Where have You Gone, Gene Siskel?

It's been several years since film critic Gene Siskel passed away, but I have yet to get used to his replacement Richard Roeper. He does okay, I guess. He's doing what he's supposed to at the job, you know, telling us about movies he's seen and whether he thinks we should see them or not. Fine, he does that. But you know what?

He's not Gene.

And there's the problem. Siskel and Ebert were a team. There was a well hewn dynamic between them and they approached the movies from different perspectives and as equals. Richard Roeper - no matter what he says - is not Roger Ebert's equal. Oh sure, he thinks that he doesn't give Ebert an inch, but that's just bull. No, he is way too reverential to the guy who, when all's said and done, gave him the job in the first place. Roeper is just the temp who was hired full time.

Hey, is Roger Ebert okay? I noticed that he seemed really thin and that his voice sounded old and quavery. The guy used to be immense, but now all he has left are some sad jowls that remind us of his once magnificent girth. I sure hope he lost the weight to be healthier and that it's not a sign of him wasting away. On the other hand, I miss fat Ebert. Oh sure, obesity is a gigantic health risk, can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, premature death, blah, blah, blah.

So maybe he lost weight for his 'health', but what about us? Formerly he was jolly and loved life which you can do if you stay up all night eating Snickers bars. As an example. I don't know that he ever actually did that, but he might have. He no longer seems to have that joy that he once did and I know it must be because those Snicker bar binges (again, as an example) are long gone and will never happen ever. And he's just one of those people who need to be heavy, like Orson Welles, or Oprah, or Star Jones.

But you see there was the counterpoint that Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel provided each other. Roger was fat, Gene was thin. Roger had hair, Gene didn't. Roger was the everyman movie-goer and Gene was the intellectual snob. It worked with those two, because you knew where they were coming from and you also knew that you as a consumer of Movie fare were probably right there somewhere in the middle. You could always trust that their opinions collectively could be your guide.

With one exception: Foreign movies. They just went into ecstasy over Foreign movies and they were just wrong. It just so happened that I happened to see a movie they both recommended and tell me if you see the possiblities here. The movie was set in Mexico at a circus, but it starts in an insane asylum with the 'hero' (a young, obviously disturbed young man) naked and perched in a bare tree that the custodians of the asylum thoughtfully placed for him.

In flashbacks it is revealed how he got there, which is that he came from a circus family and his mother lost her arms and he had to stand behind her from then on and be her arms. His mother had some mental health issues of her own and was a serial killer (I seem to remember. It's been awhile).

Anyways, I've told you enough to give you the picture. The movie was totally stupid and weird and you never could figure out what was going on or why. Of course, Sisker and Ebert both loved it. Because it was avante garde and symbolic and powerful and ... oh, please. Just take my word for it and never rent anything that sounds like what I described. I'm not a professional critic, but trust me.

Well, I learned never to listen to them about Foreign films and that's good advice for you, too. Never listen to the critics about Foreign films. These films will always suck from an American perspective. There's a reason why the whole world watches our movies and we don't watch theirs. We know how to make them and they don't.

Then one day, I started to notice Gene getting thin and it looked for all the world that he was wearing a toupee that was designed to mimic a thinning hairline. And finally one day, he did die. Roger Ebert auditioned a series of guest co-critics in his place and they rotated between them, which was fair because who could take Gene Siskel's place? My first choice for a replacement was a rather attractive black woman whose opinions were rather silly, but if I had to see someone sitting across from Roger Ebert it might as well be a sexy woman.

Finally, he did not choose her, but Richard Roeper. So, he made the wrong selection as far as I was concerned, but life moves on and we have to keep going. Then Roger lost weight and instead of fat and thin we now have not-so-fat and stocky. Instead of hairy and bald we have hairy and hairy. And instead of everyman and effete intellectual snob we had everyman and ... I don't know.

Roeper has some carefully thought out reviews, I guess. He does a satisfactory job but he'll never be ... well, you know

Edit him Before he Writes Again

I used to enjoy reading Stephen King books, that is, I used to enjoy his earlier books when there were publishers who dared to still edit him. I've got a secret for you: As much as I've enjoyed his books, he writes a lot of crap. The problem these days is that there isn't anyone who can tell him to take the crap out, so it stays in - every crappy word.

He's written a whole bunch of really great three to four hundred page novels in the last few years, but the problem is he took twelve hundred pages to write each of them. I'm thinking of IT, The Stand, DreamCatcher.

I couldn't believe that I had gotten six hundred pages into a book and he was still introducing more effing characters when he already had about thirty and I couldn't remember who they all were. That was The Stand I think. Or It. It applies to both, anyways.

Okay. He's not the only artist that applies to that gets to do what they want unchecked because they're too big and almighty. George Lucas is another. The first three Star Wars movies were so special and so wonderful and they were that way partly because there was a studio that kept him on track and kept asking the question of why people would be interested in what he had to say.

The last three Star Wars? Nope. Why on Earth did he think that senate debates, even Sci Fi CGI senate debates would be interesting? Or Jedi Sub-committee meetings or trade delegation negotiations? You absolutely know that in real life Lucas is a grumpy old set-in-his-ways bachelor who thinks C-Span is a good way to spend a Saturday night.

And you know what I think about the last Star Wars scripts? I heard that he hired somebody to write them, which I think happened and they were great. Then Lucas personally rewrote them so they were boring again. Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) famously said about his dialogue: "You can type this stuff, but you can't speak it." She should know. One of her post-princess jobs was as a highly paid 'Script Doctor'.

I'll give one more example, from the world of music this time:Prince. He used to be good, didn't he? Every note he wrote in Purple Rain is perfect and I still listen to that album from time to time. After that, he put out a lot of stuff and very little of it was listenable. Why? Nobody told him that people didn't want to hear every single thing that came into his head. Prince is famed as being a prolific artist and, boy, he comes out with some gems but the problem with finding gems - to torture my metaphor a bit - is that you have to sift through a lot of dirt. People don't want to hear your dirt.

There really is a point in an artists life - no matter what their field - when they have the opportunity to jump the shark and thumb their noses at their audiences. Sure, you do art for yourself and that's fine - do your art. But you shouldn't expect anybody else to pay for your self-indulgence and you need somebody to critically sift the wheat from the chaff. You know, an editor. That's what they're there for, Stephen.

Where Have You Gone, Angry Republican?

Oh, I am getting dissillusioned with blogging. It's not turning out to be what I thought it was going to be; Other bloggers it turns out are just in it for the money and that is so distressing to me. Somehow this forum has lost it's gentle purity and turned into a greed fests. Well, that might be more the American bloggers. I've noticed that the British bloggers seem to be more what you might think of as the bloggers, that is writing the sort of on-line journal that anyone can look in on and read about.

I've been blogging my blog now for about six months now. There are more than six months worth of blogs because I started it in about April, but I didn't quite understand what I was supposed to do so I just had daily entries that I never posted on-line and then when I went on-line I posted them as if I'd been doing it for months, but I really hadn't.

I know better now.

This must have been about June that I actually started and immediately I got responses from other bloggers one of whom was: The Angry Republican. My posts must have appeared to him to be non-Republican and I think he was laying in wait for foolish non-rightwingers who needed to be set on the path of good American values. Anyways, I'd been ending each post with a summation of how that post related to the coming apocalypse because that's what I had promised on my website. But I stopped after awhile because it just strained my brain to make some sort of connection with every single post. Go back to some of my earlier posts and you'll see what I was talking about.

The Angry Republican commented on this particular aspect in a rather amusing smart-ass manner and I replied in as much a smart ass way as I could. It must have been about a dozen back and forths before he got bored and stopped making the effort. And this was my introduction to this culture and what I thought blogging was. Or should be.

Then I found out differently. I would get these various comments that would compliment one of my posts and invite me to visit their weblog. Which I did the first couple of times. Then I kept repeatedly getting this one from Forex Trading which complimented my article 'Hogan Knows Nothing' . I would sometimes get like three a day from them and always that post and no others. So, I figured out that there must be some sort of program that was scanning weblogs and then grabbing and inserting a post title. Occasionally I would get comments complimenting my post: 'This post'.

So many of these weblogs were not really weblogs at all but commercial sites, plain and simple.

I was so disillusioned.

Q: But Steve, you damned hypocrite, isn't your Weblog site selling something? You're trying to interest people in getting your book (Breakfast with the Antichrist), aren't you?

A: True enough, but Good God that's not all I write about. In fact, I write very little about that book. There's a link to the publisher (a crappy one that fails because the publisher's tech support refuses to believe it doesn't work) a link to my website and I think that's about it. Other than that it's just my own observations and insights.

Well, I'll persist. It's not what I expected and I miss my smart-ass friend the Angry Republican. All of his views are wrong, but at least he's a real person who's only in this to further his misguided view of the world.

The Liberation of Canada

The comedian John Candy in one of his last films starred in a movie where Canada and the United States go to war against each other. It's supposed to be a comedy, but I just found something out and it makes me wonder if it's such a funny idea after all. You see, Canada has oil. Before, there was really no reason for the United States to invade, because what do they have after all? Trees? Beavers? Snow? We got that stuff down here already and we got all that we need already. Thank you.

But oil? Hmmm. It's all locked up in sand this oil, so it's only now getting really economical to dig it our rather than pump it out. Well, they got a lot of it in that sand so I've been thinking ..

You know, Canada does have nuclear weapons or as I should phrase it 'weapons of mass destruction'. That's right. And I'm feeling pretty threatened by them having weapons of mass destruction so that means that the United States is being threatened by Canada's weapons of mass destruction. Do you see where I'm going here?

Of course we'll have to have UN weapons inspectors go in there and inspect for weapons, but those weapons inspectors will be duped by the wiley Canadians. Count on it! And forget about sanctions because they'll find a way around those too. That leaves only one alternative - and you can bet that the last thing a country led by two former oil executives would want to do is invade a country with tons of the stuff - but regretfully that's what must happen.

The leader of Canada you must know is a tyrannical despot. I don't know the guy's name but I do know that he's a horrible dictator who is oppressing his own citizens. Canada has a prison system and some Canadians have to be in there by mistake, so - if you think about it - this monster is unjustly jailing his own people in his gulag of torture chambers. We would be doing them all such a favor by overthrowing this villain for them. When our tanks roll down their streets they'll absolutely be throwing rose petals in front of them in gratitude and joy.

And another thing: in Canada they have socialized medicine which is pretty close to Communism. So, we definitely need to bring them Democracy and our superior form of health care. You can't imagine how much they'll thank us for that one.

For some reason when the United States does make the decision to invade an oil-rich nation like Canada gas prices go up along with oil company profits. I'm not sure exactly why, though I think it has something to do with using their oil wealth to rebuild their own infrastructure. That must be it because nobody here in America would be lining their pockets with their stolen wealth. That just doesn't happen.

It will be a sacrifice to all of us to pay for the military expenses and higher energy costs, I know. But I guess that's just the price we all have to pay to liberate our dear neighbors up North.

Grilled Cheese Virgin Mary

I just figured out how to make grilled cheese sandwhiches on my George Forman grill. I gotta tell you that I love that thing - about my half my meals in 2005 were cooked courtesy of that former boxer's genius, which means if not for him I'd be only half the man I am now. Or at least I'd be considerably slimmer.

I'm not going to give you the recipe for grilled cheese sandwhiches a la George Forman, by the way. It's really just exactly how you make them normally, except you press them between the two hot plates (oh wait. That is the recipe).

It reminds me of a fast food they used to have in Greece called 'Canadian Toast', which was just a sandwhich with various things in it grilled between two hot plates and scrunched together. Back in those days the Greeks really hated America (not Americans, so much - just the country) and so as a signal to English speakers whose business they wanted they would call everything 'Canadian' or to a lesser extent 'British'. I remember that I used to get pizza occasionally at 'Candian Pizza'since Canada, we all know, is renowned for their pizza. Right?

I don't know how the Greeks currently feel about America or Americans since I haven't visited in quite a long time. Seeing as how the whole world hates us these days, it's a pretty safe bet that they probably do, also.

Now that I've been making all of these grilled cheese sandwhiches (Only one today, because I ran out of cheese) I've decided to look carefully at each one I make, in case one happens to have an image of the Virgin Mary burned into it. I'm constantly reading how somebody has sold a piece of toast over the internet with her on it and I figure that sooner or later one of the Grilled Cheeses I'm making just by chance will have to look like her. Then I'll just put it up for sale on the web and making thousands.

Don't worry about why the Lord God Almighty would choose to manifest his divine presence on a piece of bread. He does! That's all you need to know about this. And when he chooses to do so, it's a message of love, grace and forgiveness for all mankind. Really.

I already found one of my grilled cheeses that looked like Michaelangelo's creation scene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But I ate it, because, Man, I was hungry. That one probably wasn't worth a lot because it's the Virgin Mary that's so special to people.

Oh, who am I kidding? I'll probably just eat the Virgin Mary, too.

Glowing Green Pigs

Scientists have discovered that by injecting fetal pig embryos with phosphorescent dyes the adult pigs will have green skin and glow in the dark. All I can about this is: Well, it's about time! I can't count the number of times I needed to find my pig in the middle of the night and I had to struggle to find my glasses and turn on a light. This will sure be a huge time saver for me, I can tell you, now that I can get a pig that will shine as bright as day.

My question for the scientists is whether they bothered to consult the Lord God Almighty before they did this. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Old Jehovah still own the patent for creating new life? I don't know, maybe it expired. It's a good thing that they were able to do this before they did another wasteful project like curing cancer. Cancer's been around forever, but this is the first time we've ever had glow in the dark pork and I would rather have that over cancer any darn day. Wouldn't you?

There is a real purpose for the scientists to make these unique porcines. And that purpose is to ... find their pigs in the dark, I guess. Okay, that's not the reason they gave. They said it was so that they could track medicines that could be used in human beings because pigs are often used for animal research since they are so close to human beings. I know you ladies will claim that this is only true for the half of the human race, but it really is all of us.

So, that's why the scientists say they did it, but let's face fact here: The real reason is that it's just plain fun. Wouldn't you want a pet that glowed in the dark? I sure would. And we all know that pigs make wonderful pets. Look at George Clooney. He has a Vietnamese pot bellied pig and he just loves the thing. Sure they get a might heavy as they get older, but most of us do and I would personally love a huge fat pet that made me feel skinny by comparison.

Then let's take this a step further. Say that for some reason you do get tired of your huge green glowing friend? Glowing pork chops. Mmm, mmm. That would be sort of like a candle light meal, only you wouldn't be eating your meal by candle light but by the light of the meat itself. Imagine how much more romantic that would be.

Apologist of Gor

Fans of Science Fiction will probably know exactly what I'm talking about just by the title of my post here and for you I want to start out by saying: Hold on - let me explain! And if you aren't aware of what I'm talking about - I'll explain.

There was/is a series of science fiction books written by John Norman (a pseudonym) that were set on a mythical planet called Gor, that was also called Counter Earth because it rotated our Sun on exactly the opposite side of the Sun, which if you know anything about astronomy you know is impossible.

None the less, that's where Gor was/is located.

Gor was/is a planet that kept permanently primitive by a super-race of hyperintelligent insect overlords named Priest Kings who were at war with another more brutal species of bear-like creatures called Kurii. The Kurii wanted to take over not only Gor but Earth, too, but it was the power of the Priest Kings who kept them at bay. The Priest Kings also maintained Gor in that convenient orbit just on the exact side of the Sun.

And the most important thing you need to know about Gor was that there were slaves and especially there were slave girls.

Lots and lots of slave girls.

I started reading these books when I was a teen-ager and - in the first books at least - the slave girl thing wasn't all that much of a feature of the books. The saga started out with the protaganist, Tarl Cabot growing to manhood in Bristol England among female relatives, believing that he had been abandoned by his father. One day when he was out hiking he was kidnaped by a Priest King spaceship and taken to Gor where he discovers his father, now the administrator of a fabled Gorean city Ko-Ro-Ba. Tarl's father had not abandoned him, but had instead been kidnaped before his son by another spaceship.

Ko-Ro-Ba is at war with Ar. Tarl becomes a warrior and a rider of giant hawkish birds called Tarns and then through a series of adventures he becomes involved with the daughter of the Ubar (sort of a dictator) of Ar who is Marlenus of Ar. So far so good.

A side note here: Everybody in this story is named 'somebody of somewhere', so that by this scheme I would be Steve of Minneapolis and you would be 'you of from where ever you're from'. It just makes me wonder if every person who grew up and lives in the same city would have to keep saying that they were from the exact city they were living in and had lived in all their lives. It would be pretty silly.

So that's about the story of the first book. As far as slavery - and especially female slavery - the narrator and hero of this book, Tarl, thinks it's just wrong. I've got to tell you that over the course of this long series of books (about twenty plus) he gradually changes his mind about that - and how! But the first half dozen or so books, not so much. It's in there, but it's only a small, small part and not so much.

I took these books as mostly fantasy/adventure of the sort written by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Mars series or Robert E. Howard's Conan series. Women didn't play such a big part in those books, but they didn't have to. It was the fighting and stuff that was most important.

In later Gor books the S&M crap just took over the stories so that I would actually skim past those sections to continue with the real plot and just ignore those parts. You could usually figure out which where the places you could skip because John Norman would have these huge unbroken paragraphs which you learned to spot. His Bondage and Discipline gradually became more and more prevalent until - at the end - all of his female slaves are nothing but orgasm machines climaxing every time one of the masterful Gorean males so much as raised a whip.

It wasn't erotic. It was just ludicrous.

But I kept reading hoping that somewhere along the line John Norman would get back to plain old story telling, continuing the tale of the war between the two alien species. That never happened and I have a bunch of books I've pretty much never read because he never got back to it.

At times I thought about who John Norman was. His name I spotted as a pen name right from the start and I also figured out that he must be somebody pretty educated because he used a bunch of history to create his particular world. My guess was that he was a pretty lonely middle-aged man who was furiously busy pleasuring himself with one hand while typing with the other. If he was married, I guessed that he was far from the fictional masterful men that he wrote about. In fact, I imagined him to be rather henpecked.

My quick search of the internet showed that he was indeed a college professor, but not at a very prestigeous school and there were two pictures of him that I could find. One showed him with one hand over his mouth, but otherwise he looked slim, silver haired and possibly handsome. That picture looked like it might be from the seventies. Another later picture showed a full on face where he looked considerably older and possibly as if he's had a stroke since it looked like half of his face was drooping.

There are now many fetish communities (possibley all on-line) modeled after or devoted to the sort of 'philosophy' put out by these books. To my mind they look particularly icky - but hey, to each his own! I'm not here to judge and if adults want to willingly play at this stuff then I'm just fine with that. I do remember that there was a case in the Midwest where a serial killer was using one of these on-line communities to attract victims, but most people, I think, just take it as fun and games.

I took one of my unread Gor books off my shelf and opened it up and realized that the writing actually isn't all that good. I don't think it was always that way. My memory was that in the first half a dozen or so books the writing was at the least competent and those first half dozen (or maybe only first four or five) books were engrossing enough to read and reread. They weren't great literature, but they were diverting enough. For some reason, I never held onto the books in the series that I liked the best. I don't know why.

If you ever happen to get ahold of any of those initial books: I'd recommend them, maybe with a few reservations, maybe with a lot of reservations. But go ahead and read them. They won't kill you. They're only books.

A Meowing of Cats

Here's a tip for next Christmas, if you have a cat: Instead of hanging the bottom of your tree with hang it with cat toys. That way your feline will be delighted and you won't be irritated by it constantly knocking down and destroying your prized Christmas ornaments. It's too late to do it, now, I know. But next Christmas, try it.

Cats - or I should say house cats - are unique in that they are the only domesticated animal that did not first start out as either a pack or a herd animal, you know like dogs or sheep or cows. They were originally domesticated by the ancient Egyptians who used them to keep vermin out of the grain silo. I also hear that the Egyptians used to worship them as Gods though probably they didn't worship every single cat but only the really divine ones. It might seem a little extreme to worship any cat at all, but please keep in mind that the threshhold for God-hood back in those days was pretty low. If you could clean yourself entirely with your tongue that was usually enough.

I'm not sure exactly what the name for a collection of house cats is, if there even is one. Other animals have special identifiers when they're together in a group. For example: you have a herd of cattle, a school of fish, a flock of seagulls (also the name of an awesome group, man) and - my favorite - a murder of crows. That one says it all, it's real dark and scary and if you've seen crows together: it really fits. Lions travel together in prides, so I'm wondering if the proper name for more than one house cats shouldn't be a 'shame', as in a 'shame of house cats'. This would be because they're so much tinier than lions.

If there isn't any name yet I have two suggestions, either a 'meowing of house cats' or a 'yeowling of house cats'. I think they would both work as they are very descriptive of exactly of what house cats are what they do. Usually you don't see house cats congregating together much, except rather unwillingly as in a whole bunch of barn cats together or crazy cat ladies house. It's been my observation that in a lot of two cat households you'll see one very large well fed cat out in the open and another very scrawny and frightened cat darting about hoping not to be noticed. What's happening is that the second cat is getting knocked around by the other one.

Cats do have ways of communicating with each other - and you - but I can't claim to be much of a cat whisperer. I know that when they raise their tail straight up that means they recognize you and when they rub up against you it means not that they like you, but rather they think you need to smell like them. Presenting you with a dead animal is supposed to be a special gift, I understand, but I've got to tell you: There is one cat that's still waiting for a thank you card from me, and I'm sure he's very puzzled by my continuing ingratitude.

You may be surprised to know that house cats are trainable. I learned this one from a lion tamer in Maine who told me that training lions is similar to training any feline. The key is to know that they both have incredibly short attention spans and that if on any particular day you can get it one step closer to what you want it to do, then that might be enough. It requires unbelievable patience, though I think if you already have a housecat you pretty much know that getting it to do what you want it to is a lost cause anyways.

Amazing non-Psychic Predictions for 2006

**Check out my new books at http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow or use the link on the right to get there **Before I start with my Amazing non-Psychic Predictions I've got to ask: Has anyone else noticed how remarkably lousy psychics have been lately? I mean, where were the psychic predicting Katrina and the giant Tsunami or even Nine Eleven? Not a peep. Did you hear a peep? Because I sure didn't and you'd think that huge events like those would be a real piece of cake and they weren't - apparently.

Oh, well. I guess I should be grateful because all those other so-called psychics are setting the bar pretty low for me and my amazing predictions. Mine are absolutely without any paranormal powers because you don't need any special psychic powers to just guess what's pretty obvious in the first place. Here goes.

First non-psychic prediction: Former-Super-Lobbyist Jack Abrahmoff will name names and several influential Republican politicians will be implicated and ... nothing at all will happen to them. C'mon, almost the entire US Judiciary owes their jobs to these very same Republicans and one thing the Republicans don't do - and that goes for Republican Judges - they don't eat their own young. Nobody's going to prison. Maybe a Democrat will, because they like money, too, but they aren't so crafty as their brethern on the other side.

Second non-psychic prediction: The war in Iraq will drag on and on. No viable government will establish itself - or I should say - some sort of government will be established but everybody will know it isn't real. The Bush administration will claim victory anyways, democracy on the march blah, blah, blah. He'll probably even make a speech with that written in the background. The death toll will continue to rise.

Third non-psychic prediction: There will be no draft. There will be no draft because that would mean that oil company executives would have to send their own children to fight for their special interests, instead of having the poor do it for them.

Fourth non-psychic prediction: Bush will not be impeached and his popularity will continue to rise. How can that happen, you ask? Well, answer me this: How come it hasn't happened already? You'd think illegal wire-taps would have sealed the deal on that impeachment deal but it's all for patriotism and to prevent nine-eleven from ever happening again. Aren't you patriotic? Do you want nine eleven to happen again? Then just shut up and quit being disloyal.

Fifth non-psychic prediction: Natural disasters will continue to ravage the United States. I'm seeing grass fires in California, mudslides - also in California - and at least one large Earthquake in ... yep, California. Why all in this state?

Simple, God doesn't like them so much. They've got it too good there, so he wants to plague them to make up for it.

There will be flooding, more hurricanes, plane crashes and such but most of the bad stuff will be on the West Coast.

Sixth non-psychic prediction: War will break out across the globe and Americans won't care unless the warring parties are either white or have oil under their land. Genocide will continue in Africa and the UN will stay well clear of it and especially the US.

Rwanda? What Rwanda? Didn't they make a movie about that? Well, it looked boring so I didn't see it. Next.

Seventh non-psychic prediciton: Poverty will continue to increase in the United States as it has for the past six years. The minimum wage will never be raised again. As more people become destitute the number of people believing in evangelical Christianity will rise. Jesus likes the poor and now that there are more like you in the United States it must mean that our country is even more blessed.

Praise the Lord.

Well, that's about it. Happy New Year! And hopefully when 2007 rolls around you can tell me how wrong I was. Boy, I sure hope I am wrong.