I seem to be on hiatus
The good news is that I'm healthy.  The bad news, from your perspective, is that I seem to have stopped blogging.  I'm not sure why.  Part of it is that I've been focusing on revising the beginning of my novel, Mercury Falls.  Truth be told, I was never really happy with the opening chapters.  I wrote the first three chapters before I had any idea where the book was going, and then once I got an idea of where things were headed, I just kept writing until I got to the end.  But then I still had these shaky first three chapters that seemed to be both integral to the plot and mismatched in tone with the rest of the boo

Oh, hey there! How's it going?
Yeah, so after mostly getting over my inexplicable hand injury, I developed a slightly more explicable back injury that caused me to walk stooped over like an old man for three days and then started to wane just as I developed a bad headache that then turned into some kind of sinus thing and a fever and has now left behind only a nagging cough and some impressive chunks of green mucus.In other words, I'm kind of wiped out.  I'm probably going to need a few more days to come up with anything halfway intelligent to post.In the meantime, sign up for the Mercury Falls interest list two or three more times.&

MP Mailbag
My gopher post got quite a reaction.  Scott Oglesby commented on my observation that establishing a perimiter never seems to do any good on '24':You bring up an interesting point; I don?t think that I?ve ever seen a perimeter work in television or movies. Sometimes it comes close, but it never works. As a matter of fact, the phrase ?establish a perimeter? should now be used exclusively as slang for failure. IE

Jor-El slammed for use of Phantom Zone to house enemy combatants
Bar-Ob promises "swift closure" of extradimensional prison.KRYPTONOPOLIS - Ratcheting up the rhetoric in the race for Supreme Leader of Krypton, Demokryptic candidate Bar-Ob has promised to "close once and for all" the controversial extradimensional prison known as the Phantom Zone."How can we hold ourselves up as a model for other planets, such as... well, the only one I know of is Earth," said Bar-Ob, "while maintaining an illegal prison in a dimension just 90 miles outside our own space-time continuum? It's unconscionable."

I Can't Gopher That (No Can Do)
About six years ago, my wife and I purchased ten acres of farmland just outside of Ripon, California. ?Eight acres of the property are still orchard, while the front two acres serve as home to my wife and me, our two children, my father-in-law, and a varying number of gophers.If