As other people have already pointed out, this is nothing new. I could give you the names and phone numbers of at least a dozen people who chose to enlist rather than go to jail. All of them older than 39.

This article was just a tad bit sensationalistic. So some kid who bought or smoked pot and got caught gets a waiver to join the service. So what? We aren't talking about recruiting Jack the Ripper here--although, come to think of it he might have been a military asset-- but merely turning a blind eye to some petty convictions so a kid who screwed up can redeem himself or at the very least have something on his resume besides "convicted criminal".

When they start granting waivers to murderers, rapists and pedophiles let me know. Then I will get all righteously indignant and start harassing my congressman. As it sits now I'm verklempt.

I realize that bashing the military with whatever tools you find laying around is popular right now but this article was silly. I'm a card carrying liberal but I'm also an ex military wife. I am against this war but I also know from close observation that joining the military can be the best thing a person can do. When you take a kid who has never had any kind of stability, who has never been taught any kind of respect for society or rules and you put him in an organization where those two things are primary...

You just might save him. You might not, too, but the alternative is to let them drift along the way they always have and before you know it statistically you are likely to end up with someone who is getting three hots and a cot courtesy of the penal system on a regular basis.

Waivers are a chance for some people. Just because they aren't the kind of people you think should be given a chance doesn't mean they won't benefit from it.

At any rate, this article was indeed much ado about nada. There are all kinds of things wrong with the military and military policy that benefit no one that Mr. Benjamin could have covered but instead he chose this. I wonder why.

BASIC is the language that hooked me. I was the little girl in Fairbanks AK who ran around programming display computers to tell the world how great I was or to flash pretty colors in between naughty words. I was, perhaps, the only computer tagger in Fairbanks to ever exit.

Yes, it taught me bad habits. Yes, it isn't the most elegant thing to have ever been invented. But I am fond of it all the same. It did teach me how computers, well, compute. It introduced me to a world and a profession that I am still in.

Nostalgia isn't necessarily a bad thing. Thanks to the wonders of GameTap I am now able to show my children the games that started me on the path to being the world's oldest living female gamer. BASIC is much the same...they won't learn the habits I had to unlearn because the children (I have more than a few) that are interested in such things have already learned better habits and languages. But what fun to show them where I started.

As a TT addict I am a bit lost. Fortunately I am also a video game addict and have a choice between going for 100 percent completion on Wild Arms 5 or making friends with Bigfoot and asking him to move in with me on Sims 2: Bon Voyage. You can slap dance with him if you play your cards right.

I'd rather talk to my invisible friends and find out their reaction to that witty thing I said before TT went off-line but since I can't I'll just occupy myself with interests that are even more geeky.