a list of clients was discovered...

the latest in baseball's ongoing steroid problem is that young slugger gary matthews jr. was "allegedly on the customer list of Applied Pharmacy Services in Mobile, Ala., whose two owners have been indicted by an Albany County grand jury" for distributing narcotics and steroids. other people implicated include boxer evander holyfield and steroid poster-boy jose canseco.

my question is this: why do these places keep lists? maybe my memory-based system would collapse under the weight of hundreds of clients, and maybe i love secret codes more than the average guy. but couldn't they mystify or muddle things just a bit? ok, evander holyfield was listed under "evan fields", which is a start, but that looks more like lazy shorthand than intentional obfuscation. "evan" even had the same birthday as holyfield.

if i ever run a large-scale drug operation, i'll be sure that there are only a handful of people that could make any sense of my notes. and those people will be well-equipped to resist interrogation. come on, i'm sure you played cloak-and-dagger games as a kid, and now that you're a DRUG DEALER, it's time to draw upon those experiences. i'd give more information, but i don't want to reveal anything that will help cryptologists crack my coding scheme. but if you hold your face really close to the screen, you might see something that'll help. but only after a few minutes.

criminals, this tip is on the house.