If the message from West Virginia muddied the waters of the 'race' for the democratic presidential nominee last week, the message Mississippians sent to the nation was nonetheless crisp and clear. Make no mistake: Travis Childers' victory bodes very well for the Democrats in November.

It was a dirty...

Notice that Blu-Ray DVD has won the video format war, but that nobody really gives a damn?

At $400 a whack, people are going to stay with their old style players at least until the next-gen Internet Blu-Rays come out around Christmas.

Meanwhile, back in Cupertino, the nefarious...

If you were to ask Lance Armstrong or Al Gore, I'd bet they'd say that setbacks are the salt that makes life's eventual victories so sweet. Life can't be full of victories, of course, because too many people are competing for the same stuff, so 'contests' are a basic psychological...

Everyone knows Saturday Night Live, but few people remember Tony Rosato. He was less visible than more successful Canadian comics like the serially unfunny Dan Aykroyd or my personal favorite Jim Carrey whose name I have to labor to remember these days, since my first impulse is to call him...

Superdelegates are defecting. Maybe I know how Hillary feels.

The "critical success" of my last book left my family broke and tired. My publisher made me pay for my own author tour, my shipping charges, and thousands of dollars of photos they never used. They held onto my royalties months...

2008 will go down on record as the year of the presidents who just wouldn't go away.

So far, the most successful of them is Vladimir Putin who so cleverly consolidated his position during his tenure as Russian President that he has survived past his term with all of...

Someone just paid $1.5 million for a 15 minute film of Marilyn Monroe fellating an unidentified man 50 years ago. Apparently, J. Edgar Hoover watched his copy obsessively either because he found it erotic or because he hoped that Marilyn's partner was JFK.

Marilyn is reportedly youngish in the...

We may be hearing a bit more about Silda Spitzer in the coming weeks. The negative parallels between her husband's indiscretions and the ancient news that Bill Clinton was also caught smoking cigars with a 22 year old are too prominent to be overlooked.

Moreover, Hillary's publicists are visibly desperate...

While Conrad Black means little in the U. S., some Canadians are very well known: Johnny Walker, of course, Wayne Gretzky and also the coolest white boy in North America, Steve Nash.

But more Americans know Britney Spears parents' names than Conrad Black's. My well-informed, highly literate American friends...

It's too early to say, but what if the Democrats stopped pulling their party in two equal directions (1136 - 1108 delegates) like a hungry man dividing a barbeque chicken with his fists?

What if they began to cooperate?

Let the excitement of the nomination race play out, of course,...

Cutting Hillary Clinton dead in the Senate was a brave and necessary move for Barack Obama and the photo worked so well. There she was, gormless and desperate with her hand outstretched to the disappearing back of a man who had just received JFK's legacy. 'I just ain't got it',...

In Canada, the governing party has humiliated its opposition by forcing them to back down from their commitment to the Kyoto Protocols. The current pro-business, Big-Oil Prime Minister has deftly silenced the largest block of his opponents for the foreseeable future by threatening them with an election at the height...

Stop an old guy flying a Canadian flag at a filling station on the interstate, and he'll tell you "Jimmy was a great President." He says this for the same reason that snowbirds like him are flocking to the sunny south early this year.

It has nothing to...

In his most benign moments the current president reminds me of a creature called the 'lesser Panda'. Incomparably disappointing when compared to the better known creature of the same name, he might simply be overlooked and dismissed as harmless if history (or the Trilateral Commission) had not conspired to...

News machines hate Cassandra-like prophecies. Someone has to die first to make real news...

Shortly after the first recall of Chinese toys coated with poisonous lead paint, I tried to interest a reputable news network in the larger aspects of the 'cheap lead toys are poisoning our kids' story.

It...

2007 might well be the year your mobile computer gets stolen. Strangely, your chances of recovering it just got much better.

A college friend who runs an ad agency in London mailed me to say that all his company's notebooks had been stolen during a break-in over the April Fool's...

If things weren't bad enough already, apparently Vladimir Putin has found a ring of keys in the bottom drawer of his old desk at Moscow Center. Now, in his final months as elected president of Russia, he appears to be restarting the engines of the Cold War.

Yes. If you...

I have an oddly associative brain. Whenever I read the capitalized acronym DRM my thoughts are accompanied by audio traces of the Blind Boys of Alabama singing 'pa rum pa pum pum', the catchy funereal hook from their cover of a favorite Christmas carol.

Honestly, I can't help it, as...

Back when I was youthful, unmarried, broke and debt-free, my first techno-love was an Apple SE-30 to which, in the early 90s, I attached a full-page grey-scale Epsom monitor.

WordPerfect had been changing my documents for years. So I went cold turkey on PCs and rushed into my...