Yesterday I related the tale of the purloined mouseballs. Today the fellow who distributes copy from the printing room dropped a sheaf on my desk: eight copies of a rough draft of a column written two months ago, printed directly from my queue. I hadn't printed them. Someone had gone into my private directory - meaning, they figured out my password - called up a file and hit PRINT eight times, just to let me know they could do it.

Perhaps I'm paranoid and/or crazy, and the system just belched up the work by mistake. Possible, even though it never happens. It certainly makes coming to work more interesting, and it's having a salutary effect as well: the mouse mischief was a good excuse to have the fine fellows in Tech install my new trackball, and the file episode provoked an overdue password change. Looking around to figure out who might be playing these pranks, I'm heartened to see the number of people I consider trustworthy folk who wouldn't do this.

In the midst of all this botheration, a co-worker asked if I'd ever heard of a media-criticism web site called "Cursor," and I groaned within. Last night I dreamed I'd sued them for libel because they'd written I threw a fit over my mouseballs. (It's a pathetic inner life when you're dreaming of suing someone.) I called up the site, which is written in the voice of a celebrity hound, and there was a passage about this very web page:

I ended up at the downtown public library catching up instead on James Lileks through his exhaustive and wonderfully generous web page (www.lileks.com), "The Daily Bleat." Daily journal entries, novel excerpts, travelogues, photos of his wife and dog, as well as a sampling of photos of James himself (as one more indication of how cursed this summer has been for Budd Rugg, I learned that I apparently recently missed a snapshot of James in a snug Speedo, on a beach somewhere in Mexico). It's like a one-man Tiger Beat. If only all of my local media dream friends (that's a hint Garvin Snell! Hello Kristin Tillotson!) could be as considerate and giving in allowing their fans such full and completely gratuitous access to their private lives! Bless you, James r Lileks, you brave and shameless man!

Trust me, it's not a compliment. You have to read the entire page to get the tone, which is snarky and ultra-faux and gleefully insincere. There was an illustration of me with my face pasted on a hunkish body, and a Mexican hat moving around the frame. (With a blush of pride I noted that the page was running an applet called Lileks_hat; never had an applet named after me before.) Keep in mind that this is the same guy who put my head on an infant's body and called me a 55-year old pompous baby.

Then it struck me: I know who wrote this. The "James r Lileks" was a giveaway; for a variety of tiresome and pretentious reasons, that was my college byline. One of the two names who writes the local signed commentary worked at the Daily when I did. His e-mail address pointed to a butt-ugly domain devoted to selling some sort of contact management / database, which is apparently what he does now instead of photography. Then I looked at the e-mail address of the other writer, and went to a different domain - which turned out to host the database-shilling domain, the media-crit domain, and - God help me - a site that is, literally, a Mexican travelogue with dog photos. Good writing, enjoyable stuff, bland design identical to the media-crit site, right down to the hit-counter style. The author thanks the old Daily photog for putting the site together. So the guy who says my site is nothing but a self-serving sheaf of Mexican travel tales and dog photos is the guy who designed a site devoted to the same.

Well, as my mother would have said if she'd been online, if you can't say something nice, don't say their name or give their URL.

Long-time Bleat readers will recognize this prickly brittle mood from before, when thae Pioneer Press columnist printing a Bleat excerpt and ridiculed the idea of a daily page, suggesting - as does the fellow quoted above - that I believe everyone wakes in the morn dying to know what I have to say, desperate to hear my latest tale. For the record, then:

This page is written for my enjoyment; to vent things too flimsy for newspaper, or too tendentious & Serious for radio; to keep people in the habit of returning so they might visit the occasional projects; and most of all, to provide a spot where someone can go daily and get fresh content.

I apologize for being wary, spooked and peeved. We will return to our regularly scheduled good mood tomorrow. Unless someone sets my desk on fire.

Now I'm going to rejoin the X-Files game, where people have reason to be paranoid.

WEDNESDAY JULY 8

The Plot Thickens, or I'm nuts. I'm certainly thin-skinned.

Next novel update: Thursday. And, of course, Art Frahm's Fallen Underwear joins the Institute of Official Cheer.

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