pH for the Value-free
New Millennium

by Henry Bob Kulup

In its on-going attempt to "think outside the box," the MLDOSC* recently found itself re-thinking "litmus paper," and before long made a major breakthrough in its ceaseless efforts to better understand that confusing ebb and flow of emotion, quasi-rationality, and ego-gratification that we call "daily life."

This project of "re-litmusization" began as the new millennium bore down on us. The team was briefly distracted by Y2K (how quickly we forget). No sooner had it refocused and got back to work than here came the NASDAQ collapse. Prozac and Zoloft dosages were quickly doubled and everyone was back on track. At least until Florida and chads and Katherine Harris and James Baker (if only we could forget). A rocky 2000 Holiday Season was at last followed by months of renewed progress and in mid-summer the final breakthrough.

Team leader Skeptic Kernel (no relation to Faith Popcorn) arranged a week-long retreat for the group at Esalen, and by late August, 2001, MLDOSC was ready to publish. The initial report was scheduled for the September 15 issue of the Journal of Post-semiotic Derridesque De-construction and Reductive Redundancy. Unfortunately, the JPDDRR had its office on the 105^th floor of the South Tower you-know-where. The September 11 final tally of loss included not only their offices and staff (3 Oxbridge Ph.D.’s, 5 Stanford MBA’s, and 2 extremely ambitious Post-Marxist think-tankers from Guangzhou), but also their in-house Xerox printing set-up (they’d gone in-house because JPDDRR’s worldwide circulation never rose above 27). Somewhere in that over-eulogized pile of dust in Lower Manhattan was the MLDOSC report entitled "Acid-alkaline Tensions in Contemporary Culture: Re-formulating pH for the New Century."

Since most of the original data and drafts of the report had at about that time fallen victim to an ill-advised attempt to cross-install Windows XP on the team’s network, it has taken staffers several months to re-construct the data as best they can recall it and then re-formulate the original shattering conclusions as best they can recall them.

Confident of continuing awareness of the national trauma we have all suffered, we ask the reader’s forgiving and compassionate indulgence for any lacunae and trust that the larger picture implied by our guys’ (and gals’) breakthrough research will be kept in mind.