Today at work, like some sinister pusher Tak hands me a CD full of Clone High candy. So guess what I spent all night doing? Watching cartoons (besides the Simpsons) has become more broadly accepted as cool, so long as they're repleat with dark humor and dirty wackiness. I think it's fantastic, and hopefully some of these shows will get the attention they deserve. The episode of Harvey Birdman: Attourney at Law where Fred Flinstone is a mob boss was downright inspired. And I am endeavoring to tape the episode of Futurama that features Al Gore, Nichelle Nichols, Deep Blue, Gary Gygax, and Stephen Hawking failing to save the universe. "I'm a tenth level vice president." Genius

Visitors on the Submarine today were particularly ape-like. There is a long-standing and eminently sane policy which does not allow Visitors to operate any of the equipment (steering wheels, lights, fuse panels) on board, partly because it's almost 60 years old and behaves in irrational ways. Tak recently secured several levers in the electrical distribution room so that people could no longer move them when the room is unsupervised, and I watched Visitors become so frustrated with the levers' unnatural immobility that they turned, like caged apes, to operating every other control that was in their reach. I swear upon all that is unholy that one of them actually grunted, vocalizing their annoyance in the primitive, gutteral pre-Man tongue of our ancestors.