In a kind of Borgesian rewriting of history, United Artists has apparently doctored old photographs of Claus von Stauffenberg, the attempted assassin of Hitler, so they resemble better Tom Cruise who is playing the German hero in a film called Valkyrie slated to open in February of 2009. Read about the controversy and how it ties in to Scientology here.

Led by the seller to a discreet doorway where DVDs, CK1, and Louis Vuitton knockoffs await...

According to this article in the NYT,The Iraq Petroleum Company is back! Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, and BP will return to Kirkuk, Mosul, and other petroleum-rich areas, starting June 30th. The British, Dutch, French, and U.S. companies are returning to what was once part of the Ottoman Empire, after 47 years of being locked out in 1961 when General Qassem nationalized Iraq's oil, a program completed by our man, Saddam Hussein in 1971. The foreign oil companies were given very nice no-bid contracts to begin extraction, almost certainly giving them a nice position to pump out a lot more when the contracts end in two years. With oil at $140 a barrel, the price of war is cheap in comparison. With the leveraged investment of 4100 dead U. S. soldiers, tens of thousands wounded, about 100K dead Iraqis, and a half trillion dollars of taxpayers' money, big oil should be poised to make some very nice profits.

I had the great fortune to meet Paula Fox and her husband Martin Greenberg at LMCC's office. Paula had graciously agreed to read a long story of mine and give me feedback. She's a real pro and full of lots of life with a nice sense of humor. It was a real honor to meet one of my literary heroes.

I can't get enough of the skyless grids of downtown skyscrapers. I like the compression of space, the flattening of textures. The landscape becomes a carpet.

It was called Colony Collapse Disorder, CCD, and was a description of the alarming decimation of bee colonies throughout the U.S. and the world. About a year ago we were very obsessed about it, fearful that the bees' demise was the canary in the coalmine of the irreversibility of global warming. What happened to that story? Was it just one of many soundbites of hype that briefly occupied our ADD minds? Or was it not as bad as we expected?

The answer is that we do have ADD and the bee losses are bad, but perhaps not as bad as expected. A virus is to blame for much of the bees' demise, but also a kind of karoshi, overwork. Now to the part I did not know anything about: the business of pollination. Did you know that bee pollination is a $15 billion dollar industry in the U.S., that approximately 1,000 commercial beekeepers own 90% of the country's 2.4 million bee colonies, that far more lucrative than honey production is the pollination of almond trees, a $1.9 billion dollar business (compared to honey's paltry $160 million and double even Napa Valley's wine production)? As food prices increase and the need to pollinate more and more acres of cotton, fruits, vegetables, and nuts, the value of the beekeeper's services increase. Like the chickens overfed and forced to live on 20-hour days so that they lay more eggs, honeybee colonies are driven around the country from one crop to the next to provide their indispensable services. This week almonds, next week, blueberries, the week after, alfalfa, and so on. In short, the bees are overworked, dropped into neverending fields of pornographically titillating flowers, and on top of this many are given hormones to stimulate their busy bee behavior so that they gather (and disseminate) more and more pollen. It's a fascinating topic, and I could go on, but you'd better get it from its source instead. If our planet is to survive, bees, too, will need shortened work weeks, guaranteed vacations, and much less stress.

A portfolio of our trip to Paris is now online here.

Continuing the Paris death tourism tour...