I’m going through my second reading of Bret Easton Ellis’ “Imperial Bedrooms”, and I’m struck by this matching set of questions:

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

These questions present themselves at different points in the book, but the duality they represent is pivotal to the plot. Not to give anything away, but they echo the sentiment — from Ellis’ prequel narrative, “Less Than Zero” — to “see the worst”.

All of which sets me to wondering: What if the answer to both questions is the very same event? A deed so foul that it victimizes the same person who carried it out — think crimes against humanity, etc. — should rank right up there in self-inflicted torment. I’m guessing that that’s not normal for most people, and thankfully so.

Lots of buzzing over this week’s rollout of Facebook Places, including the obvious lifting of the social-media-meets-location concept from Foursquare.

Maybe too obvious, judging from the current Places logo, shown above. Notice how the streets intersect within that little map glyph-box, to form a familiar numeral? It’s hard to miss:

“Bahaha. It’s a 4. In a square. And on that night, tongue and cheek were reunited.”

And to infer further, that giant location marker can be seen as poking its way into the heart of that geolocational map. Or dropping like a bomb. You make the call.

If this wasn’t an intentional subliminal visual, then some Facebook designer drone is getting fired today. At least he’ll know where he’s at.

Theater gets downright experimental in Susan Glaspell’s one-act play “Trifles”, mainly because the protagonist is nowhere to be seen:

Though Mrs. Wright is the central figure in the play, she never appears onstage. She is only referred to by the on-stage characters.

Not that the play is encumbered by the absence. What unfolds is a tightly-plotted story based around the overlooked minutiae (or trifles) of crime-scene investigation, with strong overtones of gender disparity, perceptional bias, and psychological tension thrown in. Not bad for a piece written in 1916, and based on true events on the Midwestern rural crime-beat.

To me, the essence of onstage experimentation is tinkering with the basic structural elements. Shunting the main character to the background while focusing on the aside action certainly qualifies. I think “Trifles” is due for a revival somewhere; I’d love to see it in live action.

With just a little HTML and a smidgen of PHP, you too can build a human body in Web-compliant code:

Just in case you want to customize to your own physiological specs, here’s the bracket-by-bracket markup from above:

It’s telling that the PHP comes into play only when defining boobies and private parts. Like you couldn’t already tell this was devised by a guy-geek…

I’m well enough removed from gaming circles that, while I’m aware of the Halo franchise, I don’t know all too much about it.

That’s why a lovingly-crafted Atari 2600 rendition would be right up my alley:

Ed Fries, former vice president of Microsoft’s Game Publishing Division, programmed an old-school version of the beloved game that features blocky graphics, deliberately basic sound effects, and simplified movements. And yet it’s still recognizable as “Halo.”

The game, called “Halo 2600,” made its debut at the recent Classic Gaming Expo, where cartridges (nice!) of the game were given away to lucky recipients.

And it’s playable online, on the above link. It’s addictive fun in a low-impact way. Sort of reminiscent of Robotron 2084, with a far less manic pace and a lack of rapid-fire.

I do think that a name change is in order — after all, those 8-bit pixels can’t really form a cleanly-circular halo shape, can they?

While Bill Cosby was disputing yet another premature rumor of his demise, he dropped a most succinct definition of the less-popular afterlife alternative:

“Hell is a place where everybody is laughing, but nothing is funny.”

Leave it to The Cos to come up with the first plausible rebuttal to Jean-Paul Sartre’s argument that “Hell is other people”. For added philosophical impact, I’m hoping the comedian was wearing a signature Cosby Sweater whilst quipping.

This sign, adorning a Chelsea storefront, says it in as blunt a manner as possible:

Because summertime is the right time to have a store-wide sale on “most shit”. The rest of the shit inventory gets moved during the winter sale, I’m guessing.

Metro Washington has suffered without a streetcred-worthy nickname for long enough, so hipsters in the District and its Maryland-Virginia environs are promoting “the DMV”:

Sleek, succinct and inclusive, the name has been in common use for several years among the area’s — ahem, the DMV’s — hip-hop and go-go music crowd. It’s familiar to listeners of black-oriented radio stations such as WKYS-FM and WPGC-FM, whose DJs decorate their patter with mentions of it. It also pops up as geographical shorthand (“DMV man seeks woman”) on Craigslist.

Hate to break this to them, but here in New York, “the DMV” is instantly-recognizable shorthand for the Department of Motor Vehicles. That’s been the case for decades, and it’s not going to change easily. I know that not every state shares that designator for its driver’s license clearinghouse, but most in the Northeast do — including DC.

Adopting the widely-known mark of a perpetually unpopular bureaucracy as a civic tag? At first I thought it was a weak ploy. But, we are talking about Red Tape Central here. So I guess it’s perfect.

It’s true: When you massage the written word for a living, there’s no happy ending.

The job has its perks — an accumulation of random knowledge, for instance — but it also has its side effects when you unintentionally drink the copy Kool-Aid. Once you train yourself to spot errors, you can’t not spot them. You can’t simply shut off the careful reading when you leave the office. You notice typos in novels, missing words in other magazines, incorrect punctuation on billboards. You have nightmares that your oversight turned Mayor Bloomberg into a “pubic” figure. You walk by a beauty salon the morning after you had sex for the first time with a guy you’ve been seeing and point out that there’s no such thing as “lazer” hair removal, realizing that this may not be the best way to get to have sex with him again.

I’ve never consciously let grammar-policing get in the way of personal relationships. The closest I’ve come is in playing the spoiler to those early-Internet chain emails which contained the usual crackpot urban myths. Friends and family would inexplicably get mad at me for debunking nonsense like the Oliver North “warning” about Osama bin Laden back in 1987, and subsequently exclude me from the forward-message fun. (So I guess my compulsiveness paid off!)

Even though copyediting isn’t my primary gig anymore, I find the auto-editing switch in my brain never has turned off. In fact, it’s gone beyond bulls-eyeing mere typos — hardly a sporting pursuit since the advent of the filter-less Web. I now find it hard to read, watch, or listen to any lengthy piece, and not critique its overall structure: How it could have been shortened here, reworked in that section, and so on. I can’t decide if it’s a real problem for me or not. In some ways, it’s gratifying (on a strictly personal, internal level).

I had thought that the model in that York Peppermint Pattie commercial looked familiar: It’s Alexi from IMBOYCRAZY.COM!

And this is that commercial, spliced together with Requiem for a Dream:

I think the extreme closeup on the pupil in both video-works was the inspirational hook. How else to draw a line between mint-flavoring and heroin? And the chop-quick cut scenes complete the parallels. Well done.

Not that Alexi endorses the smack habit. But she does encourage you to tan it, in the event that you can’t tone it. Yeah.

It may seem morose to dwell on the following passage out of Bret Easton Ellis’ “The Informers”, but it’s been in my head for the past few days, so I might as well share it. From the end of the story/chapter “On The Beach”:

I walk away from Mona. I know what the word gone means. I know what the word dead means. You deal with it, you mellow out, you head back to town… “I know what the word dead means,” I whisper to myself as softly as I can because it sounds like an omen.

Mortality and nihilism, tied up in a tidy package of misery. Does the job.

I guess I have to applaud the symmetrical creativity in the atheistic rite of de-baptism:

In a type of mock ceremony that’s now been performed in at least four states, a robed “priest” used a hairdryer marked “reason” in an apparent bid to blow away the waters of baptism once and for all. Several dozen participants then fed on a “de-sacrament” (crackers with peanut butter) and received certificates assuring they had “freely renounced a previous mistake, and accepted Reason over Superstition.”

Fighting ritual with ritual? It may be cathartic for some, but it’s fundamentally silly. Especially if the ultra-religious, rather than regarding this blasphemousness with outrage, regard it merely as the Biblical baptism by fire carried out by other means…

There are fantasy camps, and then there are kid-lit fantasy camps:

Children have always sought to act out elements of their favorite books, becoming part of the worlds that the works create. Now, organized role-playing literary camps, like the weeklong Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn, are sprouting up around the nation.

Some take their inspiration from the Harry Potter books, like the wizardry camp run by the Brandywine Learning Center in Chester Springs, Pa., which simulates the experience of attending Hogwarts, the school from the novels.

Bookstores have joined in, organizing day camps structured around children’s books, like “The Double-Daring Book for Girls” and the “Ranger’s Apprentice” series. But the biggest buzz has recently been around Camp Half-Blood, based on the popular “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series.

Total immersion in a day-camp setting. Although I have a feeling this is gateway recreation for future Star Wars, Star Trek, etc. fanboys…

How much narrative can you discern from even the most thought-out gaming franchises? That’s what “Theater of the Arcade” in Brooklyn aims to find out, in the form of stage-play vignettes:

What if Pac-Man is really a gluttonous German burgher out to gorge himself while dodging the ghosts of those he has so callously wronged, à la Dickens?

What if the pilots in Asteroids are merely profane technicians existentially trapped within a corporation that knows nothing more than to send them into the void to shoot rocks, until they become smaller rocks and smaller rocks, until they become nothing?

I liken this in-depth re-imagination to the box art on the old Atari 2600 videogames from the 1970s and ’80s: Visualizations of the game action that were far more fully-formed than the primitive pixelation that the game cartridges actually contained. In fact, those box-art interpretations often bore only marginal resemblance to their game themes. Funny how decades later, these stage productions play off the same narrative-thin videogaming base..

Many many moons ago, a roommate of mine expressed to me how much he didn’t care for having cats in the house. But he did describe an exception to his rule:

If he were to have feline companionship, he’d keep not one cat, but three of them. He would name the first one “Yabba”, and the second one “Dabba”, and the third one “Doo”. Just so that when he had reason to call for them, he’d be justified in shouting out, “Yabba-Dabba-Doo!”.

No telling how this Modern Stone Age Family naming convention would work if a single cat’s attention were needed. Nor how to handle three meowing furballs once the novelty of the situation wore off. But I guess there are worse reasons for getting a pet.

The Hypostatic Union is the theological term for the reconciliation of the holy and the mortal within Jesus Christ — in short, “that in Christ one person subsists in two [distinct] natures, the Divine and the human”.

That duality — which allowed Jesus to suffer and die in a manner identical with any other person, while also giving Him heavenly awareness — may be too complex to grasp for some people. For them, Philip Pullman’s satiric novel “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” simplifies things, albeit sacrilegiously: By rending that union of Jesus and Christ, literally.

The makers of Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” dared only to propose that a very naughty boy had been born at the same time as Jesus in a stable adjoining his. Pullman outbids Python in profanity by having the Virgin Mary give birth to twins. One of these, Jesus, shows little gift for scholarship but exhibits charismatic talents. The other is full of scriptural knowledge and guile, and is his mother’s favorite on account of his sickliness. She gives him an ordinary name (not specified) for public purposes but to herself calls him by the pet name of “Christ,” meaning Messiah in Greek.

Life of Brian is one of my favorites, so Pullman’s book might be up my alley. Although the concept of twin Nazarene godheads is a little out there, even in a comic-novel setting. Why didn’t the author go all the way and give them a pet monkey?

The following statement intrigued me enough that I copied and saved it shortly after coming across it online recently:

“The oil wells dried up in the Middle East, new ones popped up in China. Islam got real soft after that. Everyone did, actually.”

Unfortunately, I didn’t bother to take note of the source of this enigmatic quote. And it turns out to be yet another example of the ephemeral nature of the Web: There’s no trace of it, or even fragments of its text, online. I’m guessing I came across it either on or via Twitter, but there’s no sign of that now.

I’m guessing that whoever originally jotted this down took it offline, for whatever reason. Probably wasn’t counting on me preserving it for (some measure of) posterity. But a succinct description of geopolitical futurescapes is darn hard for me to resist, so there you have it.

If you’re from California, the slang-term “hella” is probably an unlikely candidate for use as a formal unit of scientific measure, i.e. 10 to the 27th power, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000:

“Hella,” a term many Southern Californians find as irritating as teary-eyed renditions of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” is used mainly to make adjectives more intense, as in: “This lentil pizza is hella healthful!” It also can convey simple exuberance: “That party at Sunshine’s house? Hella!”

“Hella” probably derived from “helluva” and, for reasons unknown, morphed into “hella” in the Bay Area before taking wing in the 1990s. In 2001, Gwen Stefani and her band No Doubt — out of Orange County — took it national with their mega-hit “Hella Good.”

“A lot of people around the U.S. know it comes from Northern California, where there have been so many contributions to science at Davis, Berkeley, Stanford and Lawrence Livermore,” [physics student Austin] Sendek says of “hella.” “It would be a really good way to immortalize this part of the state.”

I don’t know that “mega-hit” applies to that No Doubt song. Personally, I first came across “hella” in the 1998 “Spooky Fish” episode of “South Park”, wherein Cartman used it incessantly, to the extreme annoyance of his pals (“Stop saying ‘hella’, fat-ass!!”). Given such pop-cultural linkage, I fully endorse its adoption as a mega-number prefix by the International System of Units.

Besides, we need some sort of shorthand for things like the theoretical diameter of the universe, which, according to “hella” proponent Sendek, is 1.4 hellameters. I mean, how have we gone this long without it, right?

Writer Rosecrans Baldwin theorizes that a novel isn’t a novel without an obligatory barking dog:

Having heard the dog’s call, it seemed like I couldn’t find a book without one. Not “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”. Not “Shadow Country”. Not “Ulysses”. Not Robert Penn Warren’s “All The King’s Men”, or Monica Ali’s “Alentejo Blue”, or Stephen King’s “It” or “Christine”. Not Jodi Picoult’s “House Rules”. If novelists share anything, it’s a distant-dog impulse.

Picture an author at work: She’s exhausted, gazing at her laptop and dreaming about lunch. “[Author typing.] Boyd slammed the car door shut. He stared at his new condominium, with the for-sale sign in the yard. He picked up a pistol and pointed it at his head. [Author thinking, Now what? Gotta buy time.] Somewhere a dog barked. [Author thinking, Hmm, that'll do.] Then Boyd remembered he did qualify for the tax rebate for first-time home buyers, and put down the gun.” If a novel is an archeological record of 4.54 billion decisions, then maybe distant barking dogs are its fossils, evidence of the novelist working out an idea.

Is the far-off bark really that widespread of a literary crutch? Should creative-writing courses start teaching “The Art of the Bark” to aspiring scribes?

I was skeptical of this claim, so I decided to do a quickie search with the one novel I’m currently reading: Bret Easton Ellis’ “Imperial Bedrooms”. Even better, I have the ebook edition, which is fully text-searchable via the Kindle iPhone App I’m reading it on. Sure enough, a search for “dog” brought up a solitary reference, to “dogs barking in the distance” (I haven’t read up to that part yet, so I didn’t dig any deeper).

I’m sure others with whole libraries stored on their e-readers can do a more thorough investigation, but I’m already convinced. The dog meme in long-form fiction seems to be a fixture. Woof!

Being a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I was raised to Just Say No to drugs.

But you can make an exception when it’s over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, right? I never was crystal-clear on that whole concept. If so, I’m sure the free samples that Help Remedies just sent me pass muster.

Yep, on the strength of last month’s post about Help’s unique packaging and marketing presentation, the company sent me some freebies. An email from their CEO, Richard Fine, extended the offer and subsequently hooked me up. I had a choice in what to receive; since I don’t have any chronic ailments that need relief, I opted for Help’s preventative measures:

- The help, I’ve cut myself package of 12 large and small bandages

- The help, I have an aching body package of 16 ibuprofen pills

Better safe than sorry, right? I feel compelled to injure myself, just so I can make use of this first-aid windfall. But I’ll keep my self-destructive impulses in check, and likewise keep this minor stash in reserve.

I do appreciate the outreach by Help. Indeed, the unconventional packets are fun to hold and behold, and they conveniently take up minimal space in the medicine cabinet. I have every confidence that their contents will fix me up, whenever I need to crack open their biodegradable shells.

Included with the samples was a thin little booklet that details Help’s business-operating philosophy. I really wish a version of it was online, because it’s a real hoot: Quirky brand messaging that’s reminiscent, in tone, of 19th Century snake-oil medicine sales pitches. Only in Help’s case, it’s utilized to debunk the modern variations of those pitches. Here’s a prime passage:

In the world of drugs and pharmacies there are stories about technologically complicated pills that, after entering your body and gliding aerodynamically down your throat, proceed to detonate and break into thousands of pieces. Those pieces then proceed to seek out the various bodily organs they must attend to, like thousands of tiny intelligent tadpoles (see figure 5-1).

In fact, pills are composed entirely of non-thinking matter, so nothing like this could possibly happen. Our pills are as technologically complicated as a piece of bread.

It’s product language that’s consistent, and adorns Help’s packaging, making for a memorable product. I don’t know if Help really will change the way OTC drugs are marketed toward consumers, but they’re giving it a good go. I still expect to see these little pill-packs spread beyond New York (Help’s home turf, right out of their Broadway HQ), and into the Targets of the world.

To get around the European Union’s ban on tobacco advertising, major Formula 1 sponsor Marlboro decided on a high-speed stealth presentation of its product colors:

In January, Ferrari presented the new Scuderia Marlboro F1 single-seater. (Ferrari is the only Formula One team with a tobacco brand in its formal title, Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro.) At first glance the car is void of major sponsorship per the rules and has gone relatively unnoticed over the last four months. Now, however, 4 races into the year, the EU portion of the Formula One season is about to begin in Spain and the car’s livery is in the spotlight due to the team’s unique solution to the ban on advertising.

The livery (paint job) features a predominately red car with a number of associate sponsor logos: Shell Gasoline, Ferrari itself, Bridgestone and a few others. The most striking aspect of this design… is a red, black and white barcode-like design on the canopy of the vehicle, as well as on the uniforms of drivers Fernando Alonso and Felipa Massa. Up close it just looks like a cool aesthetic touch but from a distance (and possibly even more clearly when moving 200 mph) it appears to resemble the packaging of a certain cigarette manufacturer. Can you guess which one?

The barcode look is what’s prompting the “subliminal” charges (which is, historically, a recurring allegation against cigarette advertising). The digital-like design suggests some sinister neuro-marketing afoot. It’s primarily an optical-illusion presentation, if you want to split hairs — but definitely toward a subliminal placement of messaging.

So yes, it’s definitely sneaky. Also a sign that Marlboro and its parent company, Philip Morris, put a lot of stock in the brand’s red-white-and-black logo being recognizable enough to leave an impression in such an indirect presentation. They get credit for trying to loophole their way out of a tight situation.