Well, the last letter actually seemed to work out all right, so here are few more.  Political-style...

To Congress:
Stop mentioning how long you've been working every time you're on camera.  No one in the real world is impressed.  Really.  Many of us do it all the time.  There's an economic crisis and you worked until 1 AM last night?  Wow, that's quite a sacrifice.  I'm very impressed that you've given up 2-3 hours of sleep to prevent the free world from imploding into economic chaos and destruction.

To Senator McCain:
You messed up.  The whole "canceling the debate" gambit failed.  As much as I appreciate the idea of a Senator doing his current job first, don't worry about it.  There are 98 other Senators that are perfectly qualif... well... equally qualified to deal with the crisis.  You're just getting in the way and causing political friction.

To Senator Obama:
Come on... you've been campaigning for President since 3 weeks after you were elected.  It's clear you had no intention to do your actual Senator job so just go campaign.  Stop with the photo shoots and flights out to D.C. and just get back at it.  You're messing up the whole process too.

To every news commentator:
STOP saying "main street" in comparison with "Wall Street".  Seriously, it's just maddening.  You managed to get past saying "gravitas" all the time, and you've even started cutting back on "heartbeat away from the Presidency" when talking about Governor Palin, just stop saying "main street".  It doesn't make you look in touch with the "common folk" especially with everyone else saying it too.

So there.

An open letter to The Office:

I'm not going back. Seriously, I'm not.

You dragged out the whole romance thing between Jim and Pam for three seasons and I went along with it. Because it's funny and clever and, I'll confess, I got caught up hoping they would get together. And now that they have you want to futz with it and cause some conflict to shake things up. I can understand that, I really can. The formula is as old as drama itself - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. Every show with this kind of situation does it eventually.

But you know what makes it different? It's that the characters are really meant to be together. This isn't two people just thrown together, or opposites attracting, or two people drawn together for no discernable reason whatsoever. This is two people who have a lot in common, really like each other, and should be together.

If it sounds like I'm just getting all sentimental, I'm not. It's not about some desire to see fictional characters find happiness. It's about maintaining a sense of dramatic integrity. There's no believable reason why they should have a conflict right now. Based on the season finale and the ads leading up to the season premiere Thursday it looks like there is to be some conflict over the fact that Jim failed to propose. But that's an absurd premise and emotionally dishonest to boot.

So go, go send Pam to wherever that art school thing was. Get your Lily subplot done, let Pam find some independence and some alluring artist guy so she can wonder if "Jim's really serious" - or some other BS, nonsense premise. Just have her back and them back together within three episodes.

But I'm not putting up with the drama. It's a comedy, for crying out loud. Enough with the drama, enough with the bizarre, uncomfortable episodes of last season. Make with the funny or I'm moving on. Got too much competition for that time slot on our DVR as it is.

From HijiNKS Ensue:

Played with a remote-controlled car, no less...

I can hass avocadoes?

... I'm very sorry.

Clearly envious of all the discoveries going on at the LHC, the Evolutionary Acceleration Research Institute has announced they are turning their focus to biology.

No quote, just click on the link.

The title pretty much says it all.

  

Well, mostly Kate. Natalie was pretty tired. But there's more Natalie coming shortly.

 

Natalie, shortly after birth:

Any time I ask someone if they've seen the movie Dreamscape, all I get back is a blank stare.  So, for the uninitiated, it's a fantasy movie from 1984 starring Dennis Quaid.  The basic premise is that there exists people with psychic abilities who can, with the aid of some technology, enter into the dreams of other people and interact with them.  Alex Gardner (Quaid) is one of these and he is recruited by Doctor Paul Novotny to... well, here's where my memory's a little fuzzy.

I'll be honest, it's not a great movie, so I've no real incentive to go watch it again.  In any event, it turns out that another of the dream explorer psychic guys, Tommy Ray Glatman (yes, really), is acting as an assassin - entering people's dreams and killing them.  The movie proposes that if you die in your dreams, you die in real life.  Kind of an overused, empirically-disproven premise, but given the movie's plot it could hardly have gone anywhere interesting without it.

Meanwhile, the President is being plagued by bad dreams of his own.  He seeks the help (I think) of whatever organization they all work for and it's then that Tommy Ray is hired to kill the President.  There's a big snakeman (see right) which is really more dumb than scary, and Alex wins in the end.  No surprise there.

So why talk about it at all?  Ah, to share a childhood trauma.  See, one of the dreams the President has is of the consequences of a nuclear strike.  Specifically, it has him wandering through a post-apocalyptic house while hearing the scariest freaking voices and music ever.  He does eventually find the sources of the voices, now mutated by the effects of the blast.

I'd like to say that in retrospect it's kind of stupid and not all that scary, but to heck with that.  It's still damn scary!  It's not AS bad muted, but, well, just see for yourself:



Thanks to this scene I still - STILL - to this day hesitate sometimes when opening closet doors.