There's this Brit named Steve. Steve loves strip clubs. Now, being a Londoner, he has the requisite interest in talk of sex, boozing, and sport, three topics that bore me numb, but I have only ever seen Steve get truly excited about two things in life. The first is the culture of strip clubs, best exemplified by a sex act Steve calls (complete with pantomime) feeding the pony . The other has to do with Ali G. Steve (remember Steve?) is tickled pink that people wanted to sue Sacha Baron Cohen for racism but could not, for since he is a Jew, he is incapable of bigotry. This made no sense to me, but after witnessing the insanity of the UK legal system, I see no reason to doubt it. I am standing up to my nipples in salt water. I saw someone who looked remarkably like Steve yelling with a mildly impressive accent but poor grammar. I knew it wasn't Steve because he wasn't being tailed by an Eastender shouting blimey . I am standing up to my neck in salt water. J rg points out the reasoning for why normal peon developers don't have access to NEW. This makes perfect sense once you realize that each member of the ftp team is both a citizen and resident of the United States of America. The sea is rough. It is difficult to keep the laptop dry, and, well, the Piers Anthony book in my other hand is going to smell like ocean for weeks. That's precisely why I brought it, though; it would take extreme effort to keep it from getting wet. As it stands, or as I stand, there are three options available to me. I can retreat to the beach, where I will be mostly safe from the water. You could call this turning tail and running, or you could call it mastering my environment. It's all in the marketing. I'm going to succumb to this option anyway, and now is not the time for it. So I could also keep doing what I'm doing, keeping my head and laptop and book above water by expending near-constant effort. It's a little easier than in Puerto Rico at the place some random passerby kindly informed me that i was going to die a horrible death just like the 12 other people who had died in that spot that year. In essence though, it's like the futility of continuing living when you're surrounded by INTPs. Then there's the most appealing option: to be as the reed in some Taoist metaphor. I can just let go, and let the tides have their way with me, coolly caressing my face, washing over me, drenching my book, short-circuiting my keyboard, and filling my lungs with plant matter and some kind of 0.479M NaCl solution. My lungs see a problem with this otherwise-logically-sound philosophy. There's an old Middle Eastern proverb that goes something like Be as the date palm, above the spites. When she is hit with a rock, she strikes back with her sweetest fruits. Disthrust! Dilute! Disthrust! There may have been some corruption in the intermediate language.