Topic the First: home improvement/decoration magazines. Hey guess what? With a 1920s bungalow overlooking San Francisco Bay and a budget (above the purchase price of the house) around half a million, I bet I could make a neat-looking bathroom. Style for small spaces does not apply to 3,100 foot haciendas overlooking the Pacific. Green living does not require a custom-built log home with a solar panel and low-flow toilets. I love to be stimulated by great things and take - clearly - an above-average interest in the design of our everyday surroundings, but I think there's such a home-lust problem that it's little wonder we find ourselves in these trying financial times.

Topic the Second, which is not totally unrelated to Topic the First...try and guess the parallel: Poor the Mars Rovers. I was having a great evening. The window seat finally looks like a seat, even if sitting on it would crush both it and your butt. Jenelle turned the last day of her break into a full turkey dinner and it was good like whoa. Top Gear were in rare form and (spoiler alert) the cyclist won their little race and the boat placed second. Then I jumped online and saw that budget cuts are going to effectively power down Spirit. This hurts my feelings; who else is going to explore the final frontier but this trusty little robot? I think it is so incredibly short-sighted to buy the left tail of a single F-22 Raptor but not another year of discovery, of possibility, of amazement from a scientific wunderkind the size of a golf cart 106 million miles away. Give that a minute. One. Hundred. Six. Million. Miles.