Full-size version at Lumin Consulting.

Delicious coffee.

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The number of restaurant brands participating in the Kids LiveWell program has tripled to 70 companies and 20,000 restaurants across the country. Eateries are finding creative ways to participate in the program that helps parents find healthier dining choices for their children, says Healthy Dining President Anita Jones-Mueller.

Full story at SmartBlog on Restaurants by SmartBrief.

More SmartBrief stories.

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According to one of the filings, Jobs was being considered for an appointment to the President's Export Council in early 1991. This was while Jobs was president of NeXT computer. (This would have been during George H. W. Bush's term.)

The file is 191 pages (as a PDF) and was requested by Michael Morisy of MuckRock. Morisy says that he became curious about Jobs' "behind-the-scenes" interactions with government after Jobs' death. "He was a famously private man, and almost apolitical in a lot of ways, but regularly courted for his opinion and advice.

"Government documents are also just generally a great way to get a look at public figures' lives: You can get a behind the scenes view that's otherwise not available, whether that's past legal trouble, quietly helping the feds or receiving death threats, and I think all of that is a valuable part of the story."

What the Documents Reveal

According to the memo outlining the investigation (page 160), Jobs would have been in a position to "make decisions concerning policy and personnel matters." The questions about Jobs related to drug use, whether he lived within his means, his trustworthiness and whether there was evidence of prejudice or bias on his part. According to the memo "the last 10 years of appointee's life must be accounted for."

Almost all of the people interviewed by the FBI seemed to give Jobs high marks, though there's at least one individual (name redacted) interviewed on March 11, 1991 who said Jobs was "not totally forthright and honest" and "has a tendency to distort reality in order to achieve his goals." (Perhaps that's where the phrase "Jobs Reality Distortion Field" came from...) Also interesting, the same individual said that Jobs was suitable for a "high level political position" in government because "in his opinion, honestly and integrity are not prerequisites to assume such a position."

The last section of the document details a bomb threat to Apple in February 1985 that turned out to be a hoax. The FBI doesn't seem to have found the caller.

It might sound like 191 pages would contain a wealth of information. However, much of the documents consist of government paperwork and coversheets that convey very little. (They do reveal that being in the FBI does not actually require neat penmanship.) The file also contains records of suits Jobs was involved with when with Apple and NeXT. There's very little in the document that's not already public knowledge.

But it's interesting to comb through and see what kind of information the FBI had on Jobs, and likely has on a number of other public figures. If you want to do your own Freedom of Information Act (FOI) requests, you can use MuckRock as a tool to do so. Morisy says that MuckRock tries to make "a really important, but really tedious, part of journalism and make it fun, social and easy for both journalists and regular users. For the first time, anyone can request almost any government document with just a few clicks and we think that's a really powerful tool for transparency."

A hungry wise man once said, “All tasty food should come on a stick.” The food gods have responded to the man’s stick wish and created mini Pop Tarts on...you guessed it...a stick.

Quicker alternative: toothpick, full-size Pop Tart, knife.

Full recipe and directions at caplan miller.

Delicious DIY.

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Asking consumers if they would like a smaller portion may be a better approach to curbing overeating than posting calorie counts.

The study from Tulane University found that when servers asked customers whether they’d like to “downsize” starchy side dishes at a Chinese fast-food restaurant as many as a third gladly cut back—saving an average 200 calories each meal.

“Our goal was to test whether the invitation to downsize a meal component would be embraced by consumers and, importantly, whether the approach would be more effective than a purely information-based approach—in this case calorie labeling,” says lead study author Janet Schwartz, assistant professor of marketing at Tulane University.

“I think the restaurant industry may find this counterintuitive, but it’s an interesting and easy strategy to implement that could help their customers make healthier choices."

Full story at Futurity.

More research news from top universities.

Photo credit: Tulane University

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Via loldwell.

Video gaming.

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The value of a single, global database for evaluating the dollar value of individual talent on a real-time scale was affirmed today in a very big way, with the announcement of Oracle's intention to acquire cloud-based talent management system Taleo.

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Taleo's database has been perceived as the mother lode of talent evaluation. It brings in information from professionals (perhaps including yourself) looking to expand or even change their careers. That information is then shared with recruiters who use Taleo's service to match qualified, skilled workers with the right position, for the right compensation.

But that process generates a new tier of input, enabling human resources managers to track personal performance across an entire organization. This process has grown just in recent months to an unanticipated scale, introducing HR personnel to an analytics-based system for talent and compensation management that works not unlike Web publishing - bringing freelancers on-board, tracking their traffic and revenue generation on an hourly basis, and dispensing with low performers.

Taleo calls this system pay-for-performance, and it's converting the talent management structure of large enterprises into something like the NFL.

As a brochure for Taleo's popular Compensation tool reads (PDF available here), "Many companies have found that they can save millions by increasing the accuracy of their compensation calculations. Taleo Compensation's ability to dynamically update budgets when employees leave or change departments has paid for their compensation projects several times over. Other solutions require customers to do considerable data manipulation before uploading compensation data into the solution, which increases costs and delays changes to compensation policies... Taleo Compensation enables companies to focus the right pay on the right people with a unique, rules driven approach that replaces customization with configuration."

Taleo gives HR managers a cloud-based dashboard whose design and operation appear directly inspired by data center management tools for IT administrators.

In perhaps the most contemporary of ironies, financial analysts recently perceived Taleo as growing too big for its britches - as having built a product that was too big for its own executives to keep a handle on. Last December, in the wake of SAP's acquisition of talent management competitor SuccessFactors, and in a process that could conservatively be described as "blatant," Taleo made available its CEO, Mike Gregoire, for an interview with AllThingsD. In that interview, he praised Oracle for its expertise in acquiring the right companies (citing RightNow as one example), and stopped just short of hiring an auctioneer and setting a minimum bid price.

"The No. 1 expense in businesses is people," Gregoire told Arik Hesseldahl. "We see the news about the unemployment rates, and then we see that companies can't hit their productivity goals because they don't have the right people in the right jobs. It's absolutely crazy. That's the problem we solve. Talent management is about getting the right people into your company, having them work on the right things, because you've got performance goals, measuring those goals, tying that to pay-for-performance and compensation. And, by the way, the chances that person has the right skills at the right time is about zero, so you want to tie those goals to a learning management system, and making that happen in real time, and then providing intelligence about the whole ecosystem of employees. That moves the needle with respect to business performance."

That learning management system Gregoire referred to was Learn.com, which Taleo acquired in 2010. Just a few quarters thereafter, Taleo's positive cash flow increased by a factor of six. It was an indication that while talent management was Taleo's selling factor, talent nurturing is in much higher demand among a workforce desperate to cultivate new skills in a more volatile economy.

In a presentation to investors this morning, Oracle's depiction of adding Taleo to its talent pool looks less like a nurturing process and more like something out of an '80s video game.

"Taleo's cloud manages 15% of all US hires and is one of the world's largest cloud deployments with nearly 16 billion transactions per year," Oracle's statement to investors reads. "Together, Oracle and Taleo expect to create a comprehensive cloud offering for organizations to manage their Human Resource operations and employee careers. The combination is expected to empower employees and managers to effectively manage careers throughout their entire employment, enable organizations to retain talent and optimize costs, and improve the employee experience through faster on boarding and better collaboration with team members via social media."

I've been considering paring down for some time, not because I think my connections aren't cool, but because I'm missing out on things like my family's birthday notifications and friends' graduations. Not long ago I found out that one of my best friends had a son who was having brain surgery. Apparently he'd had a condition for some time, but I'd never seen her mention it because I have too many connections.

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Alicia Eler wrote about the overload of Facebook friends today, and she noted that many of us are seeing Facebook become something different than what it was intended to be. In some ways, the changes are quite interesting, but not helpful if you want to be able to see important items from close friends and family.

How Many Facebook Friends Do You Have? Are You Planning to Cut Back?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

[View the story "How many Facebook friends do you have? Are you planning to cut back? " on Storify]

Appcelerator admits that with the purchase of Cocoafish it is moving into direct competition with other mobile cloud services providers like Parse, Kinvey and Stackmob. With Titanium and Cocoafish, Appcelerator now has an integrated client and mobile cloud platform making it one of the most powerful mobile tools providers on the market.

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Appcelerator's integration of Cocoafish will be two-pronged. The cloud APIs that Cocoafish brings to the table will be integrated straight into the Titanium platform. The software developer kits that Cocoafish offers such as its iOS, Android, JavaScript and REST will end up in the Appcelerator Open Mobile Marketplace that is a repository of tools that mobile developers can purchase.

Cocoafish has 25 cloud-based mobile features including push notifications, location, social integration, user management and photo management. These should be integrated by the end of the first quarter this year. "Appcelerator Cloud Services" from Cocoafish will launch in the second quarter. The SDKs will be available to non-Titanium customers through the Open Mobile Marketplace.

Appcelertor has been courting Cocoafish for a while and started working with the San Francisco-based startup four or five weeks ago, according to Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie. The acquisition was natural for Appcelerator given its need to implement backend cloud support and the needs of its developers. Cocoafish is a 10-person team functioning out of a co-working space in San Francisco founded by Michael Goff and Wei Kong. Appcelerator resides in Mountain View but the company is planning on expanding its physical footprint with an office in San Francisco proper some time this year.

Developers using Objective-C, Java, PhoneGap, Sencha and HTML5 will be able to configure scalable cloud services through Titanium. This is what puts Appcelerator in direct competition with the other backend-as-a-service providers that provide the same or similar functions. At the same time, Appcelerator is still active with StackMob and Parse through the Open Mobile Marketplace and will still support third-party cloud services options through Titanium.

One of the bigger misconceptions in comments in emails was that LinkedIn is primarily a job-hunting site. But there are reasons to use LinkedIn even if you have a job you love, aside from the obvious benefits of keeping up on your industry and making connections with potential business partners.

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Among them:

• LinkedIn is a great contact manager. Not all of your contacts will have their phone numbers in their LinkedIn profile (and if you don't, you should add it, according to networking experts), but almost all of them have a Web site and primary email address that you can access. LinkedIn also lets you add notes for each contact, much like a regular address book, so you can keep track of interaction with a contact and add information like best contact phone numbers, birthdays and other information you want to remember.


• LinkedIn Today curates news you care about. Every time I log into LinkedIn I'm presented with three news stories that the site thinks will be of interest to me, based on my industry (tech journalism and higher education). I can click through to LinkedIn today and get more stories, as well as recommendations for additional industries I may be interested in. The stories, in my experience, tend to be more enterprising and more focused on trends than the breaking news that fills my RSS, Twitter and Facebook feeds.


• LinkedIn Groups increase the number of people in my business network. Almost every employment and social media expert I spoke with in compiling last week's post stressed the importance of finding,joining and participating in LinkedIn groups related to your industry. "Join alumni groups, industry groups and professional interest-based groups," said Kelly A. Lux, a social media strategist at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies. "Post links of interest to the group, ask and answer questions and search the group members for new connections."

Name of Product: Baby Boomers

Units: About 70 million

Manufacturer: The Greatest Generation

Hazard: A software glitch is causing the device to get stuck in “expert” mode. This can lead to performance issues as well as compatibility problems, particularly with other Baby Boomers. The product also has a tendency to remember things as they never were and ask, “Why not?”

Incidents/Injuries: The device’s alarm goes off at all hours of the day, due to a design flaw that results from connecting it to the cable news and talk radio feeds. Attempts to disable the alarm only trigger the “You’re Attempting to Disable the Alarm” alarm, also a design flaw.

There are also a number of errors in some of the pre-loaded educational and business software. The section on literature, for instance, often mistakes song lyrics for poetry, and the units on geometry and film both confuse length with depth. Also, the device’s version of Quicken uses a faulty, non-GAAP measure of household income and debt called “Earnings Before Accounting” (EBA), and users report the device can explode if placed near an open flame or large piles of other people’s money. Furthermore, while Baby Boomers enjoy a premium sound system, its sound card seems only able to play the The Big Chill soundtrack.

Consumers who purchase the product may be under a false impression their device is in working order, as the System Diagnostics Test is a subroutine of the Confirmation Bias Program. And while a byproduct created by some Baby Boomers is generally thought to be non-toxic (see, “Hipster Recall”), the expense associated with its upkeep grows with age.

Reports that the device has absorbed Jeff Bridges into its mainframe in order to secure its lust for power currently are being investigated. Please contact Bruce Boxleitner if you are worried this may have happened with your device.

Description: Product currently comes in gray or white with extra padding.

Sold on: Anything with the word “Kennedy” in it.

Remedy: Consumers should stop using the product immediately and contact The Greatest Generation for a full refund or, failing that, a bigger check for their birthday.

“That’s kind of exactly what I’ve been doing… except I’ve been doing it for a while.”

“Listen! Listen! This is the best thing! And I came up with it in ten seconds!”
 
“I’m pretty sure I saved his life.”
 
“I’m applying to graduate school because I want people to call me doctor.”
 
“Don’t stand next to me. It makes me look too elegant.”
 
“Hello Family and Friends! The holidays are here again, and I just wanted to say, my book is a great gift idea.”
 
“I know we agreed that you would drive, but I’m driving.”
 
“I did not spend three hours standing in front of the mirror! It was two hours and forty-five minutes. What is your problem? Why are you lying about me?”
 
“He said, ‘If that’s the worst thing you’ve done, then don’t worry.’ But he meant it like, ‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’”
 
“Oh, I know they’re for everyone. But you had to know they’re my favorite. Who told you they’re my favorite?”

“Wouldn’t you love to live right next door to me?”
 
“Why are you interrupting? You called me, remember?”
 
“I won’t apply for regular jobs. You know, the kind that would expect me to be there on time.”

“What did you like about what I just said?”

We’re all moving to our places for the finale. The girls descend from their dressing rooms, having preemptively removed their fake eyelashes in preparation for leaving the theater as soon as the curtain falls. The seven of us boys surface from where we’ve been reading the Post and US Weekly in the theater’s basement, chatting about whom we are seeing after tonight’s show and where we are seeing them. As the actresses playing Roxie and Velma deliver their last lines before the finale, the ensemble clambers onto the stage, hidden from the audience by a curtain of gold tinsel that covers the onstage bandstand. I prop myself up on a girl wearing a fishnet body stocking. It’s a different girl from the one who wore the costume last week: that girl was fired or her contract was up or she’s on vacation (it’s hard to say, people come and go so quickly here).

As the gold curtain rises, the orchestra begins to play the reprise of “All That Jazz.” I lift myself into a pose that I hope passes for Fosse-esque: shoulders hunched forward, feet turned in, elbows bent, wrists attached to my hipbones. I suck in my stomach, pulling it back, away from the black mesh shirt, and become aware of the sensation that my navel is kissing my spinal cord, a feeling at once delicious and nauseating.

Though we have been directed to slither and ooze off the bandstand with the same energy and focused intention we display during the opening number of the show, I find I can’t quite muster it tonight. The surge of energy I got from taking three Hydroxycut pills at the top of the show has long since worn off.

I slink downstage toward the audience with the rest of the cast, all of us dancing in unison now, thrusting our hips back-back back-back, arms in the air, swatting our hands as if flicking wet toilet paper from our fingers—at least that’s what the choreographer has told us it should feel like—but at this moment, it feels like slamming my limbs into concrete again and again. I could swear there was a time when my feet easily left the floor, when my hamstrings were elastic, when I could ride the air as effortlessly as walking. There may have been a time when those things were true; it might have been true last night, and it might be true again tomorrow, but it isn’t true now.

I know what comes next in the choreography; I know that we spin out and then back in. But which way is out? Where are my feet? Where is the audience and where is the orchestra? Everything seems to dim and blur. I think I might be dying. If I’m dying, at least I’m dying on Broadway.

And then I see him: a handsome stranger sitting in the audience, second row, aisle seat. He must have been sitting there all along. How could I have missed him? I can see that his hair is too sculpted, his eyebrows are too plucked, his smile is too bleached. But he is smiling, and he’s smiling at me. Suddenly, I feel as though I could dance the show again from the top. This time, I could give it everything I’ve got. This time, I’d let the hunger pangs fuel me on instead of enervating and slowing me down. I am an animal; I am a god; I don’t need food, I can survive on will power and the attention of a handsome, overly groomed stranger sitting in the second row.

After the cast has bowed and we have climbed the six flights of stairs to our dressing rooms, I try to convince the boys in the ensemble to come out for a drink at Trauma, a fussy midtown gay bar we all love to hate.

“Will the bandit strike again?” one guy asks.

Since James and I broke up in November, the Chicago boys have not-so-jokingly nicknamed me “the Make-out Bandit of Ninth Avenue.” I’ve fallen into the habit of getting drunk, sloppily kissing strangers at bars and clubs, then disappearing into the crowd before my victims have the chance to ask for my name or my phone number (or worse, not ask for my name or my phone number). Most days, I’ve been waking up with debilitating hangovers and the sense that I spent the previous night acting like some seventh grade girl with low self-esteem who thinks boys will only like her if she sticks her tongue down their throats. I don’t feel great about the way I’ve been acting, but it all feels pretty harmless until I realize I’ve been trying to get the strangers I’m making out with to actually like me. “I’m thinking of applying to grad schools,” I find myself yelling over thumping music at a bar. “I’m in search of a true spiritual community,” I slur while someone soaks my chin with his tongue. “Have you read The Power of Now?”

I’m sure that when tomorrow morning comes I’ll be less than thrilled with my decision to go to Trauma tonight. But seeing a dude in the audience looking at me (me!) has gotten my blood rushing, and at this point, all reason has been obscured. I convince three of the boys to come out to the bar by lying and saying that there might be a group of guys from Wicked meeting us there as well. I lock myself in the dressing room bathroom, take two more Hydroxycut pills, just for energy, like having a late-night cup of coffee, and we walk out the stage door onto 49th Street. I look around to see if the stranger I saw smiling at me from the second row is waiting to introduce himself. He isn’t. I can feel my high begin to falter, but I quickly send a text message to Sam, a guy with whom I’ve been on exactly one (very PG) date. I tell Sam to come meet me at Trauma, he replies that he will, and my high is instantly back in place. The boys and I head west, away from Broadway, toward the nightlife of Hell’s Kitchen.

When we arrive at Trauma, we commandeer a table on the second level of the bar and start in on our first round of vodka sodas. We pretend to make conversation with one another, but really we’re just scouting the room, looking for people we know or might want to know.

Sam soon arrives at the bar and I decide that yes, without a doubt, tonight is the night I finally get over James. Sam is a Broadway dancer from somewhere out west; he never has to wear deodorant no matter how much he sweats, he can fix a wobbly chair with one smooth, efficient twist of his hands, and he has naturally broad, hairless forearms, inherited, presumably, from generations of fresh-smelling, chair-fixing farmers and cowboys. Whenever I’m near Sam, I find myself very aware of the prominent curve of my nose.

Although I haven’t slept with anyone since my break up, it has been the opinion of my co-workers that the only way to get over James is to be a man, do what men do, and have sex with as many people as possible. “Diva, you’ve got to move on,” has been an oft-repeated refrain on the sixth floor of the Ambassador Theater since November. The problem (and I haven’t yet admitted this to my castmates) is that I have never had sex with anyone I wasn’t in a long-term relationship with, and there are a number of things now holding me back. I’m scared of disease; I’m scared that my stalwart, comforting belief that I’m fantastic in bed could be proven false; I’m scared I’ll fall in love with the first person I have sex with and wind up in a new relationship before I’ve patched myself together from my last breakup; and I’m scared that if I don’t fall in love with the first person I have sex with, sex will forever be ruined for me, robbed of the significance it has always carried.

But, enumerating these fears in my head as I suck down another vodka soda and look at Sam’s pouty lower lip and broad, hairless forearms, I try to reason with myself: I’m twenty-six years old and far past the age when it’s considered either charming or appropriate to be operating under these kinds of delusions. I do still want to believe that sex is something special and intimate. I do. But I also really, really need to get laid.

Sam smiles his closed-lipped smile and slides into the booth next to me. “I can’t stay,” he yells into my ear over the blaring music. “Early audition tomorrow.” He might as well have punched me in the stomach. The hand holding my vodka soda begins to shake at the thought of going to sleep alone in my bed, yearning for James for yet another night (though the shaking may just be the result of the Hydroxycut mixing with the vodka). Still, as Sam leans in to kiss me goodbye, I notice that even after performing in two shows today, he smells like clean laundry. He really doesn’t need deodorant. If he asked me to marry him this second, I would say yes.

Once Sam has left Trauma, I look around to find that a few new guys have joined our table. They are talking in loud, animated voices—boo, I said, no, give me a nice step-touch ‘cause my twirling days are done—and ordering shots of something blue and frothy. We all consume the shots and I take a moment to assess the group. Everyone seems cute, though that could be because the lights in the bar are all colored and flashing. Everyone seems successful and witty, but I can barely make sense of a full sentence over the pounding music. I fix my eyes on one guy who is standing next to our table, grooving to the music, wearing a pinstriped newsboy hat ever so slightly askew on his head. I learn that he was on the national tour of something with a friend of a friend of mine, and is now dancing in some Broadway show or other. I lean over to a friend sitting next to me and whisper, “He’s hot, right?

“Hot,” my friend replies. “Go for it.”

I stand from the table and, as quietly as I can over the music, yell to the guy in the newsboy hat, “Come downstairs with me.”

He follows me as I push my way through the dense, coconut-scented fog. We zigzag through the wall of guys standing nuts-to-butts, all trying to get the attention of the bartender and of each other. When I reach the bathroom entrance, I lean back against the door, hoping to both look seductive and to remain upright without teetering. I pull the guy in the newsboy hat toward me and discover that he is an exemplary kisser, that his name is Caleb, that he lives two blocks from my apartment in Astoria, and that he thinks I should really go home with him tonight.

But all the swagger and aggression I displayed in getting Caleb to come downstairs with me seems to evaporate the moment he speaks the words “my place.” I tell him I really can’t desert my friends, but maybe we can meet for coffee later in the week.

“Come on,” he says, running his hands down my torso as I notice he’s got incredibly broad, hairless forearms. “I’ve got baked ziti with homemade meat sauce in my fridge.”

I can’t remember the last time I ate pasta. Actually, I can’t remember the last time I ate anything at all. And meat sauce. At this moment, homemade meat sauce has the ring of something primal and dangerous, a call from the wild, inviting me, daring me, to go native.

After a quick cab ride to Caleb’s apartment in Queens, we are standing together, still making out, in his bedroom. Aside from a bed, some pillows on the floor, and the TV he immediately turns on, there isn’t much to the room, unless you count the heavy, chemical scent of Axe body spray as a physical presence, which I do.

Caleb asks if I want a drink. I say yes, though the phrase homemade meat sauce is pounding in my ears, muffling everything else. He brings me a pink mixture in a clear Budweiser glass, and, lightly pressing one hand to my sternum, pushes me backward onto his bed. As I try not to spill the drink on his duvet, Caleb climbs on top of me, and I wonder why he seems so much less attractive now that we are horizontal. I close my eyes to block out the sight of his eyes and nose, which are nightmarishly distorted at such close proximity. But closing my eyes makes the room lurch and heave. I snap my eyes back open and try to remember what it is I had planned on doing once I got myself beneath this person I don’t know.

“Baked ziti!” I say, trying to sit up and realizing how very much bigger he is than I am. “You got me all excited for that baked ziti.”

“I’ll get the ziti in a minute,” Caleb murmurs, pushing me back down onto his bed and inching my shirt up over my torso.

I grab his face, look him in the eye, and say, “You promised me homemade meat sauce.”

My desperation seems to startle and crack his determination, at least for a moment. He pushes himself off me and heads for the kitchen. I sit up on the bed and plant my feet on the floor, a trick I learned in college that’s supposed to make the room stop spinning. Caleb plods back into the bedroom, carrying an oversized disposable aluminum roasting pan and a fork.

“Baked ziti with homemade meat sauce,” he says, a note of resignation and annoyance in his voice. He sets the pan on my lap. I dig the fork into the dish, and shove five or six noodles, globs of melted cheese, and large chunks of beef and tomato into my mouth. I close my eyes, the room not spinning at all now. I chew and swallow.

“This is good,” I keep repeating, shoving forkful after forkful into my mouth. “This is really, really good.”

Caleb smiles, says he’s glad I like it, and attempts to get me to set the fork aside by kissing my ziti-filled mouth. I indicate with an apologetic shrug that I’m not done eating so I can’t possibly kiss him back. I dig my fork back into the dish and keep inhaling the pasta.

When I finish the entire pan of ziti—which had been more than three-quarters full when I began—Caleb levels his gaze at the empty aluminum dish and asks warily if I want some of the cookies his mom sent him at Christmas. I nod and grin. He brings out a tinfoil-covered serving tray and reveals dozens of shortbreads, sugar cookies, ginger snaps, and frosted chocolate cakes. I consider at least attempting conversation at this point, perhaps about Obama’s upcoming inauguration, perhaps about the show he’s performing in. But I forgo dialogue in favor of focusing my full concentration on the cookies in front of me.

“Feel better?” Caleb says once I’ve put down the cookies, leaving two or three on the plate with a tremendous force of will. He again begins to push me down onto the bed and lift off my shirt.

“Yeah, but ya know, I should really be going,” I say, suddenly both strong enough and clear headed enough to pry him off of me and sit up straight.

“Are you serious?” he says, his eyes wide, his eyebrows disappearing beneath his newsboy cap.

I look around the room for my shoes, which I don’t remember taking off, and start saying something about going through a really tough break-up recently and just needing some me time. I tell him I’ll find him on Facebook, I say goodbye, and I hurry out his door into the cold January night.

As I walk the two blocks from Caleb’s apartment to my own, I’m aware of a sharp embarrassment—an embarrassment that feels remarkably similar to gallons of pasta and cookies stretching my stomach to a painful distention—and a stinging guilt that demands I consider how I’ll undo what I’ve just done. Thinking about the meals I’ll skip tomorrow and the hours I’ll spend at the gym, I hardly notice that, while passing the darkened homes and late-night bodegas of Astoria, I am, for the first time in my life, completely alone.

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Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

2. Upon the death of the penultimate remaining participant, the lone survivor shall take possession of all the tontine items.

3. Gary, if he receives permission from at least one other participant, may access the tontine items, but only to look at them and not to touch.

4. In accordance with the significance of the tontine pact, all items volunteered must be valued at no less than three-hundred dollars by an independent third party. 

5. Gary shall be allowed to judge the monetary worth of his contribution. No one shall complain about this, as it would embarrass and upset Gary. 

6. Under no circumstances shall any participant attempt to retrieve his tontine contribution and exchange it for another item, regardless of the new item’s worth.

7. If Gary suddenly feels ashamed of his tontine contribution and starts yelling about how he wants to exchange it, he shall be allowed to exchange his item for another item.

8. If Gary has no clear idea of what he would like to exchange for his first item, but nevertheless demands to take back his first item and starts thrashing around, he shall be allowed to take back the item.

9. The tontine items shall be kept in a secret, neutral location to be unanimously determined by the participants.

10. If Gary has one of his friends over and they refuse to believe his story about the tontine, Gary shall be allowed to reveal the tontine items and their location to his friend. 

11. If Gary’s friend still does not believe his story about the tontine, the other participants shall come to Gary’s defense, saying that the tontine is very real and that they all like Gary and think he is cool.

12. In the event that Gary wishes to use any of the tontine items in construction of a fort (outdoor or indoor), Gary shall be allowed to use the items, as fort-building seems to help Gary relax.

13. Should the fort fail to relax Gary, the most nearby participant must offer to give Gary a backrub. (NOTE: Under no circumstances should Gary be touched without first being asked!)

14. If Gary, after having one of his night episodes, calls another participant and asks to come over and sleep beside them, the participant shall oblige Gary and, if necessary, ask that their significant other please sleep elsewhere.

15. Should Gary’s current living situation not work out, the other participants must arrange to house Gary in one of their homes. The participants may determine for themselves whose home it shall be, but they are reminded that Gary does not like large rooms or brightly colored things.

16. If, after moving into one of the other participants’ homes, Gary decides to make his pancakes for breakfast, his new host must eat all of them. If Gary informs his host that the pancakes are invisible, the host shall pantomime until Gary moves onto the next thing.

17. Should the participants play Monopoly, Gary gets to be the car.

18. In the event that a tontine participant is found to be responsible for the wrongful death of any other participant, that participant shall be expelled permanently from the tontine pact.

19. Rule 18 does not apply to Gary.

20.  Any food items contributed to the tontine must be appropriately preserved.

You see, I’m not just a passenger; I’m a poet. And while they may be able to buckle me into this tiny seat, they won’t be able to contain my inspiration. No, ma’am. I’ll be knocking out beautiful poetry this whole goddamn flight.

What will it be about? Anything. There are no limits to my subject material. I’ll write a poem about flowers. I’ll write a poem about dragons. I’ll write a poem about a flower that fights a dragon and you’ll be all smug and think, Well obviously the dragon would win. But don’t get too comfortable with that mindset because, like a stealth bomber ravaging your brainscape with heartfelt language, here I come out of the blue with all these poetic details explaining why the flower winning is not only plausible but necessary.

That’s not the end, though. No way. Just when I have you willing to believe in a floral victory, that’s when the flower will take off its mask to reveal that it’s actually been a dragon all along, and its need to disguise itself is a statement about how everyone feels insecure sometimes, and also about the mask industry, because, damn, masks are crazy these days, am I right?

Sounds epic, huh? Long? Rambling? Probably 100 lines minimum, right? Wrong. I’ll shove all that into something as compact as a haiku. Because efficiency is beautiful. You know which great American poet taught me that? Henry Ford. He wrote poems so crazy they came out as cars.

That’s not to say I just write haikus. No, I’ll write within any poetic structure. And I’ll write about any poetic structure. I’ll write a sonnet about limericks and a limerick about villanelles. I’ll write two sets of heroic couplets about two sets of heroic couplets that are themselves a heroic couple, because they have super powers and they’re in a romantic relationship.

But if it’s a haiku, it’s going to be about dragons fighting flowers that are dragons in disguise. That much you can be sure of.

Pop quiz: “Just breaking lines, blowing minds.” Is this A, a saying that I live by; B, what’s printed on the flagship coffee mug of my line of “Inspirational Cups for Inspired Poets” (available on Etsy); or C, what I’ll be doing until the tray tables go up and the electronics power down?

The answer is E, all of the above.

What was option D? You’ll never know. That’s a lesson about writing poetry: sometimes it’s best to leave things unsaid.

Here’s another saying I live by: “Write fierce enough verse to put you in a hearse.” And by the way, you’re not driving that hearse; you’re in the back of the hearse, i.e. you’re a dead person. Because I’m writing verse so fierce that it could kill you, figuratively speaking. Not like its ferocity would make you consider a job as a hearse driver or something. Or, at least, that’s not my intention, but who knows? Maybe it will. You can never be sure how poetry will affect someone. With that being said, I try to avoid hearse-driving imagery in my work, because it seems like a pretty grim career, and I don’t want to be held legally responsible if thing’s don’t work out.

So close your eyes and turn on your noise cancelling headphones if you want, but it won’t help. Because you can block out sound but you can’t block out my creativity. And I mean that to be forty-percent a statement about how moving it can be to watch an artist work and sixty-percent a warning that I throw elbows when I get creative.

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Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.