A woman walked down the streets of New York, or maybe it was San Francisco, or LA. Who the heck cares? All these kinds of stories take place in some gritty urban area. Take your pick. It was nighttime, so all the buildings loomed like blocky shadows.

Kat Black wore skintight leather pants, which are completely impractical and cost a fortune to clean. They also squeak when you walk, which annoyed the heck out of her. She wore a black leather duster, a faded black tee, and a silver ankh around her neck.

Night over a small Liberal Arts college. The sky is dark as dyed felt, and the moon hangs in the windowpane like a light bulb in a Halloween diorama.

You’re a Ph.D. candidate at an English department mixer, chatting up an undergraduate over the murmur of a crowded room. Glasses clink with ice. Cigarette smoke hovers between conversations. You say something about the Brechtian significance of Reality Television. The undergrad, one Gloria, warms to your patter, asks if maybe you wouldn’t mind reading over her paper on Eugene O’Neill. You smile. Her eyes flutter over her drink. All is right in the world, or so it seems.

Dear Mr. Harpman:

Please consider this my sincere, and completely voluntary, letter of recommendation for Robot Model TX-9, regarding its application for the position of floor manager at Kosmotronics’ Planet Mars Fabrication Facility. Let me once again assure you that this letter is written of my own volition, and I am currently in no danger of being incinerated or reduced to a puddle of denatured proteins by TX-9. TX-9, however, could as easily do that to a man as a ground squirrel if it is a qualification you desire. Really, it would be no trouble at all.

Our culture has a love-hate relationship with commercials. They run the gamut from catchy to annoying to sexy to meme-tastic. Some however, are just so mind-numbly insipid, that they go down in infamy, and end up on blogs devoted to asinine advertising. Thankfully I have traded in my cable (and lost the cable companies firm

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You can’t have a cupcake shop in a coop in the backyard, but you can have chickens.