At work, I was staring dumbly at a screen scrolling lines of text. Waiting for a process to end, watching the blinking cursor I wondered: could this teeny flashing induce a fit in a sensitive epileptic, like that woman towards the end of "The Andromeda Strain"?

Yesterday while discussing acquisition of a digital camera for adding photos to this journal, I wondered aloud to G how to preserve my anonymity, given any picture where I might appear - he suggested using Photoshop to replace my head with someone's famous, like William Holden. I said instead I'd use Mr. Jenkins, who G didn't know. I guess Mr. Jenkins first registered that rainy night in Manhattan, when I stood next to him in a shelter waiting for the downtown bus to take me to see "Stomp!" This is where he's found most often, in my experience: NYC bus shelter posters, but I've also seen him in other cities, plus the occasional glossy magazine ad. I think he's amusing. So for G's enlightenment, I threw together this minimal Mr. Jenkins page. (At the "Stomp!" theater (the Orpheum), pre-show, I was in the men's room stall when I caught a whiff of something familiar. Standing up, my head emerged above the partitions, and I observed a guy in the next stall busily puffing a reefer! New York - where they still toke up in public.)

Two unrelated quotes from Zarafa by Michael Allin (on pages 32 and 86):

There is a symbolic image of the European Enlightenment on the march in Napoleon's habit of reading at the head of his army, tearing out the pages of his book as he finished them and tossing them over his shoulder to be snatched up and read one by one, soldier by soldier, or out loud in groups, back through the ranks.