The weather is in the 80s today. My window is up and the fan is on. I scared my cat to death with my new vacuum cleaner and I'm not sure she's forgiven me.

I awoke to find most of my email box full of hi-rez images of the Martian surface and what some are claiming is a ruined city (not the one in Cydonia). My initial impression is that the shallow sun-angle is lending the knobby mesas in the region a spurious faceted appearance. While I think there are indeed extraterrestrial structures on Mars, I don't think these deserve the interest the're likely to receive (which isn't to say they're not interesting, and I honestly hope I'm proven wrong).

I began reading "Contact of the Fifth Kind," a book on the extremely weird spectacle of "flying triangles" that began in the mid 1970s. Black-ops prototypes or nonhuman craft? Or something else?

I plan on spending the remainder of the weekend not stewing over the sorry state of the mass media and the US's deceptive "victory" in Iraq. Can it be done? Your guess is as good as mine.

Motto for the day: "Anyone except Bush in 2004!"