So I'm just back from a whirlwind trip to the 18th annual Chicago Pinball Expo under the guise of journalistic investigation (a great excuse to play endless games of Pinbot and Black Knight 2000 and hang out with a bunch of people who make you feel relatively un-obsessed - and, I might add, wildly untalented). Although I had resolved not to leave the confines of the Ramada O'Hare for the entire weekend, there was one brief trip out into the world, with a carful of World Champions, as we searched in vain for a Red Lobster (but settled for strip-mall Mexican). Sunday's tournament was fierce, with the grand prize (a pinball machine, natch) going to Lyman, the front-runner with the jockey-like stance, though I had been rooting for Paul, the unflappable underdog with the mullet. A weekend well spent- though now I have way too much material to write a little article, and not nearly enough to write a big one. More research is definitely necessary.

Dear rest of the world,
Just wanted to let you know, for the record, that there are really quite a few of us over here who can't fucking believe what our supposedly democratic president is up to these days. We tried really hard to keep him out of the White House, but he had connections. Now he's probably going to get a bunch of us killed even though most of us think the whole Iraq thing is bullshit. So we just wanted to make sure you knew that, before all this shit goes down. We had nothing to do with it.

(Now all I have to do is get major world leaders reading my blog. I mean, if they don't already.)