Okay, feeling a little less fatalistic this afternoon. But not much.

My sister has, by her own admission, lost her mind. Not one week after buying a little Basenji puppy, her and her fiance Jared decided that no dog should be without a playmate, and went out and picked up this 8 week old Weimaraner puppy. He's an adorable little guy, but look at the size of those paws! He's got a lot of growing to do! 80 pounds of it, apparently. Eek.

On Friday Veronica, Emilio, and I popped by the Paradise Rock Club to check out Johnny Marr's new band, The Healers. First off, what is it about the awful layout of Boston clubs? You'd figure that if you had a long narrow room, you'd put the stage at one of the long ends. Not so here ... you stick the stage square in the middle so that getting from the bar to the bathrooms is always an adventure. Anyhoo ... the show was quite good. Mr. Marr has certainly left The Smiths (and The The, and Electronic, etc. etc.) behind and developed into his own musician. Which he always was anyway, just had a certain Steven Morrissey label burned on him at an early age. Of course, that didn't stop the assorted s^#$heads in the audience from requesting "How Soon Is Now?". Spurned in that request, they proceeded to ask for songs from every Manchester band you can think of ... Oasis, The Stone Roses, The Charlatans. I was wondering how far back they would reach, if we would hear someone calling for "Love Will Tear Us Apart". Regardless, Johnny took it all with good humo(u)r. The band played an entertaining set of brit rock, with songs much more interesting than the run-of-the-mill indie fare. Ringo Starr's son Zak Starkey plays drums for the band ... hadn't seen him since The Who's Quadrophenia tour five or six years back.

Whoa man. That was ugly. A half-hearted congratulations to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for their first-ever Super Bowl championship. I'm not even going to say the name of the team they played. They barely showed up, so why mention them? Really, giving attitude all week then looking hardly interested, let alone excited, during the game ... this is why the rest of the country hates the _______. I guess this was not the Bay Area's year for sports. The San Francisco Giants made it to the seventh game of the World Series but were ultimately bested, the embarassing flub in the Super Bowl of the _______, and the seasons of the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland A's cut short during the playoffs. But let's not talk about sports anymore, it just depresses me.

I finished Splinter Cell on Saturday. Excellent, excellent game. Graphics are amazing, good storyline, and wonderful play mechanics. I'll have to run through this one again. Well ... I realized while playing Metroid Prime, or FIFA 2003, or Hitman 2, that I play too many video games. I'm toying with the idea of giving them up for a month. Just to see if I can change the way I fit them into my life. But let's not talk about video games anymore, it just depresses me.

An update to either my operating system (Windows XP) or my graphics adapter drivers (nVidia GEForce) has caused my computer to no longer run OpenGL applications. On both my laptop and my desktop. Simultaneously. I've tried reinstalling more or less everything (short of completely reinstalling the OS), to no avail. The only success I've had is removing the last two Windows XP updates from my desktop and using a display driver from 2001. But let's not talk about computers anymore, it just depresses me.

Let's just not talk anymore.