I Get Misty Eyed at Work, But No One Sees Me
Kristen e-mailed me this little note at work today, and it hit me just so ... I tell you there's nothing better and worse, sweeter and sadder than being missed by your baby son.

From: Kristen Battles-Burden [mailto:kbattlesburden@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, December 22, 2003 11:21 AM
To: eburden@nh.com
Subject: the sweetest thing...
I just had to tell you that I was showing David the pictures George brought over last night of us at the opening ceremonies of the Highland Games and David looked at the pictures of you carrying him in the pack and started saying, "Da-Da, Da-Da" and starting whimpering and tried to go down the stairs to find you. I asked him, "You miss Daddy, huh?" and he nodded. I tried to tell him that you would be home for a whole week on vacation and though I don't think he quite got it, it seemed to cheer him up a bit.
Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that little story...
Love you!
Kris

Drugs and the Writer
Question: Did drugs help some of the great literary masters write better, or just give them fodder to write about? An interesting essay from the UK on pharmacology and the muse.

Pope on Gibson's "The Passion"
While some lower echelon bureaucrats in Church hierarchy have been dodgy about commenting on Mel Gibson's The Passion because of the controversy that has surrounded it, not so the Pope, who's always demonstrated a willingness to come right out and say what's on his mind. After seeing the film in a private screening, the pope said: "It is as it was." High praise indeed. Can't wait to see it.

Guardian: We're all nerds now
The Guardian speculates: "Over the past decade, those cultural phenomena that we once filed as geeky minority pursuits have become our masters. The Internet now boasts a global community numbering 679 million. Video gaming pulls in more annual revenue than Hollywood. For its part, the film industry seems increasingly in thrall to the comic-book movie (Spider-Man, Hulk), the sci-fi epic (The Matrix, Star Wars) and the wizard fantasy (Harry Potter). Next week sees the release of the final instalment in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, awash with elves and hobbits and surely the most monumental nerd-fest of the lot. All of which raises some frightening implications. Could it be that there are more nerds today than there were before?"
Not to take this too seriously, but there were, for those of us who spent some socially awkward years between the ages of 10 and 15, many gradations of that state, and I don't think we considered them all equal, or all nerdy. It was possible to love Tolkien and fantasy and sci-fi writing without necessarily being a comic book maven, and visa versa. It was also possible to know too many big words, dig computers, or simply not be good at one particular thing (catching footballs, say) and be cool - what made a nerd was a certain social awkwardness that transcended hobbies. I'm pretty sure if, at that age, I'd dropped all my native interests and gone out for the same sports the most popular boy in class did, I still wouldn't have been drip[ping charisma all over the schoolyard.
An example? Sure, how's this for penultimate preteen nerdiness?
I can remember being entranced with the BASIC programming language on my little Commodore Vic20 computer I'd won for delivering papers on my paper route. I was really into writing games, and since the most sophisticated real home video games back then were still just beyond Space Invaders and Pong, I really thought my games (crafted by POKING graphics one bit at a time onto the screen, moving them around and PEEKING to see if they'd hit anything) were pretty darn good.
But what was really cool was that back then you stored your programs on cassette tape -- which you could also play back on a regular tape recorder. The results sounded like a cross between a modem connection and the baby monitor from "Signs".
So when I wasn't writing computer code, I'd get together with a few like minded friends, drag the tape recorder up a tree, and play back the computer programs as an aural background to our imaginary space travel (the tree, a huge pine, was of course our multi-level rocket ship).

What, A Visionary Artist Not Recognized Until After His Death? Shocking.
As yet another Phillip K. Dick inspired story hits the big screen ("Paycheck" with Ben Affleck), Wired News takes a look at the life and times of the writer who pretty much defined, from beyond the grave, modern Hollywood's "anxious surrealism" driven science fiction.
Dick wrote about that broken reality in the 1970s ...
"We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."

Richard Dawkin's Ethics of Belief
An interesting, if sometimes wrongheaded, review of "A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love" by fascinating, but often very wrongheaded, evolutionary biologist and evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is the guy who brought us, "the selfish gene" and the "meme" and he sees religious as dangerous virus; shades of this thought can be seen in replicated throughout modern cyberpunk.