The fog of war settles sullenly on our psyches. We're just behind the front lines, but close enough that every incoming mortar round feels like it has your name on it. My notebook is so covered in mud and dried blood, I'm tempted to use a bayonet to carve out my words instead of a pen. How did this madness begin?

When you’re young, life is exciting and you're full of verve, or diet-verve at least. Then you get older and start noticing how crappy things really are. And so goes the TV season. Way back in early November, I penned a blog called Sly-Fi about three new shows, all of them available in high definition, that fell, albeit broadly, into the realm of science fiction. The fact that I originally trashed the shows is no reason to assume I'd stop watching them. Here's the late season prognosis.

Central hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center was littered in brilliantly colored posters intended to pound product name recognition into even the most casual observer’s psyche.

Viiv.

Rhymes with Five. I don’t know how I knew that, other to admit, their marketing campaign must have been a success.

Christmas is a special time when madness invades the homestead and the urge to give and give and give and, well, you get the picture. But what are these gifts with which we hold these truths to be self evident? One year, a very long time ago, it was a special little baby I found in a cabbage patch. At least, that’s what is said on the label. When the blue light went on – and yes, there really was a blue light - I, along with all the other shoppers in that alphabet-mart, went careening through the aisles like so many pinballs driven in reverse until we converged at the same single spot. A towering monument of pastel packaged Cabbage Patch dolls had just been unwrapped. We, one man and host of hostile woman, were the chosen ones. We each grabbed. I got one. Studying her, my little rainbow coalition brown Jolene, asleep with her eyes open, waiting for the moment when her child would hold her and bring her to life.