The pancreatic cancer that has been weakening poor Steve Jobs is apparently back and aggressive as hell. I’m very sorry. May his remaining days be creative, spiritual and full of love. It does seem weird, however, that so many people are convinced that when Jobs dies, Apple will start to die as well. There are no young bucks out there with the instincts and abilities to keep that company grooving along like it should? C’mon.

I felt nothing but contempt for the Spanish soldiers in El Cid who cried like children when word got out that the arrow in Charlton Heston‘s chest might be fatal, or at least incapacitating. “We cannot fight the Moors without the Cid! We will not” An army that refuses to re-charge and re-constitute itself when a leader dies is indeed finished. But why would Apple stockholders think and act this way? Cowards. Sheep.

Of all time. Or at least in my experience on this planet. It’s amazing to me that there are people in third-world countries who are actually paid money to design and manufacture these back-breaking coil-spring mattresses. They must know, surely, that the possibility of people feeling comfortable enough to actually fall asleep on them is very slight. I’ve slept better on hard-metal cots in city jails.

You have to be a sadist to make one of these things; you certainly have to be a masochist to willingly sleep on one. I gave up after four, four and a half hours. Awful.

I’m in a new place on Friday so it’s nothing to obsess about. But the combination of sitting through tonight’s opening film, the claymation Mary and Max (which is partly about a 44 year-old morbidly obese guy, voiced by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) on top of another night trying to sleep on this torture mattress from Jakarta…I don’t know. Feels like a tough combo.

The insulation in this cardboard milquetoast condo, located on Park City’s Windrift Lane (a little bit of a hump north from Kearns Blvd.), is on the shitty side also. I can feel the frigid early morning air seeping through the window behind me. The cheapest home-building materials known to modern man have gone into the construction of thousands of Park City condos. I know, having stayed in quite a few since the early ’90s.

This is a fairly typical example of middle-American architecture and home construction when penny-pinching figures in. Icy air leaking into the living room and yet the guy who designed this one went in for a little counter-flourish by installing a tiny jacuzzi tub — a poor man’s jacuzzi — in the bathroom. Hey, I’m Tommy Tune! A home, in other words, that’s a little more about show than substance.