My computer at work has no sound card, or it has a sound card but no speakers, or it has both but my speakers have been pushed slightly out of phase and now they're blasting The White Stripes at a point five seconds in the past or the future. Of course, if they were playing The New Rock N Roll at a point in the recent past, I'd remember it. And if they were playing it five seconds from now, I'd still be hearing it, but with a five second delay. So I think we can safely assume that my speakers are a)invisible and b)do not work.

Right. The fact that my computer is a deaf-mute has provided me with a tool for identifying whether or not an email is significant. Corporate emails leap onto everyone's computer at once, and since I work in an open area, you can faintly hear the double chime of everyone's Outlook receiving the latest policy change, notice of resignation, parking issues, incremental footware policy changes, announcements of parties and disturbing queries like "Who took the $35,000 dollar camera out of the equipment room?". No chimes for me: I receive the silent notification of a little envelope icon in my system tray. Thank you, little virtual tray, for the gift of virtual envelopes, often containing virtual content. What I want to know is, where's my virtual butler? And don't point me to Ask Jeeves.

Again: right. The chiming chorus means that, whatever the email is, it has almost no chance of being significant in any way. Yes indeed, a stat holiday means that time sheets must be in by Friday instead of Monday. No shit. I applaud the attempts to park in an orderly fashion, but not to park in front of the bicycle shop. Okay, from now on I promise to keep the shared drive free of monstrous media files, and I understand that the new policy manual needs to be reviewed within 90 days. On the other hand, a discreet silent envelope contains the following possibilities: 1) The Viking has sent me the latest article or photo illustrating what a colossal tit George W. Bush is; 2) Goody Nurse is bored or wishes to send me some interesting trivia; 3) another Diarylander is saying hello or arguing a point (more arguments, please - otherwise I'll just keep writing the same old drivel); 3) somebody wants me to get drunk after work, and sometimes in his or her company; 4) a genuine work-related email from someone who has a specific request for me. Silence equals significance in my noisy office.

AND YET SOME MORE MUSING ON NATURE

After the bell rang and the members poured down the steps of the Capitol Building (or wherever it is those American politicians meet, says the ignorant Canadian) for spring break, the Bush administration said, "Have a nice time in Lauterdale! And we just opened up over 200 million acres of wilderness for development. Okay, see ya!" By administrative fiat, George Wah Bush has absorbed huge patches of what were once considered wilderness and stuffed it all down the front of his flight suit.

This is another disaster in a long line of environmental law disasters, as far as I'm concerned. In my last entry I said that nature would do just fine without us. But we cannot survive without it, not spiritually, not physically, not at all. Whenever we absorb it, turn it into a class of organic machine, we calcify. But there are people who write much more eloquently on this subject than I do. You have the inestimable privilege of being able to access Annie Dillard's essay "The Force That Drives The Flower". It's a long piece but wonderful to read.

THE NAMES (THIS SECTION IS INTERESTING ONLY IF YOU FEEL LIKE GUESSING MY ACTUAL NAME, WHICH MOST OF YOU KNOW ALREADY, OR IF YOU'RE A BIG FAN OF A METRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE TOP 100 BABY NAMES FOR BOYS OF 2002)

Goody Nurse sent me an email with The Top 100 Baby Names of 2002. Apparently my name, unusual for 1971, has now made the top 100. And it only took three decades. What's really creepy, though, is that my first name is the 41st most popular name for boys, and my surname is the 41st most popular name for girls. What does this mean? That I will die at age 41. Or I will have a child at age 41. Or perhaps my hair will grow to 41 centimetres. Or I will be afflicted with 41 horrible boils, and The Lord will take from me but restore my wife, children and cattle, which will make 41 in total. Or maybe I should have my named legally changed to Mr. Forty One, and I can open a bar called "Good Time Forty One," with highballs on special every Wednesday night, and cheap pitchers on Tuesday. And of course, every night is Ladiez Night. Margarita pitchers half-off if you tell the bartender that Sadie Hawkins sent you.

What I've noticed is that most of the boys' names sound identical: a trochee ending with -n. Ethan, Christian, Ryan, Dylan, Brandon, Brian, Justin, Austin, Nathan, Kevin, Logan, Cameron, Jordan, Aidan, Jason, Jaden, Stephen, Jackson, Aaron, Devin, Mason, Gavin, Evan, Caden, Brayden, Colin, Jalen, Tristan, Brendan, Alan (30). And there are more of the same, varying only in the variety of the last letter: Jacob, Michael, Matthew, Joseph, Andrew, Daniel, William, David, Tyler, Caleb, Eric, Robert, Noah, Thomas, Hunter, Connor, Angel, Isaac, Adam, Carlos, Alex, Cody, Ian, Lucas, Jared, Richard, Trevor, Patrick, Jesse, Garrett, Derek (31). Monosyllables make a relatively poor showing in this non-caveman era: John, James, Sean, Kyle, Jack, Luke, Juan, Charles, Cole, Seth, Blake, Mark, Chase (13). The trisyllabics are overwhelmingly dactyls: Joshua, Nicholas, Christopher, Anthony, Jonathan, Zachary, Samuel, Benjamin, Gabriel, Dominic, Adrian, Timothy, Julian (13). Are you still bothering to read this? Just barely? Because I've started this thing and I just can't stop. Here are the amphibrachs: Elijah, Isaiah, Nathaniel, Sebastian (4). The iambs are all Latino: Jose, Luis, Jesus, Miguel (4). At four syllables we hit the absolute limit of what parents are willing to call their children: Alexander, Jeremiah, Alejandro (all three tertius paeons) and Antonio (a secundus paeon). I can't figure out what to do with Xavier, which is either a dactyl or an tribrach depending on your preferences.

Now: Why did I bother to do this? I don't know. I should be punished. I like the sound of words, I'm a former English major, and I'm primarily a researcher, so this kind of thing is likely inevitable, a mental reflex extended to autism. You can't punish a cat for eating birds and laying their mangled partially chewed carcasses at your doorstep. So you can't punish me for milling data and putting it on my site. There are surely all sorts of conclusions to be drawn from this list of names; the first one that leaps to mind is, as The Lotus pointed out, that parents name their boys as they name their pets: a sing-song trochee that most creatures respond positively to.

Also that there are little boys out there who have the names of things: Christian, Angel, Hunter, Mark, Chase. Note the religious/hunting theme, with that weird crossover contained in the name Mark (I'm not talking about the Book of Mark; I'm thinking more along the lines of sin as being, quite literally, 'missing the mark'). I'm not too surprised: Christian theology and the mystical edge of hunting share the same territory. Talk of Jesus as a lamb attempts to restrict the Passion to the pastoral, but Jesus is also the beast that offers itself to the hunters. Remember the stories of Algonquin hunters that would hold a ceremony in honour of the bear that they killed, inviting the carcass to a feast in which the animal was the guest of honour? Welcome to the Last Supper, with Jesus as the beast consenting to its consumption, practically hacking little bits of himself off to satisfy his followers. It takes a special kind of temperament to build a theology around so ferocious an appetite. Perhaps buried in the Passion is a tale of starvation and civilization, of humans domesticating themselves as they domesticated animals, extending their lives even as they ate them. Jesus comes in many forms in the New Testament, some of them exquisitely noble: a radical prophet, a grassroots political and religious figure in an occupied state, an outcast, an incarnated spirit. But the form I like least is the atoner, the animal that wants the mob to devour it. And this is the one that gets stretched out on the cross like jerky. It strikes me that Christianity would be the perfect religion for that warren of semi-domesticated rabbits from Watership Down, the ones who lived on a farmer's property and accepted comfort in exchange for the occasional sacrifice of one of their own. Eventually they end up leading lives warped by ritual and fear, transforming collective guilt into a kind of virtue.

parode - exode