USC Annenberg Innovation Lab

Dear Dr. Bones,

Please make a memorandumb of the following:

I run the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab (&c. &c. )

and file it under both "Annenberg, Planet" and "Squid, Vampire, Lesser Tentacles of the Great."

Though it is always distressing to find that CNAI, "the Commissariat for the New American Innovation," has metastasized even worse than previously detected, there there is not, in this case, any need to panic immediately. Our previous impression that Planet A. must be located many godzillions of conceptual light-years away from Zip Code 02139, salve magna parens, remains entirely valid. Not many little green gentlebeings will be making *that*that trip in the physical mode. Very likely the Tapling 2020 subcomponent is the only one that actually has. Possibly the only that ever will.

Our wannabe pal Vampy of CNAI (¿"of the Seein’ Eye"?) needs lots and lots of worrying about, no doubt about it, but since you and I only have two eyes, I recommend keeping one fixed mostly on the Native Management tentacle, and the other on the Fiscal Neoresponsibility tentacle." Plus the occasional surveyance of Fox on Fifteenth Street.

Mr. Prof. Dr. Taplingstein von Annenberg’s labóratory of the new American creationism can be worried about adequately on alternate Saturday mornings from 0315 to 0600 hours. Supposing some weird neovation with extraterrestrial DNA does escape the gloomy dungeons of USCAIL, lots of alarms will go off, unless extremely great care has been taken to make Citizen Critter look CA-normal. Successful camoflauge [1] would require such exceedingly great care, that if Von Annenberg actually manages the trick, he will have proved himself so vastly bett’rambrighter than mere Earthies that our resistance would have been futile in any case.

This outcome, however, does not seem likely, to judge from the specimen of _Zukunftswissenschaft_ immediately at hand.

As usual, I see no reason to doubt that the exotic gentlebeing believes its own neostuff with complete subjective sincerity. Indeed, an arguer might well argue that a cynical scamster would have carefully avoided "The Arab Street Revolt" at this point in spacetime, knowing how fishy it looks to us, who watch with unenchanted dragon eye, that the Wave of the Future (Pat. Pend.) should so much resemble the contents of this week’s more intellectually respectable fishwraps. My own crystal ball has been on the fritz for years, yet I believe I could manage *that* third of the Taplingstein Revelation even without it. Now if his xenolordship had picked, say, "Subtle Demographic Imbalances in Bolivia and Ecuador," . . . .

The "China" third is no better, though defective in the opposite way: That ola del futuro has been circling the globe for whole decades and degenerations now, like an albatross in the Drake Straights. Like De Vliegende Hollander (spookschip), even. Unfortunately for Taplingstein von Annenberg, stale and trendy do not often generate a higher synthesis, they mostly just sit there cheek-by-jowl and sog. Oh, well!

Moving whight along, we arrive at "U. S. Social Tensions," which even my dragon admits begins not unpromisingly:

... the U.S. [ought] to mind its own business [because] it will increasingly confront domestic social unrest ...

But T. von A. cannot keep that level up, lapsing immediately into "if the current economic stagnation continues," a bathos which shunts us fellow travelers straight back to Trendy Terrace, "Do not pass GO! Do not collect $200.00!" Furthermore, though one would have supposed Planet Annenberg at least as impartial as Mars, it does look as if their emissary should get out of CA and ¡USA! a little more: maybe -- just ‘maybe’ -- Uncle Sam and Nephew Schwarzenegger will not be the Omphalos of Time to Come. [2]

In any case, T. von A. should definitely crosscheck with the Financial Neoresponsibility tentacle: I betcha the crystal balls over there resonate more to the tune of "The U.S. [ought] to mind its own business [because] it will find it impossible to pay for doing anything else." Which impossibility will probably *not* take the shape of POTESSA S. L. Heath-Paling havin’ to devote half the G.D.P. of 2020 to riot control, an’ year-round summer camps for Lieberals, an’ similar measures for keepin’ the Bad Poor down in our place where we belong.

(( But Nostradamus knows best. ))

¡Happy days! (through affordable healthcare)
--JHM




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[1] Could you ask your learnèd colleague Alzheimer what it means that I was perfectly sure that I had mispelled ‘camoflauge’, but lo! and behold!! what I keystroked agrees exactly with the "Answers to Selected Exercises" at the back of the web.

Is there not, sir, a sinister allegorical appropriateness that this rather commonplace type of ‘mischievment’ / Fehlleistung / *parapraxis should befall me in conjunction with precisely this of all available C-words?

Though, come to t’ink of it, more suitable would have been for the blasted t’ing to look whight whilst being thoroughly ’rong. "And that in deed and not in word alone," as the bard Hausmanius hath it.


[2] _Omphaloi_? ‘Omphaluses’?