There's no question that the World Wide Web is a much different beast today than it was during the election of 2000.   Yes, it was even then a communication medium but it was primarily a way to sell dog food.   After Bush was inaugurated www.blogger.com, which had begun in late 1999 but had not really taken off, became all the rage and truly launched the individual blogging phenomenon - big enough that Google bought them and, after that, blogging went truly mainstream, to the tune of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million blogs today.

In case you didn't know it, there's an election happening in America and it hasn't been called or conceded by anyone but only the staunchest Republican could have gone into this expecting a win.  Well, if we get 9 people on the Supreme Court to intervene I suppose anything can happen but there is no normal scenario where Republicans expected a win.

Spore was released the day before my birthday so you can bet it was on my wish list.  Wil Wright has made some great games (Sim City) and then some clunkers.  He made The Sims, which I never played, because watching myself walk around my house in a game is even less exciting than watching myself do it in real life.

But there's no question Wright had ambitious plans for this, and it's my type of game.   I am a strategy game guy more than the modern shooters and real-time tank-rush type games.   I am probably a product of my age.  I'd live my life turn-based if I could.    So Civilization and sports management games are how I spend the small amounts of gaming time I have; something I can do while watching a movie, nothing that works better on a console.

There was a time when being a journalist was a higher calling - and that higher calling was truth.    Somewhere in there it became well-known that journalists were a little more liberal than most and that was bad.   Well, why wouldn't they be?   Journalists, of the old school, graduated high school and took jobs at small newspapers.   They covered the late night crime beat, they did obituaries - they saw how in some cases people who didn't have much of a way out did things people with money and food say they would never dream of doing.   

In any civilized society, people should not starve.   I'd be more suspicious of young journalists who were not liberals in that environment.   Who doesn't want to believe we can create a better world?