It's not the intensely virulent smallpox. It's delivered by snailmail, and it makes me appreciate e-mail all the more, where the worst you can catch is a virus that makes your computer sick.

The first attack on 9-11 was very clever. Yet this? This is more Keystone Terrorist material. It's worrying, but the danger is more in the panic than the reality.

I'm glad I'm not a hypochondriac, though....

I watched Adam Walsh's special AMERICA'S MOST WANTED, that featured the 22 terrorists recently named. I hope the United Arab Emirites and the Saudis were watching, as they usually watch his show---because many of them have a better chance of catching these guys than we do.

Maybe.

Meanwhile, I'm going to do as Shrub asked us to do, and return to normal life...at least for this entry. My abnormal normal life.

Have I mentioned Barb has become a Buffy fan? I've watched the show, but never really been bitten by the bug. Until recently, Barb never watched it. She watched the season premiere of ANGEL with me so we could tape the new trailer for LORD OF THE RINGS, and grew a little interested. Then she watched an episode of Buffy.

Now she's seen the season premiere, has rented tapes of the earlier seasons, and is watching the reruns on FX---when she remembers to.

She's gone, girl.

I know a lot of women who have become Buffy-crazy, both in real life and through the Internet. Oftentimes they are in the middle of life. And considering my taste for comic book heroes, I can't criticize...in fact I think it's good that women have found a heroine they can really identify with. A vampire slayer with a sense of style.

Oh, and we've gotten Brian a Cricket phone. We had stopped our second phone line for cost's sake, yet it became kind of a drag to have to get off-line for Brian to call his friends. So we got him a Cricket.

He likes it, but what I have trouble believing is that he already has sixty-something phone numbers stored in it. When I was a teenager, I would have done good to have a dozen phone numbers I wanted stored in my phone, if our phones could do such things back then...

It is so odd to have a popular son. A son with a lot of friends. He got a report card lately which was mostly A's, a few B's, and one C---an examplary report card. Yet he's popular.

Yet he's my son. Remarkable.

Eric's still screaming occasionally, but it comes and goes, and otherwise he's a pretty happy kid and his autism hasn't slowed him down a bit.

There is another boy in the apartment complex who also is in his class, an autistic kid named John-John. He looks sort of like Little Bill on NICK Jr., the daytime preschool version of Nicholodeon television network---only with squinting, almost-shut eyes. (I wonder if he also has a touch of Down's syndrome? He reminds me of those with Down's...)

Anyway, we told Eric about John-John living near, and Eric said, in a low voice,

"Jon-Jon."

He's never said my, or his mother's, or Brian's name, but he can say the name of a classmate. I don't know whether to be pleased or somewhat insulted. Still ---it's progress.

Me? I'm reading a hilarious book called THE DECLINE AND FALL OF PRACTICALLY EVERYBODY by Will Cuppy. It starts out explaining that Upper Egypt is south, not north, of Lower Egypt, and then goes on to tell the foibles and silliness of a lot of historical figures.

Did you know Isabella I of Spain, only bathed twice in her life---once when she was born and once when she was married to Ferdinand? Bathing was considered to be more of a "Moslem" custom than a Christian one in Spain, and they were so proud of expelling the Moors, they erred on the side of ----ummm...being ripe.

Notice: time travellers need noseplugs.

Let me give you an example of his writing style, in talking of Alexander the Great and Aristotle:

"Alexander was taught by Aristotle...(snip)...who was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved with the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons."

Great stuff! Yeah, there are some dunderheads today, but nothing like there used to be. This book almost makes you believe in progress...

Almost.