Ever had a nightmare so grueling that your brain wouldn't allow it to finish? We've probably all had the experience of waking up in a cold sweat right before the shark bites your leg off or you're forced to sit through a screening of "Twilight" or whatever. Maybe you went all-out cliche by sitting bolt-upright screaming, or maybe you just laid ( Read more... )

So I'm considering getting an e-book reader. Not because I have the slightest interest in actual e-books--I'm still a paper junkie--but because I have about ten zillion PDFs, and I don't want to kill a million trees to print them out, but I also don't like the idea of having to read them all on a laptop or desktop. I understand that the standard- ( Read more... )

The local grocery store offers samples on the weekend. You can visit the different departments and graze on small pieces of pizza, bacon, cheese, or whatever other product they're pushing that week. Typically the exchange involves brief small talk with a store employee who prepares the samples and tells you what you're eating ( Read more... )

Everyone who reads this should start buying the "Batman" comic immediately, because "Batman" is about to reveal the fate of the American Empire ( Read more... )

I recently took a weekend trip out of town with some friends, and one evening we stayed at a cheap motel in a small town in Wisconsin. We went to Culver's (the only restaurant open past nine) for take-out and then sat down to eat it at a picnic table in front of our building. We'd barely gotten started when a car pulled up and a man came out and ( Read more... )

Apparently a lot of people want somebody like them in the White House. We saw it with Bush and we're seeing it even more so with Palin. I'm not talking about questions of experience or judgment. If you really think Palin's qualified enough, fine; it's difficult to argue that she's less experienced than Obama. If you agree with her stances on the ( Read more... )

Lots of odd nonsense supposedly happening over the past few weeks:

*The Georgia Gorilla, briefly trumpeted by some sources as, finally, A Real Bigfoot Body. This was all over the Fox Mulder corners of the Net; the site I've linked to was receiving three million hits a minute at one point. The "body"  doesn't look particularly real to me, although I ( Read more... )

There was a time when the future promised to be shiny and bland, like a tastefully furnished living room in a junior lawyer's dream house or the bridge on the Enterprise-D. Oh, there were problems, but the really serious ones usually took place far away--the metaphorical equivalent of an occasional fringe outpost being annihilated by strange beings ( Read more... )

It’s a bad time to be a knee-jerk anti-green conservative, because it’s become obvious that they’re mostly wrong. We really are facing serious problems which we could have prevented (or at least blunted) with common-sense precautions. So they’re reduced to a sad new form of backlash: criticizing environmentalists for daring to bring it up in the ( Read more... )

By now, we've all heard the latest negative spin on Barack Obama: he's elitist. He's an out-of-touch, pointy-headed intellectual who thinks he knows better than Joe and Jane Average. He dares to suggest that the most popular policies are not necessarily the best ones ( Read more... )