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The Plaza, Costa del Este. Quarter-page ad for a new boutique hotel in Panama City (reprise). Where’s that strip-club ad again? Wow. Oh, yeah. It’s not for a strip club; it’s for Trump’s hotel (it’s not). Spectacular. Viva Panama (44)!

Business Section

J. H. Cohn, LLP Accountants, quarter-page ad. This is weird. An ad in the Business section with a big picture of none other than the suddenly unemployed number-one news story of the day: Joe Torre. Strange placement today of all days. And check out the tagline for whatever the hell this company is: “How are you managing?” Well, today, um, we’re not managing at all. Right, Joe (45)?

Sports Section

None. I swear. Unless you want to revisit the whole Joe Torre–Bigelow Tea ad by association theory.

Metro Section

67wine.com. Full-page, back of section. Check out this massive list of wines from a company whose name I’m not paying any attention to. Wine is good. Really good wine is really good. Too bad I don’t know more about what separates one from the other. Remember when you worked for that asshole at that wine magazine when you got out of college and took the job because you didn’t want your in-laws to think you were an unemployed slacker? Too bad you didn’t pay any attention to all the free stuff you got to drink. I wonder what that jackass is doing today (46).

Main Section

None. But then again, a lot of them do look familiar, which makes me think I must have noticed at least some of these giant, logo-driven, not entirely unfamiliar billboards for the high-end likes of Movado (47), Gucci (48), Tiffany & Co. (49), Old Navy (50), T-Mobile (51), and Verizon (52).

Escapes (Travel) Section (Again)

The Plaza, Costa del Este. Quarter-page ad for a new boutique hotel in Panama City. Yup, Panama City. I was right. Not affiliated with Trump in any way. Not a strip club at all. Funny how I never considered Panama City a vacation destination yet now feel a strong desire to immerse myself in the culture (53).

Transcript of Phone Call Received at 7:46 a.m.

ME (after neglecting to check caller ID): Hello?

RECORDED VOICE OF DISTURBINGLY CHIPPER WOMAN: Good morning. This is your neighbors Bill and Susan. We’re calling to tell you that if elected as your state representative, John Doe will put an end to the shenanigans in …

ME (hanging up, thinking): “What’s so bad about shenanigans? I can deal with shenanigans as long as they don’t involve cold-calling voters, usurping the Constitution, breaking any laws, or initiating any wars without congressional approval” (then making a note to absolutely not vote for John Fucking Doe or anyone on the anti-shenanigan ticket) (54).

An Abridged Chronicle of the Online Advertising Experience

The thing about online advertising is it’s supposed to be more customized and easy to measure than any other medium. But my experiences have proven otherwise. For instance, there are several ways to see how many people actually visited my Web site, jamespothmer.com (shameless plugs don’t count), the other day when an online article I’d written for Forbes.com attached a link to it. The Stat-Counter for the site said 554, which was an all-time daily high. The most I’d previously had was somewhere around 300 the day my novel was reviewed in the daily New York Times. An average day sees somewhere between 10 and 25 visitors, so this was exciting. But the cool (or depressing) thing about StatCounter is it lets you dig deeper. StatCounter will tell you where your visitors linked from (almost all from Forbes.com), what country, state, city, and Internet service provider they came from (in this instance almost every state in the Union and twelve other countries), as well as which pages on the site they viewed. Most important, StatCounter also chronicles how long each visitor spent on the site. And this is where the total of 554 starts to get significantly less, um, significant. Because a closer look at 554 people who were connected to my site that day reveals that 335 spent a total