He Fixes the Cable

As is often the case, the Right Reverend Smith and I were occupying the same quantum plane last night, two virtual particles called simultaneously into potential existence, distant, yet exactly the same. While he stalked the halls of his northern Marienbad, I stood upon the parapet of my Amalfian redoubt high above the Allegheny. A tugboat sounded. A solitary gull wheeled steadily in the gray wind.

I have the terrible habit of listening to NPR while ujjaying my way through the primary series after coming home from the office. I keep the volume low so I can't actually understand what they're saying--the irrythmic white noise of unintelligible human speech beats whale songs or throat singing or whatever it is that people too in a thrall the the hoaky theosophical spiritism that often accompanies yoga's pure calisthenic awesomeness listen to; it's nice to have a little something in the background, but when I try Bach, I get so caught in the moto perpetuo that I end up completing the entire one-hour sequence in three minutes. Curiously, the same thing used to happen when I practiced my violin, which is probably why I was never any good at it. Anyway, I had the misfortune of ending my practice and falling into an exhausted corpse pose right as the very same story that sent Mister Smiff running came on the air. Just as we we yesterday examined the prototypical Times piece, today, let's cast our yellow eye on Nominally Public Radio, and what I propose to you is a single sentence summarizing the entire output of that magnificent edifice to cruise-missile liberalism, the whole station, all of its component programs, its entire diverse, variegated identity boiled down and then distilled into a single declarative sentence:

Bruce Hoffman is a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.

Lord. You can imagine where it goes from here.