The spine and the occasional limb of our photo gallery project have been mounted for yr. viewing pleasure - you’ll find the pictorials of our first couple of nights out at play in the musical fields of Austin, and if you haven’t browsed our photos of last October’s Halloween Parade, then this is a handy occasion. The rest of the Austin pictures will be up in the next few days. Don’t trip over the virtual debris, we haven’t had a chance to tidy the place up yet. If you find something out of place, please let us know.

We’re about waist deep in electrons over here, as we wallow through 600 photographs from our jaunt at the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin a few weeks back. The first of the picture galleries will be up today or tomorrow, with the rest to fall into place soon after that. (Thunk.)

No, not all 600 pictures. Just some of them. Here are a few while you’re waiting.

The Optimist: “My glass is half-full.”

The Pessimist: “My glass is half-empty.”

The New Yorker: “What the hell is this? Did I order this? I don’t think so.”

Linus: “My glass is … hey, look at her glass, with the gold band on the rim. I want a glass like that.”

Because it brings Mayflowers.

Haw haw haw.

(Smacking sounds are heard)

If you saw Jeepers Creepers in either its original outing or its second coming, you’ll be familiar with the notion of the near-indestructible demon who ventures forth every 23 years to eat him up some nubile young thangs. I am much the same way with cleaning my house, except without the nubile young thangs.

Spring peeped out this week, strobing briefly through the cold nights and occasional overcast, the reminders of a winter that hasn’t quite let go yet. In one of the balmy bits I had an urge to sit on my couch and read for a space - positively vernal, I! It was a brave plan, a good plan, a righteous plan. But a glance at where the couch used to be dashed it. Where I remembered a couch there was a great mound of books, papers, CD’s, pictures, bags, itinerant laundry, and dusty bric-a-brac. Time to bring the mountain not to Mohammed, but out to landfill. I kitted up with crampons, mattock, and garbage bags, and set to.

This is the part where I’m supposed to say that it wasn’t really that bad. Unfortunately, it was that bad.

My Mom used to save teabags when I was a kid. She had a little square dish for the purpose, the sort of thing that these days would be a mixer for wasabi paste and soy sauce, and after the first steeping she’d squeeze out each one, let it dry, and pop it in the fridge for further use. (I should note that Mom was reared shortly after the Depression, and she also likes very weak tea.) So that’s my excuse for discovering that I had kept a stash of every single box I have ever brought into the apartment over the past nine years - it’s genetic. Computer? There’s the box. Keyboard? Check. Speakers? Yup. Those games I bought from eBay? Of course. I had so many boxes, I could have mailed all my boxes to myself.

Have I mentioned that I run Home Office Records out of my apartment? Lotsa boxes. Don’t even get me started on the plastic bags.

By the time the first round of motivation started to flag, my curbside looked like a shantytown ready to migrate. I stopped buying the Times a few years ago when I realized that I was a non-essential step in the paper’s journey from newstand to curbside - I usually only penetrate as far as the reviews and the crossword puzzle - so it was really just boxes, with a smattering of ancient circulars and Return Service Requested credit card offers. By “smattering,” I mean two garbage bags full.

I’ve struck couch; I even sat on a bit of it. But now of course I have all these papers that want filing, and bits and pieces of this and that to sort. And I’ve got nothing to put them all in.

Speaking of waiters. Back when the East Village was still a cute idea and Avenue A was the eastern border of commerce in Manhattan - we’re talking 1998 here, more or less - my chefly friend Joe was one of the people behind a spiffy downstairs restaurant called 85 Down. The food was monster good, the prices were mostly right, the beer was decent and often better than that, the joint was molto simpatico, and it was a regular stop for me.

One of the waiters, Andreas, was a strapping guy with a barrel of a voice, a couple of early piercings, and the occasional visible tattoo. He’d lumber toward tables of paralyzed tourists with a thundering head of grave deadpan (“Just be calm, Mabel, let me do the talking - and keep your hands where he can see them”), and take up a glowering watch position for a few moments. Then, when they were good and nervous, he’d conjure a menu and daintily set it down, just so. And in his soft, resonant basso, he’d say, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Would you like to see a wine list…?”

Got ‘em every time.

If it weren’t for Rachelleb’s recent entry on chain restaurants she likes or wants to try, I wouldn’t have known that P.F. Chang’s was a chain at all. We don’t have any here in the City, and of course you can imagine how much attention New Yorkers pay to eating habits in the rest of the country … yes, that’s right. None at all.

Pierre and I ate at the Chang’s on San Jacinto in Austin, right across from our hotel. It’s a cushy, comfy place, and the food was excellent. Our waiter looked remarkably like Kevin Spacey and gave us the sort of deferent flat-hand reserved attention that we don’t ever see up here, where your waitperson is either wacky-friendly (“Hi! My name is Heather! Scoot over and let me sit with you for a minute!”), obsequious (“I am Karl. Give me money to be pleasant to you and watch, I will now smile”), or too pretty/ moody/ in the East Village/ hung over to be helpful (“What, are you still here?”). I was so relaxed I actually had a drink with a little umbrella in it.

I’m partial to the Heather style myself - I am hopelessly fond of waitresses and barmaids; it’s a curse - but our Kevin fellow made us feel like actual welcome guests. It makes me dislike our grubby chain fooderies - like T.G.I. Friday’s - all the more. Bah. Humbug. When’s it going to be spring?

Last week two Sikh teenagers from Lodi, New Jersey told police they had been attacked by five bruisers, who pulled off their turbans and despoiled them of three to four feet of hair each. The attackers also stole $40 in cash. It’s a nasty little hate-crime story, touching on the quivering xenophobia of these times.

It’s also a cock-and-sacred-bull story, in that it’s completely false. Yesterday the pair told police they had made up the assault to cover for more routine haircuts, which are not allowed under their religious rules. I’m thinking - no, don’t tell me - a $19.95 cut-and-wash special at the mall? Times two?

Uncut hair is Kesh, one of the symbols of the Khalsa, which as I understand it (vaguely at best) is an order into which Sikh youth (of both sexes) are inducted in an initiation ceremony called amrit. Hair is regarded as a bounty from the godhead, and is not removed from any part of the body; thus the famous Sikh rolled beards. The tradition dates back to 1699.

Jersey in the Noughties is a long way from the rough edges of the Mughal Empire; so is Williamsburg far from the shtetl, and I am always caught up in mixed feelings when I see Chasidim in full regalia: payes, tallis, tefillin, the works. It must be terribly strange and hard to be the protruding tip of a mountain of tradition and family blood, stuck up into the modern air. And to be a modern man for the cost of a shave-and-a-haircut? Two bits.

The sad news of the death of Spaulding Gray was not unexpected, but neither was it welcome. I didn’t know him, but I saw and read his work over the years.

Since Spaulding Gray was a storyteller who put his life and soul into his stories, we join his memory with a story of our own.

A few years back, a piece by a famous performance artist who shall remain unnamed - oops - started a short run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The first nights were a smash-up of New York’s black-clad finest. Since the black-clad finest are not always so good at planning ahead, and calendars can be elusive and confusing things in the best of times, the box office was swimming in last-minute requests from both the unwashed and the anointed. Most venues keep a stock of house tickets on hand for such emergencies as a matter of policy, and they were much in demand here.

After the show, a behind-the-scenes BAM friend reported that the box office tried hard to seat two last-minute requesters together in the orchestra: Spaulding Gray, who got his seat, and Monica Lewinsky, who ultimately didn’t show up. We all felt that the world was poorer for the lack of the monologue that might have come out of the evening.

The rover tried, unsuccessfully, to use one of its many tools to grind away at an outcropping dubbed “Flat Rock,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement on its Web site.

Now, let’s see … The logical explanation is … diamonds on Mars!