The right side of the screen is usually reserved for ads, either for local businesses (a law firm specializing in intellectual property is a steady customer) or for the elevator screen service itself. Lately they've added "Daily Meditations" to the mix, though each time I've noticed one, it has been the same -- Daily Meditation #4. The heading comes up and there's a slight pause before the meditation itself flies in from the bottom of the screen, like a Vonage ad or one of those old hit-the-monkey banners. Now the whole point of this medium is that it cycles relatively fast, in order to expose the viewer to as much as possible in the course of a single elevator ride, but I find that philosophy is not quite fitting to something called a "meditation." Trying to read it in my head at a calm, relaxed, guided-visualization kind of pace, I found that the message flickered away before I could finish.

So it was not until I'd caught it a few times that I absorbed the full text of Daily Meditation #4: MY BRILLIANCE IS A BEACON FOR LEADERS AND INFLUENCERS.

I walked out of the elevator meditating on the validity of the word "influencers," and on the wisdom of saving that nugget for last, like a compact lexical koan, but other than that I think I'm ready to move on to Meditation #5.

THE OTHER WEEK D AND I had houseguests, a couple visiting from Bermuda for a few days. We took them out to a Chinese restaurant the last night they were here. At the end of the meal, when the check came, D pushed the tray into the middle of the table and said, "Ah, let's all open our statement cookies."

J cracked his open. "If you constantly give, you will constantly have," he read aloud. "Empty pockets?"

OVERHEARD IN THE OFFICE on Friday:

"You know what's cruel? A Munchkins box with a banana in it."

DURING MY COMMUTE YESTERDAY morning, I caught the end of Jewel's "Who Will Save Your Soul" on the radio. The DJ came on afterwards to mention that they were "programming with care" that day with an eye (or ear) toward commemorative or uplifting songs, and were welcoming requests in that vein. He went on to introduce John Mellencamp's "Peaceful World."

Meanwhile, on FNX, they were playing "Peaches," the classic by The Presidents of the United States of America.

One upside to the approach of fall, with its shortened days and cooler temperatures, is the end of the FNX "Commercial-Few Summer." I have no objection to the concept of a radio station playing fewer ads than usual -- in fact, that's a terrific idea. The problem I had was that half the commercials they did play seemed to be ones advertising the Commercial-Few Summer itself. The spots did not talk about how they were playing fewer commercials -- that concept was pretty self-explanatory. Most of them focused on the phrase itself, like their marketing department couldn't get over their cleverness in coining the term. "It's like commercial-free, geddit, but it's commercial-few." Most of the ads were some variation on this, with some of them anticipating the "hey, that's not a word" criticism (although I don't know when advertisers decided that they had to limit themselves to using real words). "The FNX Commercial-Few Summer. It's not grammatical, but we're just too darned tickled by it not to force it on you every time we'd otherwise be playing an ad."

I'd rather they be grammar-sparse and annoyance-few.

YESTERDAY'S ELEVATOR WORD of the day: Beatitude.
(N.) BE-AT'-I-TUD - supreme happiness
Henry woke up in a state of beatitude on Friday.