Hi, folks; welcome to another thrill-packed episode of "Temple of the Chili Dog." We've got a GREAT post lined up for you tonight. There is something profoundly strange about this exercise in self-publication. We speak as though there were an audience, but I'm confident that none of you out there are actually, you know, out there. We turn on the lights in the TV studio, have our chat show, plug our book, movie, or album, tell a few jokes, and call it a wrap. But the studio audience is empty, and the transmitter, while not turned off, is transmitting at a frequency no one knows, or even knows that they don't know. Never before in recorded history has the ratio of information's availability to its ability to find an audience been so freakishly high. It's like Borges' "Library of Babel." For those of you non-existent readers whose non-existence does not include having read Borges' story, it descibes a library which, by containing an infinite number of books with all possible combinations of letters, punctuation, and spaces, can be proved to contain all the information anyone could possibly want-- every book known to humanity would be recreated there, as well as many great books that have never been, and will never be, written by human hands. The library contains, somewhere, a volume in which all the secrets of the universe are clearly and correctly explained, as well as countless books in which the same secrets are explained just as clearly but completely incorrectly, and still others in which the answers are right but the author's style is questionable, and so on. But, of course, due to the library's vast size, it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find any book that does not begin with something like, "kyl fhkgftu r kftrno oijuyt glhjk l uujhnuiv uhjl oIoiu p pi i pdstgp i okl," and carry on in a similar fashion for the next two or three hundred pages. Occasionally, one might run across a passage such as, "uyjkdc gre pihl, the cockatiel was hjkbv ikbhkgc," and even more occasionally, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of timgjfjkl kyvtek, ejkh kugjkl ukl,jyfgl." But mostly it's just machine noise. I believe that Borges does mention that, by necessity, the Library contains a volume which is the true and correct index of the Library's contents. Thus far, no one's been able to find it, however. I'm surprised that the Internet doesn't get compared to Borges's "Library of Babel" more often. I'm sure I'm not the first to do so, but you'd think by now the analogy would have been beaten to death, the way that Robert Frost quote about there being something "that does not love a wall" got the living crap beaten out of it by every English-speaking media outlet in the world after the Berlin Wall fell. The poem, "Mending Wall," will probably never recover from its dizzying three weeks in the spotlight. That said, you can still find this poem, as well as all of Frost's other works, on the Internet. It's out there. Just keep looking.