I know what you're thinking. "There have been no good movies this summer. If only they would release a romantic comedy about a 40 year old man who falls in love with a ghost!" Mired in a yearlong "slump" and desperate for anything that might make a shred of money, Hollywood is finally listening.

The movie is called Just Like Heaven, and it approaches the line of absurdity even for romantic comedies. I mean, it's not exactly likely that two rival bookstore owners would meet via AIM and fall in love without realizing who the other person was, but it's plausible (except for that whole "bookstore owners" thing, as all bookstores have now been purchased by Borders, Barnes and Noble, B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, or Amazon.com).

But this one takes a leap off the high dive of merely implausible right into the pool of completely ridiculous. I propose the following rule for determining whether to greenlight a movie: "would it be good if it starred Kevin Costner?". This forces movie studios to take a long hard look at whether the story being proposed is solid. And not only that, is the story good enough to rise above even the most incompetent of actors?

Only by following this rule will movie studios pull themselves out of the red before hundreds of poor A-list actors are forced to work Verizon commercials and Awards Shows to feed their families.

My fantasy football draft is tomorrow morning, which is like mini Christmas morning for football fans. The advent of fantasy football season means weeks of watching meaningless games only to see if a random running back can gain more than 72 yards or if a random tight end catches more than 3 balls.

It also means a Monday morning work ritual of hearing about how everyone lost their games because of a big performance by [Manning | Moss | Owens | Tomlinson]. It's inevitable that at least 2 hours of work are wasted per week talking about your fantasy football team with people who couldn't care less, and that's not even counting advanced scouting and trade pondering for the next week. Ahh, football season.

Gas prices are high, and I am stoked. Sure the price of gasoline is rapidly approaching jet fuel or caviar level at $2.46/gallon (and I'm in one of the cheap states!), but it is resulting in hybrid sales going up, stupid SUV sales going down, and a renewed effort to find alternative sources of power.

Check out these guys who are loading their trunk with batteries and plugging their cars into the wall. Sure, the batteries may have cost $3,000 and weigh enough to decrease fuel economy, but the fact that people are even doing it means there's a market, and if there's a market then automakers will be forced to take notice.

This means there's an outside chance that someday I won't have to dodge massive, gas-guzzling eyesores in an attempt to get to work (or to even leave my parking garage).

Everyone else is posting about Harry Potter Book 6, so I guess it's time for me to weigh in as well. I finished the book a few weeks ago, and by this point hopefully everyone who's planning on reading it has done so. At least once.

Rachel poses the suggestion that Dumbledore is not really dead and that it was all a setup so that Snape can prove to Voldemort that he's really evil. This would be kind of cheesy, but I can see it happening. It was the first thing I thought of when I read it, and JK Rowling has been elusive when asked about it in interviews, but it almost seems too obvious. The whole point of killing off Dumbledore is so that Harry has to kill Voldemort on his own without incredible luck or help from Dumbledore, Hermione, Sirius, his dead mother, etc. etc. Despite being the "hero", Harry hasn't actually done much of anything heroic in the last 6 books, and it would be delightfully ironic if Rachel is right about him being upstaged by Neville in book 7.

The other interesting piece of news to come out of this book is that the long, slow, heavily-foreshadowed pairing of Hermione and Ron has finally come to pass. The fact that it has been foreshadowed since book 1 and beaten into our heads with a two by four since book 3 apparently did not faze the many many online forum denizens who were stubbornly insistent that Hermione would end up with Harry, and who are now wailing in puzzling agony that it hasn't happened. In one article (which I might cite if I can find it later), one 20-something female fan said something to the tune of "I will never be able to have a meaningful relationship again after finding out that Hermione doesn't end up with Harry". Wow.

Nevertheless, I thought this latest installment was pretty solid, much better than the meandering book 5 but not as good as book 4. I'm sure some gigantic merchandising blitzes are already being planned in order to wring the last few billions of dollars out of the final chapter. Oh, why didn't I think of this...

In all the swirling rumors about Windows Vista, the next generation OS from everyone's favorite monopolistic software conglomerate, one thing is abundantly clear: Macintosh is the stylistic standard that we all hope to someday attain. Or at least Microsoft seems to think so. Why else would they be imitating even the most inane of Macintosh UI features:

-"Traffic Light" window controls. The minimize, maximize, and close buttons on Mac windows are nonintuitive and hard-to-click colored circles that look like a traffic light. Why abandon icons which users have been familiar with since Windows 3.1 in favor of a clearly inferior presentation of the same functionality?

-Animated window mini- and maxi-mize. The most ridiculous waste of UI/graphics capabilities is how when you minimize a Macintosh window (by clicking the yellow circle? red circle?), it squeezes together and sucks downward into the taskbar. It's distracting and it serves no purpose, especially when switching quickly between, say, Visual Studio and MLB.com Gameday.

For all the improvements that this version promises (a search that actually works and is easy to locate, tabbed browsing, god-willing a standards-compliant IE), doesn't Microsoft realize that if I wanted all the crappy graphical knickknacks that I've come to expect from Apple I would just buy a Powerbook and set aside the money to inevitably send it back to Apple to get the faulty hard drive replaced?

This is my first post using my new 19 inch flat panel monitor, so these pictures look a lot bigger and clearer on my end but probably the same on yours. I highly recommend picking one up for yourself when they're on sale again.

This fuzzy guy looks more like the squirrels at WashU, but in fact it is a yellow-bellied marmot. They're about the same size as a raccoon, but they won't eat your garbage or wash their food off in your swimming pool. Later in the week we saw two of them fighting with each other, and they made the same hissing noises as the raccoons outside my window in Florida.

Elk were incredibly plentiful in Rocky Mountain National Park, to the point where they are considering allowing hunters to come in and thin out the herd. But for now, the elk own the park. One night we drove past a guy washing his driveway surrounded by a whole herd of elk munching on his lawn. Here the traffic is stopped so one can cross the road.

This isn't a rare exotic animal, but just a single quacking duckling. Here it can be seen in its wild state rather than advertising for insurance companies or starring in Vin Diesel kids movies.