please enjoy this news item

It's the parenthetical in that last sentence that does it, natch.

BREAKING NEWS:

DOCTOR WHO - TENNANT 'ALMOST DIED' AFTER OP

DOCTOR WHO actor DAVID TENNANT was almost exterminated in real life - after a deadly bout of appendicitis.
The British actor needed emergency surgery on a burst appendix - and almost died after the operation.
Tennant's friend tells British newspaper the Daily Mirror, "It was touch and go and it was feared he might not make it." The 36-year-old - who was nine at the time of the operation - was hospitalised for two weeks.

borrowed time

In jPod, Cowboy is talking to Alistair, a video game programmer who was in isolation since a video game he designed in 2001 was based on a flight simulator that had jet planes crashing into buildings. Naturally in 2001 they pulled the game, and brought in Allistair, who's been in detention ever since.

They let him out years later, and he's talking to Cowboy, jPod's current programmer. Allistair asks something like, "what's the world been like, since 9/11?"

Cowboy says, "well, there's a perpetual sense of fear that we never had before, combined with the sudden realization that nobody's really in charge."

And I think there's an interesting part of that that's true. I have this suspicion -- particularly since that attack on the United States came quite close to the beginning of this millennium -- that we all sort of feel like we're living on borrowed time. 2008? 2010? These aren't real years -- we can't possibly be living here, in the future.

It's like we got to the end of Civ III and all our ships went out into space. Scary, no?

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This post brought to you by what can only be explained as post-Remix depression.