Feb 2007:

• "Information Overload" in the Headlines (a retro-update).
  In the late years of the last century, I began an investigation of anagrams of a particular phrase, "information overload." All in fun, of course --at first-- sharing surprisingly clever --I should say clever-seeming-- combinations with friends. But over the weeks our approach to the game became one of mock awe and superstition. We joked nervously at how much the letters seemed to know; the productions seemed, if looked at in a certain way, to illustrate the theme of the original phrase. Uncannily, as if a god had long ago carved warnings into the very foundation stones of our language. What it was about the phrase, "information overload," that had drawn me to choose it as the head of this trail of rearrangement, I do not recall.

  I spent more long nights than rationality can excuse, pouring over dictionaries, pushing sqauds of letters across pages in search of one last discovery, perhaps hoping to break that ambivalent mood, to prove it had been fun after all, a game worth having played. But neither a satisfying conclusion, nor a clear end to the possibilities announced itself, until at last the toll of sleeplessness on my waking life grew too high to ignore. The realization that the very phrase, "information overload," described the situation, had lengthened into a stale joke. I threw my notebook of collected divinations into the back of a drawer and left it there for a number of years.

  But some shadow of that fascination has stayed with me. Twice, now, in the darkened decade that has followed, I have succumbed to a temptation to revisit the permutations in search of answers to more pressing and selfish questions. Each time --so far!-- the oracle, like some chimera of Nostradamus and the author of the twisted back-cover puzzles of Mad Magazine, has taunted me, throwing my anguished questions back in my face-- this time seeming to refer to recent threats to the public, viz.