THE JO-TEL … wishes it could remember how to change the banner picture.

See, for a time, Thrill had a blog called Professor Truth. And some point, I became disgruntled with some aspect or another of life on the old Jo-tel (probably some petty thing about someone inserting a jump link on a long post of mine or something) and I defected, with modest pomp, but little circumstance, to Professor Truth for a few months. My sojourn there was pleasant and involved such posts as “Here’s to an Unhappy Christmas for the Insert Key”, “My Thoughts on New Orleans” (by Triceratops with a Saddle), “Last Night I Drank My Own Piss”, and “Top Ten Led Zeppelin Songs”. I also posted my first ever top 15 albums of the year list, appropriately titled “Top 15 Albums of 2005″. In hindsight, it’s pretty bad, at least in my opinion. However, it’s an interesting look back at the earlier days of the indie explosion, back when the mere existence of year-end lists was something to remark upon and bands like Gang Gang Dance were still considered legitimately weird.

Thrill deleted Professor Truth in 2006 and, for the longest time, I just assumed the content, including this post, was lost. However, thanks to a site called The Way Back Machine, and much to Thrill’s chagrin, some of the content, including this post, is now resurrectable. [Shark]
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Todd Leopold at cnn.com writes, “No doubt [year-end lists] have some validity — they do tend to agree on several releases — but given the huge number of items coming into the American marketplace, something’s probably been overlooked. So I’m not fooling myself. The lists below aren’t ‘the best of the year’ …. The lists below reflect my favorites of that small sample. Three or 30 years from now, I fully expect to stumble on something shoved away in a stack and wonder where it had been all my life.” Todd Leopold wrote this because he is lame. I have no compunction about saying that these are the 15 best albums of the fucking year. Suck my crit:

#15
Kallikak Familiy
May 23rd 2007

The Kaillikak Family appear to be the heir to the throne of the more experimental side of The Books. While the latter band showed us that above all they are song-writers, the Family (the nom de plume of a dude named Andrew Patterson) reminds us that it’s all about the pastiche. With subtle found pulsings, talking, and beats (see e.g. “Portland, Oregon, pt. 4″), May 23rd 2007 explores the terrain of discarded, discordantly cordant sound dreams. No sleep till PDX!

#14
Broken Social Scene
Broken Social Scene

Broken Social Scene have balls. You Forgot It in People was totally awesome. But it was that kind of album that keeps its fans awake at night wondering how the band will top it. With Broken Social Scene, the Scene gives the best answer possible, namely, that they will not be content to simply compile good songs (which they have easily done here). No. It’s clear now that they want to make an artistic statement. So starting here and stretching until … sometime in the distant Canadian future, you can expect You Forget It in People to, slowly, start looking quaint. But, if this is all sounding a bit serious, keep in mind that song ten is called “Handjobs for the Holidays”. Hey, better than no jobs.

#13
Okkervil River
Black Sheep Boy

Allow Okkervil River to introduce itself:

And I think I believe that, if stones could dream,
They’d dream of being laid side-by-side, piece-by-piece,
And turned into a castle for some towering queen
They’re unable to know.
And when that queen’s daughter came of age,
I think she’d be lovely and stubborn and brave,
And suitors would journey from kingdoms away
To make themselves known.
And I think that I know the bitter dismay
Of a lover who brought fresh bouquets every day
When she turned him away to remember some knave
Who once gave just one rose.

from “A Stone”

#12
M. Ward
Transistor Radio

Oh, M., unlike your namesake narrator of A la Recharche du temps perdu you like to keep things short. And I love you for that. You came out in January, M., but I first met you in December. You’ve been hiding from me…. With a lo-fi mentality and folk-rocker juice in its veins, your Transistor Radio warbles out 14 really nice songs. And you, in your modestly, didn’t even tell me about yourself until a few weeks ago. So quiet. So quiet, M.

#11
Gang Gang Dance
God’s Money

Fractal noise anyone? If I declare this the best experimental album of the year, would anyone hear the sound of a tree falling in the woods outside the Adirondack shack where Gang Gang Dance must have recorded this album? Maybe. The point is that God’s Money succeeds because it is equally able – through it’s short segway “diddies” that bookend the major fractal pieces – to both pull the listener out of the chaos and re-plunge her back into it. It’s refreshing to be able to see the forest sometimes. Excepter, are you breathing this?

#10
Spoon
Gimme Fiction

Spoon refuses to stop making consummate albums. Gimme Fiction, which draws the listener in with a circular magnetism, explores the grooves of rock. It’s the best Spoon album since, uh, Kill the Moonlight.

#9
Xiu Xiu
La Foret

(I bet that Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu’s frontman) didn’t even try to make this album murkier and more cerebral than Fabulous Muscles. I don’t think he has ears for what anyone else hears or thinks. That’s why he makes that crazy belching noise in “Yellow Raspberry”. Just like with every other album on this list, I recommend that you purchase and listen to La Foret with little more than a knee-reaction thought-process regardless of how I describe it in this blurb. But the album pretty much sounds like what you would expect from a band with a Chinese name that comes out with a French-titled album.) I like La Foret better than Fabulous Muscles.

#8
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!

Remember back in 1997 when Old Dominion, the 15 seed in the NCAA tournament, knocked off the number-two-seeded UCLA Bruins in the first round? That was awesome.

#7
Lightning Bolt
Hypermagic Mountain

Noise it is! Lately, Music has been really missing the lack of an heir to early 80s punk rock and thrash metal. The drop-D commercial sheen that coated mainstream “heavy” acts like Limp Biskit and Staind aimed at the exhilaration that these earlier, inspirationally grating albums provided to their high school listeners (Metallica Rulz!), but ended up creating little more than horrendous music videos and tons of dumb fans.

Noise rock takes the abusive aesthetic of a thrash metal and intellectualizes it to create sonic, Hip E.-at-2am-on-a-Saturday-awakening art pieces. Along these lines, Hypermagic Mountain, a huge slab of burning iceberg whose ferocity and competence scorches through both the brain and the gulliver, perfects Lightning Bolt’s sound.

#6
The Mountain Goats
The Sunset Tree

By the time that “Pale Green Things” begins to spins its message you realize that Darnielle has subtly and unobtrusively – and by means of autobiographic material no less – affected your emotions. If I didn’t like John Darnielle so much, I might compare him to Dylan.

#5
Wilderness
Wilderness

Of the three big Indie Rock albums by new bands this year (the others being CYHSY! and Wolf Parade) this one was the best. Like its Major Major Major-esque title track, Wilderness finds success by focusing on unusual goals. Indeed, despite sounding decidedly like stripped down Interpol, the perfectionist instrumentation and insistently repetitive lyrics spewn by lead singer James Johnson end up actually creating a detached, artistic recreation of indie rock at its most elemental.

#4
The Books
Lost and Safe

“Coming down from the ethereal heights of The Lemon of Pink, The Books had the audacity to simply give us a great-sounding album.” I wrote this for my “Best of the Last Six Months to Me” post at the Jo-tel. I was so much older then.

#3
Animal Collective
Feels

Feels has gotten a strangely divided reception from the indie-critosphere. Almost everyone acknowledges it as a great album, but about half of these people laud the album with flippant disdain for what they see as Animal Collective going for the big target – the nice(r) sounding album – instead of returning back their twiggy woods of abstraction. This is because, Feels is by far the most accessible Animal Collective album. Sung Tongs peppered its catchy melodies with discordant (”Whaddit I Done”) or lengthy (”Visiting Friends”) sound experiments. Here Comes the Indian (I read this review in the Guardian where the reviewer was trying to argue that Here Comes the Indian was his favorite Animal Collective album while repeatedly calling the album “Here Come the Indians”) was nothing but dissonance – ego-less, constantly shifting and pretty much terrible. Feels manages to focuses in on the more sonorous side of Sung Tongs (e.g. “Kids on Vacation”), mining the experimental nuances of their less experimental tendencies. In other words, helloh to yo’r undernation hand-traight, pleesr versus underyelly figure five, just bright, deathly longfellow, must such beings’s bastunderlay, vall call, water falll dinin, do Gren grssss, rollick in xero.

#2
Antony & the Johnsons
I Am a Bird Now

How long has it been since I’ve gotten so enveloped in an album for its vocals? The songs on I Am a Bird Now are perfect shrines to Antony’s defiant, male-diva voice. So much so that the only way for me to properly summarize here would be for me to attached a .wav file that featured me singing this blurb in a voice as beautiful as Antony’s. If could sing, I might have actually attempted this. And it would have been funny.

#1
Deerhoof
Runners Four

I wrote this poem to/about a Deerhoof song: “[something something] eyebright bugler [something something] (I can’t find the poem.)

And then there was prose: With this, their fifth LP entry, Deerhoof have penned their Ok Computer. The Runners Four is a wonderfully challenging listen, each song shift opening up sparkling nooks and crannies of ingenuity. If Apple O’ and Reveille were like riding a bronco, then The Runners Four is like going on Space Mountain, the Matterhorn, and Pirates of Caribbean back to back about four times in a row. I guess that makes Milk Man kind of like having sex with the hot lemon frosty concession girl. Now, should I get the lemon or little lemon frosty? Wink!

Originally posted by Shark on December 13, 2005

In a few lines, Shakespeare both encapsulates Cleopatra’s ambivalent roiling of Marc Antony’s strong persona and summarizes the romantic human condition, generally.

CLEOPATRA
Where is he?

CHAIRMAN
I did not see him hence.

CLEOPATRA
See where he is, who he’s with, what he does.
I did not send you. If you find him sad,
Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report
That I am sudden sick. Quick, and return! [FN1]

-Shark
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FN1: Antony & Cleopatra, Act I, scene 3, lines 1-7

All time measured based on the 1.0 hour.
______________

5) 2.2

Occupying the midpoint between a small and a large task, a 2.2 entry exudes both care and efficiency.

4) 8.1

While elusive, all-day billing activities are an essential component of any strong billing month, and 8.1 is the quintessential time-entry for an all-day activity. Travel time not included.

3) 0.9

Sneaky, yet sturdy, the .9 billable hour is almost unnoticeable. How long does the perfect one-page letter take? Answer: .9.

2) 1.1

As my original billing mentor told me, no one ever bills for 1.0 because people never usually spend that exact amount of time on something. Of course, this explanation defies mathematics as well as the general space-time continuum theory. However, it is completely in line with accepted billing philosophy, since 1.0 looks, to the discerning eye, like a mere placeholder, whereas 1.1 looks like a hard-earned, precisely measured task. Nothing important ever takes 1.0 hours. If it’s important enough, it takes 1.1; if not, see entry #3 above.

1) 0.4

The workhorse of the billable hour. Thinking about something really important– even for only a moment– takes .4. Any work that you do that is hard to captuer necessarily take .4, a billable time which will repeatedly save your life.

-Shark

Turd:

If Shark played baseball, stupid ESPN would call him N-Darg.

Thrill:

That would be true regardless of what sport he played, because sportscasters and players are uncreative nimrods.

Shark:

Whatever happened to the days of Sleepy Floyd and Refrigerator Perry? Also, you can’t let players come up with their own nicknames just because you lack the creativity to come up with them yourself. We should not be calling Kobe “the Black Mamba”, nor should we call Dwight Howard “Superman”. Both nicknames are bad for their own reasons but mostly because you just can’t give yourself an awesome sounding nickname. But, still, I’d take a somewhat creative self-given nickname to, say, D-Will. WHICH IS NOT A NICKNAME.

Thrill:

Between D-Wade, D-Will and D-Rose alone, it’s basically a fucking epidemic in the NBA. Can we get Simmons to take care of this shit?

Shark:

Simmons is a worthless old man now.

Hip E.:

Simmons did make up the best one of these ever, for pitcher Felix Hernandez.

Yesterday Cloud Atlas was so good I lost both of my iPhones.

– at 08:30 today I found my work phone down by the side of my seat in my car – only missing for about 20 hours.

– just now I received confirmation that my personal phone is in the hands of the manager of Chilango, who apparently lives in the Loin and does not have access to a phone or email machine, or is a dick or an imbecile, based on the fact that I played loud noises on my phone this morning around 8 like four times, and then sent it a message saying “Found phone: [email] or call [roommate's #]”

What a retard. Thank you to him though.

Turd:

Wow that is a lot of text Hip E. You could probably explain the mugging in that amount of text.

Hip E.:

Fraid not. Went to grab bike from bad part of town. Was putting it in car when shady homeless guy comes over and says he looks out for cars around here to make sure nobody messes with them. Tries to help me put bike in car but it was already in the trunk. Unfortunately it doesn’t fit in the trunk. Despite my protestations he takes it out of the trunk to “help” me put it in the back seat. Another shady dude rolls up, this one less polite and more dumb looking, and picks up the front wheel. I tell them thanks I can put my bike in the car myself and tell them to put it down. The first guy is annoyed at the second guy and says take a hike, the second guy stays put. I go OK i’ll give you a couple bucks for your “help,” just put down my bike and I’ll put it in my car myself. Pull out my wallet and I’ve got $2. They kind of fight over it but the second guy gets it. The first guy is pissed. The second guy walks off. The first guy grabs my bike again so I open the door so he can put it in. He could have been a little more careful with the leather but it wasn’t too bad. I tell him I’ll buy him a beer at the corner store across the street. He mentions if the second guy had stuck around longer he would have shot him. I lock up my car and walk across the street. The second guy comes in behind us. At this point I could have made a scene in the corner store but I really didn’t want to. For some reason I took $20 out of the ATM instead of pushing past them to the beer aisle and paying with a credit card. They both hovered over me and when the $20 came out the first guy grabbed it and walked out. I walked out after him and was like “hey, give me that so I can get some change.” He wasn’t being very talkative at that point and it didn’t seem like my reasoned argument was going to make much headway. I turned around to go to my car and the second guy was like “give me my money too.” I was like “I don’t have any more money – go talk to him!” which he did and I crossed the street and drove off. Ultimately it cost me $25. Real light mugging, but pretty annoying. I was trapped because I had my bike half disassembled when the guy rolled up, so I couldn’t really cross the street or avoid the situation readily. On the drive there I was listening to a Radiolab episode where an entomologist was walking in NOLA and a guy ran up on him and this girl, told the girl to give him her wallet, he said something like “come on, don’t do that man” and the guy shot him in the chest and ran off.

PETE:

That would be really interesting if it was the same guy that tried to pull that shit with APom and I when we parked in the Loin to see a show at GAMH in college. He tried to pull the “It’s dangerous around here. If you leave your car without my protection it will DEFINITELY get broken into.” I think I got into a shouting match with him, not because I’m so brave, but mostly because it was APom’s car we had taken. Older black guy?

Thrill:

That would really narrow it down in the Loin.

PETE:

Well I’ve been to the Loin a lot and I’ve only ever had one guy say that to me. I’m sure you’re correct, nonetheless. I’m sure it’s a tradition extending back to the days before the Great Fire. Find a white kid with a car and convince him that you will actually do something other than leave his car to the vicissitudes of the Loin while you got buy crack with your ill-gotten money and smoke it and pass out.

Shark:

Mugging circa 1902, San Francisco:

Dear sir, I see you are hitching your vessel to yon cleat. Pray you, it being well past gloaming, I shan’t believe you would think to single-handedly dock and batten this fine schooner! Why, in just the last fortnight, I have, through various interlocutors, gleaned of no less than ten or twelve incidents of unfortunate robbery committed against able-bodied men like yourself by shadowed ruffians, officiously prowling the shoals. Yerba Buena cove is no place for nocturnal heroics. Nay, I must insist that you allow me to lend a hand in your labors.

Hip E.:

Looked maybe 40-45, but I think he was not a lone mastermind. I think they see a skinny white guy pull up in a BMW and unlock a cannondale and they think, “if I work hard in school, eat right and get plenty of rest, maybe I can have a nice car like that young man someday!”

This Network Moment brought to you by Shark

from “The Suspended Life”
by John Ashbery
….

The igloo sun, while I was away,
Chastened the wolverine towels.
Isn’t Idaho the wolverine state
Anyway Ohio is the flower state
New York is the key state.
Bandana is the population state.
In the hay states of Pennsylvania and Arkansas
I lay down and slept.
The cross delirium tremens state of Mississippi
Led me to further discoveries:
Timbuctoo, for instance. And Ashtabula,
The towel city. The wolverines
Had almost faded off the towels, the frigid pallor
Of the arctic sun was responsible.

Isn’t Montpelier the capital of the ditch state?
I remember as a child reading about some bombs
That had been placed on a tram.
They were green and in a cone-shaped pile
To look like a fur tree.
Many people were fooled.
Others in faraway places
Like Aberdeen or the Shetland Islands
Were unhappy about the affair.
What can people do with people far away?
Only those near me, like Ben,
Can mean to me what Uncle Bob means to me
When he comes in, wiping a block of ice
On a chipmunk dishtowel, his face glittering
With the pleasure of being already absent.
Or when someone places a cabbage on a stump
I think I am with them, I think of their name:
Julian. Do you see
The difference between weak handshakes
And freezing to death in a tub of ice and show
Called a home by some, but it lack runners,
Do you? When through the night
Pure sobs denote the presence
Of supernatural yearning you think
Of all those who have been near you
Who might have formed a wall
Of demarcation around your sorrow
Of those who offered you a coffee.
….

-Shark

A lot of things in Austin and elsewhere have changed since Richard Linklater’s Slackers. Some things have not:

“To Stab”

At one point, armor is flashing
all around me and,
wrenching
the arm of Pisistratus off, I
can’t glean the sky from
the clay; winnowed
soldier without armor
dies there

My sword is close, and then
his,
and then the shield-skirted
sky swings down
as though both were there
rolling between feet
in earth and blood

Through dust,
air, sun, I
hit cuirass, flashing,
then flesh, above the nave;
in the noonday sun,
over my head, the Dardan
Anthemides, son of a farmer,
swings his last
dagger
breath

My sword, then,
through his remaining side: warmth
falls on my feet,
armor
shield and greaves
stripped into my arms;
I walk
backward then, through the raised dust,
spoils at my side
your visage within
mine, Kate

“Drinking Hand”

From the moment I
spot your cove,
(nymphs, maybe) there appears nothing
but to ask for,
to touch,
your clean walls,
smoothed out with
salt water

Dear Nereids, I am
always making plans to see you
across California and
the Aegean, always making up
reasons to
see you

When the stars that
I can see through the sky,
the cove,
walk through the bar
in the same same way as
the girl that, like
a cave’s stalac-
tite,
ruined it with sea-spray, then: turn
to me again like you mean it

Fill the word walls
with salt, brine;
your aspects mask the
reek of sea, the
trident
cannot properly frame you, for
you– like the sea–
foam

As I approach, your cove is
under
the land and
I am not sure that I can
get to you, yet
going abaft I direct the
Phoenician at the helm
up; he
raises his hand to the sun

I raise my hand too,
and in the lee
of the sun
I approach,
scowing the grotto shoals and,
when
I get to your cove, I turn at heel
across the water to show you my
drinking hand

-Shark

You may have forgotten, but there was once a time when having a Blackberry was awesome. There were lots of things you could do on a Blackberry that seemed very exclusive, as well as lots of assumed features that the parents and professionals that used them never seemed to question or utilize, and there was Brickbreaker too. Thank God there was Brickbreaker. Let’s depart from those halcyon remembrances, however, and start by acknowledging that Blackberry’s days are numbered. This would probably be the case even if RIM were not two guys and a blowup doll (fake secretary) in a cubicle in St. Paul, Minnesota, taking breaks from doing nothing to slap their knees at the absurdity that anyone would actually still own a Blackberry. This would be the case simply because a touch screen phone is much better suited for Internet use than any of the Blackberry control pads/sliders/balls. [FN1] These days, anything not fully and fearlessly Interent-capable is a goner. And that includes Blackberrys.

So that begs the question: why do I still use one? Let’s start this second inquiry with yet more concessions: it’s certainly not the software, which has always blown; or the aesthetics, which haven’t gotten much better since the early “hockey puck” model. No, I fully admit that those aspects of the phone are horrible insults to the idea of user-friendly electronics. But I also submit that they are insignificant in comparison to the following positive attributes of the Blackberry, which I will describe in short detail:

1. They are easier and faster to type on

This is because of the keypad obviously. I, personally, cannot type on the touch pad with any proficiency. Certainly many years of hammering out lengthy missives on the Blackberry has made the iPhone’s air-sensitive touch screen all the more difficult to adjust to, but, nonetheless, I submit that, even when mastered, the touch screen is an inferior mobile typewriting vehicle. My evidence in support of this is the fact that, despite taking on frequent challengers, no one on a touch screen has even beaten me in a typing race. The only person who even came close was a guy using a Android on the ‘finger slide’ setting. Otherwise, the Blackberry is just way faster, especially in my capable hands. The disparity is even greater when using mid-sentence punctuation, frequent caps, or most symbols. But, I mean, when do you ever use those things!

2. The battery lasts longer

Pretty simple one here. My Blackberry will last in the ‘on’ position for 2-3 days. Most people with iPhones these days have compensated for their phone’s short battery life by compulsively wiring their living spaces with standard issue iPhone chargers. [FN2] But some of us are not responsible enough to pull this off. Also, some of us go on camping trips.

3. They are, for the most part, indestructible

The hockey puck especially (I dropped that thing down flights of stairs one more than one occasion with no major damage), but even the current version: drop it, sit on it, run it through the dryer– it will likely escape unfazed. And, you know, even if it doesn’t, who cares? It’s just a Blackberry.

-Shark
_______________________________

FN1: I’ve had them all.

FN2: I like how Blackberry chargers are all different. I actually don’t think RIM even issues standard chargers anymore, I think they just assume that their customers– a, by now, resilient bunch– will find their own power source on the black market. The result is that most hardened Blackberry users have a Jawa sandcrawler-style box at home with a motley, foot-wide tangle of mostly obsolete power cords.

I’m not saying that I could save you several hours of difficult reading by citing the following lines as a capsule summary of Kierkegaard’s Frygt og Bæven (Fear and Trembling):

What I intend now is to extract from the story of Abraham its dialectical element, in the form of problemata, in order to see how monstrous a paradox faith is, a paradox capable of making a murder into a holy act well pleasing to God, a paradox that gives Isaac back to Abraham, which no thought can grasp because faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off. [FN1]

That’s not what I’m saying. But I will admit to being surprised, upon this my first in-depth reading of Kierkegaard, at the chasm between my uninformed perception of him as a hand-wringing and troubled defeatist and his actual style of cocksure, almost acerbic didacticism. For instance:

On the whole, were poetry to attend to the religious aspect of the inner feelings of characters, it would command themes of much greater importance than those it now occupies itself with. Here is the story poetry is repeatedly giving us: a man is stuck with a girl he once loved, or maybe never really loved because he has now seen another who is ideal. A man makes mistakes in life: it was the right street but the wrong house, for on the second floor just over the way lives the ideal– that’s what people consider the proper subject of poetry. A lover makes a mistake, he saw his loved only by candlelight and thought she had dark hair, but look!, on closer inspection she was blonde– however, her sister, there’s the ideal! That’s what people think poetry is about. In my view, such man is an impudent fool who can be unbearable enough in life but should be instantly booed off the stage when he tries to put on airs in poetry. [FN2]

-Shark

________________________
FN1: Anistar Hannay trans., p. 82.

FN2: Id. at p. 132, fn.

The opening lines of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik are below. I love how you are thrown pell-mell into the plot and terminology.

At three-thirty A.M. on the night of June 5, 1992, the top telepath in the Sol System fell off the map in the offices of Runciter Associates in New York City. That started vid-phones ringing. The Runciter organization had lost track of too many of Hollis’ psis during the last two months; this added disappearance wouldn’t do.

“Mr. Runciter? Sorry to bother you.” The technician in charge of the night shift at the map room coughed nervously as the massive, sloppy head of Glen Runciter swam up to fill the vidscreen. “We got this news from one of our inertials. Let me look.” He fiddled with a disarranged stack of tapes from the recorder which monitored incoming messages. “Our Miss Dorn reported it; as you may recall she had followed him to Green River, Utah, where-”

Sleepily, Runciter grated, “Who? I can’t keep in mind at all times which inertials are following what teep or precog.” With his hand he smoothed down his ruffled gray mass of wirelike hair. “Skip the rest and tell me which of Hollis’ people is missing now.”

“S. Dole Melipone,” the technician said.

“What? Melipone’s gone? You kid me.”

“I not kid you,” the technician assured him. “Edie Dorn and two other inertials followed him to a motel named the Bonds of Erotic Polymorphic Experience, a sixty-unit sub-surface structure catering to businessmen and their hookers who don’t want to be entertained. Edie and her colleagues didn’t think he was active, but just to be on the safe side we had one of our own telepaths, Mr. G. G. Ashwood, go in and read him. Ashwood found a scramble pattern surrounding Melipone’s mind, so he couldn’t do anything; he therefore went back to Topeka, Kansas, where he’s currently scouting a new possibility.”

Runciter, more awake now, had lit a cigarette; chin in hand, he sat propped up somberly, smoke drifting across the scanner of his end of the bichannel circuit. “You’re sure the teep was Melipone? Nobody seems to know what he looks like; he must use a different physiognomic template every month. What about his field?”

“We asked Joe Chip to go in there and run tests on the magnitude and minitude of the field being generated there at the Bonds of Erotic Polymorphic Experience Motel. Chip says it registered, at its height, 68.2 blr units of telepathic aura, which only Melipone, among all the known telepaths, can produce.” The technician finished, “So that’s where we stuck Melipone’s identflag on the map. And now he – it – is gone.”

“Did you look on the floor? Behind the map?”

“It’s gone electronically. The man it represents is no longer on Earth or, as far as we can make out, on a colony world either.”

Runciter said, “I’ll consult my dead wife.”

“It’s the middle of the night. The moratoriums are closed now.”

“Not in Switzerland,” Runciter said, with a grimacing smile, as if some repellent midnight fluid had crept up into his aged throat. “Goodeve.” Runciter hung up.

-Shark