First thought of the day: plagiarism and the World Wide Web. It must be much easier these days to pretend that really insightful stuff is your own when it isn’t. All you have to do is troll any number of Weblogs or Livejournals or whatever else until you find some random person’s random musings, and just GO. You have your plot or your storyline or your screenplay or whatever. That’s really kind of scary, especially since what would stop that, besides people’s inherent goodwill (ha ha.) or a whole mess of Republican-Congress-passed laws to demolish our privacy and creativity and altogether happiness? Humph.

Second, and on a much happier note, Elizabeth Smart is safe. Please don’t ask me for a logical explanation of why this mattered to me over the past nine months, any more than any other bit of sad news should. Sad news. Is there any other kind? Well, today, yes. Which is awful nice. I’m not from Colorado, I don’t play the harp, I’m not 13, I don’t have kids of my own, none of that. It just really got to me when it happened, and it’s just a little brightly colored miracle in a big sea of grey almost-war that it really truly did end happily. Of course, the media being the media, I’ve already heard specks of insinuation that she could have gotten away if she really wanted to, and all that. You know what? Whatever. I don’t care. I don’t care whether she was grabbed by a crazy stranger and held prisoner, or if she orchestrated some elaborate running-away-from-home scheme, or if it was somewhere in the middle. If you ask me, it was somewhere in the middle, and I think there’s probably a lot of terrible memories in her head and she’ll need lots of therapy. But one thing, that happened to one kid and one family, someplace far away, that could have ended very, very terribly, didn’t end terribly after all. And that’s about as good as I can get it.