Back in the late 1970s and early '80s, from roughly the age of ten to fifteen (what I'll refer to for the rest of today as 'the pubescent years'), one of the biggest highlights of the week for me was on Saturday nights, when my brother and I would settle down in front of the giant vaccum-tube television with a big bowl of popcorn for my two favorite shows, ABC's The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, airing back-to-back in those days at 8 and 9 pm in the Midwest. And the reason these shows were my favorites is complicated, of course, and full of all these little details to it all: because they were the first "grown-up" shows I ever started watching; because they offered just enough violence and T&A to get a pubescent boy's mind racing; because they gave me my first glimpse of adult sophisticated romantic/sexual comedy (with Love Boat) and Weird-Lit bizarro science-fictiony genre elements (with Fantasy Island), without ever being overwhelming to my childlike brain; and by airing on Saturday nights, they made me feel like I was getting away with something slightly naughty, catching something clearly designed for grown-ups that I would've never caught when I was younger.
Now of course as an actual grown-up, I can look back on those shows and realize all the faults they had; realize that the shows had dialogue for example that never quite rose above the level of a typical pubescent, that they aired on Saturday nights for another example precisely because they knew so many adults would be out on the town having fun, and that it'd be mostly teens watching the shows. And that's why Love Boat and Fantasy Island could easily inspire eye-rolling back then among actual grown-ups, even though my brother and I in our pubescent years loved them in this very earnest, non-ironic way. And more important, they're necessary kinds of projects to exist in mainstream culture, because they help young people precisely in those puberty years make the transition from child to adult, help them take on independent thought and subversive subjects for the first time without completely overwhelming them.
And I have to admit, after three episodes now, that's how I feel as well about Joss Whedon's new show for FOX, Dollhouse; it's certainly a show that as an adult makes me roll my eyes in cheesy comedic disgust, but I can also very much appreciate it for what it offers a typical nerdy thirteen-year-old on a Friday night, home with siblings and expressly having a pubescent evening, pushing their boundaries a little bit by having the first late weekend evenings of their lives so far, while watching slightly naughty, slightly grown-up material that would most definitely be inappropriate for pre-pubescents.
It's a high-concept premise running the show: that in the near future, some shadowy private company has figured out a way to continually wipe a person's short-term memory clean and then "load" them up with a new personality and set of skills; they use this technology, then, to turn a whole series of sleeper agents into whatever the high-priced clients need them to be that week (super-lover, super-killer, super-bodyguard), to do whatever morally reprehensible things they want, then wipe it all away once that mission is over. Like many great weekly genre shows, then, this sets up two running things the Dollhouse staff do with the episodes: each is a standalone adventure concerning whatever our hero agent is doing that week, while each also has a B or C story that reveals just a little bit more about the grand mythology powering the entire tale (how this technology was developed, where these sleeper agents came from, why they sometimes have violent problems with agents and the technology, etc etc etc).
It's...silly. It's silly, and with dialogue that often never rises above the talk of a typical early teen (especially that nerdy young morally relavistic scientist dude who invented the technology, who I want to kill nearly every time he's on the screen); but it's a nearly perfect thing for a pubescent, easily the 2000s equivalent of such great past early-teen genre hits as The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, the short-lived Logan's Run series on CBS in the early '80s, Knight Rider and The A Team and the old cheesy '70s Battlestar Galactica (or if you want to make a comparison to a contemporary show from across the pond, a sorta American version of Torchwood or the revamped Doctor Who). It's sexy without being overtly sexual, presents just enough subversive and transgressive ideas to make things interesting, has gorgeous production values for what's essentially a knockoff Friday-night teen actioner, and of course is loaded with all the stuff that makes such shows a hit among even convention-going genre-loving grown-ups (just like all the other projects Joss Whedon has done over the years, all of which I argue have been designed more for ultra-smart teens than a mainstream adult audience, although of course I don't fault genre-loving adults for liking Whedon too.)
In fact, that might be the most interesting thing when it comes to me in particular and a show like Dollhouse, is that so far I've liked it the most because of the strange, interesting little fantasy I can have while watching it, not for the show itself; I like to imagine watching this with my ten- and thirteen-year-old hypothetical kids on a Friday night, a family activity featuring a show that all of us consider worth it -- the kids loving it for the kids' stuff, the wife and I liking it because we can nominally enjoy it too, and because it doesn't shy away from darker material or the importance of thinking for yourself. Whenever I fantasize about having kids, in fact (not that often, but growing each year), I never usually fantasize about them being little kids (little screaming, petulant, snot-covered kids), but rather them in their pubescent years, and getting to profoundly share activities with my kids at that point that we can both enjoy for various different reasons. Maybe because this is a time in my own youth that I look back on with such fondness? These were the years in my own life when my dad and I built our first telescope together, bought our very first home computer together, watched the old '60s "Prisoner" every week together (which was running on one of the cable channels during my later pubescent years). Or maybe just the increased opportunities for intellectual connection with my kids? A chance to teach them life lessons and to share activities I find important? Or sometimes merely having a nice, intimate, very family-oriented Friday evening in all together, making popcorn and lounging around in bedclothes, watching the latest episode of the family-friendly yet challenging genre show that's not too terrible, not too fantastic, not too crazy but not too bland, just the thing you want your pubescent to be watching.
Anyway, those are my thoughts about Dollhouse! So for now, I'll basically be catching it on the Fridays I have nothing else to do, but most probably won't bother catching up with it on Hulu if I miss a particular episode. You know, one of those shows.
A thought I had this week...
Just this last weekend, on both Friday and Sunday I found myself hanging out with single female friends of mine who are both on the cusp of middle age, both of whom I consider very attractive for who they are, really confident and sexy women who any single middle-aged man would consider a fucking treasure to accidentally stumble across in their dating life (because let me tell you, the cliche about dating really is true -- the older you get, the harder it really does become to find someone not only still single but smart and sexy and successful and not carrying around a whole minivan full of baggage). And both nights, I found myself sitting around getting drunk with these women and listening to them gab for hours about their new relationships, suddenly complicated new sex lives and more, even with me being single myself and celibate now for four and a half years. Which of course is almost the exact same position I found myself in during high school too, just without the liquor -- of being the "sensitive male friend" of a whole series of attractive, popular women, even while being a frustrated virgin myself.
What's occurred to me this week, then, is how strange it is that I should actually now enjoy this role, and really relish my chances now to live vicariously through the funny and sometimes steamy stories of my attractive female friends; because frankly, whenever such a thing happened in high school I was fucking miserable about it, and couldn't wait until the day that I was the one actually fucking some of these girls instead of constantly giving them advice about other guys who were fucking them. And there's a whole variety of reasons for this change in attitude, of course, all of them small and obvious, but adding up to something big and unexpected by the end...
--Me being a virgin back then and desperate to give it away, versus now being a burned-out former sex columnist and swinger;
--Me having no dating life back in those days either, and the self-esteem issues that came with that, versus now knowing with much more certainty exactly what my particular romantic potential is;
--An inability back then to understand the difference between the profound empathy of a deep friendship and the intimacy of a romantic relationship;
--A certain disdain in '80s high school for the "cuckold faggot" reputation that came with being the nonsexual friend of a hot girl, versus now when I take pride in my platonic friends being so cool and attractive and interesting;
--And of course a certain unfocused jealousy back then whenever I'd hear about anyone having sex when I wasn't, versus now when I actually look forward to vicariously enjoying other people's sex stories, so that I don't have to deal with all the crap myself that always comes with having interesting sex, that always always comes with having interesting sex. Not that I don't miss sex, mind you; just that I've had so much of it now, I don't exactly go crazy anymore simply from hearing that someone else recently had sex too.
What a strange journey I had to go on over a twenty-year period, just to land back at the same place I was before; how odd and pleasurable that I should have such a different reaction to it all this time, be so much happier with the situation and so much more comfortable with myself. It's so easy, I think, to get in a mindset that says that you haven't learned a damn thing about life or relationshipos since being a teen; it's always nice to have an experience like my recent one and get quantifiable proof that, no, in fact, I have changed quite a bit since those years, that I do understand both myself and the people around me in a much better way than I ever did then. Yet another pleasant element of the quiet yet surprisingly great month I've been having, a good sign I think that I'm about to have a great spring and summer indeed. We'll see, I guess.
Dear Wall Street Journal: The Great Gatsby was written in the 1920s, not the 1930s. And it was about the after-effects of World War One, not the Great Depression. So stop publishing articles musing over whether the current economic meltdown will eventually inspire a contemporary Gatsby. You uneducated paleocon fucking morons.
You call yourself journalists. You're supposed to be better than this.
There's a whole stack of nerdy blog-entry subjects that have been piling up in my notebook recently; all of them I thought were originally going to be big long entries for my main personal site, but on reflection I've realized that I don't actually have that much to say about them, so thought I'd finally sit down this afternoon and get them all written out and posted here to VOX instead...
One of the websites I regularly read recently announced a new project, where they were seeking input from readers on a so-called "Liberal Arts 2.0," or in other words wacky new ideas to add to the definition of what every "intelligent person ought to know." I had never really thought about the liberal arts before this blog entry, to tell you the truth, and in fact still didn't quite know what the term even exactly meant; let's not forget, I was never much of an academic person when I was younger, and didn't even understand such basic concepts as having a "major" until I was actually at college itself and was being asked to declare one. So anyway, this blog entry gave me an excuse to finally sit for a few days at the Glorious And Almighty Wikipedia (O, Hail Thee!, Mighty Wikipedia of Power and Gloury!, How Thou I Adore!), and finally got to read up on the subject not only as the ancient Greeks (creators of the concept) meant it, but how it was redefined by the proto-scientists of the Renaissance, then the rationalists of the Enlightenment, then again by the first wave of public educators in the Victorian British Empire.
As far as I can tell, in fact, all of these groups meant the same thing, which is why it's both easy and difficult to define the term; in all case, "liberal arts" is another term for "what intelligent members of society believe other intelligent members of society should know, in order to be considered intelligent members of society." And depending on who you're talking to, this can boil down to as few as five and as many as twenty subjects, the kind of stuff that most people in Western societies can rattle off as what they studied in high school and college. Once I stopped and looked at how everyone else defined it, then, I realized that you could pretty much break the entire subject of "human knowledge" into three main subsects, and then from there into 13 topics that one could specifically study and practice:
1) Knowledge of how society works, broken into the specific topics of art, history, politics and economics. And in my case, if say I was in charge of single-handledly creating a new cirriculum for public schools, I would blend the study of these four subjects into one big endeavour, so that even at a very young age children are taught that these subjects are all interrelated, that there's a history and practice to them all that change at different rates.
2) Knowledge of how the inner mind works, broken into the specific topics of languages, philosophy, ethics and critical thinking. These last two especially are topics that used to be of major importance in higher education, back during the Enlightenment of the 1700s and also ancient times; it's only recently that we've been dropping specific study of ethics and critical thinking from the cirriculums of most students, and you can see how wonderfully that's been going. It's high time to bring them back, I say.
And 3) Knowledge of how the outside world works, broken into the specific topics of natural science, biological science, mathematical science, craftmaking and athletics. These last two are my biggest allowances for a specific 21st-Century outlook to all this; after all, I always think it's a mistake to assign trendy solutions to challenges that are supposed to successfully last for hundreds of years. I just think there's enough evidence mounting up, though, of the ever-changing nature of humanity, to warrant saying that we should actively now study the making of actual things with our actual hands, the actual movement of the human body. In a mature Information Age like we're moving into, there's less and less a literal need for most people to be physically strenuous anymore; and that means more and more that people are going to need to add this to their lives voluntarily, making it the new leisure activity, just like reading and listening to music were the leisure-time biggies in the 1800s, when a lot more people worked in factories and on farms.
So anyway, that's how I'd break it down; and if I were to ever be in an opportunity to have children and homeschool them, or start up a new alternative school or whatever (both things I've actually thought of maybe doing when I get older), I would base my own cirrculum on these starting subjects, then start breaking them down and down more and more, into whatever looks like would be the best way to actually teach the subjects to the students I might have at that point. Anyway, just some head-noodlin' I was doing a little earlier this week, that I thought I'd share.
There's a whole stack of nerdy blog-entry subjects that have been piling up in my notebook recently; all of them I thought were originally going to be big long entries for my main personal site, but on reflection I've realized that I don't actually have that much to say about them, so thought I'd finally sit down this afternoon and get them all written out and posted here to VOX instead...
Although I mostly dedicate my Netflix account to grown-up movies, I occasionally throw in spectacular genre pieces clearly meant for kids, stuff I'd never want to pay extra money to see but can justify at a monthly-rate place like Netflix. One I just saw, for example, was City of Ember, which just completely and utterly blew me away, even more impressive in this case because I wasn't expecting it; this movie freaking tanked at the box office, after all, bringing in a measly $15 million worldwide from almost $100 million spent on its production and marketing. But once you stop and think about it, you realize why such an astounding film would be bound to simply not catch on with the mouth-breathing red-staters out there; because it's not only a thoughtful, action-light, character-heavy drama meant specifically for the intelligent, but in an extremely wry way is a direct criticism of both Bush administration, the crashing of America's crumbling New-Deal-period infrastructure, and blindly religious middle-classers who want to pretend that there's no problem at all, just like they pretended for decades that there was no global warming. Duh -- no wonder mainstream America turned its back on this film as soundly as they did.
For all the rest of you, though, I highly encourage you to see this movie, and to experience a kind of visually sumptuous greatness you haven't seen in a violence-free family film in a long, long, long time; what a real treat it was to come across this accidentally through Netflix, something I so rarely say about big-budget movies designed for kids.
There's a whole stack of nerdy blog-entry subjects that have been piling up in my notebook recently; all of them I thought were originally going to be big long entries for my main personal site, but on reflection I've realized that I don't actually have that much to say about them, so thought I'd finally sit down this afternoon and get them all written out and posted here to VOX instead...
At least the last two great ages of humanity -- the Agricultural Age and the Industrial Age -- both came with their own explosive technological revolutions as well, the respective Agricultural and Industrial ones, where huge leaps in innovation and standardization came in a very short period of time, ushering in both the profound new problems and benefits that came from them, the profound new changes in culture and the arts, etc etc. The revolution and the age, then, have a symbiotic relationship but are both their own entities: for example, you could say that the Industrial Revolution actually started with a series of brave innovators in the mid-1700s, then had its first big commercial successes in the early 1800s, then became the 'norm' of how most things were being done by the late 1800s; while the Industrial Age probably doesn't start until the early 1800s, with the first big mainstream successes, but then lasted all the way until World War Two and the rise of the first computers.
In fact, a lot of people agree by now that the next major age of humanity actually started right around the same time, what most of us now call the "Information Age," and that we're now in the early 2000s at the point where the Industrial Age was in the early 1800s (with the age's first giant mainstream commercial successes, that is -- think Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc -- after first a half-century of academes and intellectuals mostly tinkering around with stuff). So that then makes me wonder if perhaps the technological revolution that will get paired with this age by future historians will actually come to be known as the "Post-Oil Revolution," and that in the future both computers and the so-called "Web 2.0" will all become mere sub-topics within such a larger subject. Follow me here...
See, it's computers and the web that first theoretically started allowing society to start needing less and less oil in the first place; things like email, teleconferencing and websites have profoundly lessened the amount of physical shipping we as a civilization need to do (of mail, of packages, of people over oceans), and of all the oil that comes with all the trucks and trains and planes needed for all that. This then allowed people to start realistically picturing a post-oil society for the first time, instead of merely recognizing a problem but not knowing what to do about it; the rise of home workers and digital information allowed the first innovators to say, "This isn't a pipe dream, it is actually something we can bring about."
So now we're on the tip of what could be a big, giant, BIG GIANT change in American history, depending on how history plays itself out, with this sudden new quarter of a trillion dollars or whatever it is earmarked in the Obama Recovery for post-oil infrastructure investment -- for converting all government buildings into "green" ones, for the laying of thousands of new miles of broadband internet, for establishing a new, cutting-edge national power grid, one that can easily start accepting power from distributed wind factories and ship that power across large distances fast. Combine this with tax credits to companies for voluntarily doing the same, a President who deeply believes in these issues, and a whole clan of James-Kunstler nutjobs who are foretelling a Mad-Max-like future for all of us if we don't make these changes, and you're starting to see how in a certain future we might have in store for us, the world just 30 or 40 years from now will look almost unrecognizable to us. Or in other words, just like Europe looked like 30 or 40 years after the mainstream part of the Industrial Revolution got into swing. So maybe all our hype about computers and the internet, then, in the future will merely be seen as merely yet more contributions to an even bigger change ahead of us -- a change to a world that no longer needs any fossil fuels at all.
Just a random nerdy thought I wanted to share! Bye!
So as I was saying here a few days ago, I just finished up my first weekend of research into this massive "wikicloud" experiment I'm trying out for the arts center; you'll want to read the original entry for a lot more, but in a nutshell I'm spending the next six months reading what I hope is eventually a thousand entries at Wikipedia on the subject of "The 19th Century," except not recording this research in a linear fashion but rather as a dynamic "mind map," reflecting not only the subjects studied but in what order I came across them. Anyway, so I ended up going back the day after writing that original entry (or Sunday, that is), finishing up my research on Benjamin Disraeli, then spent a good hour just cleaning up my FreeMind-created map of it all, actually taking some time now to fine-tune my arrows, bubble order and more. Anyway, so above is how it's looking, broken down into the following key:
--Obviously, the red box in the middle is the subject of this map, "The British Empire;" then any white boxes with red letters are references to other major maps that will eventually be created this year, on things like the American "Manifest Destiny" period, the Q'ing Dynasty in China, the British Raj in India, the struggle for home rule among such "white colonies" as Canada (who did it successfully) and Ireland (who didn't), etc etc etc. In each map I eventually create, the left side will always be devoted to such domestic issues as culture, politics and society; the right side will always be devoted to such foreign issues as wars, treaties, colonies and more.
--As I read more and more, then, the orange boxes with large text are the subjects I subjectively have come to feel are of most importance to this subject; that is, if you're only going to read up on a dozen things about the British Empire yourself, these would be the dozen Wikipedia entries to head to. Then the topics start lessening in importance by text size; to take Disraeli again for an example, you can see just by glancing that the 1832 Reform Bill (a first attempt to grant huge new powers within government to the British public) was a lot more important to the history of the British Emipre than was the 1875 Public Health Act (not much more than the government finally approving all the health improvements argued by such people as Charles Dickens his entire life, an important moment in Britain's history but not a major milestone). Or that the Conservative Party Disraeli headed up was a lot more important than either the "Who? Who? Ministry" and "Young England" movements he belonged to when a youth*. And by the way, the blue topics are only a guidepost code: they indicate big entries I haven't gotten a chance to fully read and parse yet, which is why they seem curiously empty of links despite sometimes being such important topics. By the time the map is finished, all the blue text will be replaced by black.
(*In a nutshell, "Young England" was a group of college-student friends who were all conservative yet compassionate and socially progressive; when they all got into their thirties and first gained government control, it was from a variety of short-lived political parties that no one could ever remember, causing ministers in Parliament to derivisely shout out, "Who? Who?" whenever their names were called. Again, a bizarre and obscure set of facts about Disraeli's early political life, important to know to understand how he could've been the unique kind of Prime Minister he was, a staunch conservative who nonetheless ushered in a whole wave of profound new social reforms; but not really that necessary to know if all you're looking for is a general understanding of the British Empire. Which is why it's in such small text, which is why it's so easy to just glance at such a map and instantly understand that those are only minor, obscure topics. Which, as the argument goes, is why such a mind-map is actually better for academic research than a linear list. Whew! End of digression!)
--And then speaking of Who? Who? and Young England, as you can see in that close-up, they have a line between them with arrow points; that's my subjective indication that I believe the two subjects are related, just like every line with an arrow you see in the map, its color determined by which end is the more important topic. And then this is compared, say, to the lines without arrows, which indicate literally which order I read these pages over at Wikipedia originally; like I said before, this I think is an important thing to record, of literally which direction one's mind went when reading these in a hyperlinked way over at Wikipedia. I believe this to be a powerful, intuitive way to learn and study history, and something that could possibly be of enormous help to others who would like to study the topic too. Maybe as of much help as a traditional textbook even?
So anyway, as you can see, this now constitutes exactly 66 Wikipedia entries I read this weekend on the subject of the British Empire; now realize that I'm anticipating this total list of entries to top 300 or more by the time this project is finished, and you can start to imagine how incredibly dense and complex this mind map will be once completed. And as you hopefully agree by looking at the screenshots, the whole thing is turning out rather pretty too, something I could see a history nerd hanging on their wall as a poster, and especially (keep remembering) with this map eventually topping 300 or even maybe 400 separate entries by the time the map is complete.
What do you think? A cool way to study history? A way to profoundly and powerfully understand what exactly is more important and less important about the 19th Century, depending on the level of expertise you want to have on the subject? That's what I'm starting to think, anyway. I love that you can just glance at a map like this and notice all kinds of little causal connections to these obscure moments of history, that make them suddenly line up conceptually in a way I hadn't thought of before, can see in a nutshell how all these far-flung colonies that were bringing in the massive riches were also causing an endless amount of expensive headaches, building and building more and more until the mighty 20th-Century crash we now know of. Anyway, just thought I'd share, as long as I was sitting here just finishing up my detailed arrow work. Love those Bezier curves, man!
P.S. Sheesh, and yet three more thoughts I forgot to share; sorry I'm so talky today...
--Another quick way people will be able to visually compare sections of the world as they progressed in the 19th Century is to look at their left sides (domestic) versus right (foreign), not only how they compare to each other but to other sections of the world. I bet the US's eventual map, for example, will be heavily loaded on the domestic side, since these were the exact "nation-building" years that led us to eventually becoming a foreign superpower only in the next century, while I bet by the time I'm finished it'll be the foreign (i.e. war) side of the British Empire's map that will far eclipse the left side's "Pax Britannica" and "Splendid Isolation."
--Notice the severe lack so far of individual people within this map, besides politicians? That's because there will be hundreds upon hundreds to eventually name, and at first I couldn't figure out how to best express this without cluttering up the map. But now I've come up with a solution, which actually these screenshots don't even reflect; I've decided simply to create entire new separate maps for "Artists and Philosophers," "Entertainers," "Statesmen" and "Scientists." That way I can put the entire planet's worth of these professionals into one big map, use giant international cultural milestones such as World Fairs as major "orange areas" instead of the usual wars. Anyway, my next update will show these.
--And finally, those orange boxes denote not only something for end users but also a reminder for me as a researcher; these are the pages at Wikipedia I will eventually come back to again and again if I ever reach dead ends in the future, if I need to "start over" at a certain page containing an extraordinarily high amount of links to other pages. And especially as my knowledge gets better and better, I'm imagining coming back to these particular pages and being interested at at that point in more obscure links there that I didn't understand before.
That's it! Seriously!
It's free and nearly effortless, after all, to throw together a little entry like this for a blog, especially when I go ahead and put together the tour list and URLs and an official image for everyone; but what it adds up to is just this overwhelming amount of promotion in just a tiny amount of time, not just getting the book mentioned in front of this collective...what, five-thousand-person audience at these five blogs or whatever it is, but also people in the lit community talking about the book getting that much publicity all at once in the first place, and this interesting weird little experiment that made it happen. It's the bizarre little cycle that comes with trying out free or nearly free marketing experiments online; part of it is how many raw numbers you're reaching, plus part of it is how much of a good excuse with a catchy hook you're giving for people to write about the experiment itself, a weird mishmash of free publicity and powerful testimonials with a collective effect that spreads out much farther than just the raw number of eyeballs who see the blog entries to begin with. It's why such stuff like viral marketing and experiential marketing can seem sometimes like unexplainable magic, why so many projects within such disciplines so randomly fail and succeed so often on a whim.
Anyway, this is merely a microcosm of what's to come: eventually all twelve of these tour stops, of course, will not just be running a mere ad for the book, but significant original intellectual content about it, interviews and guest essays and MP3s and whatnot, a much more powerful seller of artistic projects than any ol' dumb ad. And I'm sorry that this whole thing is coming off so marketing-speaky and calculated and so forth, which I know it is since the whole point of this particular entry is to talk about the business aspects of it all; the fact is that an equally important aspect of it all is to get significant new attention to all these twelve literary friends of mine who are acting as tour hosts, and for all of us to band together for two weeks as an "ad-hoc community" in order to help us all get as much additional publicity as possible. That's why I tried to have each host do a slightly different thing, so to create more and more chances to convert casual visitors into daily "virtual groupies," going from one site to the next; that way the book not only gets emphasized over and over, but all twelve hosts of this tour get a bigger and bigger new audience too. I'm just saying, though, it's not just that it's doing a good thing for the "community," however you want to define that, but is also a shrewd way to get a lot of highly positive publicity out there about the book and the center, not only free compared to reaching that many people through ads but with a much more powerful message too, hopefully resulting in a nice little spike of online sales over the last half of February. Lord knows, both Ben and I could use a little extra revenue right now...as can just about everyone else, I suppose.
