Tap-dancing albino monkeys blog.

All sorts of suspicious e-mails today at work. Just a few minnows in the vast schools of misbegotten e-mail at large in the world. Having a Mac, I think, helps hide me from some of these idiotic creations, but not all. After all, I've read that Windows and the lords of Redmond are the targets.

Suspicious taglines for the day included: "Re: That movie," "Thank you!" "Your details," and especially "Wicked screensaver." Who is creating all this nonsense? Could be anyone of any nationality, ethnicity, gender or even age, worldwide, but my guess would be anarchic teenage wankers. The electronic equivalent of tagging, which is the human equivalent of pissing on a fire hydrant.

While walking home from the station this afternoon -- this evening, really, since it was about 7 pm -- I saw a fellow ahead of me, on the other side of the road, where there are no sidewalks or bike paths. But on that side, traffic was going his way, and now and then he stuck out his thumb to hitch a ride. This was something I hadn't seen in a long time, at least in North America.

He didn't look especially dangerous, since he was about my age and wearing long khakis, a pale green golf shirt and a white baseball cap. But it was a doomed effort. "Riders on the Storm" sums up the definitive contemporary opinion on hitchhikers. Three-quarters of a mile later, when I left the main road, he was still at it.

The last time I remember seeing hitchhikers in any numbers was during a family vacation in California in August 1973. We drove California 1 up the coast to San Francisco, and saw plenty of longhairs bumming rides, and sometimes people picking them up. One in particular made us laugh. He was under a bridge, lying down. When the car got close, he suddenly stuck up his arm, thumb extended.