I finished Art of Forgiving last week.

No, this is not a joke.
My web wanderings occasionally take me to very strange places, like, for instance, this article in Rolling Stone Magazine about the "new" virgins. Yeah, that's right. Virgins. And, not as in "virgin sacrifice", either. Actual Christian young men and young women saving themselves for marriage. No, this is not a joke!

Care to model yourself?
No, I don't mean "be a model" but rather "make a model". Yeah, no kidding. Now you can make yourself in the digital, virtual world with Virtual Model. Well, at least if you're patterned after dot-bomb webdesigners on the West Coast. In other words, you can't have a full beard, like me. Just a faint, fuzzy, Gen-X goatee.
Anyway, I came pretty close to making me. And you can make yourself.

They say bad news always comes in "threes".
First, James Doohan, the one and only "Scotty" from the original Star Trek series died today. Then, as if that weren't enough, Gerry Thomas, "inventor" of the TV dinner died today, too! Talk about a pop-culture one-two-punch! Man, I really admired both these guys.

If I had a dime for every empty threat...

ten year old can do it!

Why does this not surprise me?

No, this is not a bad acid trip.
Actually, it's a pretty interesting web comic set in the not too distant future. What's even more interesting is that it takes place in an Islamic-centric desert country torn by war and terrorism. Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought it might. And, trust me, this is a very different look at how that dynamic works. Very thought provoking.
So, check out The Spiders and get ready to be blown away.

Well, more brackish than fishy, I suppose.
I've been having some pond problems. First, there were the leeches in the skimmer. No, not the little red worms that turn into some kind of tiny fly that the dragonflies love to eat, but actual leeches. How do I know what leeches look like? Well, let's just say I was the only one smart enough not to swim in that "special" lake at Boy Scout Camp. So, I poured a bunch of salt into that filter to get rid of them. That seems to have worked so far.

I finished Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov over the weekend.