about NEWTCASE

Late one night after a seventh apple-tini, I snagged a napkin from the barkeep at my neighborhood watering hole and began to sketch, in broad outlines, what would become the website you are reading today.

Initially my plans were quite simple. I would import a ring-tailed lemur from Madagascar, teach it sign language, and post its daily musings online in the form of a blog. As the lemur's command of the language improved, it would begin to pen a weekly advice column, Love Her or Lemur, that would quickly gain syndication in alternative weeklies throughout America. The columns would be collected into a best-selling book, Lemur Alone, whose release and accompanying publicity blitz would allow me to realize my lifelong dream of appearing as a guest on ABC's The View.

I shared all this with the barkeep, who expressed little enthusiasm for what I had scrawled upon the napkin. In fact, when I got to the part about licensing the monkey's likeness for a non-dairy sweetener named LemurCreamer, he promptly declined my request for an eighth apple-tini and hailed me a cab. As the taxi pulled away from the curb, the barkeep's last words echoed in my mind: I was banned for life from the Lucky Lemur Lounge.

The next morning I awoke, hung over, in the middle of an unsettling dream about bedding Star Jones in the ABC green room. (For the record, it was the lemur who was starring in Jones, not I.) But once my head cleared, some hours later, I saw that I had been going about things all wrong — America doesn't want to read a lemur's blog. America doesn't need relationship advice from a lower primate. Above all, America doesn't care to see a website that employs patronizing italics.

And so I went back to the drawing board. I moved to a different state, rented an apartment and began working for the local newspaper. I gave up apple-tinis and switched to V-8. Then, back to apple-tinis. And each night when I returned home from work, I fired up an ancient Hermes typewriter that once belonged to Gore Vidal and began creating my vision, my NEWTCASE.

What I came up with is just America needs in troubled times like these: a razzle-dazzle spectacle of the first order, one that explodes like a firecracker in the mind's eye and makes you get down on your hands and knees and thank God that one day all those years ago you sat down with your Hooked on Phonics and learned how to read.

Minus the lemur but featuring a gallimaufry of superior commentary, pithy barbs and straight talk about the thermodynamics of solid solutions, NEWTCASE is a simmering cyberstew of delight and strained metaphors. It looks like a website but feels like a sneaker. It's the website that eats like a meal. And, as the stolen GIF that follows will attest, this website is all that and a bag of chips.

So there you have it. I'm Casey Newton, and this is NEWTCASE. Break it upside-down.

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