Just when did Snuggle, cuddly bear of fabric softener fame, turn into Snarky Snuggle? His new commercials seem to be full of pretty ladies searching for their laundry -- as I hear all pretty ladies do, eventually -- and who are inevitably faced by a widely-smirking Snugglebear. "Looking for THIS?!" he actually sneers in one ... as I, The Cynical Consumer ™ herself, begin to think that fabric softener ain't as cuddly as it used to be.

In other news, Hellsing -- the anime, not that witless "film" -- is pretty dang twisted. You know your filmic media is going to be twisted when it uses blood spatters as a form of artistic expression. Come to think of it, though, Snarky Snuggle might fit into this scenario very well:

"Looking for THIS, Alucard?!"
*artistic splatter*
"Try getting that out with softener!"

Editor's Note: This exhausted scribbling was brought to you by The Completely Unrelated Topic Squad. Many heroes. One sleepy voice.

I tell you, they're all around us! iPods! Getting closer and closer!

Are there any ears left which do not have those tell-tale white earphones stuck in them? Everywhere I turn, there's some random collegiate grooving to the expensive beat of their own shuffle drum. It seems to be the males who do this most often -- particularly the short ones, oddly enough, even though for me, "short" is pretty much 90% of the population. Still, there they go, plodding along, wrapped up in their own little isolated worlds of ripped albums and downloaded spywarebeats. Can we no longer walk across campus without a soundtrack, my short-legged brethren? Do you know that 99% of females will not talk to you if you have headphones on? Have I hit upon the cause yet?

In my day, we just used a cute red CD-Walkman. Uphill. Both ways.

One of the greater campus tragedies hereabouts is the fact that all the soda machines are Pepsi in nature. You can't get a respectable Coca-Cola anywhere on this campus. Methinks this sad beverage fact is one of the reasons why going to class is such a drag: I would surely have a much better campus time if there weren't Diet Pepsi where there should be Diet Coke.

I don't know about all you Pepsi people, but I'm just not one of you. If there's nothing else offered in the carbonated department, well fine, I'll drink the Pepsi, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Give me your Diet Cherry Choke, your Diet Vanilla Coke -- your Diet Lemon Coke even, if it's feeling lonesome. And if you want to talk about Diet Dr Pepper too, well sure, let's talk. But Pepsi or Diet Pepsi? No thank you sir. Pepsi is but a wannabe Coke, my friends, a saccharine teenybopper in Cokelish clothing -- hanging around Coke in pigtails and a baby tee, biting at its glitter-painted nails and listening to That Tool Ryan Seacrest on the radio and thinking that XMEN: Evolution is way cooler than that old XMEN stuff. ("Like, Gambit who?") Fie on it.

Regular soda, on the other hand, makes my teeth feel furry. Diet soda and waging the corporate beverage wars -- now that's progress.

What's the story behind this (sadly delayed) sainted coffee photo, you ask? Well, the trendy girl behind the counter clearly requested my name, and I clearly put an "a" at the end of it, so your guess is as good as mine. Of course, the real sacrilege here is my supporting these overbrewed corporate conquerors in the first place. For shame, capitalist Jesus coffee. For shame.

No matter how far I run, the web always pulls me back into its ever-reaching pixelated embrace. I don't know if that's the earmark of a really passionate and literary-sounding relationship, or just plain quicksand.

Thus with a mighty flash of ... mightiness, AW is back up in this. New design, new intentions, new boxes, new humors. I've even learned how to encode a different background colour for each day, m'dear ardent fans. Such luxury.

Help me dust off the welcome-back mat, won't you?