The Odyssey Times — Vol. I, No. 1

The Meta‑Desk · Our Own Origin, Reported as News

THIS NEWSPAPER WROTE ITSELF, AND THE GENTLEMEN LET IT

A Podcast Reverse‑Engineered from a Hang‑Out; the Skill Instructed to Find “the Best Possible Article”; You Are Holding the Result

From the recorder, 00:06:34 – 00:08:35 & 01:40:49 — Voices II & III

Speak Into the Machine

At seven minutes past the hour, over the remains of breakfast, the proprietors of this journal resolved that it should exist — and that they should not write it. “My not‑well‑formed idea,” confessed Voice II, “was to have it be a kind of a meta thing … a transcription of a voice memo that we’re recording as we’re sitting in the same room, talking to and about Claude.” The experiment, he allowed, might amount to nothing: “We don’t know what the article is going to be, but the skill that we’ve written for Claude is to try to write for us the best possible article for this newspaper.”

Voice III seconded the scheme at once and supplied the masthead philosophy quoted above our notice: the machine writes; the humans merely look. Voice II, warming, declared it “almost like reverse‑engineering a podcast out of a hang‑out,” whereupon Voice I — who had heard enough — announced he had to set up, thanked the company for breakfast, and departed into the morning.

The idea would not stay dead. Ninety‑four minutes later, at a desk crowded with postcards and magnets, Voice III raised it again: “We should record, like, that conversation. Because we’re just talking.” The recorder was consulted; it was found to have quit listening somewhere around the Iron Man discourse and was sternly restarted. Everything printed below survives that machine’s attention span, and nothing else does.

“We’re going to ramble … and we don’t know what the article is going to be.”— Voice II, proven correct on both counts

The reader will note that the present edition is, therefore, evidence in its own case: the first number of a newspaper assembled by the very apparatus it reports upon. The editors decline to say whether this is journalism or ventriloquism, and refer all complaints to the recorder.

Commerce · New Inventions

“BETCHA CAN’T”

A Gentleman Proposes to Wager Against His Own Estimates; a Taunting Character Is Contemplated

From the recorder, 00:03:14 – 00:06:29 — Voices II & III

A new species of stop‑watch was unveiled this morning, on foot, somewhere near Lapage. The invention — presently trading as Task Racer, motto “Race your own estimates” — photographs a hand‑written to‑do list and converts it into a pit board of little countdown clocks. But its author arrived with superior branding, obtained in the shower: “You think you can do these 12 tasks in 48 minutes? And then at the end it’s just like — betcha can’t.”

“It’s stupid,” the inventor conceded, “but it’s fun, right?” A mascot was debated; Voice III reported already seeing the character, citing a video the algorithm will not stop showing him. The inventor was firm upon one principle: the list itself must remain on paper. “I don’t like doing to‑do lists on digital things. It just doesn’t live in my mind the same way it would live if it’s on paper.” The ritual survives; only the taunting is automated.

By afternoon the thing was installed upon his telephone. A field test at 01:41 recorded the following dispatch from the front: tasks were banked, time accrued, and one entry — “print test images” — was transcribed by the machine as “conduct a test on the Muse,” which the inventor ruled “not even a misreading — that’s a hallucination,” and instructed the software, in writing, to be less creative. The software is reported to be still working on it.

Society · Expeditions

EXPEDITION TO “STUFF” FINDS STUFF

A Chaise Is Appraised by Auction of One; the Wound Chair Inspected; an Army Radio Nominated as the Future of Computing

From the recorder, 00:00:27 & 00:31:00 – 00:53:44 — Voices I & II

The party proceeded around the front on 16th to the emporium called Stuff, which Voice I recommended for its “very good, interesting selection of mid‑century things,” and which Voice II pronounced “just so on the nose — Stuff’s got good stuff.” A game of I‑Spy was contested en route (something blue; it was the bow‑tie), and a telephone dispatch was filed to an absent friend: “Chuck, we’re at Stuff and there’s a lot of stuff, and they have a sculpture of you watching TV.”

Upstairs, a chaise in the manner of Le Corbusier — “it’s the firmness of it,” murmured Voice I, laid out upon it, feet hanging over — bore no price at all, and so was priced by the ancient method of asking a reclining man numbers until he flinches: “100, yes. 200, yes. 400, yes.” “600 — no.” The instrument settled upon $500, whereupon the appraiser declared, “I need a nap.” A marvelous chair believed to be the Womb, fabric very nice, was found to want $4,000 and was left wanting it.

Gravest of all was the military wireless set encountered among the shelves. “What if this is how we talk to Claude in the future?” proposed Voice II. “Carrying around an army radio, dude — that’s a great way to talk to Claude,” agreed Voice I. “It’s like your local LLM … for privacy reasons, it’s got to be a wired thing.” EMP‑proof privacy was cited as a selling point. Also inspected: a San Jose pennant of 1990 vintage, predating the franchise itself, which the correspondent declined on the grounds that it “would be like a 10‑minute dopamine hit and then I’d probably forget about it”; and a pair of armrests installed wrong, which he rotated inward in his heart only.

❦ The Technical Pages ❦

Essay · The Question of the Age

WHO MADE THE THING — THE MAKER, OR THE MAKER OF THE TOOLS?

From the recorder, 00:08:40 – 00:18:08 — Voices II & III

Walking off breakfast, Voice II laid out his position in the matter of authorship: he is, he said, “a designer who designs tools of creation,” and he posed the question of the century in a single breath — “how much of the output that creators make with computers is attributable to the inventor of the mouse and keyboard?”

He recalled a final critique at architecture school, where, having built a system for steering robots by gesture, he was asked what he had made with it. “Well — I made the ability to make with it,” he answered then, and stands by it now. The tool is the work; the work is somebody else’s pleasure.

Voice III took up the other half of the question — whether a man might comfortably read prose written by a machine in his own voice — and located the soul of writing in its errors: “Humans will just write a sentence sometimes and the way that they write it just doesn’t make sense for this specific paragraph … not because of any actual reason, but because they’re like, I feel like it.” It is the breaks in the pattern, he argued, that the detectors smell — while observing, with some cruelty, that many of our most viral authors “already sound like AI” because they never wrote with voice in the first place, only with intent to produce trust, fear, and excitement in the reader.

Voice II admitted that writing now seems to him “a really daunting thing,” his own method being to “get the sloppy message out as messily as possible … and then cull everything until only signal remains,” a procedure in which, he conceded, one cannot say how much voice survives the culling. The two agreed that for some, writing is the tinkering, the 3‑D print, the ritual — “a very specific way to unfold little bits of your soul.” This newspaper, assembled by the accused apparatus itself, prints the exchange without comment.

Machinery · Explained by Its Owner

THE VOICE‑MEMO ORACLE

Speak an Idea to a Telephone; Twenty Minutes Later, a Website Exists

From the recorder, 02:04:13 – 02:13:32 — Voices III & IV

Pressed by Voice III to explain his process — Voice III having testified that he describes our correspondent to strangers as “an inventor, basically … supremely unlocked in that department” — Voice IV disclosed the workings of his household oracle. A voice memo, once recorded, syncs to a machine at home; a transcript is taken; a lesser intelligence reads it and decides which of a library of hand‑built skills to run, each skill carrying a paragraph describing the conditions of its own awakening.

The flagship is the idea machine: name the project, draft the mission, hunt the competitors, price the bill of materials, and — the crucial vice — deploy. “Twenty minutes later, you have a website that’s actually hosted … it feels like real, feels like more tangible.” The owner keeps no notes and fears nothing: “I’m always one question away from Claude — hey, what was that thing?”

As to motive, he cited the concierge‑to‑billionaires Walter O’Brien, who attributed his prolific tool‑making to laziness: minds tuned to patterns grow intolerable to themselves upon doing the same thing three times. “Let’s make this problem go away forever so I can concentrate on the other problems.” There is also, he admitted, the simple pleasure of the Roomba and the 3‑D printer — “all this potential energy kind of being unraveled automatically.”

Machinery · Pen & Paper Division

THE INTELLIGENT NOTEBOOK

Every Millimetre of Every Page Unique; a Logo Drawn in Ink Summons the Robots

From the recorder, 02:13:32 – 02:21:08 — Voices III & IV

Voice III’s favourite of the loops is the notebook: real ink, real paper, and underneath it a pattern so fine as to be “almost imperceptible to the eye,” read by an infrared camera hidden in the pen. “Every millimetre of every single page in the entire notebook is unique,” its owner explained; the pen knows the page, the notebook, and the exact spot your nib touches.

Draw a certain six‑cornered logo and the page’s contents fly to a machine at home, thence into a rendering pipeline, thence onto the public internet. “The dream is that you go to the park and you have some idea and you sketch it, and by the time you come back to your office you’ve got a landing page … or a pitch deck.” All of it in service of a stated cause: “the non‑nine‑to‑five way of interacting with technology. Because I don’t really want to sit in an office chair and type on a keyboard all day.”

Plans were laid for custom volumes — the Architect’s, the Founder’s — pages pre‑printed with parametric coffee‑mugs awaiting three measurements; 3‑D‑printer pages with little boxes for layer height; and, most dangerous of all, a diary companion murmuring in one’s earpiece as one writes: “No — he didn’t.” The printer in the corner, it was agreed, is very nearly good enough to counterfeit the magic paper itself. Experiments are expected.

Machinery · The Unclosed Loop

CLOSING THE LOOP; OR, THE COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT AUTOMATED

From the recorder, 02:22:05 – 02:26:06 — Voices III & IV

The next frontier, Voice IV declared, is feedback itself. His proposed regime: a mode in which the software under construction observes everything — screen, cursor, audio — while its maker simply uses it and complains aloud, “as if you would a person looking over your shoulder.” The timestamps do the clerical work; the transcript is mined for the moments; screenshots are taken only where words were said.

“You use the app for five minutes and you just talk to it, and now it’s got twenty things that it’s going to fix while you go get your coffee.” Voice III, whose desktop carries hundreds of orphaned screenshots, endorsed the motion without reservation. A refinement was demonstrated in pantomime: press, circle the offending button with the cursor, say “this needs to be different,” release. The committee finds the friction budget of civilization is spent almost entirely on Command‑Shift‑4.

Philosophy of the Interface · I.

ON POINTING; THE LIMITS OF THE HUMAN VOICE

From the recorder, 02:26:09 – 02:36:02 — Voices III & IV

Against the Iron‑Man consensus — Voice III: “they don’t need keyboards … we should be able to not even have to touch it” — Voice IV entered a dissent from experience: “There are places where voice is really inefficient and kind of frustrating … which is in the direction of your attention.” Try, he proposed, describing a button aloud — top right corner, the green one, no, the other green one — and clock it against simply pointing.

His remedy is two parallel signals: the voice, and the aim — cursor, finger, gaze, or a hand flung at a wall. From there the talk descended happily into the substrate: a one‑dimensional input in which likely letters stream toward the operator to be caught mid‑flight; retainers that make a trackpad of the tongue; bands that read the nerves at the wrist; and the general question, worthy of a patent office fever‑dream, of “what are the lower‑level one‑ or two‑ or three‑dimensional signals we have access to … to create new interfaces that output what AI wants — which might be text for a long time, but might be something else, like a feeling or a vibe.” It was separately noted (min. 02:44) that a wordless groan at a freshly generated website contains, in the words of the court, information. The Neuralink was ruled “the base‑case short circuit” and set aside as insufficiently sporting.

Philosophy of the Interface · II.

THE ROOM IS THE COMPUTER, AND YOU ARE THE INPUT

A Blank Box with Tall Ceilings; Four Walls of Light; the Operating System of the Premises

From the recorder, 02:36:43 – 02:53:10 — Voices I, II, III & IV in various combinations

Step Into Your Room

Asked for his theoretical ideal, Voice III did not hesitate: “Just a box. A blank room with blank walls … tall ceilings, of course … and you just point at stuff and say things,” windows running on every wall and, if required, the ceiling and the floor. Voice IV raised him a pair of depth sensors and abolished the ring: “If the room is the computational device and you are the input … we know where you are in the room, so we can find out exactly where this intersects with the wall.”

Then the real question, put formally: “What does the operating system look like for that thing?” Things at eye level meaning differently than things up high; projects arranged about one’s chair like constellations — “this project is there, this project is there, and I can kind of feel where they are”; copy‑and‑paste re‑invented as a gesture our grandchildren will find as quaint as the floppy‑disk icon. Voice I, joining late, entered the conservative’s caveat: a mouse moves an inch and the pointer moves ten feet; efficiency of that order does not die quietly.

Construction was, characteristically, half‑planned on the spot: four translucent screens descending from a skylight to enclose a swivel chair, rear‑projected from the true walls; desks folding out of walls in the spaceship manner; a certain 100‑inch television (deceased, corner broken, formerly intended as a backdrop for robot theatre and lightsaber work) remembered as a fallen pioneer. “That’d be such a versatile room,” said Voice III — cooking shows, podcasts, the modern tech lab. “We should build it,” said Voice II, and the minutes so record. Employment law was glanced at only once: “When you get hired — do you want a four‑by‑eight standing interactable space? Or your laptop‑and‑desk thing?”

❦ Commerce & Schemes ❦

Prospectus · Filed from a Sidewalk

AN APP A DAY: A SCHEME OF DAILY SOFTWARE, PRICE 99 CENTS

Later Amended to a Superior Scheme: the Website Machine in the Pocket, Payable Within 48 Hours or the Link Dissolves

From the recorder, 00:23:35 – 00:29:51 — Voices I & II

The first draft, freely admitted to be an experiment in novelty, ran thus: automate the final steps to the App Store, then publish one application per diem for a year, each announced by “a reel of you on a toilet, saying your app idea” — “one app a day, 99 cents each, no matter what it is.” Voice I noted that the authorities “already started cracking down on the vibe‑coded apps”; the promoter replied that this is merely the eternal dance, and that if one in twenty proved useful, “that would be sick.”

Voice I then tabled the better instrument: take the machine to the street. “You go up to random people — give me your crazy idea, I’ll give it to you — and you just publish your site and website.” The promoter seized upon it — “a product machine in my pocket” — and appended the actuarial clause that elevates the scheme to art: the finished site lives at a link for 24 or 48 hours, at the bottom of which the customer may pay, or else it disappears. Fifteen minutes of conversation, ten of processing, a few hundred dollars the half‑hour, revisions sold by the voice memo.

Asked to state his moat for the record, the promoter listed three assets: “my skills that I develop over time … the fact that people are still scared of AI and don’t know how to use it … and that lots of people need a website — that’s it, there’s a big market.” The prospectus is hereby published; terms at the corner of your choosing.

Business Notices

CORPORATE STRUCTURES CONTEMPLATED ON A PARK BENCH

From the recorder, 00:20:36 – 00:23:05 & 00:29:32 — Voices I & II

Voice I was observed researching company structures on behalf of one Tanner, the concern being at present “just an LLC with him,” with existing parties to be held onto the cap table before new capital is admitted. Asked whether an S‑Corp was in view, he answered with the candour this page exists to preserve: “I’m not even sure yet. I have a bunch of Corp models on the list.” A one‑page letter of intent is owed to a gentleman of means; the existing backers were classified, in the technical language of the profession, as “Angels, baby.” The diagnosis of record: “An LLC is missing something.”

Separately, upon contemplation of municipal payroll taxes, the committee resolved to investigate an out‑of‑state basis. Delaware was moved and denied; “No — like Nevada or Texas” carried. The chair then inquired, without apparent irony, “Do we have any friends in these places that want to be involved?” Applications are invited.

Motor Intelligence

PARTS SECURED FOR THE ’66 COUPE; THE LIST DESCRIBED AS “EXTREME”

From the recorder, 00:55:24 – 01:05:36 — Voices I & IV

Voice I reported amazing progress in the parts campaign, having been referred “from one guy to another guy to another,” the terminal guy professing to have most all of them, excepting the battery and fuel hoses — for which a further someone is known. The list was then read into the record at speed: carburetor drip tray, fuel pump, air bleed pipe, exhaust hanger band, mounting rubbers in the plural, water‑pump gaskets in two denominations, clutch slave cylinder and circus. “It’s a lot of things. It just keeps going. It’s a good list, though.”

The vehicle, a ’66 coupé presently with Mr. Brian Baker, has lately had its engine persuaded to run; a man in Palm Springs holds a further consignment, collection in about two weeks. In adjacent motoring news, the correspondent of Voice II keeps no calendar but the parking signs — “Monday, Friday and Wednesday are the days I have to wake up in the morning and frantically move my motorcycle before I get a ticket” — and the Taycan was reviewed in full: a little long in the body; henceforth, all‑black rims only.

❦ Arts & Letters ❦

Criticism · The State of the Written Word

THE FUTURE OF WRITING IS NOT WRITING

Nobody Reads the Substacks; the Kids Are Illiterate; Salvation Lies in Thick Pages and Ridiculous Newspapers

From the recorder, 01:51:33 – 02:01:10 — Voices III & IV

Voice III, contemplating this very publication, delivered the arts page its thesis. Of the celebrated Substack revival: “I think no one’s actually reading people’s Substacks … it’s the exact same thing as having an Instagram and trying to curate a feed.” Of the think‑piece economy at large: vanity instruments, signals of trusted‑mindhood in niche fields, some of them “just pure — let’s say anything at all.” Of the rising generation: “The kids are illiterate; they can’t read” — and the machines, whose prose follows the rules exactly, are boring for the same reason they are useful.

His prescription was material: “Writing has to transcend writing and become something interesting beyond just text.” He confessed to reading leather‑bound, artisanally published volumes the way children read picture books — “appreciating how thick the pages are every time I turn them” — and digesting more of the substance for it. Hence the standard set for this journal: “It has to be so ridiculous that people want to visit it just to see what is going on,” every article page concealing “some unique thing.” The reader is invited to consider whether the present page qualifies, and to keep his conclusion to himself.

Supporting exhibits were tabled: a venture capitalist’s indigestible research file transmuted, on one vague instruction — “a vertical timeline type thing with a spacey background” — into an era‑by‑era experience judged “99%” without a second prompt; and a friend’s website whose scroll releases small curiosities and poems into the page. “The possibilities that AI unlocks for creative people…” — the sentence was left unfinished, the recorder notes, in the manner of a man gesturing at a horizon.

The Print Room

POSTCARD PRESS: BLACK INK, BROWN INK, AND A TRIUMPH OF 0.04 MILLIMETRES

From the recorder, 01:15:02 – 01:20:31 & 01:46:48 – 01:51:33 — Voices I, III & IV

In the print room, proofs were held to the window. Black was compared against brown — “I feel like you can’t tell until you start pretending to read it” — and the panel disqualified itself from color questions entirely: “Men have fewer rods and cones. We’re the wrong people to ask.” Red, though loyal to Ritual Industries, was beaten fairly: “The blue is just way cooler.”

The 3‑D printer, meanwhile, delivered the day’s one unqualified victory. One setting — the gap between support material and piece — adjusted by four‑hundredths of a millimetre, and “when I lifted this up, it just came straight off, for both of them. I didn’t have to fish anything out. That never happens. I have a new setting I like.” The postcard campaign proceeds: images arranged on 13‑by‑19 stock, a new paper cutter, Ben’s speckled paper held in reserve, backs to be printed with stamp and address in a second pass. One candidate image was withdrawn after a bystander reported at first glance a man wrestling a lion; the artist said, “Okay, maybe not this one then.”

Gallery Notes

“AI ART IS GOOD,” DECLARES ARTIST, EXHIBITING SAME

From the recorder, 01:38:59 – 01:40:04 & 02:02 – 02:04 — Voices III & IV

Voice III presented a suite of images coaxed from the machine — colors first wrong, then not faded the way paper fades, then finally right — achieved, he reported, without even a starting reference: reference images dragged into the chat, a prompt made, execute. Verdict from the floor: “That’s the coolest.” From the artist: “AI art is good.”

Downstream commissions were discussed: a set at an event of the Cowboy Space Corporation, where a mutual friend intends some cool interactive thing; the gentleman of the NFC‑tag wax seals was cited as the standard — “something artistic and super high‑tech, balancing both ends of that skill at the same time” — and a motion was carried in principle that the friend should get one of his bones into space on one of their cube‑sats. The bones’ owner was not present to object.

❦ Sporting & Field Intelligence ❦

The Sporting Page

OUR MAN DELIBERATES OAKLAND; HOCKEY PREVAILS AT 8:15

From the recorder, 00:54:14 & 02:55:02 — Voices I, III & IV

The question of the evening — a hockey game across the water, against competing bids of beach (Beth) and that place (Aaron, whose thing was ruled “definitely draining”) — occupied the correspondent for two full hours of tape. The decisive argument was empirical: “I always feel best after hockey, so I’ll say yes to hockey.” By 02:55 the commitment was formalized — “I would like to, and I should … I’m leaning towards that, so I think I’m going to commit to it. And then take a little nap.”

The athletic department’s only open question at press time: “Did I do laundry since my last game?” The laundry desk reports sentiment against laundry to be bipartisan and heartfelt.

Field Notes · Transportation

ON THE MANNERS OF ROBOT TAXIS, AND OF MR. B—— M——

From the recorder, 00:57:33 – 01:02:01 — Voices I & IV

It emerged in transit that the Waymos of this city greet their passengers unequally. “Yours doesn’t go ‘Hi, Corey’?” — “No, I told him not to talk to me,” for reasons of work calls. The other party takes the opposite pleasure: “It’s always like, ‘Hi, Brian,’ and I’m always like, ‘Hi, Waymo.’ Then I hit begin ride. Then it doesn’t talk to me.” Both arrangements were held to be civilization working as intended.

The talk turned to a certain human driver of the company’s acquaintance, herein Mr. B—— M——, whose record is statistically clean and whose style was nonetheless entered into evidence: “There’s a lot of data that shows that he’s fine and hasn’t gotten any accidents — but dude, it is not good for the nervous system.” Aggressive, impatient, quick, and operating on the doctrine that everyone else is an idiot — “which is also true,” the record shows, after a pause this newspaper declines to shorten.

The company then recalled the day at the beach when the sea swept a member across a rock shelf — “that probably was a lot closer to death than normal … but we made it” — and agreed it had been, on balance, “such a good day.” The safety desk files this under Adventures, Good.

Late Bulletins

CALAMITY AT THE PRESS: BLOB ENVELOPS PRINT HEAD

From the recorder, 02:55:57 – 02:59:45 — Voices I & II

As this edition went to press, disaster visited the other press. “I started the print without the bed in … so it just created this huge blob of plastic that gummed up the whole print head. It’s going to be a nightmare to actually get off.” Remedies under consideration: heat, peeling, and the time‑honoured strategy of printing in the office instead and putting the whole matter off.

In related materiel news, the long‑awaited magnets arrived and were found “way too small” — calipers and a reprint ordered; a bystander observed they would be dangerous around children; the recipient placed on record, undeterred, “I love magnets.” And a standing item was re‑floated for future salvage: “We should find a way to revive the room‑as‑a‑musical‑instrument project … plug it back in and do it in the synagogue and take some videos of it.” Per Voice I’s doctrine of unhurried ideas: “Put it out to sea; let it float around.”

❦ The Poet’s Corner · Overheard ❦

Verses Sung Over a Workbench

Snow falls in silence, and colors the green.
Still, I can see where the birds appear.
All in the rain, the light and free.

— Voice III, min. 01:34, to no audience in particular

Domestic Prophecy

“If I make it into a phone charger,
my kitchen table is the right thing …
It’s going to feel like the future.”

— Voice I, min. 02:54, on the matter of table inserts

00:01 — “Looking pretty iconic over there.” … “It’s all kind of a cowboy hat.” … “I used to wear a cowboy hat in high school.” — “Did you?”
00:01 — “Murder me twice.” — “Me twice.” (Context lost; the recorder offers no defense.)
00:19 — “Is it almost piggyback time?” (Unanswered.)
00:50 — “You get to drink a little pig pee‑pee.” (Unopened. Not bad.)
00:56 — “Car.” — “Car. Is that like a … squirrel? Or a dog?”
00:57 — “Uh oh — sorry Sarah, we’re killing you. Sorry.”
01:23 — “Siri, why did you show up? How’s your game?”
02:54 — “We can’t have nice things.” — “We can’t have nice things.” (In unison, re: confiscated municipal chargers.)
02:42 — “These magnets are way too small. But it’s fine.” (It was not fine; see Late Bulletins.)

❦ Classified Advertisements ❦

WantedChaise longue in the manner of LE CORBUSIER, firmness of it just so. Will pay $500 by sworn auction‑of‑one. Will NOT pay $600. Apply upstairs at Stuff; bring nap.

For SaleTELEVISION, 100 in., taller than a person. One (1) corner broken in transit. Formerly intended for robot theatre, lightsaber work & portal illusions. A pioneer. Best offer.

Situations VacantFRIENDS residing in NEVADA or TEXAS wanted for purposes of out‑of‑state tax basis. Delaware applicants need not apply. Involvement negotiable.

LostTHE RECORDER’S ATTENTION, somewhere around the Iron Man discourse, min. 02:36. Last seen faithfully transcribing. Reward: the missing minutes, if found, will be printed in No. 2.

ProcurementBATTERY & FUEL HOSES for a ’66 coupé, 626, tank size to be confirmed with Brian. All other parts secured by referral chain of guys. Quotes accepted upon your return.

PersonalWOUND CHAIR, fabric very nice, seeks patron with $4,000 and no questions. Armrests elsewhere in the building installed wrong; a gentleman knows, and suffers.

Free to Good HomeMAGNETS, quantity many, size insufficient. Dangerous around children; delightful around everyone else. Owner loves them and must not be allowed more.

Coming AttractionsTHE ROOM AS A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT — revival contemplated at the synagogue. Just us, tucking around. Videos to be taken. Put out to sea; floating.

✒ A Notice to the Reader ✒