I had the same thought, ita. Also, that explains why I had no idea Linda Hamilton was on the show. I have to say, though, in general I'd rather have no female characters than poorly developed/appendage-only female characters. Not that that was happening on Thief, just in general. What I'm saying is, I'm OK with all dudes. Plus a teenager.

You know -- it's true and somehow it didn't even bother me. (About Thief, I mean.)

ION, I love the video for Mary J. Blige's "Be Without You" on so many levels. I love the fact that Mary can get Terrence Howard to play her boyfriend in a video.

I played laser tag with a friend's 12 year old stepson a few years ago. Well, and about 14 other strangers. It was at this amusement parkish place (you know, bumper-tubes, minigolf, scooters, video games.) It was kinda fun. They had this room set up all space-y with obstacles and stations you had to defend. Dark and noisy. C got a little bent out with me because in situations like that, the things I am not are competitive and serious. Of course, he was also annoyed with the glee with which I played minigolf badly.

We used to play laser tag a lot at my first job. My team used to annoy a lot of the other teams. They would play every week, practice all the time and take it very seriously. We would turn up once a month or so and wipe the floor with them. It was fun.

I was never sure how that worked. I don't *think* we were cheating.

There was also the time that somebody persuaded a team of the mathematicians to play. That got ugly. Confused fish, meet barrel.

There was a team of developers who used to play paintball against their managers. Apparently after one of the first layoffs, it got kind of ugly and was discontinued.

Tiktaalik - Fossil of an intermediate form between fish and land-dwelling reptile. Aw, it's cute and paleontologically significant!

We had a workplace event last summer where we hired a dunk tank and you could buy shots ($ to charity) to dunk most of the upper-level administrators. It was the best workplace event EVER. People kept hiring the softball-playing ringer; everybody got dunked many times.

I've never played lasertag or paintball. I have this irrational fear that if I played paintball, things would end up like this: [link]

edit: image is rather disturbing....

While I'm linking to the BBC, UK's first case of bird flu, [link] about ten miles from where my mum lives.

I would also like to stress that although we drove through Cellardyke about a week before the bird was found, we did not stop at the harbour and we did not have *any* suspicious test-tubes with us. Not at all.