Static Zombie

gf --> f

Shelby Logan's Trial

Last Sunday night I landed in Seattle around 11:30 PM after a weekend of sleep deprivation, and seven hours later I headed back to the airport for a day jaunt to Las Vegas to testify in a civil case against one of the organizers of Shelby Logan's Run. For some reason the idea of flying from San Jose to Seattle and then to Las Vegas seven hours later seemed better to me than taking an extra bag with me to No More Secrets and flying directly to Vegas from San Jose. It actually worked out fine, and I can report that the desert is far more allergy-friendly than California.

Shelby Logan's Run was a Game run in Las Vegas in 2002 by some Microsofties. It was, in many senses, the Game to end all Games. While this event had puzzles, the focus was on over-the-top experiences (and where better to offer them than Vegas?). In the course of the event some or all of us camped in a dry lake bed during a torrential thunderstorm; powerboated and scuba dived on Lake Mead; shimmied up a rock chimney; captured, cared for, and ultimately scanned a living rat; fired a semi-automatic weapon; drove ATVs across sand dunes in the black of night; rode a free-fall ride atop the Stratosphere tower; performed a song in drag at a gay bar; got pierced ears; explored an abandoned prison by flashlight; and more. It was my first Game, and no Game since has delivered anything close.

The Game ended prematurely when one player fell thirty feet down a mine shaft and became paralyzed from the neck down. A clue sent teams to a site where there were multiple abandoned mines, and in plain, unencrypted text told teams to enter a specific number and no others. This player entered the wrong mine (without a flashlight, I believe), and fell. A very real tragedy.

Inevitably, perhaps, lawsuits followed. I don't know who exactly sued-- the player, his family, or his insurance company-- but all organizers of the event were named in the suit, and all but one settled out of court. The last holdout finally got to trial, and I was asked to testify for the defendant which I was only too happy to do.

Every player signed a waiver when they sent in their fee to participate. A scary waiver. It explicitly called out that players might be called upon to perform strenuous activities (and listed many examples), with possible consequences including death. I remember talking about that waiver with my teammates before signing it-- it was hardcore. I don't know how that waiver holds up under Nevada law, but it wasn't vague and it wasn't perfunctory. I took notice.

I was in the van when the unfortunate player's team arrived, and the defense wanted me to testify as to their behavior and to provide the jury with a first-time player's perspective about the Game. I agreed for many reasons, the most important of which being philosophical-- people in our society don't take enough responsibility for their own actions. Were there things the organizers could have done to prevent the accident? Yes. But ultimately, the tragedy was the man's own fault. Americans don't like saying that. We like pointing fingers and finding someone else to blame. But every single player signed that waiver. They knew the event involved operating on very little or no sleep. They knew physical activity was involved.

Earlier in the event I drove an ATV at night and opened up the throttle a bit-- until I hit the next dune. I sailed over the crest and my headlight illuminated... nothing. I had absolutely no idea where the ground was. I could have been catapulting into an abyss for all I knew. It was terrifying. Not in the casual sense the word is commonly used, either-- I mean heart-stopping, pit-of-my-stomach, images-of-snapping-my-neck raw terror. When my wheels touched down, I immediately eased up on the throttle and took a safer, more sedate pace. I took personal responsibility for my own safety. Nobody told me how fast to go. That was up to me. I chose the level with which I was comfortable.

Players were given specific, explicit instructions about where to go at the mine site. What happened was terrible and tragic, but ultimately someone didn't follow instructions, went somewhere he'd been told not to go, did so alone and entered a dark tunnel without a flashlight. People in our society need to accept more responsibility for their own actions, even when those actions are tragically wrong. And in this case, I didn't believe the event organizers should be held responsible.

Philosophically, I wish that all the organizers had gone to trial instead of settling. I understand the desire to just have it all be over with, though, and not wanting to endure the stress or risk of a trial. The one defendant who went to trial was mainly responsible for programming the hand-held electronic device used throughout the Game, which had nothing to do with that particular clue site. My understanding is that, while the plaintiff attacked the waiver, the defense strategy had nothing to do with it but rather that the defendant simply had no part in planning, organizing, or executing that particular clue or clue location. Yesterday I found out that the jury returned a verdict that the defendant did not act negligently, which I assume means he's off the hook.

I understand the plaintiffs are still going after the owners of the mine, and there I think they have a much stronger case. Why on earth wasn't that mine shaft sealed? It seems so obvious. And so, while I think the plaintiff bears responsibility for what happened, the mine company unquestionably shares in it. I hope the plaintiff has better luck going after those deeper, and more culpable, pockets.

Geek Zinger of the Day

From the Sony Jeopardy! forum, in a discussion about the typesetting conventions used by Jeopardy! clues:

User 1: Microsoft Word will not be winning any awards for typesetting as long as I have anything to say about it. For my money, that's like saying that the Harry Potter books are the pinnacle of modern literature, because they're popular.

User 2: Well, I like Harry Potter a lot more than Microsoft Word. In Harry Potter, at least some wizards know what they are doing.

Personal Multiplex

With the exception of Prison Break, the second season of which is stacking up on the Tivo in anticipation of a cliffhanger-foiling marathon binge, I'm all caught up on my TV for the moment. Here's what I'm watching this season:

Prison Break
Heroes
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
CSI: Miami
Veronica Mars
Boston Legal
Jericho
Lost
CSI:NY
The Nine
Smallville
Survivor
Supernatural
CSI
ER
Doctor Who
Battlestar Galactica
Deal or No Deal
NUMB3RS
The Amazing Race
Las Vegas

That's 21 hours a week. Then add:

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (daily)
The Daily Show (daily)
The Colbert Report (daily)
Good Eats
America's Test Kitchen
Ebert & Roeper
Robot Chicken
The Venture Brothers
Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law
I Want That! Kitchens, Baths, and Tech Toys

and that's another 10-11 hours per week, bringing the total to about 32 hours of television a week. Holy bejeezus, how is that even possible? Ok, thanks to the magic of Tivo, each hour is really only about 45 minutes, and some shows like Millionaire and Deal or No Deal compress even more than that with judicious use of double-speed. So that gets the real viewing time down to about 24 hours. Not all those shows will run all season long, and new series like Jericho might get the boot either by me or the network. And I'm usually doing something else while I'm watching most of the half-hour stuff and some of the dramas. So really it's not as bad as it looks. Ahem.

Anyhoo, for now I'm all caught up. But my Tivo is still bursting at the gills with unwatched movies, some recorded as many as three years ago. Curious, I just counted them. 41. Forty-one unwatched movies. Again I say, holy bejeezus! I know you're curious, so here they are:

I expect that before long, the wave of incoming television will crash over me and I'll be fighting to recover enough Tivo space to keep up. When that happens, after nuking any unseen I Want That!s and other fluff, movies are the next to go. Besides Cube Zero, which I'm sure is crap but I want to watch anyway, what should I delete first? Anything on that list really not worth watching?

Mucous Technology

Over the last several days, as allergies have once again driven me to view a shotgun to the head as a viable remedy, I have marvelled at the human nose's seemingly limitless capacity to produce mucous. You'd think that the human body, like the pool from which American Idol draws talent, would contain a finite supply of the stuff, and that eventually-- perhaps, say, after a few days of nonstop flow, it would run dry. My body's Wal-Mart is completely sold out of hair follicles on aisle one, but mucous is the blue light special. It's the freaking miracle of Hannukah.

But with the mapping of the human genome complete, the solution to all the world's fuel problems are within our grasp. The answer has been right under my nose. Nonstop. For the past three days. If scientists can learn to tap into mucous technology, the planet's oil wells will always flow freely.

Cryptext Me

In other Da Vinci Code news, the first phase of the Google contest ended today. Since only the first 10,000 people to solve today's puzzle would win cryptex replicas (please let their codes be settable!) and become finalists, I made sure I was refreshing the page at 10 AM sharp to get in on the action. Apparently, so were a lot of other people-- enough to cause the site to think incoming pings were part of a hacker attack. Fortunately they provided a captcha to enter to proceed. Still, I think it was extremely poor planning to make the last challenge involve downloading from Google Video, increasing the disadvantage faced by players with slower internet connections. I've heard that by 10:20, all 10,000 slots had been filled.

Peter's First Theorem of Office Happiness

Any day in which free box lunches can be scavenged from conference rooms is a good day.

Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome!

Funny story.

My old web host migrated me to a new server (without telling me). Suddenly, POOF! Movable Type stopped working. Wouldn't even let me log in. Calls to tech support got misinformation and no progress. At precisely the same time, Matthew Baldwin sent me an email chiding me for not having registered staticzombie.com. And so the universe aligned, and one thing led to another web host, and presto-- here we are, running on the new Movable Type 3.2-- which I'm sure has some whiz-bang features that I'll discover when I have more time.

Actually, one feature that it does have is TypeKey support. If I turn this on, it would require that you register with TypeKey in order to post comments. Yeah, I know-- a bit of a hassle, but it's actually quick and painless, and you only have to do it once. Then you just provide your TypeKey ID when you post a comment. The HUGE advantage for me is that it would effectively eliminate comment spam (or so I'm led to believe). Cleaning out comment spam costs me quite a bit of time, so getting rid of it would be a huge relief. Any other MT 3 bloggers care to share advice on plug-ins to install, anti-spam strategies, etc? Is there a good alternative to turning on TypeKey authentication?

Meanwhile, everything here seems to be working. Entries that link to other archived entries are broken, but I'll fix those when I have a few minutes. If you spy anything awry, let me know.

Welcome to the new Zombie.

What's Your Sign?

The contents of The Mooncurser's Handbook itself, much of which I either wrote or edited, are now online. To help avoid any need for Google or internet access, we preloaded a bunch of common encoding schemes into the Handbook for easy reference. One such list (not used in the Game, as it happens) is the solar Zodiac. I just happened upon it for the first time today, and was surprised to see thirteen entries instead of the expected twelve. The unfamiliar entry was Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer or Snake Wrestler. Even more surprising is that my birthday falls within this sign! All my life I've thought I was a Sagittarius, but in fact I'm an Ophiuchus! Apparently this is a long-standing controversy within astrological circles, with Ophiuchus being left out of the tropical zodiac with which we're all familiar. Sources I've found say Ophiuchus is another name for the healer Asclepius, who sailed with the Argonauts and healed Orion after he was bitten by a scorpion.

Next time someone asks me what my sign is-- perhaps on my next trip back in time to a 1977 disco-- I can blow their minds. I suppose it could have been worse-- that extra constellation could have been Kobayashi, the Competitive Hot Dog Eater.

SURE It's a Leg...

At the supermarket today, I saw this logo at the checkout counter and did a double-take. I'd say prostate cancer's the least of his problems.

Beauty

Back from a week's vacation with the following observation:

pretty, short woman = "cute"
pretty, tall woman = "gorgeous"

Discuss.

Hooray for Congress

On behalf of everyone in Washington State, I'd like to thank our elected officials for waving their magic wands and granting us an enchanted sales tax deduction-- which, in a state with no income tax, is a very nice thing indeed.

Now, about this Social Security thing...

How Hard Can This Be?

When it comes right down to it, few products are as simple as a pencil. If you were to sit down and list the priority 0 features of a mechanical pencil-- the things you absolutely must have in your product to satisfy your customer-- you'd probably come up with something like this:

• Graphite withstands normal writing pressure without snapping
• Additional graphite can be dispensed to simulate "sharpening"
• Expended graphite can be easily replaced
• Top of pencil features an eraser
• Eraser can be replaced when it wears out

But we all missed something. Something so basic, it's blazingly obvious in retrospect:

• Using the eraser should not cause graphite to be dispensed

The Papermate Top-Notch Grip-- though it features a delightfully spongy region that makes it comfortable and secure to hold-- utterly fails the basic usability test because erasing is a nightmare. Graphite is dispensed by pressing down on the top of the pencil. Where the eraser is. Guess what happens when you erase something? Suddenly your pencil has Pinnochio Syndrome.

It's inconceivable that this flaw wasn't noticed early in the pencil's design process. If I were the president of Papermate, I'd have called all my people into a room and not let them back out again until they'd redesigned the product so that it worked properly. But these things are still being cranked out today in droves, in iridescent and metallic colors. And apparently they're being sold for cheap, because our office supply room is full of them. And by "full", I mean "if you can find the one supply room in the building that actually still holds supplies in the wake of corporate cost-saving measures which, apparently, include purchasing sub-standard mechanical pencils to save a few pennies and removing supplies from all rooms but one so employees spend valuable time scavenging for basic needs instead of getting work done."

Time Warp

Due to some apparent file corruption, I had to restore Static Zombie to a backup from just before Christmas. Fortunately, since I got sucked into Half-Life 2 and haven't been blogging, nothing was lost. Yay!

Meanwhile... judging from its new opening credits, it appears the new sales pitch for Alias is "Jennifer Garner is hot, hot, HOT!" And I can't say that I blame them.

General Tso's Christmas

I'd like to take this opportunity to wish all of you Christian Static Zombie readers a merry Christmas. And to the rest of you, enjoy your Chinese food.

It's In the Past

If they put all of the costumes from The Lion King on pedestals on stage, lit by a single spotlight, I'd still have given a standing ovation. Nobody goes to The Lion King expecting high theater or musical greatness. No matter how innovative the staging and inspired the costumes, sooner or later you're still going to have to sit through I Just Can't Wait to Be King and Can You Feel the Love Tonight. But that's okay, because I got what I came for-- jaw-dropping costumes and puppets that make the animals of the jungle come alive. The giraffes, leopards, and elephant were astounding, and the hyneas were brilliantly executed. The staging of the wildebeest stampede was quite clever. The additional African music improved the soundtrack. In sum, a fun show. Zazu in particular was brilliant-- both in the costuming of the actor, and in the lifelike verisimilitude he invested in the hornbill puppet he carried. Timon, on the other hand, just didn't work for me.

I have to say, however, that $80 a ticket is just a weeeeeeeeeeee bit steep. The Lion King is a family-friendly show, but over $300 for a family of four strikes me as a tad extravagant.

Can You Feel the Love Tonight? Disney's accountants sure can.

Tomb

It has come to my attention that a new location-based entertainment venue called 5Wits has opened up in Boston. The venue aims to offer interactive, physically immersive, walk-through adventure experiences on an annual basis. Its first show, Tomb, challenges your team of explorers to overcome challenges as you work your way to the pharaoh's tomb.

I'd be there in a heartbeat, but regrettably I'm on the wrong coast-- and I'm not flying across the country for a 40 minute experience unless the words "hot seat" and "millionaire" are involved. I know a number of Zombie readers are in the Boston area, however-- you are hereby charged with visiting the attraction and returning with a report.

iPod Me: Update

It's here!

My free 20 GB iPod arrived via FedEx at 9:15 this morning. I'm as giddy as a schoolgirl. "People really do win on MTV!" So I can now say with conviction that freeipods.com is not a scam. Not only did I get a free iPod, I also got two free $10 Amazon gift certificates from joining one of their offers.

The details: I completed all the requirements on September 7, at which point my status on the site changed to "Order submitted to vendor, waiting for product." On Friday, Oct. 15, my status changed and I received email informing me that my iPod had shipped. It made the trip from Shanghai in great time, arriving via FedEx three days later on Monday, Oct. 18.

A big thanks to everyone who completed an offer on my behalf. I suspect this may spur some further activity on the conga line, so here are some referral links from fellow Static Zombie readers. Help 'em out by clicking on one of their links, signing up, and completing an offer-- then post your own referral link in the comments. Let us know once you reach 5 referrals, so I can remove your link and avoid having people "waste" their sign-up.

To help Chris: done, link removed
To help Justin: click here
To help Craig: click here
To help Alfredo: click here
To help Larry: click here
To help rem: click here

Boys and Their Toys

This has been a week of new toys. On Wednesday my new laptop arrived. Thanks to Slick Deals, I was able to get in on a great deal at Dell for $500 off an Inspiron 8600 laptop, plus an additional $200 rebate. It's got a great 15.4" widescreen and 128 MB Radeon 9600 video card, and with a Pentium M 1.8 Mhz processor the little fella's way more powerful than my desktop P3-550. Maybe now I'll finally get to play Neverwinter Nights which has been gathering dust for a year. On Monday I should get my wireless LAN set up, and I'm looking forward to surfing and working from the couch or bed.

If anyone has any laptop software to recommend, I'm all ears.

This weekend I paid my first visit to Fry's where the motto is "If it runs on electricity, we sell it." I can see why the Silicon Valley crowd goes gaga for this place-- it's like a Radio Shack, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart combined. Geek nirvana. I went to pick up a laptop carrying case, but wound up getting a backpack instead. I've been carrying the same backpack around for fifteen years and this seemed like a good time to retire it. The backpack form factor just seems more versatile than a shoulder-strap laptop bag, especially since I'm used to schlepping one anyway. I also picked up another 512 MB of memory to bring the laptop up to a healthy 768 MB.

Meanwhile, someone at work was selling a used Game Boy Advance SP package (with headphone adapter, power charger, Final Fantasy Tactics, Warioware, and Yoshi's Island) for $100, which also seemed too good to pass on. I wanted all three of the games anyway, and even used they'd have set me back at least $60. I was getting tired of having to angle my GBA just right to catch the light. I foresee much lost sleep in the future.

And the parade of toys continues later this week, as (if FedEx can be believed) the long-awaited free iPod finally arrives! More on that as the situation develops...

Super Stockpile

So you're the U.S. government, and you've got a heavy hitter like Superman more or less on your team. He won't fight your foreign wars for you, but you can count on him for antiterrorist actions and emergency rescue operations. But the guy's a loose cannon. What if he goes on a bender, or comes down with Alzheimer's? You love having him on your side, but his power presents an enormous possible threat to national security. You'd have to guard against that possibility, wouldn't you?

I don't keep up with the Superman mythos outside of TV's Smallville, so I don't know how open the secret of kryptonite is. Is it like KFC's seven herbs and spices (everyone knows there's something, but nobody's sure exactly what) or more like JFK's extramarital affairs (everyone knows about it, but it's not considered polite to discuss openly)? Either way, the U.S. government certainly knows that kryptonite can take out the big S. It seems to me that the response would be twofold. First, the government would make kryptonite a controlled-- if not downright illegal-- substance akin to plutonium. It is radioactive after all-- according to Cartoon Network's Justice League, Luthor ultimately contracted cancer after years of carrying a chunk of the space rock on his person. The feds would want to keep kryptonite bullets off the market, and making possession illegal would authorize them to confiscate all samples they discovered.

The second step is a natural consequence of the first-- maintain a heavily guarded, lead-encased government stockpile. Just in case. If Lois Lane is killed by ecoli poisoning at the Metropolis Jack in the Box, we'd want some insurance in case Supes goes postal. Or, you know, decides to rule the planet.

This is what comes of eating lunch alone and seeing a USA Today article about superhero films.

Hiatus

Static Zombie will be on hiatus for a couple of weeks as I get out and enjoy the start of summer. You do the same.

Lordy Lordy Lordy

This weekend I attended the bat mitzvah of a long-time family friend who, having never become a bat mitzvah as a child, spent the past year and a half studying to do so now. This put me inside a temple for the first time in many, many years, and I discovered that my opinion about organized religion hasn't changed.

I hate it.

Many of the great evils of history-- the Crusades, the Inquisition, the PAX network-- have been performed in the name of religion. I despise the way children are indoctrinated to the rituals of faith without questioning or fully understanding the tenets behind them. These children grow up to put more importance on the rituals themselves than on their meaning. Rather than being taught to open their minds, embrace multiple points of view, and discover for themselves which beliefs inform their lives, the indoctrinated fall in line and adopt a rigidity of thought that not only holds no room for opposition, but feels threatened by it.

Yes, I'm oversimplifying. The point remains. More importantly, I personally have no use for a God who cares for form over function. No God worth worshipping would care if my head was covered, or my clothes had fringes, or I starved myself for one day a year. In fact, no God worth worshipping would desire that worship. It's something of a catch 22, although God himself would of course be unfazed. "What, you think I'd trip over a paradox, you little pischer? I was bending the rules of space and time before I gave birth to myself."

I don't believe in God. The concept was something created by man to explain the unexplainable. Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. God is the ultimate magician. It's not a matter of lack of proof. We have no proof of extraterrestrial beings, and yet logic compels me to believe that Earth is not the only cradle of life in the infinite universe. Similar logic leads me to believe that God is a fiction, and that organized religion is simply a means for a select few to gain and retain power.

If God does exist, I'd like to imagine he's a lot like the one who talks to Joan of Arcadia. No fire or brimstone. No right or wrong belief. Just a benevolent patriarch hoping his creations find their way, who looks and sounds a lot like Mrs. Landingham.

I have no problem with people who believe in God. OK, that's not entirely honest. I can't really understand how intelligent adults can conclude that there exists an omnipotent being who can hear their thoughts, be everywhere at once, and yet care one iota about whether or not they eat pork. It just makes no sense to me. Now add that such a being allowed the Holocaust and Dude, Where's My Car? to happen, and I no longer care-- he's lost my vote. But you're entitled to your own opinion, and personal faith should be just that-- personal. If belief in God brings you comfort and joy, terrific. It's when your belief starts crimping someone else's style that I call a party foul. "In God We Trust"? What this "we", kimosabe?

The thing is, I recognize why organized religion thrives. It's not because of God. Or fear. Or inertia. It's because of the deep, abiding human need for community. We want to belong. And what organized religion does really well is create an environment where people can feel like they belong. All they have to do is drink the Kool-Aid. Presto, instant community. There are very few secular organizations with such a strong feeling of community. Some, like the Masons, are shrouded in secrecy. Others, like the Elks, are glorified boys' clubs. If you want to plug into a social network for your family, religion is really the only game in town. Sure, the kids hate to dress up on Sunday and sit on hardwood pews for a couple of hours. But they see all the other kids in the neighborhood, and their parents get to know each other, and there's all that Bingo. Non-believers like me-- the ones who aren't willing to just go through the motions-- get squat.

Maybe I should start my own Church of the Dueling Pianos, with Beatles sing-a-longs and collaborative NY Times crossword solving every Sunday.

Debate and Switch

Political correctness is evil.

No, I don't think that's too strong a sentiment. It's evil. It's the conceptual embodiment of Thought Police. It panders to special interests by distorting meaning and obfuscating language. It creeps into people's subconscious and heightens their own sensitivity, causing them to take offense not because something is truly offensive to them, but because they're afraid it might be offensive to someone else. It squashes discourse when people confuse intellectual debate with personal animosity. It is the sword of Damocles hanging over the free expression of ideas.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled weekend, already in progress.

Term of the Day

Learned something new today.

Solving today's NYT crossword, I came upon the theme entry at 44 across, clued "Place to buy wine". The clue had me puzzled, because intersecting entries strongly suggested the intended answer was PACKAGE STORE. But that made no sense to me. I was convinced that the puzzle had a typo, and the clue was intended to read "Place to buy twine". But nobody else was saying anything about it on the NYT crossword forum.

A quick trip to Merriam Webster revealed that a package store is, in fact, a liquor store. Which perhaps explains why I'm never able to get stamps there.

Ironically, I think I hit this same term a couple of years ago in a crossword and was equally perplexed. Maybe it'll stick this time.

Best. Euphemism. Ever.

Dress left.

Briefly

I had a Laundry Situation this morning. You've been there. Fresh from the shower, toweled off, ready to dress and meet the day. Then you open your underwear drawer. The camera zooms in on the vast emptiness that greets you, then pulls out in a series of ever-widening quick cuts as you scream in despair.

You glance at yesterday's underwear beckoning ever so suggestively from the lip of the hamper. <rasping breath> "Luke. I am your father. Join me." You reject the Dark Side and scramble around your bedroom, checking your closet, your other drawers, the heaps of clothing on the floor-- anywhere a clean pair of underwear might be lurking.

That was me. And I found something. A pair of underwear stuffed into the back corner of the sock drawer. Banished and forgotten, but clean.

Boxers.

I'm a briefs man. I suppose that's my mom's doing-- it's what I always had as a child, and I never saw a reason to switch. But somewhere along the line I got a pair of boxers as a gift-- also from mom, in her misguided but well-intentioned "Peter will like anything with Bugs Bunny on it" phase-- which languished in disuse. But now I was backed into a corner. And fun as it is for Joey and Chandler to say, I didn't fancy going commando. Boxers it was.

And it feels weird. It's like I'm naked underneath my clothes. Every time I shift in my seat, I shift, if you know what I mean. I thought the <zip> <zip> <zip> of corduroy was the most self-conscious I could get from walking down the hall with parts of my body rubbing together, but today I discovered differently. Maybe it's a jeans thing. Slacks and boxers might create a synergy of loose-fitting comfort, but snug denim wants snug undergarments.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have laundry to do.

It Was 35 Years Ago Today

On December 3, 1968, I was born into a dark, barbaric world of discrimination. A world where the value of your birthright was dictated by the calendar. A world where children born at other times of the year got presents twice-- once for their birthday, once for the winter holidays-- but where the poor, sad children born in December got one "combined" gift. "This is for your birthday and Hannukah, dear." "Uh... gee, thanks. Oh, that birthday gift I gave you last May? That's for Hannukah, too."

It's not our fault we were born near the anniversary of Christ's manger debut. And as for Hannukah-- that sucker bobs and weaves its way around the calendar, just waiting to drive a haymaker into defenseless newborn children. So remember, people-- two celebrations, two gifts.

Think of the children.

A Real Snail-Mail Letter. Scout's Honor.

hi peter...
my name is [name withheld]...and i want recive all the report which is include gatthering......i will play a game with you...can you find my adress....and forget payable checque...i think you would sent thoese report free to me..."i dont have any money"......there is country; Turkey, the town is; Konya...but i dont want to give you my adreses....i think that report is only issue 11...but if there is other report, whay not..sent them to me to...

[name withheld]

Go Away

To Peter's little friends,

Peter's been a bad boy and won't be able to come out and play for a while. I'll let him go out in a few days when he's learned his lesson, but until then he won't be able to see you.

- Peter's mom

Ready For Their Close-Ups

I recently watched Traffic, about which I don't understand the ballyhoo. I found none of the three stories particularly compelling, and the sliced and diced narrative distracting.

However.

By the end of the film, I was irrevocably convinced of one salient fact. Catherine Zeta-Jones is the most stunningly beautiful actress working in movies today.

Don't believe me? Have you seen the ads for Intolerable Cruelty? I rest my case.

I bring this up because last night, I crowned her counterpart on television. 21 year old Amber Tamblyn, the titular Joan of Arcadia, gets the nod on the small screen. I think much of the credit goes to the hair stylists and make-up artists on the show, because Mary Steenburgen also looks terrific, but Tamblyn lights up every scene she's in. Her beauty, plus the delightfully written, playful dialogue between her and God, have me hoping the show survives for a while.

Sometimes You Feel Like A Nut

...sometimes you don't. This week, I haven't-- hence the lack of entries.

I will say that tonight's Angel was a dandy little ghost story-- a shame it wasn't held back another week.

Do Not Mock Happy Fun Ball