My friends Doug and Stephanie Hackney are on a permanent tour of the world. Lucky for them and us, the world is a large place. That way they get to upload awe-inspiring photos like these. Click here to see their photos from the furthest tip of the world and to read Doug’s simple, striking, declarative narrative. Favorite line: “But as the mountains shook off their cloak of nighttime clouds, the day looked more promising.” That approaches Hemingway.

“Everybody who fights me loses,” said my five-year-old this morning, his Pokemon game in hand.

I replied, “You’re not the first to say that.”

A professor of rhetoric digs at the meaning beneath Obamalingua.

This video is well worth your five minutes.

Remember how I was saying that every day is a lesson in what I don’t know? Today’s lesson would be about octopi.

Thanks to Mark Chaet for alerting me to this.

The last week of May at the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, Nebraska I’m doing two things I like to do: teaching and judging. I like to teach, and I like to judge. (The latter, at least when it comes to the comportment of elected officials, the relative merits of something artistic, and the personal habits of people who are breezily late and/or ill-mannered.) The conference begins May 24th, and if you’d like to join us, you should click here. If you’d just like to see what I’m teaching, click here. (I’ll be teaching two days, and serving as a panelist throughout the week. And also, if past writing or theatre conferences are any indication, hanging out at pool halls and clubs ’til closing.)

When, late last year, they sent me a very nice email asking me if I would do this, once I ascertained that this in no way conflicted with the San Diego Comic Con (which is in July), I agreed, then set about rearranging my schedule so I could do so. (Among other things, I’m teaching a new class this summer at USC. More about that in a future post.) I also thought: Hey, maybe I’ll drive. As we all know, I love driving that Mustang convertible. I could see wide open stretches of America with the top down. I did that in 2004 stumping in Arizona for John Kerry (he lost). And also, I would have my car. So I looked again at my schedule, both personal and professional, then went to Google maps where I always go now because Mapquest has made it a habit of giving me the longest, slowest, most aggravating, and most often wrong route, and then I discovered something I did not know: Omaha, Nebraska is 1554 miles away. In my mind, it was two states over. No, it’s four states over — in the middle of the country. Who knew? I won’t have enough time to drive there and back, and the nice people at the conference are providing a plane ticket. And so, the plains conference became the plane conference.

I take all this time to relate this story because for me every day is an adventure in discovering what I don’t know, including, to paraphrase Socrates, what I don’t know that I don’t know. I’m eager to visit Nebraska because it’s one of the few states I haven’t been to, but until that fateful day when I looked at the map online, I never had a fixed idea where it is. Now I know it’s next to Iowa. That state I can fix on because it’s next to Illinois, and I’ve been there plenty of times. But Nebraska? I know Springsteen did an album I never wanted to listen to about it. I know that 20 years ago a guy I grew up with who was then a sometimes-dangerous drop-dead drunk once took off for there on some strange odyssey he never allowed himself to discuss again. And… that’s it. I know nothing else about Nebraska. But I’m looking forward to finding out more.

Just now I was on Slate.com reading John Dickerson’s piece on why Obama swept the Potomac Primary — my own hunch being, “People prefer him” — but then a banner ad caught my eye. It was for Office 2008 for Mac. Hm, I thought:  productivity upgrades for the Mac. What are they?

Then I clicked. You can do so too, if you’re curious yourself.

What I got was an endless, uncute, and meaningless cartoon in the Thurber style, accompanied by a light bop bass line. A cartoon van pulls up, a stick figure guy is jugging three balls, letters roll back and forth… I still can’t figure out what it’s about. But it went on and on. I finally ditched the site figuring that improvements like this I didn’t need. Note to Microsoft:  People in general don’t wait this long on the internet to learn things, especially people who are seeking increases in productivity!

In what is shaping up as a rough year for heroes of my comic-book youth, “Howard the Duck” creator and “Man-Thing” scribe Steve Gerber has died. Gerber wrote the strangest comic-books of his time, ones where cigar-smoking ducks dispensed wisdom and cows were struck by vampirism and Satan’s son was somehow a rebellious hero, and on and on. Thirty years later I still can’t understand what “Omega the Unknown” was really about, but it stuck with me. (And I still have all eight — only eight! — issues.) Mr. Gerber was very kind to me when I interviewed him for my badly mimeographed fanzine circa 1975, and his comics are proving to be kind to my two younger children, who are currently reading their way through his run in “Defenders,” a comic that once featured a supervillain team that included a woman with a red ball for a head and a gorilla with the balding head of an accountant. His work will live on.

Andrew Sullivan, pulling for Obama, notes a Clintonian lack of self-sacrifice in the opposing camp.

In June of 2001 at a conference in Philadelphia I heard New York Times columnist Tom Friedman complain about what he called the “evernet.” Friedman said that increasingly we’re all in a condition of being ever-connected by cellphone and internet, a state that doesn’t allow for thoughtfulness, and that he personally was doing what he could to unplug by checking email relatively infrequently and by not… owning… a cellphone. I found the latter claim incredible, and he said so did most people who would call the Times insisting on having that cellphone number, only to have Mr. Friedman’s assistant say, “He doesn’t have a cellphone.”

These past four days I’ve thought a lot about what Friedman said, because I switched off my cellphone and email for four days (and counting) and left town. I had already been out of town for three days on business, and had been shall we say “robustly scheduled” for the four or five weeks prior. Now what I wanted was to talk to no one (except to say something like, “Yes, I’ll have another”) and I wanted to do nothing according to schedule. I didn’t even want to know what time it was. I wanted to be able to order room service if the mood struck me. And I wanted to be able to get everything I might want in one location. With those parameters in mind, I went to Las Vegas. While there, I checked no email, answered no cellphone calls, observed no appointments save one (which I’ll get to), and, incidentally, ordered no room service.

It felt strange. And wonderful.

One morning I ate “breakfast” (it was 11:30 a.m.) at the oyster bar. Breakfast consisted of New England clam chowder, six freshly arrived Bluepoint oysters, and a whiskey and soda. The day before at 6 p.m. I had had “lunch” there: steamed mussels, six assorted oysters, and two whiskeys with soda. On some day during my stay I ordered a meal that one would actually associate with breakfast — eggs, sausages, potatoes, orange juice — at 3 a.m. I don’t know what day that was.

I did some writing while I was there, just because I felt like it. It turned into a completed short story, written in one sitting. I still write plays that way, but I don’t think I’ve written a short story that way in 10 years.

And at some point Friday I decided that I was going to see the Cirque du Soleil show and Beatles tribute, “Love.” Once I bought the ticket, that was the one appointment I had to keep. When my wife and I went to Las Vegas in December I took her to see “Ka.” I had wanted to see “Love,” but it was dark that week. “Ka” had its moments, but its specious advocacy of primitivism over advanced civilization annoyed me in its naivete. (More about that soon, probably. I still have my notes.) “Love,” on the other hand was, well, awesome. In the literal sense. Everyone in the house felt awed by the performance, by the staged interpretations of the music, by the physical accomplishment and the ingenuity of the staging and most of all, afresh, by the music itself, no matter how rejiggered. Said mash-up did nothing to improve the original music, but by nature of the new context it did everything to remind one of its inherent originality. At one point, the entire audience is submerged, so to speak, down below with the Yellow Submarine. That feat alone showed the work of genius. I made a mental list of everyone I would like to bring back to see the show.

So, I had four days off. (I’m officially back checking email and the link tomorrow at noon.) It’s certainly not a lot of time. But in an over-connected and over-scheduled evernet time in my life, it was a welcome respite, the sort of thing done more easily before three kids with schedules all their own, and a hodgepodge of personal and professional obligations, all of them important to me. In the week before I left, while I was considering where to go, at one point I mentally had my passport in my hand. With a few more days I might have gone that route; Costa Rica looks beautiful and remote in those photos on the internet.

Well, not really. But I am out of town and I’ve turned off the cellphone and I’m not checking email. If I had more time, I really would have gone fishin’ — at one point, I visualized my passport in hand and checked out going to Mexico or further south of the border, but I don’t have time. (Too many pressing obligations — writing-oriented and otherwise — next week. Plus there are those pesky classes I teach.) So instead I took off for Las Vegas, where so far I’m doing nothing but reading, watching angry talking heads on Fox News, and dining at the hotel oyster bar. For me, this equates with relaxation.

I would have gone to a favorite spot for brief getaways:  a remote strip of beach near one of our state’s fine, fine prisons. Last time I went there I sat out by the surf for eight hours smoking cigars and drinking drinks and writing and during the course of that day never saw another person. After five weeks without a day off and lots of talking and writing in there, you can imagine the attraction this deserted beach option held. But it’s been cold lately and I wanted to go as hassle-free as possible, and the idea of round-the-clock room service called to me. (Not that I’ve called it, yet.)

I just now came back up to the room from the latest trip to the oyster bar. Most enjoyable moment so far: watching a Japanese couple photograph their food as it arrived. She ordered a rib-eye steak and he photographed it. I’m not mocking them — my friend Stefan did the same thing when he went to Japan — but it was a reminder that one’s rote experience is often novel to others.

Okay, that’s it. I have to go back to reading about “The Third Reich in Power,” because I’m once again interested in the insidious ways evil people assert themselves.  Then I might actually go, I dunno, walk around or something.