Several years ago (at the last San Diego ComicCon Mark was able to attend) I received, from Mark himself, a magnet featuring two of the characters from Thieves & Kings. I have, since the day I received it, wanted to sketch Heath (the red haired girl), but have never found the time. I finally found the time this week and, even though this isn't the sketch I had planned, I did it. The reflection was not originally intended to be Ariel--it was supposed to be a model, Heather Christensen. I thought she would have been the perfect reflection, but I never had the chance.

It appears that I have wrongly judged PNY's intentions of paying my $20 memory rebate. I received a "check" in the mail (one of those postcard check things) today from PNY for $20, so all is well in the world again. I still think the whole process is intended to keep rebate money in corporate pockets, but at least they rewarded perserverance this time.

WASHINGTON, DC (AP) - Congress approved sweeping legislation, which provides new benefits for many Americans. The Americans With No Abilities Act (AWNAA), signed into law by President John Kerry shortly after its passage, is being hailed as a major victory by advocates of the millions of Americans who lack any real skills or ambition.

"Roughly 50 percent of Americans do not possess the competence and drive necessary to carve out a meaningful role for themselves in society," said Kerry, a longtime AWNA supporter.

"This is why many of them voted for me. We can no longer stand by and allow People of Inability to be ridiculed and passed over. With this legislation, employers will no longer be able to grant special favors to a small group of workers, simply because they do a better job, or have some idea of what they are doing", said Kerry.

President Kerry pointed to the success of the US Postal Service, which has a long-standing policy of providing opportunity without regard to performance. Approximately 80 percent of postal employees lack job skills, making this agency the single largest US employer of Persons of Inability.

Private sector industries with good records of nondiscrimination against the Inept include retail sales (72%), the airline industry (68%),and home improvement "warehouse" stores (65%)

President Kerry has also set an example, personally selecting hundreds of Nonabled people for top government positions, including many cabinet-level jobs.

Under the Americans With No Abilities Act, more than 25 million "middle man" positions will be created, with important-sounding titles but little real responsibility, thus providing an illusory sense of purpose and performance.

Mandatory non-performance-based raises and promotions will be given, to guarantee upward mobility for even the most unremarkable employees. The legislation provides substantial tax breaks to corporations which maintain a significant level of Persons of Inability in top positions, and gives a tax credit to small and medium businesses that agree to hire one clueless worker for every two talented hires.

Finally, the AWNAA contains tough new measures to make it more difficult to discriminate against the Nonabled, banning discriminatory interview questions such as "Do you have any goals for the future?" or "Do you have any skills or experience which relate to this job?" and "Are you awake?"

"As a Nonabled person, I can't be expected to keep up with people who have something going for them," said Mary Lou Gertz, who lost her position as a lug-nut twister at the GM plant in Flint, MI due to her lack of notable job skills.

"This new law should really help people like me."

With the passage of this bill, Gertz and millions of other untalented citizens can finally see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Said Kerry, "It is our duty as lawmakers to provide each and every American citizen, regardless of his or her adequacy, with some sort of space to take up in this great nation."

It's funny, but not entirely out of the question. Do your part and vote Bush!!

I have been trying to implement serching within Badbatopia's pages using Interspire's free FastFind search tool, but have been unable to get it to crawl any of Badbartopia's pages. I suspected the frames were to blame, so I pointed the "crawler" to one of my HTML only pages (that only links to pages with standard anchor tags), but still had no luck.

I decided, after way too much time searching the internet for solutions to this dilemma, to trying browsing my site in browsers other than Internet Exploder (I tried Netscape, Mozilla Firefox and Opera) and discovered that if I was browsing badbartopia with any browser other than IE, you are seeing almost none of the content of my site. I'm not exactly sure why this is, but I have decided to redesign Badbartopia (possibly sans frames with strict adherence to WC3 HTL standards). The scrolling DIV feature also seems to be a loser with the other browsers, so I'm going to have to monkey around with "fixed" positioning for non-IE viewers.

Enough about this, because if you are using any of the non-IE browsers, you are probably unable to read this anyway...