All this talk by our city council people about giving the homeless identification numbers to keep track of them has me experiencing roaring mathematical flashbacks of the third kind. Assigning numbers to entities -- how functional! We may soon be able to establish a one-to-one correspondence between Seattle's homeless and an American ton of rubber chickens!

By further applying Pascal's triangle (in reverse!), we can stack both the homeless and the rubber chickens in two dimensional piles (provided we neglect their thicknesses), then stand back and watch them keel over! More fun than blowing up the King Dome! (Remember kids, don't try this at home.)

Speaking of dead French gamblers: when all the homeless in Seattle have their own personal numbers, just think how much easier it will be for them to play the lotto!

I'm hoping that the numbers passed out will include fractions. I don't think fractions get enough attention in our post-modernistic fast-paced internetted digital world. A lonely, neglected fraction is a vindictive fraction. You've all been warned.

But I know that won't happen, because everyone is so keen on the idea of using these numbers to count the homeless, and everyone knows you don't use fractions to count anything, right? You have to use counting numbers, right? That'd be 1, 2, 3, 4, and numbers like those, right?

Wrong. You don't need numbers at all. You need identifiers, and the means to know when to introduce new identifiers (when there is a new homeless person in the city) and the means to know when to retire old identifiers (when someone becomes formerly homeless).

The city of Seattle doesn't know that much. Our city officials can't tell when someone has become homeless, nor can they tell when someone has stopped being homeless. They don't have a clue.

So the "number" of homeless the city arrives at by passing numerical identifiers out is certain to be meaningless.

In our last issue our esteemed editor god, Timothy Harris, pointed out some immediate objections to what he refers to as Tag n' Trak. For example the fact that many will not want to cooperate with the system for fear that the police or the INS will be allowed access to the data.

So at the beginning it is certain that the city won't count everyone.

But then, after a year or two have passed, the count will become too large, as the city is unable to know when to retire numbers, because there will be no sure way of spotting those exiting the system.

As the false count piles up it will become blatantly bloated, & the city will have no choice but to resort to the obvious fix: anyone who doesn't try to use the city's services within a certain time period gets their number retired.

So people who have given up on the city will again go uncounted, and we will be back to where we started.

(Actually there are those in the city government, Tom Byers, Peter Steinbrueck, etc., who say that the purpose of all this is only to count the resources available to the homeless, rather than the homeless themselves. Why then they are not proposing just assigning the numbers to the resources, they don't say.)

At least the proposal only involves passing out finite numbers to the homeless. Because if they were going to pass out infinite numbers I would be really peeved, as the following recycled poem is meant to indicate.

A Finite Rant Against Infinity, in 23 Lines to Be Exact

1. Don't need no body telling me

2. 'bout the 'lleged beauties of infinity.

3. A concept invented for divinity

4. by people with neurotic affinity

5. for passive-aggressive duplicity.

6. Paradox pawned-off as lucidity

7. meeting challenges with contrived absurdity

8. exploiting riddles to extract complicity.

9. THEN there's mathematical infinity.

10. Borrowed tongue-in-cheek from theology

11. and harnessed to Fourier Anal-why-ticity.

12. Hey I got a goddamn math degree

13. so don't even think to try to impress me

14. with your grasp of Cantorian Mystery.

15. Mystery my ass! It's deliberate reductivity.

16. and the fact that infinity squared is infinity

17. has nothing to do with eternity.

18. It is a dodge, a sham, an escape from the complexity

19. engendered by the finite's quirky specificity -

20. a specificity that makes the finite number 23

21. an enigma all too often mistaken for simplicity

22. (and if you really want to make points with me,

23. let's hear you explain the number three).

Bump In The Road

© Dr. Wes Browning

President Clinton says we did all right

To bomb Serbs eighty days and some nights

"We did it the right way," he says gleefully

"We'll finish the job! Take it from me!"

And you know there could be somethin' to that

We might have done right for an actual fact

I heard we bombed Serbians only with bombs

We didn't drop anything else on their lawns.

Sorry about that last rhyme. I meant it to be better but I came to a "bump in the road", such as the ones that slowed the Kosovo peace settlement and the end to our bombing. In my case the bump in the road was the English Language. In America's case it was real bumps in the road from the Macedonian coast to Belgrade.

Those damn bumps! Isn't that always the way it is when you're trying to bomb the bejeesus out of some people and forcing them to submit to your will? I know it is for me. People are always resisting. You're just trying to have a perfect little war with perfect airplanes where no one, absolutely no one, who was anyone important dies, is that asking too much?

But nooooo. There's got to be bumps in the road. I even heard some of the road was blown up! And even where it wasn't, there were actual enemy soldiers who didn't want us to march to Belgrade, and homes full of people lining the roads, that didn't want us to march to Belgrade.

And homes empty of people lining the roads, people who have already expressed their opinion about us marching to Belgrade in the most emphatic way imaginable, by laying their bodies down and dying, to be bumps in the road. It's just so very frustrating.

Speaking of frustrating bumps in the road, and aren't we always, you will find in this issue a story about how our city officials are looking into ways to improve services for the homeless, and incidently cut costs for those services, by tracking the homeless better.

The trouble with the way it is now, every time you turn a homeless person away from a shelter because there's no space left on the floor, you lose that person in the dark of the night, and wouldn't recognize her/him if you saw him again.

Why wouldn't you recognize her/him? Because there are thousands of her/him that's why, if there were only twenty or thirty, everybody could just remember what they looked like.

But I digress. The point is there are thousands of homeless not getting into shelters, and we all know that, but the funds needed to build more shelters are constantly being denied on the basis of the fact that no one knows who those people are.

I know who those people are, they are bumps in the road.

We will have shelters enough for everybody, trust us America, down the road, we are doing the right thing, we are doing it the right way, it'll be a little slower than expected, there are bumps in the road.

Well I got off on a tangent again. I meant to deliver a powerful polemic on the subject of software solutions to hardware problems and vice versa, but I got carried away by this whole road thing.

But what I really regret is that I have failed to make room for the deep sociological analysis that I was going to provide that was going to explain what the War in Kosovo and tagging homeless people in Seattle have each to do with what we all are really most interested in these days, the revelations in the press regarding Charles Kuralt's mistress.

Oh well. Meanwhile here's a poem I wrote in honor of dear Charles, may he rest in peace and good cheer, and may there be no more bumps in his road.

Late to the Wake

We've come too late t' the wake, I see,

The man's been dead two years or three!

His last word said upon his bed,

Was "Pat"! not "Rose Bud"! nor even "Dead"!

Who's Pat? all asked, around the room.

A long lost friend, they'd all assume.

But not so long lost as all that,

A fishing partner was fair Pat!

To be precise, Charles made the fish,

for Pat to catch and make a wish,

then put him back in his fish den

the Magic Fish to leap again

& again & again, for near thirty years,

for Fishing always gave Charles cheer.