If you treat your employees like Fortune 500 wage-slaves, don’t be surprised and hurt when they start thinking like Fortune 500 wage-slaves.

(It’s really surprising in how many cases what you meant in your secret heart just doesn’t count.)

First it tries to convince me that bicycles cause bronchitis, now that leafy green vegetables lead to food poisoning.

(I suppose I should at least be grateful for the timing; it’s not as if I hadn’t already been having a first-class — well, second-class — lousy week, but better now than, say, two hours into next weekend’s eleven-hour flight from Zurich to Atlanta. Now I’m afraid to do anything healthy, though.)

Kenneth Koch: I guess you don’t want to mention any names. Why don’t you want to mention any names, by the way? Especially since I once heard you say that names are more expressive words than any others.

John Ashbery: Some people might get offended. I don’t see the point of that.

K.K.: Do you mean you’re afraid?

J.A.: No. Just bored in advance by the idea of having to defend myself.

(Via This Recording, which Meghan turned me on to yesterday and thank God, because I have been spending the whole day sitting here watching stuff compile — it’s kind of like watching paint dry, only not artsy — and boy howdy have I needed some new Internet to distract me. They also have awesome posts about ’40s pinups, medieval and early modern automata, Junot Diaz, John Updike, traveling with elderly step-relatives in Jordan and Israel, and dating while drunk, but you can find those yourself. I’d worry that I’m not cool enough to read these people, but who would I be kidding, claiming to even be cool enough to worry about that?)

Update: Having one’s chat logs read like this dialogue would be something to aspire to. I may have to get a t-shirt that says You speak after my own heart but you speak more as an aesthetician than as a man.

I need some new plots.

Update: What prompted the above*: Abigail Nussbaum’s review of the Hugo shortlist. Ms. N. was one of my favorite reviewers even before she said all these nice things, and she has the plot of “Finisterra” dead to rights.

On an only tangentially related note, Chris Garcia’s Drink Tank, Hugo oddsmaking issue (via Cheryl) has “Finisterra” in second place, barely behind “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” at 5:1. I find this flabbergasting, not only because I expect Ted to win in a walk, but because Daniel’s “The Cambist & Lord Iron” has enough buzz that Brad deLong is endorsing it, and Greg Egan’s double nomination is no handicap when instant runoff voting lets his fans happily rate his stories first and second. But then, I’m not a bookie.

* Also, one of the first readers of my novelette-in-progress, while overall quite happy with the story, described the climax as “formulaic.” He was right.

A service like CafePress or Printfection that allows you to automatically donate the profit on the stuff you design to the charity of your choice, so you don’t have to do the bookkeeping yourself. (The OH JOHN RINGO NO T-shirt, proceeds to the Helen Bamber Foundation (not yet available) is a typical, brilliant example of this sort of thing.)

Preferably, this would just be an option at the aforementioned, since they already have the infrastructure and the customer base to keep the infrastructure up to date. I’d like it to be as easy to do as it is to set up something like the pixel-stained technopeasant wretch shop on CafePress — proceeds of which should have gone to some charity or another, but arranging it seemed like too much of a pain in the ass, so I just left the markup at zero.

Is there anything like that out there? Because I think that bingo card — maybe a whole series of them — belongs on a t-shirt.

…before it becomes hopelessly obsolete.