Just for kicks I completely refurbished one of my original fake organizational websites, the Save the Guinea Worm Foundation, and moved it onto the Deadly Sins server. Some time ago, I discovered that the University of Tulsa library was using my site as an instructional tool to help gullible students differentiate between genuine research-worthy lunatic fringe websites and satiric ones. If you don't know, Guinea Worms are horrific parasites that enter human beings through contaminated drinking water, and then spend months growing to ghastly Twilight Zonish proportions within their unfortunate host. By the time they poke their little heads out to spew their nymph offspring into another water supply, they can reach three feet long. There is no quick way to extract them; tugging may cause the worm to break off inside the body, triggering a potentially fatal infection. Instead, one is typically obliged to wind out a bit of worm onto a twig every day, progressively removing it over several weeks. It's pretty much a creature straight out of one of your messier nightmares. I imagine Hell is positively bristling with them.

Which helps explain the steady stream of hate mail the Save the Guinea Worm Foundation received back when I still checked its mailbox. For a while, I kept making the site more and more outrageous, anticipating the day when savvy surfers would inevitably see its satiric intent. But no. The web is a marvelous cave wall upon which we primitives are aroused to scrawl our base perceptions of the world. Like Martha Stewart and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, its capacity to embarrass itself exceeds that of any satirist.

Taking advantage of my momentary solvency, I bought myself a graphic tablet to replace my mouse. Now I can all my drawing and design work with a penlike device that tracks over a flat tablet I hold in my lap. It feels like a substantial improvement, especially considering the fact that I was being kept awake at night with aching lower arms and hands, the result of a day spent contorted around the mouse. The only disadvantage I've detected is that I am not ambidextrous with the pen as I am with a mouse. Switching back and forth between hands is one of my common methods of relieving short-term strain, but the pen has proven a more challenging device to master with my odd hand. I am having to spend a little while each day forcing it to relearn familiar movements in this new position. Once again, technology rewires neurons.