Many of my friends, I have discovered over the past few years, are fellow members of the Church of NyQuil — true believers in the product's ability to mitigate the inherent nastiness of a winter cold that's set in. I imagine they'll be as horrified as I am to learn that one of NyQuil's key ingredients, pseudoephedrine (a.k.a. Sudafed, the lowest-common-denominator knock-you-out-but-clear-your-sinuses decongestant) has been removed from the NyQuil mix, apparently because too many FUCKING TWEAK JUNKIES* were stealing NyQuil to make crystal meth. So, this Public Service Announcement: When your winter cold sets in, look for the generic NyQuil equivalent that hasn't yet removed the precious de-snotting ingredient.

* Sorry for the caps. But tweakers suck.
[spotted at digg.com — finally, a better Slashdot than Slashdot!]

There's a nice little piece over at the WSJ Online (the free part of their online presence) about interactive fiction (or IF — sometimes referred to as text adventures). The 11th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition has just come to a close, and there are a clutch of new games to be played. Color me excited. Sure, modern games are great, but to a wordsmith like me, there is something special about interactive fiction. Beautiful prose that responds to the "reader's" impulses may seem quaint by today's gaming standards, but I find something restful and unique about a largely blank screen, a few magical words, and a blinking cursor. (As I have said before.)

Flying out to (and back from) Boston last June, I played For a Change and Galatea, two award-winning, free works of IF. Neither will drive you nuts with insane puzzles, and both contain some top-notch, engrossing writing. Highly recommended.

On the ballot I filled out yesterday for our Special Election, there were only eight items: the eight statewide propositions. (There were no local issues in Oakland.) I gleefully went to my polling place and electronically checked "NO" eight times. It was the most fun I've ever had at the ballot box. It felt shockingly good. And I wasn't doing this just because I think the initiative system is terribly out of control — none of the props were worth supporting. Every single last damn one of them had fatal flaws, even the ones that good folks managed to sneak onto Arnold's Ballot of Evil.

I awoke this morning to hear on the radio that all eight measures went down in flames. So for the first time in my life, the complete results of an election matched my own votes exactly. How much you wanna bet that never happens again?

Today Chronicle columnist and fellow Oaklander Jon Carroll wrote:

About 10 years ago I realized that my idea of reality was changing. It was as though I were in a room, an ordinary square room with a sofa and a table and floor lamp, and slowly all the edges began separating. Slowly the walls pulled away from the floor and the ceiling, and the walls pulled away from each other. I could see something between the cracks.

For want of a better word, I called the space outside the walls "sky."

The rest of the piece is definitely worth reading. I think I know what Carroll is talking about: A couple of years ago now, I was sitting in a room of my own when there was suddenly a fantastic explosion that blew the walls out about three feet, and the sky just poured in. Everything has been different since then. In my happy moments, I am literally overwhelmed by the beauty of said sky, which I had never even noticed before.