Some Comments

I was in Chicago this past weekend. A couple thoughts:

-On Friday I went with the little lady and her mother to a high-end furniture store for an open house-- they were friends with the owner. The owner was a hard-core, old school Italian guy, who cracked me up. He was like a caricature of an old school Italian guy. Then he threatened me, that if he ever heard even a rumor that I treated Nikki badly, he'd send someone after me, and that he knows a guy in LA who's so scary that all he has to do is make a phone call to scare the pants off anyone, and that he'd send that guy after me. Good times!

Then I made a joke about how my Ikea table cost a lot less than the $4,000 table at this store. No one was remotely amused, and Nikki later told me that it was disrespectful. Yet again, good times.

-Then on the plane ride back I sat next to a Mexican man with a wispy moustache. It was a four-hour flight, during which he read nothing, listened to no music, watched no movie, and slept not at all. He sat there and stared straight ahead for four hours. I've never seen anything like it.

-Also on this flight I read an article in The Economist (great magazine because all the articles are a half a page long) about the future of virtual reality. I cannot stress enough how cool virtual reality is, and how big a part of our lives it will be in the future. It is like the Internet but with way way more possibilities. By putting on the eye and ear headgear, you can enter an entire virtual world. According to this article, there are already 1 million people who regularly enter the world of virtual reality (called Second Life). I know this sounds like something only a huge nerd would do. But at the beginning, the Internet was for computer nerds only. Cell phones were for fancy people only. This will be mainstream too.

Apparently you can lease "land" or space in the virtual world and use it to build a service or put up an advertisement-- there are currently 7,000 profitable businesses that exist solely in the virtual world. Or an autistic person can enter this world to practice living in the real world in complete safety. Or a doctor working with schizophrenics can enter the world and program hallucinations, so he can hear random voices and experience what it's like to be a schizophrenic.

The main reason you're confused after reading my description is that I don't really get it either. If someone who doesn't really get something explains something to you, you're going to end up confused. But just know that I'm obsessed with this topic, and be thankful that I limited myself to two paragraphs to talk about it. Remember that one time I wrote about space and time and the universe for like 20 paragraphs? This could have been like that.

-Then, most importantly, http://www.break.com/index/edgarflip.html