otherwise mandated to accrue billable hours. Further, the Trademark Office gave them the power to do so, because it does not have the political will to set its policies to push for narrower breadth, leaving us with the sort of overbroad mess that is Facebook's like trademark--which Facebook's lawyers will now explain that they are obligated to aggressively defend. All of which is how a law that is really sensible at its core, with a credo of preventing confusion in the marketplace, became a lawyer-driven machine whose credo is that it shall convict a hundred innocent logos before it lets one guilty logo walk free.

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The bassist for the Breeders

She was just plain hot, and it helped that she was in a fun band. I later found out that she was gay, and I was immensely disappointed--the band is called The Breeders, darn it. This is some kinda false advertising.

Lisa Germano

I saw her at a Neil Finn concert, where she was playing the violin. It was a great concert, and the violin was of course excellent. Eddie Vedder, who has done a Finn family cover or two, showed up later, but refused to reveal his mohawk.

She's done a lot of her own work, on 4AD, but had also done frequent studio violin work where she's just listed somewhere in the credits so you don't know it's her unless you do the research. Now that you can buy music on iTunes or Amazon and other places that don't give you liner notes at all, you'll never find this stuff out again.

From what I've read, she goes in and out of doing music and being disappointed by the industry and working elsewhere. E.g., somebody told me that during one of her not-music phases she was working at Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, and one day when I was in the neighborhood I actually went and asked one of the employees for Lisa. Employee told me Lisa works Tuesdays, but I never went back. It's not like I had any real plan of what to do from there.

If I had to identify Ms Germano in a line-up, I don't think I'd be able to. She's literally a blur to me. When I saw her at the Finn concert, I didn't have on contact lenses. As she got older and no longer passed for sixteen, her cover photos got increasingly fuzzy. We can't have female performers with visible wrinkles, now can we.

I've mentioned before the class of music I call girlfriend music, which is built around the singer telling the listener that she'll be happy to be your best friend forever, and will cuddle up to you and keep you warm all night. There is of course boyfriend music as well. Ms Germano has done a few tracks like that, but most of her songs are about how fucked up the singer is, such as the one about how how “I want cancer of everything,” “This is a happy song.”, or the little girl princess song that taunts the fundaments of all the other girlfriend music.

Björk Guõmundsdóttir

If you don't have a crush on her yet, watch this filler from a Sugar Cubes video compilation wherein Björk waxes profound about her television.

But then she started recording a lot of techno stuff, and that Medulla album really only had one good song.

I know what she looks like, because she goes out of her way to wear eccentric and oft-photographed attire, the most famous being that one swan dress, which I thought was kinda nifty. For the most part, that eccentricity doesn't really come through in the music; when people say that it does, I wonder how much they're looking at the outfits and how much they're thinking about the instrumentation itself, which isn't anything particularly odd for all but Medulla. Except that she doesn't really use guitars for much of anything; I hope that's not all it takes to count as eccentric.

The point of this discussion here, of course, is not to talk about these various pop stars per se, but how one goes about constructing a personality given limited information. I avoid interviews with pop stars, because--no surprise at all--they invariably sound dumber and more pushy in their own words than in their carefully chosen lyrics. I know that the photographic images are best-case scenarios, and then we're left to wonder the odds that Björk is wearing anything more elaborate than sweatpants around the house.

I'm not sure how one goes about constructing a rock star crush. Are you inserting yourself into that video where you're both floating in space? Making out in the green room? Filling out your tax forms together?

Neko Case

I got her Fox Confessor CD on a recommendation from a pal who was vehement that I'd like it. Played it once, put it on the bottom shelf. A few months later I put it on again, and barely listened to anything else for a month.

She's a little bit country, a little bit something else. She does her share of girlfriend music too, the real standout being Challengers by The New Pornographers and Neko, but most of her stuff is also pretty cynically oriented. Like Furnace Room Lullabye's “I just couldn't breathe with your throne on my chest” or that `Man-eater' song which seems explicitly designed to get the listener to dislike her. Or that one song that's allegedly entirely honest and not-fictional, “I leave the party at 3AM/ alone, thank God,/ With a Valium from the bride...”. We were on paddleboats in the Tidal Basin, during the Cherry Blossom Festival, when we heard a band on the shore playing a cover of this song to the gathered tourists and their kids. That brought me joy.

The people who manufacture her image have to walk the line between photos of her in a cowboy hat and photos of her looking all alty, covered in audio cables and butterflies. She seems to wind up at a certain taxidermy chic that I'm not really into. I read this several-page NY Times article about Neko, which cemented my conclusion that we wouldn't really get along.

I still have her songs on heavy rotation, even though in my mind we've broken up.

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OK, I'm not a politically correct type. When discussing the use of the word Nigger, I don't say that I'm discussing the N-word. My only complaint about Jew jokes is that the new ones don't come up often enough, so I've already heard them all. I won't expound further on how I'm not politically correct, because such expositions are always from politically correct types.

But Helen Thomas's offhand comment about how the Israelis need to go back to Germany bothered me. Should she have been fired for it? I dunno, and I don't know the other circumstances regarding her employment. But I take this as much more than your usual slip of political correctness. To save you clicking on the above, let's go over the transcript.

Interviewer: Any comments on Israel...
Helen: Tell `em to get the hell out of Palestine.
I: Oooo. Any better comments on Israel?
H: Hahaha. Remember, these people are occupied, and it's their land...

Stopping here, this is actually not controversial. Anybody who is sane right now (IMHFO) is seeking a two-state solution: an Israel and a Palestine, where Palestine is sufficiently stable and Israel sufficiently secure (i.e. not-paranoid) that there would be no Israeli troops in Palestine. So the comments so far are sharply stated but basically mainstream--until we find out what she means by Palestine.

H... not Germany, not Poland
I: So where should they go, what should they do?
H: They go home.
I: Where's home?
H: Poland, Germany.
I: So the Jews go back to Poland and Germany?
H: And America and everywhere else.

And this part pisses me off so much, I have to use bullet points.

• The paragraph above, about rational discourse, presumed that by Palestine she meant what we refer to as Palestine. Instead, she meant all of Israel. Have a look at this book review by Harold Bloom of Trials of the Diaspora, an account of British Jew-hatred through history. Thanks, Ms ABR of Washington, Columbia.

To protest the policies of the Israeli government actually can be regarded as true philo-Semitism, but to disallow the existence of the Jewish state is another matter. Of the nearly 200 recognized nation-states in the world today, something like at least half are more reprehensible than even the worst aspects of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. A curious blindness informs the shifting standards of current English anti-Zionism.

I concur with the paragraph I just reprinted: it's odd that for only this country, we decide that a lousy, blundering, boneheaded government means the entire state should be eliminated.

So our first bullet point reminds us that Ms Thomas--the daughter of Lebanese immigrants--seems to be advocating for the dissolution of the State of Israel. More in another bullet point below.

• So, where do Israel's Jews come from? Let's do more research than our columnist who regularly writes about Middle East affairs and ask fucking Wikipedia. From the Demographics of Israel page as of this writing, citing statistics from the Israeli Census:

According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2008, of Israel's 7.3 million people, 75.6% were Jews of any background. Among them, 70.3% were Sabras (Israeli-born), mostly second- or third-generation Israelis, and the rest are olim (Jewish immigrants to Israel)--20.5% from Europe and the Americas, and 9.2% from Asia and Africa, including the Arab countries.

About 35% of all Israeli Jews are recently (first or second generation) descended from European Jews, while 25% are descended from Jews who immigrated from Arab countries, Iran, Turkey and Central Asia. In addition, 45.6 thousands (0.8%) are, or are descended from Indian Jews, and 106.9 thousands (1.9%) - from Ethiopian Jews.

Helen is obviously speaking of Jews, so we can ignore Israel's 25% population who have every right to be exactly where they are because they're not Jews. If she means first, second, or third generation immigrants from countries with lots of White people, then she's referring to just over half the Jewish population, leaving the other half ignored. Sephardim and Mizrahim have enough trouble as it is without Helen completely ignoring their existence.

There are lots of European-descent Jews in Israel, but like the Knesset, Israel's race breakdown has no majority party. The statement all Israeli Jews are descendants of Eastern Europe is just a stereotype, typically dragged out to bolster a story of European conquest of the Middle East.

• Hate speech always has this simple form: All members of a subgroup have a certain characteristic. E.g., Gypsies will cheat you. Scottish folk are all skinflints. Jews are all scheming bastards. German people are Nazis. It's always the same subgroup/character rhythm. And the wrongness is always the same: outside of total tautologies, no statement about all members of a group will ever be true for all members. For individual cases, you can find a cheating gypsy, or a scheming Jew, but then you're down to just defaming somebody you don't like.

Statements with the subgroup/characteristic rhythm are a superset of hate speech. You can maybe say something in that form that isn't hate speech--maybe the thing about Scots is just a joke in stupid taste--but the easiest way to make sure you avoid hate speech is to just never say anything in that stupid form.

• So Helen gets points: she didn't directly say anything of the form All Jews are [characteristic]. Instead, she went with a close cousin: All people of a subgroup need to leave. Here in the US of A, we have our own phrase with that rhythm: All Mexicans without proper papers need to leave.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that 76% of undocumented migrants living in the USA today are Hispanic. Those are national estimates, and I don't think it unreasonable to presume that in Arizona, which is close to Mexico and not close to much of anything else, the percent Hispanic is much higher.

• So Arizona is saying all Hispanics of a certain type need to leave the USA, just as Helen is saying all Jews need to leave Israel. This becomes pernicious for two reasons: the first is that, if you ask why they need to leave, then you're right back to the canonical hate speech form: there's something about Hispanics or Jews that makes the speaker think they need to move. The second I'll get to in a bullet point or two.

• But Helen would retort that she's not talking about the characteristics of Jews, but about the occupation of Palestinian territories, and UN resolutions (after the one that established the State of Israel) reprimanding Israel, and various bits of international law. Arizona speaks not of Hispanics, but Hispanics who can't prove their citizenship when stopped at the side of the road.

That is, the speakers plead to legality.

Legality arguments always have a whiff of disingenuousness, and when aimed at a small subgroup that would otherwise face the sort of epithets above, the disingenuousness gets all that much stronger. Arizona, state population 6,500,000, averaged 1,000 drunk driving fatalities per year for 2007 and 2008 (PDF), well above the national average rate. But the state troopers need to spend their resources checking immigration paperwork?

Really, the recourse to law is just a fill-in, and falls apart quickly. Sample imaginary dialogue:

Speaker: All Jews need to leave Israel.
Interviewer: Why?
Speaker: Because of UN Resolution 487. Let me recite it for you verbatim.
Interviewer: But why do you want to enforce that law, out of all the laws in the world?

The only answer Speaker can give at that point--the only honest answer--is of the canonical hate-speech form. There's something about the Jews that make me feel that we need to enforce UN Resolution 487 with more vigor than Resolution 912. They just all have some characteristic.

It is indeed a step from all Jews need to leave Israel to the canonical hate speech form all Jews have characteristics that I dislike. But I'm basically comfortable making that step, and it's amazing that Helen, an experienced and very competent reporter and columnist, would not have expected the listener to make that step, which brings us to the last bullet point, which takes three bullet points.

• The other difference between standard hate speech of the all members of subgroup have characteristic form and the all members of subgroup need to leave form is that the second is actionable. If the subgroup doesn't want to leave its home, then it is a call for the use of force against a group to get them to move--and while we have the billy clubs out, we need to decide what to do if we can't get them to move soon enough.

Consider what Helen means when she says that the Jews need to leave Israel. They ain't leaving of their own volition--as above, 70% of Israeli Jews were born in Israel--so ¿what is the mechanism by which the Jews of Israel will be persuaded to abandon their homes for Germany, Poland, or America?

Scots are skinflints is just incoherent and stupid. Hispanics need to leave the country does have that same hate-speech form under the surface where you can't get to it, but on the surface it is an actionable threat--it is literally a call to arms. Since you're literate enough to read this, you're familiar with examples of how the call to get some subgroup out of a country has preceded many large-scale tragedies. Is that where Arizona's law is taking us? Unlikely, but it is the first step nonetheless.

• Any time you find somebody who says that Israel is some sort of apology for the Holocaust, that person is advocating for the dissolution of Israel. Folks who don't question the Israeli state will rarely draw such a blunt Holocaust ⇒ Israel flow.

Historically, it's both true and false. There were many things that had to happen: the sun had to set on the British Empire, of which this plot of land was a posession; the millions of Jews who wound up in Israel had to want to leave their existing homes, or be expelled from their homes; the UN had to exist and OK this whole thing; the Holocaust had to make it blatantly obvious that something had to be done; the USA and UK had to maintain their limits on Jewish immigration, keeping the Jewish Question up in the air. I.e., a lot of things happened, a lot of conferences were held, and if the Holocaust hadn't happened, we don't know whether the pressures from all those Jews who were coming in to the British protectorate for decades before the Holocaust still would have won out.

The USA was founded partly after tax revolts against the British Crown, but that origin story has no bearing on today. Is anybody out there arguing that British taxes are now normalized and reasonable, so the USA should cede back to the UK? Yet I keep seeing people argue that one of the key causes in the origin story of Israel, the Holocaust, is three generations behind us and therefore Israel can be dissolved now.

Which is all to say that I don't like talking about Israel and the Holocaust in the same breath.

• But gosh golly, Helen--go back home to Germany and Poland? Do I have to spell this one out to anybody anywhere? Jews were Auslanders in Germany and in Poland before, during, and (notably) after the Holocaust, and time and time again, Jews in Germany and Poland were told individually and collectively to go home, where home was defined in exactly the sort of terms that Helen used above: anywhere but where they were.

The irony of saying that Jews in Israel need to go home to Germany is just so--I can't finish this sentence. Ms Thomas hit it out of the park here: there is a veiled threat in statements of the form that group needs to be anywhere else, and she picked the perfect manner of putting that threat in relief.

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The gardening incident was the weekend before, and was brief. I'd somehow forgotten that I wear my midseason biking gloves not just because they have those nice gripping dots and are just the right thickness to keep the rose bush from cutting me, but because of the time that I got a pretty significant rash weeding. That time, I'd evidently brushed against some poison ivy, versus this time, when I evidently grabbed an ivy vine and gave it my best yank. I mean, that's what you do when weeding, no?

The vine didn't get its revenge for a few days.

I learned something about my hand-washing technique. The blisters were initially entirely between my fingers, which tells me what I'd missed in my conscientious post-gardening hand-washing. From there, they got bigger and spread. I'm right-handed, so it makes sense that my right hand took the brunt of the poison. From between my fingers, it spread to the back of my hand. I suppose I handle my pillow pretty well, because I awoke one morning with the right side of my face red. After another night of that, I had to give up on my bed and sleep on the floor. Not sure why my right arm eventually got dry and red. Contact with my face (because I can't sleep unless I have a hand over my head)? Flow along the bloodstream from the epicenter between my right index and middle fingers?

When I have a skin ailment, I can think of no more wonderful experience than holding the affected area under near-scalding water. It's the catharsis and relief of scratching and scratching but without all that potentially damaging friction. To borrow a cliché, if this were an awards ceremony, holding a rash under near-scalding water would be a solid contender for "Best physical sensation (non-sexual)", and a nominee for the overall prize. A pal working in public health tells me that superhot water is actually good for you--dries out your vesicles--while a nurse pal laughed at the idea. I will be going with the opinion that says it's good for me.

Otherwise, the last week or so has just consisted of feeling itchy and unpleasant, and watching blisters slowly grow and placing mental bets with myself over when they'll give up. The blisters--stretched skin--have a wonderful texture to them. They don't burst in a satisfying and potentially painful and disturbing way, but eventually just start weeping a yellowish plasma that's just annoying and stains things.

So you don't want them to burst, but if they don't burst, then they start to get annoying anyway. Imagine somebody lightly pressing their pinky against the back of your hand, just a kilo of pressure, for two days, without pause. The one on the side of my index finger is making my index finger nauseous.

The webbing between middle and ring finger (both hands) hasn't been getting much sun. That joint doesn't stretch much on the best of days, and the skin has been loosened by all the vesicles, and the weeping little blisters have kept the webbing perpetually damp. To borrow my second cliché of the day: my perpetually dampened skin has what is typically described as Old Person Smell.

I spent most of Memorial Day weekend in the bathtub. Taking inspiration from the painting of Marat in the tub, I put a long flat cardboard box over the tub and did work on my laptop, until I decided that I would rather have my hands underwater. Water aside, any sort of manual labor began to feel repugnant. So from there, it was movies and TV off of a Netflix-on-demand login that somebody gave me.

A review, in digression: I'm amazed that Up, a mainstream movie from Disney Corp, was so vehemently anti-zoo, characterizing them as a throwback and zoo supporters as basically evil.

With my hands in this state, I've put off everything involving manual labor. I sleep in odd places because doing the laundry took too long (trying to not get pus on freshly-washed whites) and fully making the bed using the hands I have on hand seems daunting. I think I've lost weight, because even eating requires use of one's hands.

Figure One: This time next week, this will be a normal hand. I'm told the word for these isn't boil but vesicle.

I have a desk job, so the next day I got to go to work. That is, I spent a full day in public, with a visibly marked face and hands that are repulsive to me--and I'm the guy who knows how they got that way. The day was spent trying to see how much I could do without putting my hands above table level, an exercise I recommend to you next time your office life gets a little dull. I found means of carrying papers without showing my hand. The presentation I gave--ten minutes but Q&A ran toward an hour--was done entirely without hand gestures; I wonder how off-putting that would've been to the listeners.

On the way home, the Metro was typically crowded, but when I stood to leave, people parted. It was kinda regal, in a `you people think I'm hideous and contagious' sort of way. Of course, nobody was staring at me or such--quite the contrary, everybody seemed to not notice me at all--yet they somehow knew who I was.

But I can take amusement at others' revulsion from me because I know I'm just a tourist to the condition. Contact dermatitis takes 10 to 14 days to clear up; given that I got a megadose of it, I'll certainly be on the high end of that or longer, but then I'll be done, and my face and hands will go back to being just kinda average.

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It's the little things. The things that take ten seconds a day. They add up.

I finally sat down and did the math. Let's say that some stupid activity, like typing in a password, takes fifteen seconds every day you come in to work. Then over the course of a year, you've spent an hour per year typing in passwords.

From here, we could think like an efficiency expert, and ask what your wage is. I don't know who you are, but let's make up numbers: you get paid $25 and hour, and have twenty coworkers in your office making the same. OK, so the company is spending $500/year to have people enter passwords. Plus the time spent changing passwords and mistyping them, which doubles or triples that.

Here's the rule of thumb: if you spend two minutes doing something every workday, then that will total a full workday per year engaging in that activity.

You can scale that figure up or down. As above, fifteen seconds is an eighth of two minutes, and so totals to an hour/year. An hour is thirty times two minutes, and so an hour-per-day activity equals thirty full workdays per year.

Now let's move on to the rest of your life. The rule of thumb here is that if you spend four minutes per day doing something, then repeating it every day for a year will add up to a full day. Scaling down, ten seconds is 1/24th of four minutes, so ten seconds/day adds up to an hour/year. Scaling up, an hour/day adds up to 15 days/year.

This is the sort of thing spreadsheets were made for, so for your calculating convenience, here is a spreadsheet (in OpenOffice.org's ISO-standard open document format) so you can toy around with the figures. You'll notice that I assumed 240 work days/year and 360 days/year, because the numbers are much more round that way, and there are few things that we really never skip.

OK, at this point, you've made a tally of your whole life, and worked out that you spend the first day of your work year logging in to your PC, the next two work weeks listening to your coworker complain about his neighbor, and a full week of your life lying in bed wondering what you're doing with your life. You've established that, as they say, living's mostly a-wastin' time.

The question from there is what to do about it. Much of what you've tallied probably isn't worth a couple of hours per year. So cut it out. Spending an hour or so learning to eliminate a minute-a-day problem really will pay off over the course of a year.

But most of the little things can't be eliminated. Even if you could eliminate peeing from your life (since it adds up to at least a day/year for even the most efficient whizzers), what would you replace it with? More time trolling news sites? Going back to that season of the Simpsons that you missed? Toying with spreadsheets? You could take this exercise as a chance to eliminate cruft from your life, but you can also take it as a reminder that most of the experience of living is simply not productive or goal-oriented.

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I just finished reading applications from fifty high school students, which means that I've just read a hundred recommendation letters.

Reading the applications--from students who lived in the slummy side of the Maryland suburbs but went to a really good high school, were immigrants and the children of impoverished single parents--was pretty fun, because that was me, back in my youth. But now I'm here on the receiving side of the recommendations, rather than the begging-for side; I think that makes me old. Also, today is my birthday.

But you're not here to listen to me complain and reminisce and otherwise blog--you're here to find out what made for a good or bad recommendation.

Out of these hundred recommendation letters, 0.0% said anything bad about the student. The closest any came was a form like Student has a low GPA, but it doesn't reflect student's abilities in..., which I won't really count because the student's GPA is clearly written on the transcript. Such letters often turned out to be the better ones, as I'll explain below.

While I'm on transcripts, I have to give a shout-out to Baltimore's schools, many of which produce readable transcripts that say GREAT KIDS GREAT SCHOOLS in full color at the top. This is brilliant: the arguably most important audience for a transcript are colleges, scholarship programs, and other people to whom the student and school are pitching--¿why not make the transcript appropriate as part of a package selling the student?

Back to the recommendations, every last one of which was positive. They all used the relevant adjectives: hard-working, bright, a social leader, et cetera. The adjective list was requisite, meaning that everybody had one, meaning that it's not possible to use them to distinguish one student from another. Some of the recommendations for the female students used adjectives like attractive or beautiful--that's just creepy, and not exactly what the program focuses on.

But if the adjective list wasn't there, then I'd worry. One guidance counsellor sent in a progress form in lieu of a letter, which just made me wonder why the counsellor chose not to say anything. So the adjective list and the associated fluff paragraph has to be there, even though nobody can use it for anything once it's there.

Many of the recommendations were badly written. Typos were common, prose was hackneyed, form letters recommended the student for the wrong program, and one was printed in Comic Sans. I couldn't in good conscience downgrade students because their teacher or counsellor wasn't sufficiently careful, though maybe there are readers out there who are fine with doing so.

Any recommendation longer than about three paragraphs got skimmed. Dear recommender: it's not about you.

OK, everything I've mentioned to this point was about what didn't matter: everybody says nice things, lots of recommenders haven't had an essay-writing class in a few decades, and none of it reflects on the students.

What did work: personal anecdotes fleshing out other parts of the application. Any single data point that indicated that the student did something remarkable. Dear reader, you saw that the student took AP English, but you may not have noticed that she took that a year after graduating from the English as a second language program. Or the student often stood up in defense of his fellow students during class discussion. Or the student's grades actually rose after giving birth to her son. From my limited experience, the recommendations that took a cue from literary theory and characterized by showing concrete action were the ones that most often caused me to bump up scores on the scoring sheet.

These sorts of anecdote do what the transcript can't do--and also what the student can't do, because an essay about how I stood up against intimidation and I did what is right just sounds cocky. That's why events always have somebody introduce the keynote speaker: if the speaker listed his or her awards, we'd be throwing tomatoes, but when somebody else does it, then it's just flattery.

The secret that we all know is that those intros are written by the speaker. The back cover blurb on both of my books, glowingly describing my background, was written by me in the third person, and it's safe to assume the same of any other back-cover blurb you may run into, unless it has an explicit attribution.

I almost expect recommendation letters to be the same: the student should be orchestrating the message, and the student should be suggesting what the recommender highlights in his or her letter. At least that's my opinion, and on the handful of occasions when I've written recommendations for others, I've always expected the applicant to tell me what to say.

If we accept that the recommendation letter is a chance to highlight interesting details among the forms and statistics, then this is a fine formula.

We'd have a problem with this if the recommendation letter were supposed to be an independent party presenting an honest, blind-to-the-applicant opinion of the applicant. But that's just a fiction. As above, 100.00% of the recommendations were positive, so the only thing demonstrated by the positive adjectives is that the student managed to find two people who weren't so jaded as to write a poison pen letter. I mean no offense to the high school teachers and counsellors of the world, but I did not look at a single name out of those hundred recommendations, and if I did, I wouldn't have recognized you. One person got the school principal to write, and that stood out just for being infrequent.

The point in my stressing the anonymity of the author is to stress what a fiction is the recommendation as personal opinion. I don't know who the author is, and I know the author is going to say something positive, so there's little space left for the sort of personal opinion implied by the fiction. Instead, the recommendation letter is a space in the application package where specific successes can be touted and additional detail presented. From my admittedly tiny sample of a hundred, I found that a lot of people didn't understand that, and instead simply added more glowing adjectives. Those recommenders hurt their applicants.

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