My Sick Mind

SAN FRANCISCO – Amazon.com Inc. is dropping the price on its Kindle e-reader, but the change comes with a trade-off: On-screen ads. The online retailer was set to announce Tuesday that the new Kindle with Special Offers will cost $114 — $25 less than the currently lowest-priced Kindle — and include advertisements on the bottom of the device's home page and on its screen savers. Seattle-based Amazon will start shipping the newest Kindle on May 3, and it will also be sold in Target and Best Buy stores on that date. Now we know what retailers think of us. We're worth 25 dollars. Amazon figures you'll buy a Kindle for 25 dollars less than its regular price if all you have to do to save that money is put up with some advertising. They say every man has his price. Yours has been set. In a demo of the device, a screen saver showed a deal where customers would pay $10 for a $20 gift card to Amazon. If a user is interested in that deal, they can click to have details of the offe...

I used to be a voracious reader. Then, I discovered television. Television required little eye movement, there were lots of choices and I could do it while I did other things. I enjoyed music too, and among all those attributes, it required even less eye movement, making it even more appealing. At some point, reading books became less of a habit and more of a chore. I had good intentions. I used to peruse local book stores and pick up something that I thought looked interesting - usually history or some other non-fiction - and I'd run home with it and leaf through it before settling down to watch my favorite TV programs. The book would sit until I finally decided to place it in my bookcase where it would sit in its original, pristine condition, usually with the receipt as the well-intentioned bookmark at page one. Over the years, less and less on television and even less music became appealing to me. Television is full of low-budget junk "reality" shows, and musi...

Kirstie Alley is fat again. Surprised? When Kirstie Alley stepped on the scale for the first time in 15 months, it wasn't pretty. "I started screaming," Alley, sipping homemade fruit-infused water in her Hollywood kitchen, tells P eople in the cover story of its new issue. "It said 228 pounds, which is my highest weight ever. I was so much more disgusting than I thought!" It turns out, she went off that Jennie Craig crap she was hawking for the past couple of years, and when she went back to the burgers and grape soda - Viola - the weight came back. That's why diets don't work and now it will be harder for her to lose the weight she lost the first time. It's quite the racket, the diet foods. People desperate to change their shape sign up for those programs and "feel great" but forget that they can't eat like that forever, so when they lose the weight and go back to the junk they were eating before, the weight invariably comes bac...

We're supposed to believe in Global Warming and I guess I do, although my frame of reference is limited to the 51 years I've spent here. I can tell you two things: (1) We don't get as much snow as we used to and (2) I used to ice skate on a nearby lake and now, the lake doesn't get frozen enough to support my cat on ice skates, which would be quite a sight. Occasionally, we hear about ice breaking off some northern outpost, and they tell us that it's as big as Texas or something, and we think, "Jeebus, as big as Texas?" Holy crap - an entire redneck state is headed this way. The only thing we don't know is how long ice has been breaking off. Maybe it's been breaking off for decades and only now we're hearing about it? Or maybe the planet really is warming, I don't know. Either way, I think it's a good idea to take care of the place. That, plus the fact that it's April 26 and we're in the second day of a three-day wave of 90-p...