This hardly needs to be said at this point, but I'm done with this profile. My work is going to be collected on my own, tidier site: Press.

It's funny, isn't it, the way that things trip your memory up? The rustle of leaves, the sound of a car's horn, the rattle of a doorhandle, or the smell of smoke. Some things just bubble up, even amidst the black patches of memory.

It's come to my attention at thirty-five years of age, I simply am not going to be able to remember everything I've done in my life. There are stretches of lazy summers that are gone, now, all blurred together, unsure if I caught that grasshopper when I was nine, or eight, or was it six?

It's the scent of smoke this time, the rising fumes that jog my memory. In this case, it's a strange memory - and as I remember E, it jogs me to remember D, then C, then A, then back to B, then re-remember A, as if I had forgotten something of it. And A, in this case, was being yelled at by an editor.

The job of investigative journalist is a strange one. During my time in university learning the art of learning, one point that kept coming up is how many of the investigators responsible for famous and important exposures worked fifteen-hour days and went home to a rat-infested hole in the wall, and then when I graduated, I learned that the majority of my peers were going to be upper-middle class, if not outright wealthy. Journalism had become big business, and the dreadful yawning mouth of The Paper had gone from consuming news to consuming noise.

It had never really worked for me. I'd bought myself a battered raincoat the day I started my journalism course and it had, throughout the years, just gotten more battered over the years. Maybe it's ego, but I can't help but imagine I look quite classically cool as I emerge from the places where I ply my trade. battered raincoat, classic hat to hide classic bald spot, and it's that self image that has kept me from pushing up the ladder.

I'm an odd guy, I guess. I get into stories and I want to follow them through. It started a long time ago, and to tell you would take all the time we've got, I fancy - more time than column inches there are. It's not helped by my memory, though. I started taking notes of everything as a child because I did, in fact, spend most of my life forgetting things. When I hit high school, the paper just seemed a natural connection, and from there...

That's not what I wanted to talk about.

So, the American midterm elections are over. This is, for those not aware, an election that's mostly about changing seats in Congress and the Senate.

The party I agree with less was able to establish itself in one of the three houses of government as the majority over the party I agree with more, and both dislike each other so much it's likely nothing of substance will get done in the US for the next two years as they gear up to the new election cycle.

Yet, I'm personally hopeful. Because there were a few big name tickets this year that were outright crazy. I mean, completely off-the-wall bonkers. Crazy in the way that legitimizes every silly urban myth Australians whisper then justify with 'in America...'

And none of those people got in. That's a good thing.

So America, at large, may not be doing everything I agree with (the big wedge issue this year was supposedly global warming), and it may have some very loud, very loony public figures who I am interested in because they are amazing at hubristic excess, but... it's just people disagreeing, you know? There's (hopefully) nobody seriously talking about armed revolution because the Other Guy Won.

Neat, huh?

Date:	2010-10-14 09:46
Subject:	My Thoughts on Mirror's Edge (Talen Head)
Security:	Public
Mood:	calm

Mirror's Edge is a first-person platform style game that synthesises together the French art of Parkour with a first-person perspective. That perspective, a long-standing utility of the action/shooter genre, has become so fundamentally tied to the idea of run-and-gun combat that very few game designers have attempted to use it for anything else. There've been a few first-person adventure games (and indeed, in the early days of first-person engines, it was one of the best ways for adventure games to use limited graphical resources), but for the most part, there's a native 'S' that follows 'FP.' When you take First-Person games into the action genre, there are things that are just expected.

This expectation - and defying it - makes Mirror's Edge a breathtaking, refreshing take on its genre, even if that genre is perhaps small by definition. If one were to consider Mirror's Edge to be a first-person game that involves a lot of action, reaction-time based stuff and, by necessity, guns, and therefore in the same genre as Halo and Quake (which, by the way, aren't the same type of game), then it's a very new take on the genre.

If you consider it to be a platform game, pursuing various death courses in one's escape from a variety of threats, then it's a unique way of looking at those - no longer are you somehow distant from these events, prescient of the guards behind you, giving you an opportunity to duck conspicuously large bullets and all that. Nope, you're in the muck, and you have to work to make yourself aware of your environment. You have to pay attention. This is a skill that most platform games eschew, even those that have made the transition to 3D.

So no matter how you slice it, Mirror's Edge is something new. That is, in my opinion, a good thing, a very good thing, something worth celebrating. Yet, while the principle is worth noting, the newness is well-worn off a game two years old. When one sets aside the novelty of what it tries to do, we are left with an unfortunate example of a decent game which had all the potential to be great. It is a game which is crafted of equal parts of glorious splendour and colosally frustrating failure.

Given that it's a game of ups and downs, I figure it's best to try and split the discussion in half, with two simple directions. What's good about it?

By what I understand of the principles that underscore parkour, Mirror's Edge is the more pure parkour game that exists. While it's part of a rising trend right now to include parkour's realistic-but-seemingly-not physical acrobatics in video games, the other games that share this trend - Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia being highlight examples - Mirror's Edge is the first one to not glorify it. That might seem momentarily counterproductive, but one of Parkour's principles is to be as efficient as possible, not to do anything for display. So you know, insofar as specific principles that matter to a French martial art go, neat!

Playing Medge, the visuals are going to just pop out at you. It's bright, there are primary colours, they contrast distinctly with white, and a bright blue sky. Even the inner workings of places like sewers and ship engine rooms are brightly painted with distinctive tones of green (which really, is a bit weird, but hey). After being told by the Playstation game catalogue for the past ten years that 'good' graphics come in the three-tone catalogue of mud, blood, and muzzle-flare, Mirror's Edge defies this and dives, full-bodied into bright and bold colours. Red light becomes a beacon to you, and the game was good about emphasising those factors that you care about in the architecture rather than leaving you to fumble around, jumping and hopping as you get near a wall to try and find the little ledge you have to climb up.

The characters also look good! Faith in particular is a wonderful example of a character design that defies a lot of common wisdom. She looks good - not my flavour, but she looks good, she's dressed sensible as a traceusse, and she's shown that she distinguishes herself from her fairly staid, boring environment with forms of individual expression like her tattoos. She hasn't got the same sense of overdesigned unnecessaryness that you see in characters like War and their ilk; she's got a very practical, sensible design that further emphasises the 'realness' of the setting.

The game also shows and flows alongside a narrative - it's a story-driven game that for the most part does a very good job of convincing you to listen. You're rarely pulled out of the action and put into cut scenes - though those cut scenes, in a different style, tend to be jarring - and then you get this kind of immersion that a narrative can really use as a device to get you paying attention. The story makes sense, and includes behaviour that you don't normally get to muck around with - every 'mission' is distinct in how it serves the story.

Now, as a corollary to the parkour notes above - that the game is pure parkour, that philosophical point is less interesting than just plain letting us watch the awesome parkour. Platforming from a first-person perspective is tricky, and Mirror's Edge isn't so fun because of its first-person perspective that it makes up for that. You know you're doing fantastic things and can imagine the structure of your passage, but you don't get to see it. You don't get to relish the image of Faith doing an amazingly neat bounce-hop-step whip-around wall-leap and grab! which diminishes the joy of the game.

While the game offers you a narrative direction, a story that actually creates characterisation and tells you to care about things, it isn't adequate; the characters that it creates for you to meet and deal with aren't very interesting. You're told you should care about Faith's situation, that you should really feel for her perspective on life, or that her sister's plight is very important, or that her friends matter, but none of them ever do anything to make you like them, or even just feel one way or another! I mean, when Three Dog in Fallout 3 crowed on the radio with his goofy name, it made me care - at first, I thought him to be a dickhead, but over the course of my time, hearing him talk, I became quite affectionate towards the ridiculous method he chose to express himself. There isn't any of that for Faith and her crew. They're just there. Bald, fairly basic ciphers that commit a pretty predictable plot into action, like mechanisms rather than people.

Meanwhile, the gun combat is interesting, but ultimately frustrating. You can steal guns from opponents - and that's very cool and fun. I tried to play the game like Elliot from Leverage for a good while there, taking guns away from people, beating them senseless, and tossing the gun over my shoulder. Unfortunately, this method becomes incredibly hard, and the gun combat you have to deal with is even harder. Guns aren't very accurate, your enemies are all heavily armoured, and while your opponents have large ammo clips, you can maybe milk two or three drops out of your own gun - worse if you're trying to play as if your gunplay is nonlethal!

The game does a lot with its architecture - you're always moving around, and as a platforming game, there's a large amount of 'space' spent by the level design. You're always interacting with things much bigger than yourself - climbing a skyscraper from the inside, running around inside a mall's inners, and even a massive storm drain. The finest work of the game, however, is when it puts you out under a wide-open sky, and lets you feel the wind in your hair, as it were. The rooftop climbing, teetering-falling-oh-shit-here-comes-the-ground feel of the early game is stifled, however, as the last part of the game focuses on enclosed spaces. Spaces that aren't claustrophobic, but after the wide open spaces with many different paths that the first half of the game showed you, those small, confined spaces feel positively cruel.

Remember that brilliant aesthetic I advocated earlier? The way the whole city looks different to the normal, trudging city crud that we're a little too used to, thanks to a thousand other FPS games? It's still true, but after taking that wonderful step away from the norm, it then creates a new norm. The inside of a ship's engine room looks almost the same as a rooftop air conditioning system, which looks more or less the same as the inside of an office building or a mall. That's not to say all the rooms are the same, but given how different the locations are, these locations are not different enough from one another.

We're at the frayed end of the rope at this point, so let me conclude the complaints with a discussion of something that should be better, an actual suggestion. Years ago, I heard from, of all things, the Robocop TV series, the line Don't Ever Forget What You Already Know. So guys? All of you making first-person platformers? When a person jumps, their eyes naturally move to look where they're going to land. They look DOWNWARD. There were video games that did this - that did a first-person jump where your point-of-view dipped downwards - in the nineteen eighties. And you can't even take the excuse that nobody's done it lately, because the Metroid Prime and Metroid Hunter games did it! Graarrgh, such a simple thing, done so badly.

Now, really, this is all retreading old news. But Mirror's Edge, like many of the games I play, is old; it's old enough that it's going into the cheap bins for twenty dollars or so. And there, I'd argue, it's well worth it. Twenty dollars could get you a good, but static, movie, or maybe a really nice meal.

Mirror's Edge is worth more to the kind of person who will get into the experience of taking a level, then trying to take it better again. If you want a game where you have to really gnash at it for a good long time to get your money out of it, Mirror's Edge is great.

On the other hand, if you're one of the disenfranchised children of the 1990s looking for an adventure-platformer, with a great plot and a lot of enjoyable cast of characters, you're going to be sadly disappointed.

I wrote this last night, speaking to a friend about her son. I was so proud of it I felt it merited public attention.

Your son is going to live in a world where we will be reaching out to places in the world that but my father's lifetime ago, did not exist in our understanding.

When my father was born, the world was standing tenatively in the dawn of a nuclear age; in the shadows cast from Nagasaki. Atoms were dangerous, capricious things that loomed ominously over the landscape, that made men fear, that brought the world under a blanket of snow so cold that at least twice, the whole world stood on the precipice of making that winter eternal. Twice over, hands hovered over the buttons.

When I was born, we didn't know what we were. Didn't know why we were. And I was ten when the USSR collapsed and the bombs stopped being important. And we could stop defining ourselves by who we were against and had to start stumbling towards telling people who we are.

Your son is going to grow up in this world. A world shaped by people who have, through the power of thought, looked at the sun and realised that there is nothing in this world that we cannot understand if we but try; that this is our world, and that we owe it a responsibility of care, and that if we but care enough to show an interest, it will never fail to surprise and to delight us.

You have given the world a beautiful gift, that is your son, and you have given your son the beautiful gift that is the whole world.

No angels, no dragons, no elves or imps or pixies or fairies; you have brought him into a world that's there: It's really, really there. You don't need to give him ephemeral things like faith and miracles. You can give him the things that are there; it is enough for him, and it has to be enough for him, because it is everything that there is.

Justice. Love. Duty. Beauty.

These things are things that we make. And they are things that mean nothing unless we share them. There is always something beautiful waiting to be known.

And that's not a quote. That's just what I think.

Smurfette is the only male smurf.

Speaking as a population, details like long hair and hips and a high voice are not necessarily gender indicators. Let us not forget the peacock, after all, or many other birds, where the 'pretty' bird is the male (so he can better attract mates, and, after having done that, distract predators from his progeny). To look at the smurfs as a population, Smurfette is a member of one gender (we assume), and the others are members of another.

Smurfette's gender is indicated by pronoun usage - the smurfs do indicate her as different for some reason. However, as a population, any long-term community with newcomers is not going to survive with only one breeding-feasible creature. There's nothing to indicate that smurf gestation period and mating habits are wildly out of whack with what we're used to. If a smurf were to be born 'fully grown' very quickly, it would ask for a lot of resources and take a lot of toll on its 'mother.' They're complex organisms, things that work for ants won't work for them.

So, assuming that Smurfette is a different gender, and assuming as complex organisms the smurfs have a reasonable gestation periods, the conclusion that makes the most sense to me is that Smurfette is, in fact, male - and every other smurf is female, responsible for the gestation and development of young. This explains how the population can grow and why the smurfs themselves have such homogenity - there are always new smurfs being born, off-screen, because Smurfette's always spreading his gamtes.

Right now my gaming group stands in a transitional zone between systems we like (4th Edition D&D, D20 Modern) and systems we've mastered (3.5th Edition D&D). The ability to sustain a narrative is, for the most part, independent of the mechanisms used to maintain that narrative, as a good enough narrative will make almost any mechanisms palatable, and can also do a lot to pull players away from bad mechanisms. There are many players who can recognise how bad mechanics pull away at the narrative, and avoid those mechanics 'because of the hassle.' I have been using this time as a player, not as a gamemaster, to really consider the systems from the perspective I normally don't have. Due to our unfamiliarity with the systems, I have a lot of time to consider what's going on, as there are routine breaks in the flow while rules are double-checked, details are consulted and gamemaster rulings challenged.

That problem has become fundamental to many of the gaming experiences in these new systems, a problem I recognised in another system, Big Eyes, Small Mouth. The common link between them is that there's an absence of a setting, an absence of a style. The more I dwell on this topic in observation, the more I have come to consider this thesis. Style is a mechanical necessity. Due to these settings being as undefined as they can get away with, mechanical concerns are brought up that, if the style was best understood, would be easily set aside.

To draw on the potential whipping-boy D20 Modern, if Die Hard - the original - was run as a D20 Modern game, in style and mechanisms, there would be almost no concerns whatsoever about a character making the DC 30 check required to break a plate glass window. Why? Because people break through windows in that kind of movie all the time. You don't see the ten minute sequence of Bruce Willis swinging his gun into plate-glass windows with a resounding bonk accompanying every blow. Leaping through the window is a given! But that's not the same case for a claustrophobic movie like REC - where that plate glass is supposed to represent the ultimate border of the game world. Flailing against a window you can't break and feeling helpless is something that adds to that story, not detracts from it.

This is not to say these are bad systems because they try to be modular. If I have a complaint in this regard, it is that neither game presses importantly enough on the Gamesmaster that the style of the game, the setting and its tone are part of a mechanical ramp that the players are going to use to get used to the mechanics of the game. This is part of what makes the Eberron campaign setting for D&D so potent a tool for players to experience. It has a clear style, a clear feel - Eberron is a game that is about fighting the villain atop constrcuted bridges, of riding the collapsing, ruined statue down the hillside and fighting the hill giant that is desperately clinging to it at the same time.

If a player has a good feel for how things should work, they'll be more likely to try to do the things you want them to do. If a player hasn't, and they don't, the game becomes much more about the mechanisms that lay there, and they can be quite ugly. This can lend players to start thinking of problems in a way that is all about solving them as efficiently or disruptively as possible - they attempt to 'act out.'

Consider our routine ripping on Mournglash for his desire to find a third path through every binary option. That is because in his mind, these challenges were presented in such a way as to be a battle of cleverness, and in the kind of stories he wanted them to be, it was the cleverness of the hero that led to them rejecting the precepts of the game. He had an idea of how things should be, and he tried to force that onto the game. That's not to say that this was a good or bad habit, by the way; it was a purely neutral behaviour that a Gamesmaster can direct to useful ends, or can be used to exasperate the Gamesmaster's ends.

Another example is from Lucasarts' game collection. To provide an outline of their newer, upcoming game Full Throttle, a developer proposed the distinction between the protaganist of Full Throttle, Ben, with previous Lucasarts protaganists, such as Day Of The Tentacle's Bernard Bernoulli. Bernard is a nerd who needs a crowbar's help to pick up gum from the floor, and carries around a book so boring that it can put horses to sleep. Ben is a six and a half foot tall biker whose main hobby is vehicular homicide.

The scenario was as follows; Both protaganists are presented with a locked door, and have nothing but a sandwich in their inventory. Bernard would open the sandwich; take the mayonnaise from it, and use that to grease the lock, before sliding a piece of lettuce under the door, pushing the key out of the lock with the toothpick, catching it on the lettuce, and pulling it back under, before using the key to unlock the door. Ben kicks the door in while eating the sandwich. This is what style can get you. You can have a group stymied by a door which you just want them to kick down, or you can have a group kicking all the rich, story-dispensing NPCs in the head (and making them explode) if you send the wrong messages about the style of the game and its setting.

Now, I know I have a powerful objection to the word, but it's the best I can manage here. To simplify this piece so far:

In local news, I have instituted a new rule; Any time I enter the kitchen, for any reason, I can't leave until I've washed something up if there's anything that can be washed up. Two positive effects; first, I'm getting more washing up done, and second, I'm not going to the kitchen as much.

But in international news, with an eye to the Olympics, we learned today that an infatuated, mentally challenged man successfully evaded security in the Olympics stadium sufficient enough to get within twelve steps of Vice President Joe Biden. He was intercepted by two plainclothes female mounties who picked him out of the crowd as seeming 'a bit odd,' spoke to him him, and captured him when he attempted to run.

Good Thing: Layered security did its job. Guy got apprehended and nothing bad came of it.
Bad Thing: He got past MOST of the security with a picture of a security pass he printed off the internet and laminated at Kinko's.
Weird Thing: INFATUATED WITH JOE BIDEN?

Bonus Weird Thing: In three days time all I'm going to remember is my own elaborate fantasy of what plainclothes female mounties look like. And it's hot.

Disclaimer: The following is written entirely as an emotional exercise in expressing an opinion that will most likely be both unpopular in social environments. As with many things under pressure, this makes the contents more volatile. Cases will be overstated. Fairness will probably be diminished. Consider that this opinion will by necessity be suppressed in public, and consider the venom more retaliatory than mandatory.

I'm going to hear the word 'just' used a lot in discussions of James Cameron's Avatar, I think. Any failing the narrative had can be neatly swept away under the heading of it being Just this or Just that, or I'm Just overthinking, or I don't like it because I Just want to.

Avatar is to me some kind of blessed ambergris awash on the shore, a fiasco so large and grandoise I could clamber inside and start hollowing away at its awfulness and not be done, months later, my grisly work having taken on a thoroughly rancid smell in the wake of the untouched parts now bwing old, fetid, and no longer interesting.

This movie is simply too big to criticze. I could spend as much time as the movie itself takes to play out, merely nit-picking details, talking about how the naming scheme for things is bad, the science is bad, the engineering is stupid, the world not as interesting as it says it is, and so on. To tackle the big issues, such as those of characterisation, of depth, of the story as we are told it, of storytelling technique, overused and underused elements, would be essays unto themselves and require a lot of re-watching that would mandate a viewer or reader be utterly obssesed about both this film, and, for some reason, my negative opinion of it.

Without delving too deep into the matter, I feel that District 9 handled the inhumanity of humanity theme much better and is in my opinion, a significantly better film, and integrates its Action Movie shenanigans much more satisfyingly. If you're wavering on whether to watch the movie, consider that it has a simple story, with every possible thing telegraphed ahead of time. This is actually kinda satisfying, since if you're looking for those moments, you can feel kinda satisfied as the story progresses ahead of you.

Still, the concepts the story handled were all handled in a Fischer-Price fashion, simplified to the point of being, well, childish. Pandora was stated by a man not given to lying as a massively dangerous jungle, yet by observation it seems to be far less dangerous than real-world jungles. The biology doesn't work, but James Cameron admits this, so it's somehow okay. Whatever of its many messages it tries to deliver are all mangled by one another, and it's internally inconsistant.

To give it its due, the film is visually splendid and, bearing that in mind, it is, I feel, a good film to show children. I feel that by broaching topics of death, and of inhuman behaviour, with its simplified story elements, it can serve as a good stepping stone for children still entering into the adult range. That this is The Biggest Movie Ever (and, it really does seem it is), that this is the New Titanic that King Kong was supposed to be, and that the best I can say of it is that it's a good stepping stone for children to better work, should indicate how awful I felt the film was on its own merits.

Blech.

The funny thing is, despite wanting to spend hours talking about how terrible the movie is, I had a lot of fun tonight and really enjoyed myself going out to watch the film in question.

Being at one point in my life a ten year old boy, I had a full chance to get really acquainted with the varieties of and forms of ways to make milk interesting. Milo and Quik are the two big brands and they had a variety of other, probably older variants that were less brand-recognised, including No Name Chocolate Milk Powder. Mostly, these milk additives are decent, but unremarkable ways to spice up a bit of milk.

The concern I have with them is that as I grew older I started to consume the whole glass of milk, not just the foamy stuff on top, and that led to a realisation that most of the time when you make a cold milo, you are making a cold trench of milo crumbs soaked in milk to rest on the top, and a vaguely-milo flavoured tumbler of milk beneath it. This is not, to my surprise, a bad thing. I've heard from some that they actually prefer the milo to do that, and consider sculling a tall glass of tinted milk to be a small chore to complete in the name of scooping up these drifting milobergs. For me, this arrangement lacks a certain wholeness to it.

Perhaps as the result of a childhood that imprinted on me the idea of saving the best till last, I find the idea of a pleasant experience followed by a chore to be made worse because of the lack of anticipation. I want it to taste like chocolate all the way down. Understanding that of my tastes is hopefully a useful guide for knowing whether or not you will appreciate Dick Smith's OzeChoc as much as I do.

OzeChoc just blends into the milk, straight away. The powder's a little clumpy, meaning you can if you're not vigorous enough with your stirring, wind up with the occasional dry taste of sugary dust in your drink. If you've the patience, you can crush it in the tub with a spoon and make sure it's finer before you stir it into the milk, and avoid that problem, or you can just stir like a mofo. Either way, there's no boiling water to muck around with, and no need for pan to boil milk. Glass of milk, spook, and OzeChoc. That it tastes good is really quite perfuctionary at this stage in the process. We're so advanced as a culture that you'd need to be proactively trying to produce 'chocolate milk flavouring' that somehow failed to taste of pleasantly sweet chocolate flavours.

It's something of a pleasant surprise to find a way in which I can support Dick Smith. The guy's a nice man, and a skeptic as well, so I'm glad I can purchase his products without having to resort to consuming Dickbutter and Dicktams.

Presented without comment.

Date:	2009-12-06 04:43
Subject:	Rolling Rocks
Security:	Public
Mood:	hopeful

"I say I'm a guy
But really I'm just a speck
Compared to a planet
And compared to a star
The planet's just another speck;
To think about all of this
To think about the vast, emptiness of space
With billions of billions of stars
Billions and billions of specks."
- Bill Nye, The Eyes Of Nye

I think I just play with the ferrets so I have an excuse to hit someone in the face with my old socks.

Why do I pursue the aims I do, in the names of game balance?

It's because of the people who support the underdog. It's because of those people who admire and respect the fighter. It's for people like her.

you just find something that reminds you unfailingly and unrelentingly of a friend you love.

From Glendon Mellow who seems to be a nice proper chap and all.

Jack: There's nothing wrong with being elite.
Or another example.
This one isn't about collectibles but it's the same kind of thing. I'm in a book store ... for new books. I've gone a little bit crazy and I'm about to spend a couple of hundred bucks. I murmur under my breath "money's too tight to mention".
Now the guy behind the register, he hears this. He looks at me, nodding his head knowingly like we're in some "club of cool" together. He says, "Yeah, Simply Red" like it's a password, and now we do the secret handshake.
And I'm thinking "Simply Red"? Lame English band. More soul at a polka convention. And the book store guy thinks he's on some kind of inside loop with that.
Sadie: Jack, that's the smuggest thing I ever heard. A guy tries to be nice and you stand there hating him just because he hasn't heard of the Valentine Brothers.
You're like my ex-boyfriend. He was that way about authors. He'd deliberately drop obscure quotes and references. He'd take over conversations at parties. But none of what he read was for the love of it. His knowledge was like a weapon.
Don't tell me you're like that. I don't want another jerk. I've had...
Hey, why are you smiling?
Jack: Because you've heard of the Valentine Brothers.

From wsfa:

"I'm not willing to give my true self up. It's a testament to my real personality that I would go so far as to make up another personality to give to the world," [Megan] Fox tells The New York Times Magazine. "The reality is, I'm hidden amongst all the insanity. Nobody can find me."

From this review of Roing Gogue, Sarah Palin's autobiomographicality:

Obviously a liberal. It seems they enjoy this type of ad hominem humor. What can you say? The French think Jerry Lewis is funny.

'Solve for gnome.'