ALLABOUTGEORGE

Cellphone? Fuhgeddaboutit!: I love my Ricochet, but I did see two brothers in the Alice Arts Center’s Cafe 1428 in downtown a couple of weekends ago with Motorolas, messaging each other, and I remember thinking to myself that it was kind of cool. Russell Simmons and Star Jones seem to think so too.

“I remember when Guy Oseary in L.A. gave all these executives BlackBerrys and we used to laughingly refer to them as the white man’s pager,” Mr. Simmons said. “He was giving them to Brad Grey and Bernie Brillstein and those people.” (Mr. Oseary is a record executive. Mr. Grey and Mr. Brillstein are the producers of “The Sopranos.”)

Both devices appeal to gadget-crazy consumers who want their e-mail anytime, anywhere, despite the awkwardness of tiny screens and tiny keys. At least they both beat cell- phone e-mail, which is also available.

“It’s completely changed the way folks communicate,” Ms. Jones said. “You have to make so much small talk on a phone call and go through personal assistants. With the two- way it’s an instant one-on-one connection.”

Why I was late for work this morning: … The train I missed was probably the one involved in this.

Bay Area Rapid Transit officials have identified the worker killed by a train this morning while he worked on the tracks. Pittsburg resident Robert Rhodes, 43, was struck and killed by a train at 9:45 a.m. in the tunnel between the 16th Street and 24th Street stations in San Francisco.

Rhodes was an electrician checking on sparks in the tunnel, according to BART officials. Officials are investigating the incident to learn exactly how the accident happened.

New pair of headphones: I bought mine at the Metreon this evening. They say Sony MDR-A44 on each arm. They’re made of black plastic. They bend if you blow on them hard. But music comes through them real clear, it does. This evening, it was a spin through the “S” section, starting with Armand Van Helden’s remix of the Sneaker Pimps’ “Spin Spin Sugar” and pausing midway through Stevie Wonder’s “As” to take up arms against a sea of chicken noodle pho at Ba Vo on 13th Street. Flipping through the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Bay Area’s only indie paper now that the deal has gone down, I came across a mention of the disquiet I’ve been feeling in two pauses between things — the interval between my old ‘phones coming apart after months of battering in my overstuffed black backpack and the purchase of my new ones, and the mere days remaining between the end of the Clinton presidency and the beginning of the Bush “residency.”

Every time I shade my experience with something no one else is conscious of, I probably lose another point. All I’ve done is prove I have an overhealthy imagination and a lack of interest in facing the world without added atmosphere, the world as it “really” is. But maybe until the world becomes a place I like enough to accept on its own, I’ll keep my headphones handy.

To Russia with hate: … goes David Duke.

Race, employment and whatnot, pt. 2: … I lucked across Erin Teixeira’s profile of David Wellman, a white-studies professor and freelance white-supremacy decoder who testified as an expert witness on a CSU Hayward professor’s behalf (using this handy-dandy checklist) — sans secrets or rings.

Power-mad: So I’m sitting at work, on the fifteenth floor of a San Francisco high-rise, and I’m waiting for the electricity to cut off. PG&E won’t offer any warning about when it’ll happen, and somebody says the power may stay off for as long as four hours. So as it happens, it’s also my day to do something interesting at work today with the site cover, and the uncertainty about the timetable for carrying that off is making things, shall we say, interesting for me.

Got through the doctor’s appointment today: I showed at 9:05, thinking myself ahead of the game, only to find he expected me at 9 a.m.! I appear to be healthy, though in need of a slight kick in the pants re: my so-called sedentary lifestyle. But I can do this. It’s no biggie.

Trying out this after reading about it here.