Delicious books in the mail from amazon. I must be their best customer. William Gibson's new one, Pattern Recognition has a lead character who is allergic to fashion:

"CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That's what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention...What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She's a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.
...A glance to the right and the avalanche lets go. A mountain of Tommy coming down on her head...My God, don't they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra... There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."

New cell phone numbers for us. Melissa is 207 948-8053, and I am 8063. We got little Motorola phones (v120, v60i) that can be synchonized with my palm thingy, but in two years when these contracts are up, phones should be available that will converge the phone, the PDA, and GPS in a better way. These phones at least have voice recognition, so that I can say "Melissa" and it will dial her phone. I wonder what small shift of brain tone happens from speaking rather than punching numbers.