A fundamental problem with this entire example is that it is based on a very ancient tech cliche: that every person who owns a Mac or any Apple product is by definition a Mac-fanatic. This is so off the mark as to be outright bigoted. However, as we're talking about computer preferences, I don't see that kind of bigotry as particularly alarming.

This may shock some actual Mac zealots, but my wife and I have been using Macs since 1992 to do work. Actual, day-to-day, nine-to-five (before we went freelance) work. And being work, it often boils down to sheer drudgery. Another term for it is making a living. If we couldn't do that on our Macs, we sure as hell wouldn't be using Macs. But I tellya, at the end of a long work session, the only thing we want to do is get away from the damned things for a while. Awfully hard to be all starry-eyed and rah-rah for an OS and the box it runs on when their job is to crank along with you to pay the bills.

Are there more Mac users like my wife and myself than there are so-called Mac-fanatics? I don't know, but I'm betting there are. Lots more, but you don't hear from us much because, well, we're busy.

For the rest of my life I'll always wonder what Ellison was getting at with the reference to the historial mystery of Croatoan Island in his story "Croatoan". And I'll always remember my introduction to post-apocalyptic sex in "A Boy and His Dog", which I read when I was ten years old. (That was forty years ago, in case anyone wants to get all "Call the cops! Protect the children!" on it.)

And I'll always remember the 1978 World Science Fiction Convention, dubbed IguanaCon, in Phoenix, AZ. Harlan was the Guest of Honor, and it was at the height of the controversy over the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment). Harlan was royally pissed that Arizona had not ratified it, but he'd already committed to being at this event so he lived in an RV stocked with everything he'd need for the duration in order not to spend a dime in that miscreant state. Oh yeah, and there was The Tent. Admirable, I suppose, but in the end a most pyrrhic gesture.

The utter vapidity of today's so-called erotic imagery is indeed sad and disillusioning. Nothing is real, or at least can be trusted to be real anymore, and if it isn't then what the hell's the point? With faces lifted and botox'd with increasingly obvious and soulless results, breasts enhanced within an inch of surreal, and waxing up the wazoo (and all that increasingly going for guys as well as gals), it's all a parade of designer bodies stamped out by an uber-fashionista consciousness that seems ready to delete all humanity from our visual experience.

So flag lapel pins tell us if someone running for office is a true patriot or not, eh? Just like the IXOYEs dotting all those minivans tell us that only True Christians ride in those vehicles? It's that simple? Golly...

Here's an idea: how about a romantic/adventure comedy about a HAPPILY married couple running around getting into mischief? That setup has been so rarely pursued compared to the they're-married-but-one's-now-fed-up-and-wants-a-divorce trope that one would think it could be a gold mine of fresh ideas.

I realize it can tricky. Powell-Loy chemistry doesn't grow on trees. But you never know what you might get until you try, and I ain't seen anyone try in a loooooong time.

In terms of a codified set of rules for social, cultural, and personal behavior, the Christian Bible, taken as a whole, is a mess. That's one reason that many Christian scholars, theologians, and apologists try to prioritize the Bible's myriad explicit and implicit edicts according to various criteria, some sounding more or less reasonable and having varying degrees of success based largely on social, cultural, personal and/or historical perspectives.

One of the few Biblical directives that manages to stay afloat throughout all the interpretive storms is the one that's probably most often recalled in this form: "Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself."

Quite simple, quite concise (even with the archaic pronouns), and quite tricky. No Christian, except perhaps the anointed Jew who was the start of it all, has ever been able to live by it 100%. I'd venture to say most are doing well to manage it 10% of the time. Yet the power of that edict to rise up again and again and remind us of perhaps the most essential thing to which we should aspire remains undimmed by time, tides, and politics.

If Huckabee cannot keep his grip on something this fundamental to his purported Christianity, if he cannot show that he stands for this above all other things in his run for the Presidency, then he has most assuredly failed as a Christian.

Fighter jet is indeed an anachronistic term, but so is jet airliner, a term classic rock radio will never let us forget so long as they continue to play Steve Miller.

"BusinessElite" is a trademark. Great, I'm happy for Delta. It's still crap English, and in a written sentence should at the very least be bracketed by quote marks to flag it as such. And frankly I'm all for publications like New Yorker sticking to the stylebook.

And I gotta get a ticket on one of your flights. Your landings sound like an experience!