Contrary to many opinions, there are legitimate reasons for using an electronic voting system. They provide much greater flexibility in creating ballots in the languages needed for the community. They also provide better support for blind or disabled voters. Last, and certainly least, the quick tabulation can satisfy America's need for immediate gratification.

Of course, the problems in such systems as currently implemented are manifold and obvious, even to those without need of tin-foil head gear. Closed-source software is easily manipulated, both by political operatives and unscrupulous vendors. Using the same system to create check logs as is used to count the votes means that a single failure will invalidate both the votes and the logs. And most telling, the lack of a physical ballot precludes the opportunity for manual recount. We have to trust the machines.

There is a solution, although the current political climate makes it unlikely to see production. Use a machine to produce on-screen ballots in whatever languages required. After reviewing his or her selections, the voter presses a "Vote" button, which prints a human- and machine-readable paper ballot. The voter takes this ballot to the desk, and drops it into the locked ballot box as their official vote for purposes of counts and certification.

This system satisfies the needs of a diverse society with a short attention span, allows for quick optical scanning of identically printed ballots, and still provides paper ballots of record should a manual, non-electronic recount be desired. It would pointless to hack this system, as the human-readable ballots would tip off the voter to any impropriety. But sadly, this system is completely illegal in Florida.

Florida, like many other states, provides its citizens with an illusion of participation in democracy, while covering the entire process in a thick layer of partisan trickery. An exhaustive detailing of the various laws and policies which govern the voting process would, well, exhaust me; suffice it to say that the Secretary of State gets to set the rules governing elections largely as she sees fit, and that Secretary of State is a political appointment. Change for the better, if it comes at all, will be slow in coming, and only after the concerted efforts of non-partisan voting rights and election reform groups.

But in election season, I like to dream of a perfect world.

So I worked, and took conference calls, and ended up getting home at 4:30. Even though it had become obvious that Ernesto was not going to be all that (and certainly no bag of chips would be involved), I decided I needed to take down the potted plants on the porch, to prevent the accidental creation of succulent missiles in the neighborhood. To save a little trouble I put one of my giant cat cages on the porch, and put the pots into that. Everything worked out fine.

Well, except for the wind chimes. Hot, sweaty, and facing a storm is not the optimal moment to discover that a full-blown Metropolis of wasps has moved into the bamboo tubes you are moving.

Even when I am hot, tired, and sweaty I can haul ass for short distances.

Once I was done with all that, I came inside to discover that the newest NHC reading of the sheep entrails indicates that Ernesto is — to use the technical term — a dud. Cyclonus interruptus. What wonderful news, since that will cement in the dim little minds of our FOX viewing residents that hurricanes are all a lot of hooey.

Ah, well, it isn't a total loss. I happen to like canned tuna on saltines.

There's a post of mine (of sorts) over at Burnett's Urban Etiquette. The events described took place a couple of weeks ago, just as my last bout of illness was taking hold.

Dealing with hurricanes is admittedly quite frustrating. You try to prepare your home adequately for the storm, based on the best predictions of the National Hurricane Center, only to find yourself severely overstocked on canned tuna and saltines when the system disintegrates over Cuba.

Now imagine that you aren't just making decisions for your home and family, but for a $2 billion corporation with offices all over Florida. You put the safety of your employees first, and want to give then plenty of time to deal with their own tuna and saltine issues at home; at the same time, you have an obligation to the stockholders to only close those offices most likely to be in the line of fire. With the Cone of Terror an unpredictably moving target, it's a tough decision to make. If you close a location that ends up dry as a bone, you'll catch hell from the board of directors, but being overly optimistic can lead to unthinkable results.

I'm very glad that my involvement in the process is purely words and data, equipment and systems, participating in conference calls. They don't pay me enough to make those decisions.

I'm on the mail list for the Zogby polls, and this morning an interersting question came up, one I am passing along to you. It relates to a longer post I have going on-line later today.

If you were allowed to vote in national, state, or local elections via an Internet site, would you? And for our international guests, has net-based voting been enabled in your country?

I find it oddly amusing when the feed for a site I follow shows a post which cannot be found on the site itself. Most of the time it's a simple error, such as a few weeks ago when I posted an entry with a misspelled title, and timed things just right so that both the misspelled and properly spelled versions appeared in my feed. Sometimes, though, my curiosity goes unanswered.

Tonight the feed for the Official Google Blog lists an entry called "We love you, webmasters". Even the sidebar on the OGB site itself shows the title. However, the post itself is a 404. Ah, well, no matter. Perhaps it will reappear after it's been vetted by the legal department.

And it is nice to be loved, even if I'm not sure why our Googly overlords choose this moment to express their true feelings. Did we notice that Google had a fetching new hairstyle? Did we compliment them on their cooking? Or did we webmasters finally remember to lift the informational toilet seat before searching? There's nothing worse than sitting down and finding search requests splattered all over the seat — just ask AOL.

Friday update: Googles loves webmasters again.

[The following essay originally ran on August 22, 2001. Yesterday Bradbury celebrated his 86th birthday.]

Today is the 81st birthday of author Ray Bradbury (who doesn't seem to have an official web site*). Bradbury's been one of my favorites for decades now; he was one of the first "science fiction" authors I encountered who was more concerned with the soft sciences than hardware and blasters. The bulk of his work is clearly science fiction with all the trappings — space travel, high technology, alien races, and the rest — but the stories generally revolve around how little all the futuristic gizmos change the essentials of human nature. A Bradbury tale doesn't resolve neatly with the revelation of some technological trump card — their plots hinge on the ingenuity and mental acuity (or lack thereof) of their protagonists.

Bradbury was also the first author I found who clearly saw poetry in the genre. He is sometimes lumped in with "juvenile" authors due to a seeming lack of complexity in his work, but it's the simplicity which provides its power. His tales are not told in the simple primary colors of his contemporaries, but in as wide a palette as can be imagined, and his images are archetypal and uniquely American, recalling a simpler time of small towns, endless summers, and rockets with fins. Under the plain words and linear plots, however, is an extraordinary depth, and an uncommonly sensitive touch.

But I'm getting all lit-crit here, and that defeats my purpose. Bradbury's work is easy to read, but if you take a moment to savor it fully, it will stay with you. I read my first Bradbury stories thirty-two years ago, and I can remember them as clearly today as yesterday. The only change is my appreciation for his craft.

Happy birthday, Ray, from a kid who's never forgotten the sound of the carousel at night, or the taste of dandelion wine.

He does now, and it includes this wonderful essay about Bradbury's wife, who enabled his career.

On eBay I recently bid on and won the 4 CD set of The Best of William Burroughs from Giorno Poetry Systems. I'd been looking for a good copy of this set for a while, as it includes a lot of great photos and biographical material, in addition to the obviously marvelous recordings themselves. I was quite proud of myself, too, as I managed to get it for a reasonable price at a time when copies often go for rather unreasonable prices.

The package arrived today, and when I opened it I was delighted to note that it was in good condition. Aside from some scuffing on the LP-sized outer box, the booklet and discs themselves were in superb condition. It was only after a few excited minutes perusing them that I realized my eyes were watering, and that I was starting to sneeze. It appears that the previous owner was a smoker.

This frustrates me, not because I consider the set damaged somehow — I don't — but because I don't like having this weakness. I grew up in a house of smokers, back in the days when failure to light up after a meal meant you were anti-American, and probably a Godless Communist as well. I have dated a reasonable number of smokers, too, and been party to far too many smoke-filled rooms to recount. So I am hoping that this heightened sensitivity is just a temporary side-effect of my recent medical issues, and not a permanent fixture of my environment.

For now, having ripped the discs to MP3, I have banished the set to the garage until it airs out. In the meantime, I need some aspirin.

Bolaños is Spanish for "tool".

Show of hands here: Who thought Bolaños would listen to reason and back down on this loser issue? Anyone? With weeks to go before the election and an opportunity to keep his mug in the media as an anti-Castro crusader? I thought not.

More in the Herald, as Frankie the Tool does his level best to ensure that Miami never gains any level of national credibility.

So one reason I don't post stuff about my health other than the occasional humorous* bit is this: by the time it looks serious enough to warrant a disclosure, I start to get better. It's as though posting loosens some phlegmatic wad in my psyche and starts me on the road to recovery.

Not that I'm healed yet, mind you, but my fever is steadily below 100°, and I can breathe from time to time. As long as I haven't suffered too much brain damage, I guess I'll be okay. And if my mental capacity has been impaired, you'll be able to tell easily enough: I'll start supporting Frankie Bolaños' campaign.

*your mileage may vary

[I am still ill, so I hope this post is at least moderately coherent.]

My late mother had issues with doctors. She was one of the old school "tough it out" kind of people, at least as far as her own health was concerned. She didn't have a problem with sending me or my brother to the doctor, if she felt it was warranted, but she seldom went, herself. That's one of the reasons why her cancer went undiagnosed for so long.

Consequently, when I am feeling poorly I find myself walking the tightrope between riding out the symptoms and dragging myself to see the doctor. I have an obsessive fear of being labeled a hypochondriac, but also have no particular desire to be a martyr to my fear. So given this, the worst possible outcome for an office visit is to have him say, "I'm not sure what's wrong, so just take these pills and see if it gets better." Needless to say, this is the answer I get most often, and the answer I got during my visit this week.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this for me is that I can't even really identify the symptoms with any accuracy. I've been running a low grade fever for four days, am suffering from extreme fatigue, lack any appetite, and am so congested it reaches around my skull and down the back of my neck. That's it, although that's enough to keep me from being able to do much of anything. It's really rather extraordinarily frustrating.

So while I am usually loathe to post this sort of thing on Hidden City, I ask your forbearance while I work out this mysterious malady.

Did you know that Suri Cruise is the messiah? It's true, and TomKat are keeping her identity a secret to try to protect her from her arch-enemy, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, the Antichrist. At some point in the next twenty years they will meet in battle at Megiddo — or Hollywood — to determine the fate of all mankind.

But the battle will get too intense, with a real risk of the total destruction of all life on Earth. This is why, as a safeguard, Tom Cruise will have the Scientologists build a shrinking ray. He'll use it to shrink the Olsen Twins down to mere inches tall, allowing them to sing the awesome Mothra song, and summon giant Japanese monsters to battle the evangelical Christian apocalypse. The tide will turn with the appearance of the Giant Soviet-era Robot piloted by the disembodied brain of Fidel Castro, fighting alongside the mechanized Statue of Liberty created in underground Disney by a team of scientists working under the supervision of JFK's clone brothers. But whose side will Zombie Reagan take?

Well, it made sense last night.

As will soon be reported everywhere, I suppose, an updated version of Blogger is in beta. It doesn't grease all the creaky joints of the old version, but it looks promising. It also explains why earlier today I was getting some weird URLs when viewing profiles, redirections to beta.blogger.com.

Unfortunately, it's a limited beta, and I haven't gotten an invitation to migrate yet. Damn you, Blogger! Doesn't my old Blogger Pro account give me any perks?!

Update: Actually, I found the problem. Right now the beta only works for Blog*Spot users, not people who FTP files to their own servers. "Coming soon," though, or so they say.

Update 2: Hmm, this isn't promising for me. It looks as though Blogger/Google are going to focus solely on content they host via Blog*Spot.

How does Blogger in beta affect FTP blogs?

Blogger in beta is based on the concept of dynamic serving. Since people using the FTP or SFTP features are not hosting their blogs on Blog*Spot, they'll be unable to publish dynamically. We will continue to support FTP publishing in its current state (i.e. static web-pages created by Blogger and transferred to your server). However, new features that depend on dynamic serving will be unavailable to these blogs. For people who wish to take full advantage of all Blogger's features, we recommend switching to Blog*Spot publishing.

Bummer. It's cool that they are adding features for their hosted users, though.

Saturday night I had the opportunity to meet some prominent South Florida bloggers face to face. While vows of secrecy and blood oaths prevent me from divulging the names of the cabal present, I feel I can safely mention that — contrary to social stereotyping — the members of this community are without exception youthful, attractive, talented, educated, witty, committed, and urbane. (I am certain the regular patrons of Tobacco Road were wondering if this was a casting call for America's Next Top Model, and if they are models, why are they using such big words?). For those who were there, it was a pleasure to meet you, and my only regret is that I didn't have as much time there as I had hoped.

You see, I was quite late to the event, due to some unfortunate circumstances. While getting ready for the event I stumbled in the shower, slicing my scalp open with a razor and turning the bathroom into an outtake from Psycho. There's nothing to get your evening off to a good start quite like a head wound. I waited almost an hour for the bleeding to stop, twice having to change shirts because ill-considered movements renewed the flow. After this sort of bloody omen I considered staying home. So for those who attended, no, I don't normally wear bandages on my head as a fashion statement.

This incident, together with an annoying technical issue regarding my credit union and the ATM network, lead me to be almost two hours late. While I confess that punctuality is not included in my slim volume of virtues, I was particularly annoyed by this delay, and was in a somewhat foul humor by the time I arrived.

Fortunately, the event itself was a delightful (if sweaty) affair, and any apprehension and irritation was quickly dissolved by the warmth and enthusiasm of the attendees. (The two swift applications of Myers Dark on the rocks with a twist helped, too.) Perhaps the blood loss and alcohol replacement combined to render my unanticipated self-introduction to the group a bit incomprehensible, but at least no one called me on it to my face. Perhaps, though, they were being indulgent, in the way you tend to make allowances for your grandfather's rambling tales of the old days.

I hope it is something we do often, so if you want to be in on the next meeting of the minds, drop me a note. Beyond that there's little I can say, mainly because the rest of my comments will be part of an upcoming installment in the Internet Years series.

While I finish up a few other projects, I would like to take a moment to direct your attention to three perhaps under-appreciated sites worth your time.

First is Wide Lawns, Narrow Minds, the fabulously well-crafted and hysterically funny tales of life in an extremely exclusive and exceptionally expensive country club community in the far north (i.e., not Miami-Dade County). The anonymous Wide Lawns Subservient Worker regales us with tales of debauchery and depravity among the rich and fatuous, leavened with bittersweet stories of her own past. Frankly, if WLSW was writing reviews of McDonald's menu items I would still be a fan — her talent is that strong.

Further afield is Your Humble Viewer. Paul J. Marasa creates an excellent mixture of reminiscence and critique as he posts on movies seen and remembered, commenting both on the film itself and his own interaction with it. While I love Like Anna Karina's Sweater, which provides more in the way of erudite film criticism (and consequently demands more of its audience), Viewer has an engaging conversational charm making it a delightful read for anyone interested in movies.

We all have something we fear. Some are common, some not, but there are few terrors we all share equally. But our fears are rarely static.

I used to be quite afraid of spiders. However, when I learned how beneficial the creatures are in keeping down the population of my even less savory insectoid neighbors, I forced myself to get used to them. I still instinctively do the spastic dance when I walk through a web — jumping back, arms flailing about, looking like a loon to passers-by — but I don't go through the rest of the day checking my clothes for a passenger.

I used to have a terrific fear of drowning, too, caused in no small part by nearly drowning as a child. Moving to Florida seems to have eroded that fear, although I suspect I wouldn't react well to diving. That point is moot, since my misbehaving sinuses eliminate that from my recreational options.

And while I used to have a terror of growing old and dying alone, well... let's just say you grow into some fears.

I have one fear, though, that still drives me batshit insane: taphephobia, the fear of being buried alive. It isn't quite claustrophobia, although it is obviously related. I can be in a small room, crawl under a bed, or fly coach without a problem. But if you immobilize my shoulders, I'm done.

While it doesn't come up often (thankfully), the fear is still annoying in its intensity. As an example, in checking out Google's new movie trailer service I accidentally clicked the link for The Descent. If you don't know, this movie is about a group of tough women spelunkers who go into an unexplored cave and get killed off one by one until the movie is over. (Okay, I'm making an assumption about that last part, but this isn't high art we're talking about.) About ninety seconds into the trailer, one of the women says "I'm stuck!" and the camera shows her upper body sticking through a narrow hole.

My heart started racing, I couldn't catch my breath, my eyes blurred enough that I had trouble hitting the stop button on the video player, but most of all I was furious. This betrayal of my body and my subconscious makes me crazy. I was sitting in the middle of my living room with windows all around me and not a cavern in sight, and I was irrationally trembling like a child. Once I had killed the video it took me a half hour to get back to normal.

Unlike spiders, I am not willing to let myself be buried alive in order to confront my fear. I will have to chip away at it rationally until it becomes manageable. I certainly don't want to eliminate it entirely — after all, taphephobia is a legitimate fear. Just not to this extreme.

Here are a few observations and impressions from last night's Steely Dan concert at the Seminole Hard Rock Cafe.

• I had not realized that Hard Rock is a mall, a mall full of old people in bad clothes. Kind of like Aventura Mall.
• I don't know if it is a sad commentary on me or the machines, but when I wasted a dollar on one of those incomprehensible video pseudo-slots, all I could think about was how amazingly bad the user experience was.
• People collect Hard Rock Cafe merchandise? I find something deeply unsettling about this. Do they also collect TGIFridays flair?
• As we walked past a middle-aged guy in a black polo shirt with a full head of well-groomed white hair we joked that he must be the president of the Michael McDonald Fan Club. Actually, we were wrong; it was Michael McDonald.
• I confess to being predisposed to like the show, since they opened with Bodhisattva, my favorite Steely Dan tune.
• The sound in the concert hall was terrible. Perhaps it was better in the more expensive seats, but in the upper back corner it sounded as though someone next door was playing Steely Dan albums really loudly, and the concrete was absorbing everything bit the mid-range. This particularly affected the vocals, which were often so muffled as to be incomprehensible.
• The band was tight, though, and the horn section was great.
• I stepped into the nosebleed lobby between the Michael McDonald set and the Steely Dan set. One glance around the room and I counted sixteen people playing with Blackberries, Treos, or other smart phones. There were also an awful lot of skullets in evidence, as well as plasticized women in halter tops. It's also the only time I've been at a concert where the men's room line was longer than the ladies' room line.
• Michael McDonald was good, Steely Dan was better, and when he joined them for the second half of their set it was very good indeed. They playlist was an impressive reminder of how many solid hits they had, and a testament to the strength of the Brecker/Fagen songwriting team.

It was worth going, and I had a decent time, but before I go to another show at that venue it will have to be something for which I'm willing to shell out the big bucks.

Part three of Internet Years will be delayed until Thursday or Friday, as tonight I'll be off seeing a performance by the band named after a steam-powered metal dildo. The show's in some Broward County den of iniquity [sound link], so wish me luck.

In the late 1980s I started working with computers for a living, and in relatively short order began to kludge together ways to twist the mini-computer system I managed into a desktop publishing system. (Getting an AT&T 3B2/400 running UNIX System V to do what you want is a daunting task, especially when it you want it to do something unnatural, and particularly when you taught yourself how to use it and had a fool for a teacher.) But eventually I won out over the machine, and began writing and (irregularly) publishing a 'zine, something most of my friends thought was an insane waste of effort and money. For me it was a chance to ease my way bacm into creative endeavors after a long absence.

By 1990 the desire to learn more about computers lead me to become active on a couple of local BBS systems. I was thoroughly fascinated by the ability to communicate with people over a computer, and to meet people in the mind before I met them in the flesh. These were the strange days for me, when I was learning so much so fast, faster than my illogical mind could process. But I worked it out, and even today I can remember the weird bits of arcanum, incantations with lost meanings and that retain their power. And along the way I heard about a network that would allow you to send messages from one system to another, removing the limitations inerent in the archipelago of bulletin board systems. It was called the Internet.

The first Internet account I had was back in 1992, a login for Delphi. I used it to visit FTP sites listed in fringe culture glossies and photocopied 'zines, downloading sound files stolen from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and 2001: a Space Odyssey, or public domain books from Project Guterberg. And every now and then I would venture into the Wild West of USENET.

My Eureka moment on the Internet was in this era. I had just connected to Delphi's VAX server and gone to an FTP site to download a program to create your own adventure games, and realized the site was in Finland. "Holy shit!" I said to the cat. "It's 3:00am, I'm sitting in front of a computer in my underwear, and I'm also in Finland. Finland!"

Soon the Delphi account gave way to a shell account with Illuminati Online, and then a second account with Cybergate in Deerfield Beach. (Somewhere in there I was also on Prodigy, but let's not talk about that.) From rummaging through my e-mail and data archives recently — I am a notorious digital pack-rat — it looks as though I created my first web page on io.com using vi back in 1993, shortly after the introduction of HTML. Those early pages — together with similar efforts on GeoCities and FortuneCity — were collections of ephemera: repurposed essays from my 'zine, bits of short fiction, and game-related material. I've been writing and publishing on-line in various forms ever since.

All of which means I've been on-line since the days of USENET, and of Kibo, and of the September that never ended. I remember the controversial introduction of the image tag, and how people screamed that it took too long to load sites that used it. NCSA's initial public release of Mosaic was amazing; it was the first popular graphical web browser. I remember when the Internet was first and foremost an exchange of ideas (and porn), and the mere suggestion of allowing in commercial enterprise was enough to get you black-listed. I remember the Internet coffeepot, fer chrissakes, and when Archie was the only search engine around. Yeah, verily, I am old in Internet years.

Things haven't really changed all that much, though. Sure, I guess flame wars have a shorter life cycle than in the newsgroup days, and trolls drop their noxious bait in comments rather than USENET posts. And of course blogging has provided the revolution that the web and HTML promised, giving any schmuck with an opinion the ability to broadcast his ignorance far and wide without learning a line of code. But people and their desires change at a much slower tempo than technology, even at a tipping point like this. I'll talk about that more in our next installment.

While I inadvertently let the precise date slip by, I am now in my seventh year of resisting the use of the word "blog" to describe Hidden City. For your potential amusement, this is my first Blogger-based entry here, from July 11, 2000:

Even though I had heard about blogs for a while, the manifold impositions of work and what passes for life have kept me from actually investigating them. 'Til now, anyway. An article on Webreview discussed them, and extolled their virtues as being the salvation of an overly commercialized Internet. (And those who know me know how easy it is to get me wound up on that particular topic. I am sure most of my friends are truly sick of hearing me say "Why, I remember when you would get flamed for even suggesting that someone be allowed to sell shit on the web!" But I digress...) Anyway, this is a first post, part of an ongoing effort to get some more use out of this domain of mine. And maybe have some fun, too. Thanks for playing.

Yeah, it makes me wonder why I kept going, too.

There will be more on this topic Tuesday.

"Blogs don't have computers, Rob, they live in ponds!"

I'm still slogging my way through entering my library into LibraryThing. It's a marvelous tool, and is getting better each day; unfortunately, it isn't the fastest thing in the world. This is a particular problem when you have as many fringe books as I do, which require additional research or manual entry to get the right edition. For example, at this writing I am the only LibraryThing user with Mackey's Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (two volumes), or with the edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream illustrated by Charles Vess.

So given that I have a few thousand books in my library (comics largely excluded), and thus far I've managed to enter a whopping five hundred titles, it is reasonable to ask why I bother. There are three reasons.

First, it gives me an off-site back-up of what I own, should something unfortunate occur. My house has been burglarized twice, and both times DVDs and CDs were stolen (along with many other items). By having inventories I was able to quickly identify what was missing and needed to be replaced, although some discs were long out of print. (I still wonder what those little bastards thought when they sat down to watch Liquid Sky.) Plus, it doesn't hurt if I need to negotiate with the insurance company for replacement funds if a hurricane rips the roof off my house and deposits several thousand gallons of water within the walls.

Additionally, I'm learning about the practical applications of categorization. Determining the right tags to use to describe each book takes some thought, and I find myself going back to the first two hundred and re-tagging them as my understanding of the aggregate changes. I am somewhat new to this folksonomy business, but it looks as though having almost 65,000 LibraryThing users tag over 4.5 million titles provides a decent statistical base for my own decisions.

Perhaps most importantly, I am being reacquainted with my own library. I have books from my childhood, cultural artifacts, and more signed books than I had known. Plus I've found collections I hadn't known I was forming, and interests I had forgotten that have been rekindled. Much of this has lead me to do more research, and some of that reading may end up on these pages. Of course, some of this has lead me to realize I own a lot of crap I don't want or need: eBay, here I come!

All in all, though, I've become convinced that LibraryThing is one of the more interesting web applications I've seen in quite a while. Now that they have a partner who has pledged non-interference, it looks as though it has a bright future.

Every madman tells a story, don't it?

My hosting company seems to be having some issues this week, so I appreciate your perseverance in continuing to check back. I hope the issue will be resolved shortly.

The only redeeming value of spam mail is that it on occasion provides some form of inspiration. This morning's 1,050 gnats caught in the filter had a big theme. Literally, the theme was subject lines with the first word being a synonym for "big." One of these subject lines, however, has a destiny: Vast Agnes. There's poetry in that name — I can already see her in my mind. I suspect she'll be back here someday.

Some ill-defined thing in my dreams startled me awake at 3am today. I knew I'd never get back to sleep, so I made a pot of coffee and headed out to the porch to think through some things. What slight breeze there was came laden with African dust, any exotic traces overwhelmed by conversion to prosaic grime. It only took a few minutes sitting on the steps to become sticky with sweat and tropical humidity.

The neighborhood cats were AWOL, probably making their rounds, with the exception of Greywhite Slashface, a grizzled tom whose recent altercation with some night creature had left him both battle-scarred and slightly more amenable to human company. He hobbled into the yard and stretched out under the broken mulberry tree, looking expectantly in my general direction.

"So what do you think, cat. Is Castro dead, or not?" He turned away in disdain, but I wasn't sure what to make of that. "I think he's still alive, but probably not for much longer. I don't like wishing people death, but I might be able to make an exception for him."

Greywhite pulled himself up and walked a few feet further away, then slid back down into the dark and damp grass, outside the range of my yellow porch light. "Yeah, you are right. It's too damned hot for politics. Hell, it's too damned hot to even write."

The cat looked toward the house, his eye glinting from the darkness. "Yes, I have air conditioning, true. But my power bill was over $250 for the month. That's a lot of money, you know. But no, you don't know, do you?"

I straightened my back and felt my shirt fall hot and wet against my skin. "God, I hate this. It's almost as bad as the two weeks without power after Wilma last year, sitting in my living room with the windows open praying for the air to move. By the way, did you know there's a storm coming? Chris, this one's called. Looks like it won't hit us directly, just some rough storms, but Cuba may be getting hammered by it."

The cat skulked through the grass toward the warble of a night bird, but paused to look back at me before disappearing into the darkness.

"Hmm, you think Fidel's using JFK-era weather control satellites to drench the island, staving off any potential revolutionary activities? Hell, I guess it's no crazier than some of the tinfoil hat theories I've heard the last few days."

A low growl came from around the corner of the house, near the overgrown bougainvillea.

"Okay, okay. Off the record, background only. You got it."

The sky lightened to indigo. I swatted a few errant mosquitoes stuck to my arms, collected my coffee cup, and went inside for a shower.

It's too damned hot to make sense right now, anyway.