Now you can exterminate without fear of viruses or other unseemly computer problems. Listen to these endorsements:

"It just works." - Dr. Kit Pedler

"No complications or special instructions!" - Styre

"I took it out of the box and immediately destroyed a mid-sized planet!" - The Master

"Do they come in pink?" - Paris Hilton

The Holy Empire of Erisian Dope Fiends was such a nice place until the capital city burned to the ground. Oh well. Who wants ice cream?

I had an idea for a story about a time travel organization that is inept at fixing the past - the only thing they are good at is making themselves appear to be extremely successful to people who don't know the whole history of what they have changed.

One illustration I was going to use is that WWII was muddled with repeatedly, and the reason Hitler still happened was that it was the best result of WWII they had obtained after hundreds of tries and so they decided to finally just leave it alone.

Now, the problem with being a voracious consumer of media is that I have no idea if this is an original idea or if I am shamelessly ripping someone off. Anyone ever read a story like this?

P.S.: I just discovered that I am more popular than Goose Pee. Proof: http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Prince+Mu-Chao&word2=Goose+pee

I figured the best place to check the pulse of Hillary supporters would be comments on her blog. I assumed that they would be divided as to whether to support Barrack and there would be arguments going on.

As you can tell by the ALL CAPITAL LETTER, mispeled and excla!!!mationated comments, these people are determined to end Hillary Clinton's career in their desperation. Do they really think that if her supporters are the cause of the Republicans winning the White House again, she has any chance at all of becoming the Democratic candidate in 2012? Do these people still not understand how political parties work?

From browsing the comments, these are primarily older women who were 60s and 70s feminists... and they are seriously talking about giving up the Supreme Court for 10-20 years - Stevens is 88, Ginsburg is 75.

Methinks that Mr. McAuliffe is going to regret doing his job too well.

"My client performs his duties out of respect for people and their ability to choose their own fate. The Plaintiff would have you believe that my client is a vindictive and sadistic monster who tortures his wards incessantly. The Plaintiff spreads these salacious rumors by using an army of 'interpreters', ensuring himself protection from a slander lawsuit.

"As we have shown during our cross-examination, my client's wards are treated fairly, according to the way they treat other people. The Plaintiff would have you believe that this infringes on his Golden Rule patent, but we have shown that this patent has never been exercised, and that the two millennium expiration date has been surpassed. We have also shown that the patent was issued in error by Multiverse, Inc., because of the pre-existing patent for Karma, now also expired.

"We have proven that The Plaintiff does not prepare Golden Rule Summaries with which to judge individuals as specified in the patent request. We have also called into question His other rules, which are completely ignored when making His so-called 'judgments'. The testimony of Mr. Peter declared 'the cut of their jib' as the prime factor in all judgment decisions, and freely admitted the complete lack of documentation for all incidents that occurred before E.7636.335.X. year 1983, data which was deleted so that The Plaintiff would have the disk space to install 'Halo 8', a computer game of some sort.

"We have shown that this is the 72,342 suit filed against my client by The Plaintiff, and we hope that you will recognize this for the malicious harassment that it is, and award my client his pain and suffering counterclaim, and of course, attorney's fees.

"We know also that The Plaintiff has offered each of you that rules in his favor eternal salvation, but we know that your quality of character would never allow you to accept such an obvious bribe. If I was not so confident in your moral standing, I would inform you of the denigrated quality of life inherent in this so-called eternal salvation, and contrast it with the way of life described by our witnesses to help you recognize this offer as a threat, not a boon."

"In summary, The Plaintiff's claim is invalid for a number of reasons, and His constant attacks on my client's character and morals is repugnant and beneath Him. We ask you to find for the Defense, and award the full counter-claim requested to send a message to The Plaintiff that this sort of behavior will not be tolerated by right-thinking people.

"Thank you."

I am constantly surrounded by my diversions. Between my Ipod, Blackberry, laptop (with its nefarious internets), books, and DVDs, it is rare that I take a moment to put down all of these diversions and just take a moment to reflect. Since I became an input junkie, my output has, frankly, been negligible. If you don’t stop and process some of the information you take in, you are just a walking Wikipedia... and why would I need to be that when I have a Blackberry and can access the real one whenever I want?

When we brought my grandparents down to their new home in St. Petersburg, I was able to spend a couple days on my Mom’s porch, relaxing and looking out over the Gulf. At the time, I thought it was the view and weather that was giving me the sense of calm that has been so foreign to my jittery reality lately, but on reflection I think it was really the relaxation and sudden lack of urgency to be plugged in or entertained.

What I need to do is to find that same place when I don’t have a beautiful view to idly contemplate. I need to check that urge to whip out by Blackberry and see what my RSS feed has delivered in the last hour. And why do I need to look? In case a piece of world-shattering news has hit since I last checked? No, I think the real reason is because I have become so used to being entertained that I have forgotten how to entertain myself with my own thoughts.

I was tough on my job in my post last week, but I have been reminded of a few important things since I was reemployed late last year. You can have terabytes of data, and it will be quite useless unless you know how to analyze it, make connections, and extrapolate new information. What good is a book unless it is being read and then thought about?

I’ve always known that, of course... everyone does, after all. It’s just that for the past few years, whenever I sat down at a computer with a blank screen in front of me, I would feel completely uninspired as I searched around for something to write about. I forgot how to tip that small thought or observation over so it dominoes into the next thought, which in turn throws the whole clanking, Rube Goldberg-esque mind-machine into motion.

Another thing the job has brought to my attention is that no matter how well you think you know something, that mind-machine has a strange way of distorting, misfiling, mutating or deleting it behind your back (or, more accurately, above it).

Hopefully, when I lose the ability to see how easy it is to regain perspective, which I am confident I will manage to once again misplace, I can look back on this and it will remind me how little energy it takes to tip that first thought.

I love trees. I don’t mean in some hippy-dippy, Save-The-Rainforest sort of way – I’m sure they need saving at this point, but that isn’t what I am talking about here. I’m talking about the way I feel when I stop for a moment and appreciate a single tree.

Trees are prevalent, and so much you can say about trees is cliché. Both evolutionarily and individually speaking, trees are such an important part of our childhood. They have been an unwitting friend to the human species since we began, and have rarely caused trouble.

The beauty of a tree changes from season to season⁽¹⁾, and everyone has a favorite tree season. Do you love the spring tree best – the budding and flowering home to the returning birds, a sure sign that winter is over? Or do you love the deep green, full trees of summer that shade and protect you from the suddenly aggressive noonday sun the best? Most people, I think, would say they love the trees of autumn the best – the beauty of variety as a seemingly infinite array of yellow, orange and red hues explode overhead.

Personally, my favorite is the bare, lonely winter tree. It is alive, but appears to be dead. It is dark and plain, but holds the potential for the explosion of color found in the other seasons⁽²⁾. The complexity of the branching is so evocative of chaos and yet in essence so representative of order that it seems to me that a winter tree is the ultimate representation of the yin and the yang.


⁽¹⁾I am speaking here to my fellow cool- and temperate-zone dwellers. As for those of you who fall outside of that blessed range of variance in which seasons have a meaning besides the need to turn on your air conditioner, I’m afraid I might appear a raving lunatic, but I assure you that despite what my lovely wife says, the cold, distant sun of January is a small price to pay for the drastic, life affirming reminder of change that occurs when a Minnesota winter melts into spring.

⁽²⁾And if you are wise, you already know that potential is more exciting and, weirdly, often more vivid than reality.

So much of my money and time goes into books that I’m forced to examine my love of the printed page now and then and ask myself what I gain from reading and collecting what is, to the uninitiated, essentially bound paper with ink stains.

I love being surrounded by cases full of ideas. I love the sense of discovery when I find a book that challenges and amazes me. I love the sense of peace I feel when I immerse myself in a good novel. I love the thrill of making a connection and seeing inside the mind that lives halfway across the world, that speaks a different language, that saw things that I will never be able to see, that died years ago, or that is completely fictional and yet so real.

I love the smell of a dusty old book – you can tell if a person typically shops at used bookstores if one of the first things they do after picking up a book is smell it. I love the shared experience of reading the same thing as thousands of other people – and I love that I don’t have to meet them all (because after all, I am very busy reading). I love the analogy and the metaphor. I love wit, black humor and subtle allusions – all of which reach their zenith on the printed page.

I love talking about books I read to people who have not read the same book, and trying to succinctly explain the core themes. I love talking about books I read to people who have read them, and more often then not finding that although we read the same words, we actually read quite different books.

I love discovering a book that makes you so excited that you feel the need to go out and find every book an author has written. I love it when there is one book of theirs you don’t find that has been out of print for years, and then you see it one day out of the corner of your eye at the used book store, selling for two dollars. I love that you can spend those two dollars and get so very much for your money.

I love discovering that an author I admire admires another author I admire, or an author that admires an author and actually alerts me of the author’s admirability. I love alliteration, acrostics and admire all gimmicks (I would have done an acrostic, but I think I used too many "I"s).

Most of all, I love that moment, pregnant with possibility, when you first pick up a book you have never read. That split-second in which you allow yourself to believe – This could be the one. This could be the one that I have been looking for all this time.

So many people define themselves by their job. If you ask 100 people the open-ended question "What do you do?", 99 will answer by describing what they do to get a paycheck. I know it is a convention of language that the question is universally accepted as meaning just that, but... why?

Why, when so many people would recoil at the idea that all they will be remembered for when they die is the work they did between the hours of nine and five, do we answer such an open-ended question with a boring title like "Systems Analyst"? Why not say "I read" or "I keep a garden"... something that says more about who you really are, and not how you make your mortgage payment?

Society, and therefore people who look to society for cues about how to act, view reading and writing, gardening, crafting and other things of such ilk as mere hobbies that can only define someone that does not have a job. For those with a job, these things fade into the background, and seem to exist only as interesting little personality quirks that make your cubical decoration or your conversation a little bit different than everybody else's.

The next time someone asks me what I do, I'm going to say "I read". Or maybe, "I write LiveJournal entries about that very question," if I want to confuse them a bit. Anything but what they expect to hear – which form of horrible drudgery do I endure to enable me to exist in a society that values the individual only to the degree with which they are able to contribute to this phantom we know only as The Economy.

In addition to the Seven Samurai and Dawn of the Dead Box sets... among other things: