ION, Northern Exposure complete series dvd set.

And it comes in a faux suede fleece lined bag! Guess I know what I'm asking for for my birthday! I was gonna ask for this down robe, but now I dunno. Northern Exposure, yay!

Oy. Went to a party, had great food, had great talk, had nice wine, drank my first Pimm's.

And discovered that one friend has become a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Into total tin-hat territory: that the towers were brought down by demolition, that the planes weren't commercial airliners and the passengers were taken elsewhere, that it was all arranged by the Bush administration.

W. T. F.?

People believe this? This administration can't find and kill the one guy in all the world they want dead; you want me to believe that in less than 9 months after Bush's inauguration they arranged the biggest Wag-the-Dog scam in modern history? And in the six years since nobody's breathed a word of it? Not one pissed-off aide or resentful girlfriend calling the Post, no emails forwarded accidentally or backups reviewed by the IT guys?

No. Way. are these guys that competent.

Go pull the other one.

Yeah. I actually would love to believe it. That would mean our government was a bunch of Jason Bournes, when in fact, they really are a bunch of Inspector Jacques Clouseaus. Damn.

Some people are nuts, that's all.

And discovered that one friend has become a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Into total tin-hat territory

I was going to say: you've diagnosed the problem right there. Conspiracy theories are a strategy for coping with powerlessness: they say, we know what really happened; we have power over that historical event; we will agitate to set things right because nobody else will. Arcane knowledge of details, a built-in mission of virtue, a paranoid sense of persecution and/or apathy in the general public? Total built-in ego-stroke.

Also, I tend to think conspiracy theorists are people who suffer from too structured a frame of reference onto the world. The theory always hinges on a couple of random details that are unresolved, or don't make a lot of sense, or are just weird and random. Better to leap into conspiracies than to admit that sometimes weird and random and hard-to-explain things happen! There is no such thing as events in real life that don't make a lot of sense!

A week or two ago, This American Life had an English blogger who chronicled the Underground bombings in London confronting homegrown conspiracy theorists who believed that it was electrical surges being covered up by the government. She was like, "I was on the bloody train! I heard the explosion! I saw the bodies!" and they just told her that she was a paid agent of the conspiracy.

Arrgh. Citibank.com is not working and my cc bill is due in two days!

Also, after about two weeks of dithering, I finally decided on a two-day vacation to the Jersey shore. Leaving in a couple hours.

I'm going to be on the Jersey shore tomorrow! Maybe I'll see you.

Jersey shore where?

she asked from Jersey, not particularly near the shore.