I'm not sure what audience this Flash animated demonstration of a "self-healing minefield" is intended to reach. I mean, are there DoD higher-ups who don't like coming in to the office if they don't have to? Does the President get a weekly e-mail filled with interesting links now, instead of the fat manila envelopes hand-delivered to the Oval Office that movies and TV have taught me to expect?

The site doesn't have much to say about how exactly these mines are supposed to move around. They "hop," it says. I'm not "up" on military hardware, but I know that there are, currently in existence, mines which pop up into the air before they explode. However, it seems like most of these rely on some sort of propellant charge intended only to get them at about head level or so. Presumably a whole new locomotion method would be needed for mines intended to move around regularly without exploding. Here's a page about some different kinds of landmines, including "bounding fragmentation" mines: Norwegian Peoples Aid Mine Action program. Includes helpful disarming instructions.

Anyway, I wonder if the mines hopping around was their first idea, as opposed to giving them some sort of robotic undercarriage to crawl around the battlefield with. Which I suppose might be way too expensive. But what I'm thinking is, there is at least one research lab out there working on a spider-like (Actually, horseshoe crab-like. I saw it on TV!) robot that could, they hoped, someday be used for landmine removal, apparently just by finding the mines and blowing them up, as I recall. So presumably the planned production cost was not going to be all that high. What I'm envisioning is a field of mobile landmines engaged in heated personal combat with swarms of mine-seeking suicide robots.

Not a judgement, just an observation: My roommate is currently listening to "Eye of the Tiger." To be fair, I'm currently listening to a song about a robot. No, wait, now I'm listening to a song about a girl saving the world. From robots. If there are people out there who still don't own a copy of "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots," I feel sorry for them.

All of the Sci-Fi Channel news is 100% true. Go figure.

It makes sense that the nation with the most people would also be the nation with the biggest ecological engineering projects.

It would probably be better for me if I didn't know this. If I had to know it, it would surely be better not to care enough to talk about it. Casting those guidelines into the wind, I'd like to engage in a bit of a web-assisted mind boggle.

Today is April 1, favorite day of 13 year olds and web satirists and others, I guess, because of the unique avenues for tomfoolery it presents. Today I saw Teevee's very funny, though too-plausible, effort. And I guess that was about it. I think.

The news doesn't stop for anything, even the sad shut-in news for losers, though, which brings me to today's wacky(?) news items on The Sci-Fi Channel's information ministry website. Things start out more or less normal. A remake of The Thing? As a four hour miniseries? Well, sure, why not? Every generation needs one, it seems, though I'm at a loss on where it will go. We've got the extra gooey version, the square-jaw version, and ten different X-Files versions already. But I am not a Hollywood Fatcat, despite my most desperate efforts.

Things go on and get odder. Like, you want new made for TV movies about wizards and invasive species? They have your back! A list includes: Dragon Storm, in which John Rhys-Davies just sort of shrugs and begins saving up for retirement. It features dragons. But they are from OUTER SPACE! Idaho Creature Incident, in which there is a space alien. In Idaho. Ghost Monkey. GHOST MONKEY. Ghost Monkey. Ghost Monkey is based on a true story. Sort of. Snakehead Terror, which is about those fish that were much in the news last year. But what if they were huge and ate people? I bet you'd be sorry. Now you can be! Then there are some other movies that don't sound very good at all, but do manage to sound like plausible production ventures.

Then there will be a new show next year called Dead Lawyers. "DreamWorks Television (Steven Spielberg Presents Taken) produces this one-hour series, about hotshot defense attorney Jimmy Quinn, who is run over by a bus and finds himself in a law firm composed of unscrupulous lawyers who must return from the dead to redeem themselves by defending everyone they screwed when they were alive—pro bono!" The "pro bono!" made me giggle.

Surely some of these are funny hoaxes, and we will all enjoy a good laugh tomorrow. In the meantime, my next project is ripped from today's headlines: Terrorists take over a hospital quarantined due to a crippling outbreak of a killer pneumonia strain. Whoops!

Also, the terrorists are vampires.