04.22.04

Bukowina Tatrzańska

If you think of Poland as shaped like home plate, the Tatra mountains run just along the country's southern tip, right where the catcher would be if the catcher were Slovakia (and Hungary were the umpire). I understand that baseball metaphors may be lost on some of my readers, but chances are anyone unfamiliar with baseball comes from a country that does a decent job teaching European geography. No harm is done.

The key point to retain is that Poland has mountains, they are somewhat ridiculously concentrated in one spot, and they're tall enough to keep the ferocious Czech and Slovak tribes to the south from ravaging the country.

When I was I tiny little monoglot I used to spend winters here with my mother, staying in the inexpensive and ubiquitous guest houses that dot the foothills, many of them built with money earned from a couple years' illegal construction work in Chicago. Whatever else you may say about socialism, it made for some splendid vacations - not only did everyone get copious vacation time, but those vacations were often subsidized to the gills by whatever factory or organization one happened to work for. And whatever you might say about American exploitation of illegal immigrant labor, it paid for a hell of a lot of home construction in southern Poland. In a way the region was a synthesis of everything that was good about the great rival economic systems.

I didn't care one whit for détente as a kid here, I was far more interested in sledding, jumping into snowbanks, and the enormous suppers served every day at two in the afternoon. Later on in life I assumed that my memories of those suppers had been inflated by nostalgia, but after returning to the region in my teens and being served a twelve-egg omelette for breakfast, I decided my memory was probably not exaggerating at all. Pickles the size of a bratwurst, stuffed cabbages served whole to a five-year-old, eight hard-boiled eggs "garnishing" each washbasin-sized plate of soup - for two childhood winters, I ran around in the snow like a maniac all day, pausing just long enough to eat gargantuan meals and endure the ordeal of changing into dry clothes, the wet ones peeled off layer after layer like an onion skin.

It was a paradise for kids - there were endless places to go sledding, horses pulling sleighs, long hikes up to Morskie Oko (a strange kettle lake high in the mountains), the funicular up to the very highest of the summits. Even the occasions where I did myself serious damage turned into happy opportunities - a broken left arm after slipping on ice earned me an introduction to the rescue helicopter crew, a group I idolized. The pilots (who risk their lives every winter to rescue unlucky and unprepared day hikers) sat drinking coffee in their lounge and expressed amazement at my fortitude.

A sledding accident the next year propelled me into a stack of cut pine trees, with branches sharpened and bark removed, used in those parts for drying hay. I got a hell of a gash on my cheek, but it healed as a handsome little scar that served me well later in life, suggesting a totally fictitious smoky manliness, air of danger, some dimly-remembered knife fight.

The region extending from the Tatra Mountains north to the outskirts of Krakow is called the Podhale (rhymes with koala), a word that means "below the pasture" and gives you a fair idea of what the local economy was based on before everyone started sneaking off to Chicago. The Polish highlanders (górale, rhymes with Podhale) are a linguistically and culturally distinct group, and like pastoral moutain people everywhere they are renowned for their hard drinking, their hospitality, their mistrust of strangers and their enduring (and eminently marketable) folk traditions. The highlanders have always been ultra-patriotic, and extremely Catholic in a country where people already take their Catholicism pretty seriously. When the pope visited his home near Krakow (he comes from nearby ), the region essentially emptied out for several days, as everyone went to welcome back their native son (the highlanders consider the Pope one of their own). Church services here are stunning - everyone puts on ceremonial Sunday clothes, which are handmade traditional garb, the men wearing large light-colored felt pants, the women beautifully embroidered frocks. Weddings last for three days and usually involve enormous quantities of vodka, endless music and dancing, and the occasional application of the ciupaga, or ceremonial axe, to resolve amicable disputes between the guests.

Before the war, the focus of life here was raising sheep. Galicia and the Polish mountains belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire; our local friend and guide can still remember her father talking about the yearly transhumance before the First World War, when the shepherds would take their flocks across the mountains to summer pasture almost as far as Vienna. Life back then was harsh and dirt poor; the poverty helped isolate the region from the lowlands, while the pastoral wandering put the highlanders in contact with their brethren all the way down the Carpathians, one reason the lanugage and culture here are unusually distinct.

The Podhale became a popular winter getaway towards the end of the nineteenth century, and especially after the 1919 rebirth of the Polish state, when the beau monde would come down from Warsaw and Kraków for winter frolics in the city of Zakopane. During the Second World War, the Polish side of the Tatry suffered like the rest of the country under German occupation, but the collaborationist Slovak side boomed with strange Nazi sanatoria - you can still find their overgrown ghosts in the forests there. As the country returned to some semblance of normality after the war, the area again became popular vacation destination, a good place for skiing in the wintertime or hiking in the summer. There was a bit of a crash in the early nineties, after the borders opened and people flocked to more exotic, satisfyingly mountainous places like Switzerland and Austria, but recent anxiety about terrorism and a desire to stay closer to home have helped revitalize domestic tourism. For unknown reasons, the area has also become immensely popular among Ukranians, the wealthier of whom helicopter themselves in for weekend getaways. No one can fully explain the fad, but no one is complaining about it, either.

It would be dishonest to tell you that the region is dotted with ski areas without explaining that in Poland, a ski area consists of a hill, a highlander in a shed, and a long metal cable with handles on it. Aspen this is not. For a cross country skier, however, the area is a near paradise - a village on every ridge, hundreds of years' worth of footpaths and back roads, and beautiful views in every direction. The houses in the Podhale have sharply sloping roofs, to deflect the copious winter snowfall, and they look lovely against the ridgelines, with wooden ornamental work and symmetrical little balconies on every floor. The truly old houses can be stunning - a handful of wooden churches have survived for several hundred years without burning down, and in their own way they inspire as much awe as a cathedral.

Much more frequent than the real old houses are concrete-block skeletons of newly started houses, or abandoned half-finished houses from many years ago. For reasons both cultural and economic, real estate has long been king in this part of Poland. Under Communism, practically the only thing you could do with extra cash was to build yourself a house - there was nothing to buy, and opening a bank account was both unwise (hyperinflation) and difficult if you couldn't easily account for the origin of all the money you were trying to deposit. And if you were returning from Chicago with a few thousand dollars in Western currency, you most certainly could not go to a bank - even owning dollars was illegal for most of the sixties and seventies. A large house was a great investment - not likely to drop in value, a place to lodge your children once they grew up, and a steady source of guest income in the tourist season, particularly after the law was relaxed to allow for bed-and-breakfast style private hotels.

The other way to store large quantities of money, of course, was to buy copious amounts of grain alcohol and store it in the attic.

Ha ha, only serious. Forbidden to keep hard currency, people logically turned to commodities that were easy to store, easy to sell, and were guaranteed not to lose their value. And it's hard to imagine any set of political or economic circumstances short of the Second Coming where it would be impossible to exchange alcohol for ready cash in Poland (one suspects that even during the Second Coming they would work something out). Grain alcohol is the ultimate liquid asset - compact, valuable, always in demand - with only two shortcomings: susceptibility to fire and susceptibility to the man of the house, who in these parts can rarely sleep easy knowing that just a lock, a few wooden planks, and his wife's constant vigilance separate him from a month-long bender.

If you are lucky enough to get your hands on it, grain alcohol of course tastes great straight, but you can also use it to prepare this tasty beverage:

Herbata po Góralsku

(Highlander Tea)

Fill a glass 3/4 full of freshly brewed, strong, hot tea. Add a heaping teaspoon of sugar and enough grain alcohol to fill the glass completely. Stir, let sit for five minutes, serve hot. For an extra kick, use only half a glass of tea.

Care should be taken in consuming this beverage, because the hot alcohol vapors rising from it very liable to sting your eyes when you go to take a sip - it's also probably flammable, although I didn't have the guts to test this hypothesis while sitting half-drunk in a large wooden house. The longer you let the tea stand before drinking, the lower the alcohol content will be (keeping in mind that 'lower' is a relative term).

Like carp or a decent loaf of rye bread, grain alcohol is one of those things that it is mysteriously difficult to obtain in the United States. The same country that can put a man on the moon, or offer fifty seven varieties of flavored coffee, somehow cannot provide its citizens with a commodity as basic as 190-proof ethanol in the convenient 1/2 liter bottle. And so the Polish tourist is forced to resort to smuggling.

Curiously enough, the prohibition against bringing grain alcohol across the Atlantic has nothing to do with import restrictions - rather, it's because the silly airlines insist they will not transport a highly flammable liquid. A moment's thought exposes this as nonsense, since airliners fly around all the time filled with extremely combustible kerosene, which is not only more dangerous than ethanol, but also has an unpleasant, greasy aftertaste.

How to Smuggle Grain Alcohol Into the United States by Maciej Ceglowski


1. Purchase a bottle of vodka and a bottle of pure grain alcohol
2. Fill a basin with boiling water, and soak the bottom half of the grain alcohol bottle until the label slides off
3. Clean the glue off the bottle completely with soap and water; pat dry
4. Soak the vodka bottle in a fresh basin of boiling water
5. Once the glue on the label is softened, lift the vodka bottle out of the bath, set it next to the grain alcohol bottle, and slide the label from one to the other in one fluid motion
6. While the label is still pliant, center it, pat dry, and let cool
7. Drink the bottle of vodka

Once the glue sets, you will have a bottle of grain alcohol cunningly disguised as vodka, and a pleasant warm feeling all through your organism.

Not all the luxuries of this part of the world are so easy to export, of course. If you want the best toasted cheese to be had anywhere, or ham so good that you will weep for the lost years you could have spent eating it, you have no alternative except rush to the Carpathians. And there's no way to bring home the clomp clomp of hooves on snow, the distinct stench of ancient Hungarian buses, or the ferociously bright stars when the tramontane wind blows. But holed up homesick in a cold winter room on another continent, pouring half bottle of vodka into your mug of Lipton gives you a fair first approximation.

3:02 PM

04.21.04

Of Purely Local Interest

The Middlebury Russian Choir will be performing on Wednesday, April 28 at 8:00 PM at the Middlebury Center for the Arts concert hall. We aim to entertain.

10:08 AM

04.20.04

I Am Going To England

Sometime around the middle of May I will be returning from a trip to Poland and making a stopover in the United Kingdom. If you are a UK reader and would like to meet up with me, please send an email and I will forward you the latest in tentative dates.

While I am definitely going to London, Oxford, and Sheffield; all other reasonable suggestions will be entertained, particularly if the word "pint" appears in your email.

7:00 PM

04.16.04

Orthodox Easter

I am not Orthodox, but I have always loved the Orthodox Easter service, with its candles, icons, and incense, and the whole congregation piling out to circle the church at midnight. There is always a baker's dozen of international students from Russia and the Balkans at Middlebury college, so each year there is usually a semi-organized trip to one of the little Orthodox churches scattered through New England. I feel a certain amount of ambivalence about this kind of mercenary, once-a-year Christianity, but I rationalize it by telling myself that no one ever pissed off God by going to church.

This year the dates for Orthodox and non-Orthodox Easter actually coincided, an unusual circumstance given the fearsomely complex and dull ways Orthodox and Western churches disagree about how to calculate the date of Easter. It turns out the full cycle of Easter dates only repeats every 5,700,000 years, so these kind of coincidences will be unpredictable for the forseeable future, unless we take the time to learn how to do the calculation ourselves. But if you think reading about weblog syndication formats is mind-numbing, try a taste of Easter math:

Years are given the numbers 1 through 19 (the "golden number") as (year modulo 19)+1, the first year being 1 B.C. [this is just dodging around the zero-origin; we could take (year % 19) starting at 0 in the year 0. However, I'll be traditional so as not to conflict with what you may find elsewhere.] In 1 B.C. (golden number 1), the March new moon is on the 23rd. A year later it falls 11 days before that, on the 12th. The next year, it's 11 days earlier still, taking it to March 1st. But we have also had an intercalary month, and another month starts at March 31st. THIS will be the paschal (Easter) new moon. If the moon is new on March 1st, it is full on the 14th, which is before the equinox.

This year there were fifteen of us making the trip - six Bulgarians (they have cracked the mysteries of the Middlebury admissions process), a Greek and a pseudo-Greek, three Rumanians, a Russian, a giggly Serb, and our American driver, a very sweet girl whose quiet deportment masked a truly Balkan driving style. I sat up front to watch for moose, while in the back the students sang Bulgarian songs and bounced happily around in the van.

We were headed for the little Orthodox church in Claremont, NH, a two hour drive to the southeast of Middlebury, most of the route over winding roads across the spine of the Green Mountains. There was a surprise waiting for us on the interstate - almost immediately we came across a roadblock, police officers stopping all traffic under bright Klieg lights. Except that on closer inspection, they weren't police officers at all - the checkpoint, more than 120 miles south of the Canadian border, was manned by the U.S. Border Patrol.

I have never read the U.S. Border Patrol training manual, but I always assumed that it had an entry for "fishtailing unmarked white van full of Eastern Europeans" listed somewhere in the chapter on "Things to Watch For". So it was with a little bit of trepidation that waited for an officer to stroll over to our driver's side window, and address the only US-born person in the entire van.

"Evening. All U.S. citizens?"

"Uh - some..."

"Some?"

"Some are international students with student visas"

"Student visas, eh?"

A glance inside at fourteen mortified Slavic faces.

Well, I'll believe you for now... Go ahead"

Which raises the question - what the hell are we paying our border patrol for?

Actually, it raises severa questions. What, if anything, was the Border Patrol looking for at 11 PM on a Saturday night in rural New Hampshire? How on earth does the arrival of a long, swerving van full of Bulgarians, Romanians and Greeks at midnight fail to cross a suspiciousness threshold? And what was the significance of this "for now"? Were there road blocks even further south?

Illegal Canadian immigrants beware - we are watching, we are waiting.

The van was full of mirth after this near-encounter with The Man, and everyone arrived at the church in an excellent mood. We had only a few minutes to spare before midnight, and the whole group filed into the church just as candles were being passed out.

An Orthodox church has no pews to sit in - the entire service is performed standing, and in the case of Easter the service is almost entirely sung. The Claremont church was entirely dark except for a light in the vestibule, and it was packed with people. Strangely enough, the priest was giving an an almost conversational homily, something I had never heard before. Even more strangely, a tall man was taking flash pictures in the dark, and no one seemed to bat an eye. I would come to realize over the course of the evening that the picture taker was affiliated with the church, or perhaps the border patrol - he seemed to go around photographing all he could, church-wedding style.

We all got candles and at the stroke of midnight, the chain reaction started - the people in the very front got their candles lit, and then passed the flame along to their neighbors, until everyone had a glowing beeswax candle in a little dixie cup, and the doors to the church opened wide. The congregation filed out the door, those closest to the front singing enthusiastically, and the singing dropping off towards the back, where the newer or less committed parishioners were. We walked out into the beautiful, freezing night, the bells of the church ringing loud above us.

After circling the church once, the congregation arrayed itself below the main steps. Two skinny girls in front of me, clearly sisters, were huddled up together and shaking like reeds in their thin Easter gowns. I took off my gigantic winter coat and hung it on their shoulders, under the suspicious eye of their mother. It made them look like an absurdly puffy little two-headed monster, still shaking but not quite at the same high frequency.

The priest arrived at the doors of the church and began to sing. This took a while, but the gist of it was that he was very happy that Christ had been resurrected, and the congregation sang back that it was also happy, and that we would have eternal life, and could it please go back into the church now. Of course this done with much more elan than I can convey, with lots of back and forth about trampling down death by death, but there was definitely a certain desperate shuffling of feet among the people who hadn't brought their coats. After many verses and a recitative, the doors to the church swung open and we all filed back inside.

The church, which had been completely dark as we left, was now blazing with light. Every candle in the place was lit, filling the air with the scent of hot beeswax, and there was already an undercurrent of incense. The Orthodox service emphasizes mystery - between the congregation and the altar there is a large wooden screen, the iconostasis, and only the celebrants actually go behind the iconostasis to worship at the altar, moving back and forth between this holy space and the main chamber where the congregation stands. The Easter service is entirely sung, with many repetitions, and at regular intervals one of the celebrants will walk out from next to the altar and announce to the congregation:

"Christ is risen!"

And everyone will respond:

"Indeed he is risen!"

This in Old Church Slavonic, and Greek, and English, and a host of other languages. And then the singing kicks in again, and it repeats for hours. Something about the music, the incense, and the holiness of the service makes the time pass smoothly, so that despite being on your feet and awake far past midnight, you are not encumbered by it.

The kids, of course, begin to pass out soon after the excitement of midnight wears off. In front of a little wooden barrier separating rows of people I could see an elaborate nest, with blankets and pillows laid out and a selection of sleeping two-year-olds arranged like sardines. They were so thoroughly asleep that the Second Coming could not have roused them. I got myself within eyeshot of a songbook and tried my best to sight read, for which I hope my neighbors and an all-forgiving God will pardon me.

But about two songs in to the actual liturgy, late in the service, I found myself singing a song that I knew by heart, but could not place. It was the very strangest feeling, and it took me the best part of a verse to realize that what we were singing was a translated, Christianized version of a very old, very pagan Georgian hymn:

Thou art a garden, newly in blossom
The beneficial root, arisen in Eden
A fragrant poplar grown in Paradise
And thou thyself a brilliant sun

The world is a strange and wonderful place, I thought, when a Polish guy in New England can recognize a Georgian hymn in a Russian church without even being carded by the border patrol.

When the very last of the songs was over, the priest invited everyone to take communion, diplomatically pointing out that this was for the Orthodox who had properly prepared themselves through confession and fasting, and not for any old wahoo who happened to be hungry after three hours of singing (no wafers in Orthodox communion, you get real bread). The closest I had come to preparing my soul for communion was ironing the shirt I would wear for the service, so I slipped out instead, past some desperate post-Lenten smokers on the church steps, and walked over to check on our van. I was surprised by a very bleary and tousled Romanian head that popped up over one of the seatbacks, looking absolutely wretched with fatigue, like a prairie dog that had been up for three nights. The girl had some paper due, and was too tired to walk into the church even though she had made the whole trip out to be at the service. Her head dropped out of sight again almost instantly.

Returning to the church steps I saw several of the Middlebury students now stepping outside - the liturgy was over, and only the devout were left to take communion, standing in line with their arms crossed. We tiptoed back to the van and seized the enormous basketfuls of food stored in the back, carrying them down into the church basement. There were cakes, quiches, cookies, nuts, cheeses, a shocking quantity of wine, an big basket of dyed Easter eggs, and for reasons beyond my ken, two thick, incongruous cylinders of pepperoni. These were all spread out to be blessed by the priest when he came downstairs. I watched a beefy, barrel-chested Bulgarian football player hang his head as several of the little Romanian women scolded him for not having properly kneaded the dough for his yeast cake, leaving it too rubbery. The rest of the group was already having egg battles - the goal was to crack your egg against an opponent's, and see whose broke first. Lacking all technique and egg selection acumen, I lost round after round, the eggs turning to ashes in my mouth after each harsh defeat. Soon the room filled up, people eating and chatting, small children piled into a corner to sleep or play, the entire and obviously close-knit congregation wondering who the hell we were. Some of the more adventuresome made small talk with the students, while the priest's daughter cornered our tall, melancholy-eyed Russian and gazed adoringly at him as he spoke.

When the buffet had been stripped quite bare, and even the crazy Bulgarian girl who had worn heels to the standing-only service ("God sees") had finally given in and found herself a chair, we began the long business of collecting students and piling them back into the freezing van. Even the dead-tired Romanian had been forced inside by the cold, and had spent the last hour swaying by a platter of cold sausages. Soon the pepperonis were loaded again, empty baskets piled in the back, and every seat but one filled with shivering students. We dispatched the more diplomatic of our Greeks to tear the Russian away from the priest's daughter, who was still nodding intensely and boring into him with those deep, sad eyes. We made a forty-seven-point turn out of the driveway, headed north, and waved to the Border Patrol as we fishtailed home to Vermont.

5:51 PM

04.16.04

On Readability

I have inflated the print size and made some other small changes on the site in hopes of making it easier to read. Given the site motto, it seems to be the least I can do.

Despite my usual horror at the idea of user feedback (I come from the "all comments are comment spam" school), I'd like to ask for suggestions from anyone who finds this site uncomfortable to navigate. I have a good pair of eyes and an Apple cinema display, so in many ways I am my readers' worst enemy. You can email me at the address in the sidebar - extra points if you include an actual stylesheet patch.

Please note that thanks to Mark Pilgrim, the site is also quite readable in Lynx (or any other text browser).

11:35 AM

04.07.04

PC Forum

Last month I attended PC Forum, a conference of IT movers and shakers that attempts to answer the question "when 400 CEOs, venture capitalists, and high-powered corporate executives use an open wireless network, does it occur to anyone to encrypt their email?"

Answer correctly and you win an all-expenses paid, five hundred forty day trip to the sun-kissed Arizona pokey.

I confess that I boarded the Phoenix-bound airplane with very little idea of what PC Forum was, not realizing that I was headed to a posh and venerable old conference from the days when 'PC' was a buzzword (it claims to stand for 'personal communication'); not even realizing that Arizona in March didn't require three wool sweaters. I was in the state that Zen masters call "beginner's mind", and that employers outside of academia call "gross negligence". Somewhere over west Texas, my conscience jerked awake and I dug out the thick packet of conference materials, feeling like a secret agent opening sealed orders.

PC Forum, the packet informed me, is a kind of high-end conference for IT executives, senior corporate pooh-bahs, venture capitalists, journalists, and pretty much anyone else who believes that computers will revolutionize the worship of Mammon. The mastermind behind the conference is Esther Dyson, one of those ubiquitous Dysons who are like the Gambino family of computer science, except with fewer rubouts. Dyson is an unassuming, soft-spoken woman with an extremely accurate sense for which side her bread is (thickly) buttered on - the conference itself brings in over $4,000 per balding head, and many of those attending also subscribe to a compact little $800/year newsletter called Release 1.0. Having read an issue of Release 1.0 (an $80 value) I found all the monetizing a little hard to justify, but of course it should have been clear to me that the high prices weren't about cupidity at all - they were functional ($4K a head is an effective gatekeeper), and also served as a sign that I was about to enter a very different subculture.

In my own habitat (the world of hackers, idlers, open source types) information with a price on its head is suspect by definition. The dogma is that truly good stuff should be able to withstand peer review, criticism, and open discussion, none of which are possible when you have to pay money up front. Charging for information indicates you are a some combination of charlatan, self-promoter, or newbie. A Clay Shirky essay may be the nearest hacker-side equivalent to a publication like Release 1.0, and it gives a good illustration of how the hacker subculture works - the essay is published freely, the goal is to disseminate it as widely as possible, and the measure of success is how widely it is able to change the conventional wisdom and set the ground rules for futher discussion. The propagation of new buzzwords, particularly among people who don't understand them, is a handy metric for measuring this success.

Of course, people in this habitat are as motivated by wealth as anyone else, but the financial benefits are a second-order effect. You endeavor to make a name for yourself through ideas, and then you find ways to milk your reputation for money. Like in academia or in the arts, you are supposed to affect disinterest and even a slight distaste about matters financial, while working hard behind the scenes to rake it in, hand over fist. A too-obvious attempt to cash in gets you in trouble - consider Jakob Nielsen, who went from usability guru to object of ridicule in part because he tried too hard to push his paid consulting business.

In the kind of group that attends (and can afford) PC Forum, the calculus is completely different. Ideas and information are a form of capital, and there is an elaborate social and legal infrastructure in place to make sure other people don't swipe that capital away from you. The very phrase "intellectual property" originates from this worldview. The logic is clear - why isolate ideas and data from the mechanisms we use to assign value to everything else in our economy? The market, for this group, is the ultimate reputation system, because getting people to give you money for something is a test of value that you can't fake. Far form being a red flag, a price tag attached to information suggests that such information may be worth buying, or at the very least that the people selling understand how the world works. By that logic, a $4,000 conference is interesting in ways that a $200 conference might not be. And anyone who just gives valuable information away is an idealist, a sucker, or a fool.

This was my first real exposure to the commercial-minded group, and it made for a very interesting conference, particularly given that the theme of this year's conference was "The Big Picture: In Focus". The challenge the conference organizers faced was how to give a roomful of very distractible, high-ego people an illusion of far-reaching vision without actually stepping outside of the worldview of software and computing as a business. It was the exact analogue of the "how to make money in open source" panels you find sometimes at hacker conventions, a way of pretending that you grok the other world without having to let go of any of your favorite assumptions.

Attendees really did want to hear new perspectives and look at the Big Picture, whatever that is, but at the same time everybody in the room had succeeded by being relentless, detail-oriented, highly focused and keeping a close eye on the bottom line. This made for a certain impedance mismatch between the lofty topics and the actual discussion - witness an earnest panel on the transformative power of grassroots politics conducted in front of an audience of major political donors, or a panel on new frontiers in search technology with an almost fetishistic focus on the design and operation of travel sites.

One of the most daring of the talks was on the importance of defaults, where the speaker revealed that people are very much inclined to go with default settings, a revelation software hackers have known about approximately since VisiCalc. Other panels included an amusing exchange between Bruce Schneier and the scowling, oatmeal-brained assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at the Homeland Security Department, an aimless puff-interview with Google, and a high-spirited moderated discussion about how to solve spam while making sure that people aren't deprived of the chance to hear about valuable opportunities and offers. The conference ended with an interminable dinner talk on the difficulties of philantropy - to quote Esther Dyson, "how do we teach the poor to cook instead of giving them food", which captures the occasional fatuousness of the event nicely.

Just the fact of holding the conference in Scottsdale already lent it a strong dose of unreality. Arriving in Arizona by airplane, you cross hundreds and hundreds of miles of completely barren desert, until suddenly you are descending into a single concentrated valley of suburban developments stretching to the very base of the surrounding cliffs. It feels very much like descending towards the surface of Mars, and then suddenly finding yourself over Glendale, Connecticut instead, except with Mexicans, more swimming pools, and saguaro cactus in place of sugar maple. The entire city is sustained by a combination of fossil groundwater, a large fraction of the Colorado river, and massive collective denial about the wisdom of building large population centers in the desert.

The Fairmont Scottsdale Princess is an oasis in the heart of this strange place, an expansive resort hotel built in Pink High Adobe style, with bekhakied footmen and service staff discreetly creeping along miles of balconies and arcades. The hotel is an absolute palace of luxury, with rooms that could contain most of my post-college apartments, where even the walk-in closet has a walk-in closet. And at the center of it all is an enormous swimming pool, which makes for a fine place to soak if you can suppress the mental image of the thirsty desert trying to penetrate the many yards of protective concrete and suck the pool dry as a raisin.

There's a school of thought about conferences that says all the interesting stuff happens outside the actual sessions, and PC Forum does nothing to disprove it. Admittedly I missed most of the highest-caliber schmoozing, not being a golfer, but the combination of free meals and open wireless meant I got to witness a fair deal of the interesting action. It was fascinating to watch an entire schmoozing ecosystem spontaneously self-assemble at each mealtime, like animals gathering at a watering hole in the savannah.

Of course the large tasty mammals of this ecosystem were the assorted CEOs, venture capitalists, publishers and high-level executives, easy to identify because they were besieged by petitioners, and because they walked around gesturing and muttering like crazy people (one AOL exec sat through an entire lunch next to me talking on his headset). They could be elusive, stampeding off to the golf course at the least pretext, but I also would be elusive if every other single person in attendance wanted a piece of my hide.

Playing the role of jackals, hyenas, and various other scavengers were the journalists from the big websites and newsweeklies. They were not particulary obtrusive and they tended to hover around the edges, but you could tell they were on the alert for signs of weakness and decrepitude. For reasons that baffle me, most of the journalists at PC Forum were men of a single type - bearded, menschy, somewhat pear-shaped, with a vaguely oppressed look about them and a crowd of small children in tow. In the mornings they could be spotted far away, exiled to a breakfast Siberia with their haggard wives and numerous progeny.

Strutting around like those long-legged birds that fearlessly pick insects off the heads of large predators were the countless publicists, most of them frighteningly well-dressed women in tight black pants. They rendered the few real geeks in the crowd completely inchoate with the concentrated power of their social skills. I had never interacted with a publicist before and the experience inspired awe. At one point I had a brief conversation with a publisher and found myself getting an exit interview from his watchful publicist immediately afterwards - did I have a good conversation? Did I get everything I needed? Who was I, exactly? Did I have a card?

The parasite group, the one I clearly belonged to, consisted of a buzzing gnat-like cloud of young, well scrubbed, relentlessly cheerful people desperate for buzz, funding, attention, support, capital, or press for their various projects. To my total astonishment, one of these young cheerful people turned out to be an adult version of a kid I knew from high school, someone who I remember as a tall, gangly soul with a propensity to stare and an unfortunate resemblance to John Denver. My mother used to babysit him, to the great delight of our classmates.

But now there he was, standing before me in the flesh, another foot taller and just as intense, tracking down prospective backers for his revolutionary geolocation software. We chatted for a while and then I watched his towering head slowly recede through the crowd of margarita-drinking conferencegoers, trying to penetrate to the heart of a investor cluster.

I focused instead on penetrating to the bottom of my drink. And then it was off to the whirlpool.

I want to go back every single year.

7:17 PM