Up yours, Department Lemur! I'm "working at home" today, a nifty conceit made possible by the sloganeering of MicroSatan and Steve "You Can Have it in Snozzberry" Jobs! As far as the Lemurs know, I'm lashed to my terminal, slaving over the pop culture report ... in actuality, I'm slumming in another part of the world, drinking minty absinthe and snorting up pillow lava while this column is assembled by trained supermodels! Wise up, suckers! HAH!
 

Baby's on fire! The Bad Art collection of Vito Salvatore presents artwork so mind-bendingly awful that it must be brilliant. Mitigate your indignation at the current national fascination with Norman Rockwell by drinking deep the all-American bathos of Purdy's "Monkey Bride!" Trade in your last Fred Remington for the true west tableau of "Sparsely-Attended Bullfight!" Lose your Warhol for the truly provactive "Sex X!" And why would you even entertain the idea of purchasing a Leroy Neiman print after drowning in Warshaw's (artist name approximate) stupefying "Liquid Pools," a work so wretched that even the curator's wife won't allow it to be displayed? Salvatore is really onto something - by buying up bad art en masse for less than 10 bucks a frame, and then reselling it to "you, the collector, for much, much more" ("Monkey Bride" can be yours for $217K), he has revolutionized the art world's Jennifer Lopez-sized bottom end. In other words, if you believe your "Still Life with Bananas and Haggis" is as crappy and derivative as anything Roy Lichtenstein turned out, guess what? There's somebody out there who's willing to prove your floored genius. You've never laughed and squirmed as hard in your life as you will when you pop into this demented online gallery.
 

Useless Knowledge makes the Passenger wanna get up on his thang. (Stay back!) UK is everything but what it claims to be - a keen repository for trivia (didja know that ketchup was once sold as a patent medicine? That the proper name for the # symbol is an Octothorpe?), familiar quotations ("Silence is the true friend that never betrays." - Confucius) and forbidden vocabulary ("fictioneer n :one who writes fiction especially in quantity and without high standards"). A "that explains it" index of How Things Work and a true/false trivia challenge only compound UK's high value. You gotta believe that any education is a good one. If you've been looking for a way to kill off an hour in your lonely little cubicle, be at ease, seeker. Be inquisitive. Be Useless.
 

You drank coffee and watched TV, right? Don't ask me how I knew; it's a gift. (Be grateful I don't share What You Did Last Night with law enforcement and religious groups.) My clairvoyance aside, isn't it time you combined your two pre-commute enthusiasms into one smooth, nutty latte? CoffeeTV tracks the bean around the globe by way of fascinating factoids - did you know that London's first coffehouse opened in 1652? - and more importantly, by way of java-related RealVideo snippets. Enjoy 30 years' worth of coffee commercials from the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and France. Get recipes for your favorite coffee drinks, hot and cold. Learn all there is to know about Brazilian coffee harvesting techniques - which amounts to everything the Brazilians want you to know and nothing more. Then get in your car and go to work, pal. Daylight's burning.
 

We'd had enough of Vegas for one lifetime, and since we had but 10 bucks to our name, there was only one way to leave town, and that was to Catch Out. We walked confidently into the Union Pacific yard - there wasn't a Bull in sight - and waited for salvation. We had everything we needed - a few gallons of water, earplugs, a scanner, a mess of spicy beef jerky, backpacks full of warm clothing, matches, papier de toilette - an elevated state of preparedness that allowed us to lay the remaining variables squarely on the fates. Would our train head north to Salt Lake City or south to San Bernardino? Would we luck into an open box car or get stuck with a mess of piggybacks? You wouldn't think there was an enthusiasm built around this, um, different mode of travel, but the Train Hoppers Space proves otherwise. And even though the dangers that come with that free ride are made plain - "It's unsafe and potentially life-threatening, and no one should ever do it," warns a Union Pacific employee - the THS still manages to make train hopping look like the most natural and romantic of adventures. The train rolls into view. And we run ...

I can't be finished already, can I? I reckon I had better get into the office before the Lemurs visit their wrath upon me. Last time I crossed The Department ... well, let's just say that the scars on my wrists and ankles didn't come from my self-destructive "goth" period, and that sunlight is a fine, fine thing. Better notify your congressman just in case. See you next week!