You want me to beg? Sure, I'll beg. Here's what you get when you sign up for the Passenger's "Postcards From Paradise" newsletter.

For starters, you get a heads-up the second the site is updated. You get a pithy "now playing" capsule. You get a list of the last four groups of Passenger picks. You get a "classic" pick from last year. You get an irreverent subject line that will mean absolutely nothing to you. You get my "Live Life" picks, a few non-Web diversions you need to enrich your life. And last but certainly not least, you get an e-mail publication named for an old Flesh For Lulu tune - the words to which I've never remembered. Something about "moral hands" ... hell, it was the '80s. I'm lucky just to be here.
 

"When he told me his secret, his eyes looked like the silence between when a child skins his knee and when he realizes he's been hurt and begins to cry." These - and a million other moments just like it - are the coarse fabric of which Lowbrow.com is woven. A simple, yet ambitious page that loads a new failing in the human condition every time you refresh, Lowbrow is so damned fascinating that you can easily lose an hour peering into other people's souls, loading and reloading .... No explanations are given, no guidelines are provided; Lowbrow is colored only by what you read into it. Harsh accusations are thrown, heartstrings are pulled to their fullest tolerances, crudely funny jibes are made at the expense of the feckless and inept - and you, dear reader, will love every last word. By the way, the field on the left-hand side of the page isn't there for laughs - enter your own "lowbrow moment," and take an active role in defining this provocative page.
 

"A bittersweet symphony, that's life," sang the Verve in a Nike commercial beloved by millions. Ah, if only it were just that, but there's a whole lot of burger-slinging breaking up those sweet/bitter episodes, which leaves Garnet Hertz' Simulator to capture every one of those in-between days the Verve thoughtfully left out to insure a 30-second spot. You can wear the Spam T-shirt or denim longsleeve! You can choose between Raisin Bran and Crispix! You can drive to your mind-numbing job fast or slow! You can make Big Macs until your brains liquefy! You can pile more mashed potatoes on your plate! So thorough is Hertz' imitation of life (your life, not mine) that you are given a choice of dreams - color or good old monochrome. Now in its second hit year at Hertz' conceptLAB, where dreams come wonderfully unglued.
 

When you've got a fetish site like the I Hate Star Trek Page, you're obviously rarin' to reap the whirlwind that a swift kick to the fringe culture will provoke. And - you have to love your subject, just a little. (How else could you sit through those awful odd-numbered movies?) Anthony Case's page exhibits both qualities: he admits his love for the original series and some of the movies ("up to number seven at least"), he knows enough about the Next Generation to wonder why the transporters were overused as a plot device ("the ultimate deus ex machina") and he prints every hate letter he gets - and he gets a tribble-load - in the aptly-titled "Hall of Flame." The Passenger kind of likes the New Trek (more specifically, I like Marina Sirtis', uh, technique), and I still found Case's page a sheer riot, full of the type of loose humor that Paramount's legal staff could stand to point at themselves. One question, though: in his "Ten Reasons why James Bond is better than Star Trek," Case describes the "James Bond Theme" as the "second-coolest theme on the planet." And the winner is?
 

"It was like a surprise attack on a lazy spring day - as if someone, on top of a metaphysical hill, holding a metaphysical machine gun, had sprayed us with bullets." I read Haruki Murakami's story in the New Yorker, "New York Mining Disaster," on the advice of a friend; from that same friend I borrowed Murakami's novel "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and have already begun poring through it. The New Yorker tagged Murakami's short piece as "Tokyo with attitude," but that's inaccurate - not the attitude, but the place. Murakami's world has no borders, no nationality, no world; it is a dream territory, where life does not march so much as flow, and where a comparatively normal guy can know an awful lot of strange people. Amy Tak-yee Lai's thoughtful, unofficial homage to Murakami will further your translation into his world, as it has furthered mine.

See? The sign-up page is right below! Please? Please? Please? Let me get what I want? This time? God knows, it'll be the first time ...