Greetings from Huntsville, your latest source of American workplace shootings.

Pass the chicken.

There's nothing quite like waking up one morning to learn that your adopted hometown is the news event of the day. "Four men dead in workplace shooting; police say that the gunman is holed up in some..." ... unnamed apartment building that's apparently over on my side of town.

Hi. My name is Amy, and I'm watching Joe Millionaire, and yes, I know I suck.

I realize that there's a special place in hell for people like me, and that there's no such thing as pleading "But it's the only 'reality show' I've ever watched! Ever!" Claiming that exception has more in common with "But I didn't inhale!" than it does with any semblance of truth, and it gets you no free ride into any of the slightly cooler circles of hell.

"I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me."
—Harry Truman

Even at two weeks out from the actual anniversary, the headlines gathering like storm clouds on news shows and websites still make me cringe and simmer with anger. "The day that changed the world." "The Unthinkable." "Day of Terror."

On the eleventh day of September, 2001, I sat at my computer, stunned beyond measure, and wrote:

"Isolated showers around the area will die a slow death overnight as lows fall to the lower 70s with patchy dense fog developing in areas that recieved rainfall. Expect more isolated showers and thunderstorms on Monday again with highs in the low 90 s. Hope for some rain it will cool temperatures off and create a nice breeze. About midweek it looks a tad drier with temperatures slipping into the upper 80s and low 90s."

Brian, Suzan, and Jeff are currently curled up in the living room, watching Cowboy Bebop. Me, I'm sitting back here in the back of the house, tapping quietly on an unfamiliar keyboard. It's such a shame, really; I've tried my hardest to like anime and I just can't, so I'm hiding and writing while they watch TV.

Ingredients:

1 Star Trek:TNG apéritif
2 fingers Oban
1 (each) chaser Buffy and Notting Hill

Result: one very amusing evening. Day Three of vacation for the worn-out engineer, in fact. By 9:30, Jeff was laughing at all of my jokes, not just the funny ones.We've gotten a little spoiled in the past few weeks; our exposure to TV commercials is fairly limited now that we have a TiVo to speed through them. Tonight we picked up on the tail end of Notting Hill, and had no buffer to zap through commercials.

So he (see Oban) and I (see mental tiredness from finishing new cat.net skin) watched commercials, and made fun of them with the best middle-of-the-evening gusto we could muster.

Until we got to the inexplicable commercial, that is. Seemingly unconnected images flashed by. It took us a few seconds before we both realized that every shot was zeroing in on the hindquarters of the people we were watching.

"What is this, a butt commercial?"

"No idea."