Shopping Tips and Guidance by Mandy Claire

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" If you think all faeries look like Tinker Bell and act like Snow White, I'm here to straighten you out! Oh, faeries can be terribly, terribly bad!

There's a notable book called The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, by W. Y. Evans-Wenz in which the author interviews people who have had faerie encounters or who knew lore about faerie encounters. One of the unifying themes of Evans-Wenz's investigation is that our Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Breton, and Cornish forebears were respectful at least and fearful at best of "the gentle folk."

I like to swagger around unafraid of anything. Therefore, the only thing that has kept the faeries from spiriting me off completely is that it's more fun to torture me day-to-day in picky ways. They know I believe in them, so they need not make the point that they exist. All they have to do is annoy me when I get too cocky.

Last week they took my Netbook.

They warned me that they were planning to do it. As I was driving home from a teacher workshop last Wednesday, I became so convinced I'd left the Netbook at the workshop venue that I literally pulled into a parking lot and looked in the back seat. There it was!

But do you think I could find that Netbook a day later? It wasn't in the car. It wasn't in the house. Since I had last seen it on the back seat of the car (and the door was unlocked) I assumed someone had pinched it.

Yes, someone had pinched it, all right. The faeries pinched it! They kept it for five days and then left it right on my bedroom floor, smack dab under a big pile of dirty laundry!

But that was just the warm-up.

I've been doing this "alternate route" teacher certification gig for quite awhile now, trying to get fully certified to teach in the state of New Jersey. Remember all those night classes with Mr. Bigwand? (*shudder*)

Get this: All the other people who took those classes are now certified. My certificate is being held up by one online application that would take two minutes to fill out. Except I've been in this program so long that I don't have a user name and password in the system, and so I can't get in to fill out the application. All of my other paperwork is there, including long, labor-intensive assessments done by my school principal AND all of my night school grades! I even had to take a Loyalty Oath witnessed by a Notary!

One stupid, friggin, senseless piece of e-work, and I can't get it done.

Faeries consider our technological age a marvel of new opportunity. To them, the Internet is a playground, both whimsical and sadistic.

Ask me what I'm fixing for supper. I'll tell you: humble pie.

Gentle people, please give me my New Jersey state certification in Language Arts instruction, grades 9-12. Did I not give to you the beautiful ceramic mug with the school insignia that all first-year teachers get? Take the doggone Netbook if you must, but certify me! I AM CERTIFIABLE!


Are we gonna be nice now? Are we gonna see mice growl? Are we gonna need an ice towel? And how!

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," gumming up the Internet with meaningless drivel since 2005! Today's post is going to be lengthy. There's a lot of ground to cover. So take a look at the Table of Contents and see what matters most to you, then scroll to that headline. And hey, if you've got time to read a lot, go for the gold!

Today's sermons:

1. Margot Berwin
2. International Vulture Awareness Day
3. Adventure with Spare
4. Pilgrimages to Asbury Park


Off we go!

1. Margot Berwin
 Today was the day I was supposed to review Margot Berwin's novel Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire. Except I screwed up. If you're here to read about Margot, check out my August 23 post, in which she herself speaks as a guest blogger. This is your last chance to be in a drawing for my copy of the book! If you leave a comment on that post site, you could be a winner!

2. International Vulture Awareness Day
Yes, o ye who serve the Sacred Thunderbird! There is such a thing as International Vulture Awareness Day! And it's this Saturday, September 4, 2010! This nonprofit, and truly international, event highlights the catastrophic die-off of essential vultures in Africa and India, where they succumbed to poisoning from non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs given to livestock.

This is a unique opportunity for my three readers.

I will be attending a sanctioned International Vulture Awareness Day event at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary outside Allentown, PA. It will be difficult to miss me, as I will be wearing a bright red t-shirt with a turkey vulture on it, and probably my Mountain Tribe hat as well. So if you would like to come and worship the Sacred Thunderbird with me, Mapquest that park, and I'll see you there!

If you can't make it to Hawk Mountain, in all seriousness please take some time on Saturday to raise a petition to the bored gods on behalf of all Old World vultures. Rituals for the recovery of their numbers will be a way of showing your dedication to the Great Balance that we humans heed when it suits us, and ignore when it doesn't.

3. Adventure with Spare
I'm sure you know how it is. You want to go home for a visit, but you don't want certain members of your family to know about it, for whatever reason. On August 10-12, my daughter The Spare and I went home to the family property in Appalachia to see the Perseids meteor shower. Spare is very interested in the universe, and I was keen to have her see it without any light pollution. We decided, without making a big fuss, to go watch the meteors with my uncle and cousin. (What would have made it a fuss would have been telling my sister, who would have wanted to join us with several of the seven pets she has adopted in the last calendar year.)

Spare and I set out from Snobville and drove west through the heat and humidity, all the way to beautiful Berkeley Springs, WV. There we put up at a swell Bed & Breakfast. By the time we got to Berkeley Springs, the temperature had settled from its daytime high to a measly 97 degrees. The sun was mostly hidden behind clouds that weren't big enough to bring rain but sure were thick enough to hide meteors.

At about 7:00, Spare and I set out for Polish Mountain. It's about 25 miles northwest of Berkeley Springs. At a fast clip on Interstate 68, you can be there in about 30 minutes. But anyone who drives at a fast clip at twilight in the mountains just deserves to tangle with Bambi Daddy. I took it easy, and we got to the family farm just at dark. The hills were still shrouded in clouds.

My uncle Foggy (that's his real name) is going to be 85 in October, and he's almost completely deaf. His hearing aids have broken, and he says he can't afford new ones. Sadly, a deaf Uncle Foggy is better than one that can hear, because now Foggy doesn't listen to Rush Limbaugh anymore. His one-sided conversation centered around the doings of my cousins that I never see who live in Cleveland, instead of the world from Rush's point of view. Since I take an interest in my cousins and their welfare, it was pleasant to get a lengthy oratory on that topic, rather than an earful of right-wing rhetoric that would have soured my stomach for the rest of the night.

While Foggy talked on one side of the room, Spare and my cousin chatted on the other. My cousin (Foggy's son, but without the homey name) has traveled all over the place, including a very long trek into the mountains of Nepal. Spare found that interesting. Then they moved from conversing about Buddhism to the pluses and minuses of Facebook. Two-way conversations will drift like that if you give them enough time.

The midnight hour approached, and Spare began to nod. She's not one of these all-nighter kind of teens. Her volunteer work starts at 9:00 a.m., so she doesn't loll in the sack like many of her peers. By midnight she may still be awake, but usually she's headed for the sack.

At about 11:45 I said to her, "Okay, Spare. I'm going out on the back porch. If those clouds are still hanging low, we'll leave and try again tomorrow. If they've lifted, we'll stay and take our luck with the Perseids."

The clouds had lifted.

On that mountainside, with no moonlight or electric glare, the sky shone with a trillion, billion, million stars -- some close, some far, some pulsars, some planets. The sky presented an unbroken, limitless miraculous hour of starshine.

Spare stepped gingerly into the darkness of the porch. (I neglected to mention that she's a city girl through and through who had voiced anxieties about everything from bears to no-see-ums, and all sizes in between.) After begging assurance that there were no snakes about, she looked at the sky and gasped. Did I mention she's a city girl? She had never truly seen the night sky.

"So," Spare said. "How long do you think it will be before we see a ........ WHOAAAA!"

That was her response to the first of about three dozen fireballs we saw over the next two-and-a-half hours.

If Spare had been sleepy, she forgot all about it. We got our eyeglasses from the car. Cousin spread a big bedspread out on the mountainside, and we all lay down to stare at the Milky Way. Since the Perseids radiate toward the north, and our farmhouse faces west, we stretched out with our legs higher up the mountain than our heads (this was tricky). But there's no level ground around the house. It's on a mountain. Mountains are hilly. Maybe you've never noticed that, but I'll bet you have.

It was absolutely sublime, lying there in the pitch darkness, staring up at our fabulous galaxy, and "whoa"-ing every time a meteor streaked across the sky -- which was frequently. In between meteors, the three of us talked about this and that. Mostly my cousin and I teased The Spare about all the critters that were just waiting to eat her, should she dare move off the bedspread. He discoursed on a strange pit viper he'd seen that didn't look like it belonged in these parts. I stuck strictly to the stories I'd gotten as a girl (The Black Dog, the Boogey Man), and added frightful tales of the flying electric armadillos. But all conversation ground to a halt when the Bored God Perseus treated us to a display of His majesty. Starry, starry night.

Finally at around 2:30 a.m. the crescent moon rose, and when it did it bleached away the Milky Way and many of the dimmer stars. That seemed like a hint that the celestial party was over, so Spare and I bid farewell to Polish Mountain and headed back toward Berkeley Springs. When I say I drove slowly, that's putting it mildly. I would hope you'd do the same if you could literally see dozens of deer on either side of the road.

I've led a rather quiet, sheltered life. I'm bookish. And what adventure I craved I mostly found at Polish Mountain, where you can still walk for ten hours and not see another person. In the basically uneventful life of Anne Johnson, that fabulous meteor shower is one keeper of an experience. I may never set foot in the Rocky Mountains, but I am the Appalachians. They complete me. And now my daughter knows why.

4. Pilgrimage to Asbury Park
"Well, Anne," you ask. "If you love the Appalachians so much, how come you don't live there?"

That's a question I often ask myself, and usually answer this way: "My life ain't over yet."

In the meantime, I live in New Jersey. Both of my daughters were born and raised in New Jersey. My older daughter, The Heir, adores this neon-and-asphalt swampland. Absolutely worships New Jersey. We do tend to feel that way about the place where we are raised, even if it's a scum sack.

The Heir had one singular ambition this summer. She wanted to go to Asbury Park.

Heir's not a big Bruce Springsteen fan. That's not why she wanted to go. She wanted to go because Asbury Park is a seaside resort that's down on its luck and therefore has crumbing architecture and strange abandoned buildings belonging to a bygone era.

I've always loved The Boss's music, but I'd heard that Asbury Park wasn't such a swell place to stroll. Thankfully, my Fairie Festival nemesis, Otter the River God, teaches school there. So I asked him about it, and he said yes, it is weird, and no, it's not dangerous.

Heir and I made two trips to Asbury Park this summer. Both were mother-daughter outings, but Heir is 21 now, so it almost seemed like girl time with a buddy. Our second excursion was last Wednesday. And on that day the cloudiness was absolutely dedicated. It looked like the sky was going to fall into the sea.

Never mind. The Stone Pony was gearing up for an evening outdoor concert, and the Boardwalk was full of young music fans. Heir and I sat on a bench and listened to a sound check. Then we played pin ball, then we strolled, and then we watched the surfers as the evening fell and one little speck of blue sky split the storm clouds.

I never owned many record albums, but I had copies of all of Bruce Springsteen's except "Greetings from Asbury Park." And I listened to The Boss more than any other rocker (except Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young). Last Wednesday, in Asbury Park, I finally figured out Bruce. And I understood why his message had never resonated with me before.

You see, we expatriate Appalachians are always singing about the beauties of home, and how we want to go there, and how (if in no other way) we want to be buried there. "When I die, won't you bury me on the mountain ... far away in my Blue Ridge Mountain Home."

Bruce is basically all about getting out and not looking back. "It's a town full of losers ... I'm pullin' out of here a winner." Gosh, I sure have absorbed enough of New Jersey to understand that! But seeing the Stone Pony all lit up for a concert, amidst the relict piers and abandoned rehab projects, I finally got The Boss. Now, instead of listening to "Thunder Road," I'm gonna be riding on it.

Thank you, Heir, for teaching a parent well. Finally, finally, I am down with New Jersey.

For any of you who have gotten this far, you might want to put Asbury Park on your radar. They actually have town-sanctioned bonfires on the beach in the wintertime! Yes, all you Pagans out there, you heard me right. I'm drooling too! A perfectly legal beach bonfire! Who's with me?

This extended navel gaze represents the end of summer for me. Not that it was much of a summer -- I spent most of it at teacher workshops, fighting the sinking feeling that the brass in my school district seem to think I'm not measuring up. So beginning tomorrow, I sally forth to try to measure up. I go back to school teaching. First, getting the room ready and putting together a Classroom Management Plan. Second, buying the supplies and books that the district can't give me (and if you want to help again, I sure would appreciate it). Third, planning lessons. And more lessons. Lessons according to what the district wants, and lessons according to what Anne thinks her students need to know to connect what they're learning to what their life will be about.

All this is my way of saying that, starting tomorrow or the next day, "The Gods Are Bored" will return to its regular length and subject matter. Believe me, friends, you will be hearing about International Vulture Awareness Day!

Two of my dear old aunties got Alzheimer's Disease, and sometimes that makes me worried. I'm already showing a scary tendency to get stuck in the middle of a sentence, unable to finish a thought because I can't find the correct (simple) word.

Let all morbid thoughts be banished! Now. What was I talking about?

Oh yeah! I promised that, in response to Keith Olbermann's "Fridays with Thurber," I would start posting witty literature here at "The Gods Are Bored" every Friday night so that you could sleep through my blog instead of Keith's bedtime tales.

Here's a nice little snippet from Mark Twain that aptly sums up my opinion of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" campaign.

I have a religion--but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.....Perhaps your religion will sustain you,will feed you--I place no dependence in mine. Our religions are alike, though, in one respect--neither can make a man happy when he is out of luck.
- Letter to Orion Clemens, 10/19-20/1865

Pray and grow rich! It's the American way.

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," where we are blissfully free of the peskiest varieties of vermin! We've seen many unwelcome bug and mammal infestations here at Chateau Johnson, but just now things are pretty calm ... except for the fruit flies. And we love fruit flies! So all is well.

I'm sure you've read or heard that a certain particularly despicable vermin is making a comeback. That would be your bed bug. Or, not your bed bug, I hope. Someone else's bed bug. May the bored gods protect all my readers from bed bug infestations!

There was an article on Yahoo about the mounting bed bug problems, especially in the big cities. The article was factual and gave a few tepid tips on how to rid yourself of the little nocturnal bloodsuckers. I did a quick perusal of the subject matter, noting that people have been carting bed bugs home from movie theaters and department store dressing rooms. Well, that sounds reasonable enough to me. If you can cart a cockroach home in a bag of groceries, and a tick home on the back of Fifi or Fluffy, you could just as easily wind up with a bed bug on your jeans, if you draped them over a fitting room chair.

Bed bugs are making a comeback.

You know the expression. "Good night, sleep tight. Don't let the bed bugs bite." Ever wonder about it? The "sleep tight" part stems from an era when mattresses were suspended by ropes. If the ropes were tight, you slept better, because the mattress didn't sag.

Have you ever seen a rope bed in use? Me neither. Sometimes you see them at antique stores. No one buys them. Hence, the "sleep tight" is probably an old, old saying. And the bed bug part too. They've been around, these bed bugs, for a long time.

I don't have any free advice on how to rid yourself of a bed bug infestation. I know I cleared my house of a bad mouse problem by adopting Alpha, a cat who had lived in a dumpster for an unspecified period of time. But there's no peppy pet you can adopt to send the bed bugs packing. If we got them here at Chateau Johnson, I would probably just wring my hands helplessly and get bitten.

If you scare up Yahoo and look for the bed bug article http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/health/4-places-bedbugs-hide-and-how-to-avoid-them-2371120/which I've tried to link here, probably with scanty success, let me tell you something. The comments are better than the article. To date there are more than 450, most of them displaying thoughts and beliefs that do not encourage faith in humankind. Random samples:

* If you go to Wildwood, NJ, don't stay at the *** ***** Hotel. Those things will pick you up and carry you to the toilet in the middle of the night.

*The worst bed bug is in the white house and he is sucking out our blood.

*These come from illegal immigrants. Everyone knows Mexico is filthy. Those people are bringing in the bugs, and we're letting them.

*It's no wonder bed bugs are in hotels. That's where the foreigners stay, and everyone knows foreigners aren't as clean as Americans, especially people from the Middle East.

And on and on and on like this! I only read about the first 50, and all four of the above were there. Of course some reasonable comments followed, in which sensible writers pointed out correctly that bed bugs are equal opportunity vermin, completely disconnected from the sanitary conditions around them. These voices of reason get shouted down in that comment thread by morons who insist that bed bugs are riding around on the bodies of illegal immigrants and Middle Easterners, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a no-good liberal who ought to have swarms of bed bugs leeching every last drop of blood from his blue body!


You can learn a lot about people by how they source an infestation of insects in their homes.

Here at Chateau J, we've had a bad infestation of fleas in the past. I blamed the handyman who was fixing our kitchen. It couldn't have been my cats Alpha and Beta running around the yard! No way. They'd never gotten fleas that bad before. Trust me, you've got to keep these white, Christian, Vietnam veterans out of your home.

When I lived in Baltimore, in several different apartments, I was surrounded and confounded by cockroaches everywhere. Not a single living space I could find was free of them. Well, we all know that extremely intelligent people don't practice good hygiene. And after all, I was a student at Johns Hopkins. Know where those roaches came from? The briefcases of some of the finest minds in this country, that's where! Keep your kids away from the Ivy League, and if you can't, don't let them bring their luggage home with them. Make them strip in the front yard, do a cavity search, and only then let them inside for the parental hug. Smart people are buggy people! Word.

Which brings me to my final example of how despicable insects invade your home through human hosts.

There must be a whopper of a hornet nest in my attic. Can't see it, because that same handyman (uh oh) built a room on the third floor for The Heir. For about five years I've seen big-ass wasps fluttering in and out under the roof eaves. This, I tell you, is directly related to Halliburton. Some of the tar in those roofing shingles was probably fondled by Dick Cheney. Need I say more? The dude is a human wasp, isn't he? How else could I have gotten wasps in my roofing?

The moral of this sermon is that you have to watch out what kind of people you deal with. You could get bugs, and of course it would never just be by chance or bad luck.

Pinky swear, if I get bed bugs in this house, I'm going to haul Glenn Beck to court for extermination fees! He's got 'em, you can tell. Don't let the suits and hair fool you. At home he's a slob. With foreign friends, illegal household help, and sheets he stole from a hotel in Wildwood, NJ.

Vi vet at "artsystilen" kan være litt overveldende og kanskje se ut som om det er så utrolig vanskelig å holde på med! Men, de fleste ganger er det både raske og lette teknikker og man må bare vite om dem :-) Og dette har ARTsy-teamet lyst til å gjøre noe med...

Vi kommer derfor til å lage noen produkt-artikler mellom teknikkurs og utfordringer, og det for å få frem produkter vi har lyst til å ha litt mer fokus på :-)

Denne artikkelen er om bladgull - et produkt som kan gi kortet eller prosjektet eller lo'en din et kult distresset og antikk uttrykk. Det finnes mange typer bladgull, og masse av dette er egentlig tynt farget metall. Det finnes et stort antall teknikker og måter man kan gjøre det på, og her skal vi vise noen av dem...

We know that the "artsystyle" can make an impression that it's hard to do, and that it takes a lot of time to do! But, most of the time things just about knowing techniques and playing around. A lot of techniques is fast to do, and even easy :-) Therefore, we will in between tutorials and challenges make articles about different kind of products that we feel needs to get more focus :-)

This article is about gold- and metal leaf - a product that gives your card or project or layout a cool distressed and antique finish. Theres a lot of different types of gold- and metal leaf, and there have to be the same amount of different ways to do it...




Det finnes utrolig mange typer lim og dobbelsidig taper som du kan bruke, og på bildet under finner du noen av produktene...

There is a lot of different types of glue or adhensive that you can use, and on the picture below you can see some of the product to use...



















Håper dette er til inspirasjon, og at vi kommer til å se mange kort, prosjekter og lo'er fremover med bladgull :-) Legg gjerne igjen en kommentar, og eventuelt en link til din egen blogg med et bladgull kort, prosjekt eller lo :-)

Hope this is inspiration for a lot of you, and that we are going to see a lot of cards, prosjects and layouts with gold leaf in the weeks to come :-) Please leave a comment, and also a link to your blog with cards, prodjects or layouts where you have used gold leaf :-)

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," offering the opinions of a certified nobody since 2005! I'm that nobody, and it's all good. I roll with it. Every now and then I'm asked to throw on the "somebody suit" for a few days, and it still fits. It has never gotten a whole lot of wear.

Jason over at The Wild Hunt has a post up today about the commencement of the World Congress of Ethnic Religions. Of course this is a wonderful, terrific get-together, sponsored in spirit by the entire staff here at "The Gods Are Bored."

It's just that name. World Congress of Ethnic Religions.

The word "ethnic" is a freighted term. It suggests a community that is insular due to some set of circumstances. In this case it ennobles the "ethnic" religions in question, but it also (no doubt unintentionally) suggests that those religions belong to their praise and worship teams, and no one else. One of the comments on Jason's post, perhaps not surprisingly, declared, "Heathen proselytism needs to be an oxymoron."

For those of you not up on your Language Arts terminology, the comment might say, "Heathens shouldn't promote their religion outside their narrow ethnic boundaries."

The fact that the large, monotheistic religions have proselytized relentlessly -- and by doing so have earned enmity in some cases -- does not suppose that "ethnic" religions cannot also attract new members to their praise and worship teams. Are we to throw up our hands and say, "Okay, if you want to be a Heathen, you have to prove through DNA extraction that your ancestors were Nordic?"

If the busy god is blind to ethnicity, then the bored gods had better be blind to it too. Otherwise, in our increasingly pluralistic world, it will become more and more difficult to sustain "ethnic" religions, no matter how badly we want and need them.

Bored deities cannot afford to have the badge of a certain ethnicity slapped onto them. I'm sure some will disagree with me, pointing out that people should know as much as they can about their ethnic heritages, and that religion is a big part of that. I would counter that religion must be the part of that heritage that you are willing to share with anyone, of any stripe, who wants to explore your praise and worship team and get to know your deities.

Would you rather your religion be run like a country club or a free outdoor rock concert? The busy god opted for the latter, and look what it's gotten Him. Time to push back a little.

World Congress of Ethnic Religions? Rings hollow. How about World Congress of Essential Religions?

Our operators are standing by to take your call.

Først og fremst så ønsker vi å kunngjøre vinneren av ARTsy-utfordringen for juli og august, og valget var ikke lett å ta! Men vi kom da frem til en vinner til slutt, og damen som har vunnet har virkelig et talent når det kommer til mosaikk kort!!

First of all, we need to announce the winner of our ARTsy challenge for July and August, and we really had a difficult choice choosing the winner. But, we made it, and the lady that won has really talent when it comes to mosaic cards!!




Gratulerer så utrolig mye, Solveig! For et fantastisk kort du har laget, og du fortjener denne premien! Husk å sende oss adressen din på mail - artsyteam@gmail.com

Congratulations, Solveig! Well done, and what a beautiful card!!


We are hereby proud to announce our new ARTsyteam member, and she is a girl with long experience within this hobby. She is a talented girl with here own style, and she makes the most beautiful and awesome backgrounds. Her knowledge within rubberstamping are high, and I am sure that we will learn a lot from her. And, we are sure that she will inspire our readers!

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" It was nice having a guest blogger yesterday. And now I have an offer for you. If you leave a comment, I will put your name in a drawing for my reviewer's copy of Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire. You'll just have to give me some way in which to contact you -- your own blog or an email so I can get your snail mail address.

On Monday, I celebrated 26 years of marriage. Please don't ask me where those years went, or how my little babies have become young women. I think we dream of Heaven as an eternity because our lives rush by so fast.

But today's sermon is about the changing face of news-gathering and democracy in 21st century America.

My husband will go in to work this afternoon at the newspaper where he has worked since 1987. He will have to vote on a negotiated contract that contains a 6 percent wage cut, some of it through unpaid "furlough" weeks. Everyone is heaving a sigh of relief that there will be no layoffs (at this time) of a workforce that has shrunk by about 75 percent since Mr. J arrived here.

This is your diminished daily newspaper. And trust me, readers, your politicians local and national, your corporate CEOs, your sneaky lobbyists, they are loving it. No more pesky investigative reporters watching them! Add to this with a groundswell of resentment against government regulations, and you've got a world run by the wealthy few with nary a roadblock in their way!

If you couple the diminution of daily print journalism with the Supreme Court decision that allows corporations to spend all the money they want on political campaigns, you get a serious challenge for the rank-and-file citizenry. Who is going to run this country?

We are. You and me. Let's get busy.

It has already begun. Think back to the recent presidential campaign. What do you remember -- the slick commercials, or that couple in their living room singing about Sarah Palin hanging around with Godzilla? One YouTube gone viral!

If corporations can spend what they want on elections, We the People can post YouTubes, spend nothing, and perhaps deliver a vote.

Net Neutrality on the line? We'll figure out how to bypass it. Many, many fine minds will be on the task in the days and weeks to come, and they will share their discoveries ... for free.

I used to get so upset about WalMart. Giant corporation, mistreating its employees, foisting shoddy goods made by underpaid workers on the lower echelons of our social structure. Guess what, WalMart? We the People are pushing back! Sites like this, "People of WalMart," slap you with a negative image through satire that even Keith Olbermann would be too polite to try.

My daughter The Heir was telling me last night that someone went into the produce aisle at a WalMart, whipped out a little techie device, and took a film of how filthy the shelves and floors looked. Loaded it onto YouTube. "The Aisles of WalMart." More bad press than the store would get on the front page of the New York Times.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet your investigative reporter of the 21st century. It's you, with your phone and your links. Help us, ObiWan IPad, you're the only hope we've got!

Needless to say, my husband and I were talking about the future of print journalism in this century, particularly as it will impact the decade to come. We concluded that newspapers will not disappear entirely, because print journalists, with their reputations, will still be allowed to have interviews with people of interest. If I, as the author of this fine news-gathering site, "The Gods Are Bored," called the Philadelphia Eagles and asked to interview their new quarterback, I'd get hooted off the phone. But my husband, who is a sportswriter for the daily -- that's an entirely different story. He gets the slot.

I am worried about corrupt politicians getting away with murder (anyone who reads Carl Hiaasen becomes particularly paranoid). Well, that's where we all have to step in. A man named Michael Carnock is trying to boondoggle his way into the construction of a huge housing development on the edge of a wildlife refuge in Western Maryland. Google his name, and up come my rants against him and his project. Go to my site and find a link that says "Save a Little Stream." I'm determined that Michael Carnock will never break ground on his development, and so are just a few more people. We're watching him and reporting on his every move -- through a chat group and a web site, and places like this blog.

Pick your battle, reporter. It's time to go to work. Don't feel guilty that you're putting print reporters out of a job. That ship hasn't sailed yet (*knocks vigorously on wood*). But there are fewer print reporters and many more ordinary people with cell phones. Look out for your interests, and act accordingly.

Hi readers! Earlier this summer, a publicist for novelist Margot Berwin contacted me to review Margot's novel. Margot has an MFA in creative writing. I read the book and decided it would be best if Margot took the floor and wrote about the book herself. So please give a "Gods Are Bored" welcome to Margot Berwin!