I was raised in Bozeman, a town about 20 minutes west of Livingston and Paradise Valley. The Yellowstone Club is bad enough... but like any good Montanan, I recognize that one of the special things about Montana is the fact that we are not, yet, filled to the brim with wealthy, arrogant settlers who are only interested in living out their Wild West fantasies and not in contributing to or becoming a part of the Montana community.

P.S., in a state in which the economy surrounding the working class is flagging while wealthy retirees continue to pour in, it's probably not a good idea to suggest that natives who have worked and sweated their entire lives for the state's substandard wages are somehow inferior to the California imports who gleefully scoop up property as if it were collectible. Montanans are, as any out-of-stater will tell you, notoriously suspicious of non-natives, and insulting them is not a good way to get into their graces.

I've never played GTA except in one of its earlier Gameboy incarnations, but I have played a game called Saints Row, which is a shameless but high-quality ripoff of the GTA game idea.

One time, all I did was spend a long time getting as many fuel tankers onto one patch of the interstate as possible before getting them to blow up (as I recall, my dying/flaming character got shot about 300 feet in the air, to the applause of my friend and brother who were watching).

Other times I have picked on the cops just to see how long I can last against policemen, SWAT officers, and finally some dudes in helicopters shooting at me before I finally klonk off.

When the bridge lifts up to let a boat go underneath it, I also really enjoy seeing if I can launch myself off one side and safely land on the other.

But GTA-style games hardly have a monopoly on ridiculous acts. I've murdered entire towns in Oblivion, before deciding that an empty town is pretty boring, and reloading. In Assassin's Creed, I like to get into a fight with 30 guards at a time, and then due to the game's combat engine, win against them anyway. I've also scrambled up the side of the tallest cathedral in Acre just so I can take a dive off of it and see how long it takes me to hit the bottom. Have I mentioned the time I used a cheat in Oblivion to clone hundreds of thousands of watermelons and turn a town square into a giant fruit basket that almost froze my console?

Anyway, the point is, people do a lot of stupid things in videogames. The whole point of videogames is that you can do things in them that you might never want to do in real life. And I am a perfectly normal, not violent person. I am an A student at a good college, a member of the board of my church, the principal horn of the band and orchestra. The idea that people who do things in videogames do it because they want to do it in real life, or that doing things in videogames might cause them to want to do it in real life, is absurd. Perhaps a very tiny percent of the population that is highly suggestible, or already prone to violence and denigration of other people. But normal individuals can play violent videogames and kiss their infant child on the forehead at the end of the day and move on with their lives, thank you.

I liked This American Life on radio and have never seen it on TV, but to cut to the point... it's about time to write about BSG!

...and how weird it is this season. Weird and full of Baltar.

All this bickering is amusing but not conducive to anything. You sanctimonious Obama supporters who act like Clinton is just some freakish Medusa standing in the way of the Anointed One's Anointing are doing far more to split the party, at least here on Salon, than Clinton ever could.

If Obama was just some dude standing in a field, I wouldn't have any problem voting for him. Unfortunately, he is a dude surrounded by the most arrogant, self-righteous, self-obsessed idiots I have ever seen. You can talk about Clinton and how she's standing in the way or reconciliation all you want, but the only thing stopping me from agreeing that Obama is a decent candidate is the pure vitriol and sexist bile his supporters spout.

You hate her because she A) advocated something which would have helped her politically or B) advocated something which would have reenfranchised primary voters in two states who got shafted because of some dipshit rule?

Because both of those two things sound like the natural actions of a good politician, not something morally repugnant. Moral repugnance is Obama deciding that the "rules of the game" are more important than making sure the voters are heard, which is exactly what he did. Sounds an awful lot like the old politics, and not so much like hope, to me.

... and considering that I go to a religious school and attend church regularly, that's quite a lot... none of us give a crap about the display of a partially nude sea nymph body on a coffee cup.

Since we live in Minnesota, we all go to Caribou to get our coffee anyway. Starbucks is a little gross.

Internet self-diagnosis is a dangerous thing. For example, when I got a rash under my arms from allergies to a new brand of deodorant I was using, the Internet told me that my actual problem was more like AIDS or some kind of flesh-eating skin disease.

Thank goodness I am reasonable enough to switch deodorant brands before I freak out.