But is there actually a gay-porn version? I mean, you know, beyond the original Conan Doyle stories?

Excuse me, but where is the gay porn content in the original Sherlock Holmes stories? I must have missed those bits in the 4 or so times I've read through the entire Canon (4 novels and 56 short stories). I was aware that Holmes and Watson shared a 2-bedroom apartment in London when they were young to cut down on expenses (and that Watson moved out after a couple of years when he married Mary Morstan). I guess some Nervous Nellies with a lot of time on their hands might conclude from that that Holmes and Watson absolutely must have both been gay.

But where are the gay porn bits? It should be easy enough for you to point them out to everyone since almost all the stories and novels are in the public domain and available online at Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/d#a69

Please show the rest of us where the gay porn bits are.

I'm an agnostic/border-line atheist myself, but I find the New Atheists as smug, self-satisfied, and pleased with themselves as some of their fatter, sweatier counterparts on the 'Christian' Right. Thanks for running this interview with Chris Hedges. I plan on buying his book. It's nice to read an interview with someone who thinks for himself.

There's nothing wrong with being an atheist, but being so absolutely sure you must be right about it is scary (most people have gotten through that phase of their life by their 30s I would have thought).

I feel so bad about what I did that I have effectively scrubbed all of the most shameful details from my memory. Though I don't believe my ex-boyfriend has; he remains a friend, the most talented person I know, and often calls to wish me a happy Valentine's Day.

[...]

Of course I have hoped that I would fall in love, find a best friend, perhaps someone with whom I could discuss the romantic comedies of the 1930s. (News flash to my callous eighth-grade self: These men are not, as it turns out, so easy to find.)

So why don't you do yourself a favor and take him back?

Regarding this part of the article:

Well, yeah -- more people are listening to him. On the other hand, though, "is it good news that less than one in five feel it was worth $5? I'm not sure what I was expecting but that percentage -- primarily from fans -- seems disheartening."

Reznor's reasoning is a bit off here. Actually, less than one in five feel that the increase in fidelity is worth $5. There are probably a lot of people who like the album and are perfectly happy with the lower-fidelity, free version of the album. I'm not even sure most listeners understand what the difference in compression rates mean. And not all music lovers are audiophiles.

But I would hope that any reasonable person who liked the album, even if they didn't care about the fidelity, would have contributed $5 to the artist.

The epidemic is a mystery in need of a particular detective, a cross between Agatha Christie and Rachel Carson

Sherlock Holmes would obviously be your man:

"But you have retired, Holmes. We heard of you as living the life of a hermit among your bees and your books in a small farm upon the South Downs."

"Exactly, Watson. Here is the fruit of my leisured ease, the magnum opus of my latter years!" He picked up the volume from the table and read out the whole title, Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen. "Alone I did it. Behold the fruit of pensive nights and laborious days when I watched the little working gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London."

---from His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

[I] would love to start my own record label and also record my own album.

Hey, who's stopping you? I'm 46 and I found myself in the same position a couple of years ago. Here's what I did:

(1) Wrote and recorded a bunch of music by myself. Multitrack recording on a computer is easy nowadays. Assuming you can get by on piano or guitar, you don't need any other musicians to record an entire album. Except for drum loops, I record every instrument myself, and I'm not the world's greatest instrumentalist by any means.

(2) Started my own website and uploaded my music to it. Maintaining your own website is not that hard a skill to learn.

(3) Released my music under a Creative Commons license and posted links to it on opsound.org.

I've been doing this for a couple of years now and have easily written, recorded, and released 2 albums worth of material. I decided early on, though, that I wasn't going to sell it and would release it under a Creative Commons license. I think this is the smartest thing people like us can do. If our music is any good, it will eventually get noticed. This also means not quitting your day job. If you're worried about money all the time, you're not going to make good music.

If you're worried about looking like an idiot on stage, just skip the touring years and go straight to your "studio period".

The people I work with, while nice, are not in any way relatable to me. I view them as mindless robots who do whatever society tells them to do.

They're just people like you, trying to make it through the day. You think they don't have secret sorrows and secret ambitions? If they've given up on their dreams (and they probably haven't), well, that probably wasn't their fault.