I love Kindle 3. It landed on my doorstep yesterday in a brown box. It caused unusual upturned creases to spread on both sides of my mouth.

K3 is smaller and lighter than K2. After reading K3 for an hour or so, I picked up K2 and it felt absurdly cumbersome, like switching from a paperback to a hardback book. How did anyone ever tolerate it!?

K3 has better contrast than K2. Comparing the K2 next to the K3 shows a striking difference: the words in K2 now appeared faded from centuries spent under a glaring sun. How could I have read some many words like that!?

Also, K2 cost me 2.6 times what K3 cost me. How could I have paid that!?

I watched Jack Horkheimer every week late at night on PBS right after Doctor Who. I recall struggling to remain awake, for just a minute or two, while an ethereal melody played a happy lullaby, and Jack described what to look for outside. It formed a kind of bridge between all the Science Fiction I was ingesting and the real world: here were stars, constellations, galaxies I'd read about, and there was Jack, floating out amongst them. Some people hustle pool, others hustle cars, then there's that man you've heard about, the one who hustles stars.

My current desktop. Pretty exciting, yes?

This hummus you gave me is SO much better than General Tso's Chicken!

It's time I got a cleaning lady. It has to be a lady; I don't want a dude cleaning up my place, some dude walking around. And it should be a non-English-speaking lady, like a Mexican cleaning lady. The less English my cleaning lady knows the better. I feel like a Mexican cleaning lady is less likely to tell anyone I know about the weird and disgusting shit she'll be cleaning up, about my various embarrassing stains and odors and leavings. Same goes the dry-cleaner, laundry... anyone involved in cleaning up after me. The less English a person knows, the less concerned I am about what they think of me. How much does a Mexican cleaning lady cost? It has to be like minimum wage, right? Or can I pay her less if she's Mexican? Is there a Mexican Cleaning Lady Agency I can contact?

Contract a health ailment you are convinced is something terrible and fatal, finally visit a doctor, ponder your mortality in silent dread while the tests are analyzed, then learn it was something much less serious than you feared. This should give you at least two days worth of a good mood.

Most Saturdays I drive over to the Furry Lodge, dress up in a big bear suit, and rub up against anything in pink fur for about an hour. After that I'll pick up a 6-pack of Pabst, sit on the roof of the dry cleaners, and throw rocks at the Latino skate-boarders. They call me "El Chupacabra". Probably because of the bear suit. Finally, to cap the night off, I usually swing over to my ex-girlfriend's house and root through her garbage, searching for some shred of evidence that she desperately hates her life with her fancy husband and shiny new children, wishing like Cinderella she still had me in her life (and not in her trashcans). Then Animal Control usually shows up and knocks me out with a tranquilizer dart. Probably because of the bear suit.

Speaking of crazy, Beefy Lou has lost some more of his mind recently. He's been obsessing over his hands and feet, exclaiming how proud of them he is, how amazed by how well they work together. "If one of my feet has an itch," says Beefy Lou to anyone willing to pretend to listen, "one of my hands will immediately scratch it. No negotiation, no fee, nothing. Pure altruism!" And to anyone still within earshot: "This one time my left hand had shit on it, and my right hand cleaned it off! Actual shit!" And when calling on the phone, instead of a greeting you might hear: "You should see my hands clap. Such precise synchronization..." And so on like that. Nobody will choose to go near him now, so he is left with those loyal little friends of his, the ones attached to his body.

Meanwhile, my war with household insects has erupted once more this year. I've stocked the compound with Raid cannisters, citronella bombs, swatters, and those blue zapping lights that people in the eighties used to attach to their porches and patios. I have especially little tolerance for creepy insects like earwigs and roaches, alien little creatures imbued with preternatural menace. I've been seeing a lot of these lately, and they fill me with primal fear every time, so I've issued my hands and feet kill-on-sight orders for them, even if the hands are already engaged in cleaning shit off of one another. Certain creatures cannot be tolerated!

Wait there's Beefy Lou right now -- he's just run by outside shouting something about Jello. I think it was, "Jello must be yellow. Jello must be yellow." Ah well, even crazier today.

Meanwhile, Dr. Jones has been obsessed with World Cup soccer, and like all Americans who watch this game, he's certain he can improve it with certain modifications. These are not the typical improvements you often hear people espouse like instant replays, better timekeeping methods, forechecking, and so on. His improvements are a bit stranger. For instance, he recommends that the field become round and slowly rotate on a turntable while the goals remain stationary, sort of like a lazy susan or a revolving restaurant. That way the direction of the offense must always arc against the motion of the field, causing a light but persistent dizziness for players and spectators alike. How this is an "improvement", Dr. Jones won't say, but he claims to have gotten the idea after watching a documentary on mass hypnotism. For similarly enigmatic reasons, he wants every player to wear an astronaut's helmet, flip-flop sandals, a brightly colored inner-tube around their waist, and keep a live cricket in their mouth. And as a final insult to the audience he would have loud-speaks play an irritating buzzing horn sound during the entire game. Madness! He plans to petition FIFA for these changes soon after the end of this year's tournament.

Wait a moment! Now Beefy Lou has arrived outside my door. He's whispering something through the keyhole, wait... he's saying... "Old people... Old people... Old people are tragic... and.... and smelly.... Old people are tragic and smelly...."

Sigh.

And it just bothers me that this last remnant of extrasolar humanity, this loud-mouthed, self-obsessed crowd of whining idiots, who basically just spent the *entire* series squabbling over the most minute political issues, find *this* decision uncontroversial, *this*, the most radical decision ever made by anyone about anything, the most absurd plan ever devised by ape or robot, *this* they all go along with. Sure, Apollo, no problem, let's just FLY ALL OUR SHIT INTO THE SUN! NO PROBLEM, APOLLO! WHATEVER YOU SAY!

It's making me crazy.

This trailer for the new live action Star Blazers movie looks amazing. It was Star Blazers stacked on top of Star Wars that made me a Science Fiction geek lo these many years ago, and now I've become so cynical on the subject I should be cursing and spitting over the notion of a live action Star Blazers (the way I curse and spit at my scarred portrait of Ron Moore every morning). But damn, this looks like it could be really good. Nah, I guess not.

I searched my feelings today and decided that the Battlestar Galactica finale still annoys the snot out of me! They flew all their technology into the sun! What were they thinking!? They have no idea what kind of viruses are floating around down there. Are they going to switch from laser cutters to stone axes? Don't they want plumbing anymore for the gods' sake? They don't need electricity?? I guess because they no longer have anything with a plug attached to it, why not! Don't they even want refrigeration!? A comfy freaking chair to sit on? Oh, I hate that Apollo so much! I hate I hate I hate you Ron Moore!

Imagine Avatar, ok, that dopey James Cameron movie? But now replace all the sexy blue cat creatures with slimy Jabba the Hutt monsters, all lying around farting and puking and compelling slave girls to dance or suffer the teeth of the Rancor. It's much better, right?

Avatar is Dune for dumb people. There, I've figured it all out so you don't have to.

Some of you, my adoring flock, will find me unpredictable when I say unto you, "I did not hate the Lost finale". I actually rather enjoyed it. I know, I know, the whole afterlife thing is hokey, and not unexpected, and the character reunions didn't always click firmly into place (especially Sayid and that blonde girl; I thought his big love was that Iraqi woman..?), but I was satisfied anyway. There remain a thousand plot holes and ten thousand question marks; the resolutions were mostly *magic* (a wizard did it!), but I didn't mind. This was *low* on the BSG scale of finale-suck. So who cares if the island is the geological equivalent of Marsellus Wallace's briefcase? So what if some of the characters got shafted (the last few episodes this season made me think of an amateur chess player who finds himself in a position too complex for him to understand very well so his strategy is to exchange pieces until things simplify enough for him to stabilize his game. Similarly the Lost writers went about killing off all the characters they couldn't fit into their endgame, reducing the plotlines into something more manageable. They sort of succeeded. I guess they did.)?

Of course, I might have been happier if the island turned out to be a giant alien spaceship, and all the 815 survivors were abductees undergoing experiments, a-and Jacob was an alien-human hybrid, and the smoke monster was fuel exhaust, and....

Flyers pulled off some beautiful fractal symmetry last night: down three games to zero in the series, they win three games and force game seven; then down three goals to none in game seven, they score three goals and tie the game; the fourth goal is the fourth game is the win -- outstanding!