ATLAS SHRUGGED
I guess it’s serious when I find myself quoting bloody Ayn Rand, if only for effect. The planet twitches, a nervous twitch, and 100,000 and maybe more are dead. How can that be reconciled with the storm outside my window, that Newton the cat doesn’t like the thunder, or that I spent half yesterday fighting a inundation of pop-ups? (Or that Bush thinks that $35 million in disaster aid – far less than he’s spending on his fucking inauguration – is going to really help? Isn’t that like $350 per fatality?) I guess it has to be reconciled, the micro and the macro, otherwise we go insane.

But what happens when the Earth actually screams?

Meanwhile here’s a scarey Simon Winchester piece from the New York Times along the same theme...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/29/opinion/29winchester.html?pagewanted=2&th&oref=login

The secret word is Helpless

AND ON THE SUBJECT OF POPUPS.
The software Ad-Aware seems to have worked very nicely, thank you. But now I ponder what dumb bastard thinks advertising that interrupts my work, wastes my time, ruins my day, and gives the impression it’s destroying my computer is going to make me buy their fucking product. Are you capitalists terminally half-witted?

CRYPTIQUE – Get off of my cloud.