Harry Lime: Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly. This weekend I caught the famous noir thriller “The Third Man”. What a great movie! I really enjoyed the plot. It had all the usual, post-war amorality, a stunning European dame, Yankee idealism, European cynicism, and the question of what can we say for ourselves, as a race, when The Judgment comes.

I dreamt that I was attending a wedding, and in the white dress was my friend who was murdered years ago. She was breathtaking, radiant, and tan. She was the way I remembered her, but with that elusive red tint she tried to get in her hair working exactly the way I knew she always wanted it to be. I dreamt that the cathedral was large and wooden, clearly Catholic but minus a lot of the kneeling it seemed. Along the exposed ship’s ribs of the supports of the vault there were pennants, standards, and flags. There was a large organ in the far right corner, with long pipes that bellowed the inevitable Mendelsshon’s ‘Wedding March’.

You may want to see Kris Carr’s crazysexycancer. It’s the documentary of a young woman who gets word on February 14th that she has inoperable cancer. The question is, what did she do with her life after that. What do we do with ours?

Guy on the right. A siren. Have a daughter who has a daughter. Bless the power of of fame and money ( ça veut dire “resources” ) to improve the gene pool.

William Gibson said one of my favorite dicta about the future: “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I feel like a wave of the future washed over my shore recently. I received a postcard from my health benefits program encouraging me to take advantage of “an exciting new service…a personalized, confidential genetic analysis.” A what? It continued: “With a simple DNA test,…you can work with your doctor or a Navigenics genetic counselor” Say what? Is that a job you can apply for, “genetic counselor?” Can you imagine the resume for the person that applies for that job.

I think Ryan and I must be on a similar wavelength lately as I too was thinking the exact same thing as him: I am thankful to not have come of age in an era where the internet’s depthless hard drives could store my equally depthless teenage narcissism or youthful folly for-ever. As an early (may I say that?) adopter in the general populace (1994, dial up Unix shell on a SCO-V UNIX) of the Internet, I didn’t get off scot-free. Thanks to BBS’ and Usenet, I managed to write some pretty inane things (e.g. “Are you excited about Mike Modano and the Dallas Stars?