When people are gone, the wife is turned off with the lights.

Now, there''s a Freudian slip worth investigating.

Gone With the Wind: my personal example of absolutely the worst special effect ever. During the burning of Atlanta, it is painfully obvious that what you see burning has no resemblance whatsoever to a city. With a little bit of searching, you can learn that the filmmakers set fire to the Skull Island set from "King Kong." What a waste.

The news is that in 2011, the vendor is taking something out of the package, claiming that the manufacturer is unfairly competing.

It gets better--following their math, 92 minutes a week gives a 14% reduction in mortality from all causes, and every additional 15 minutes gives an additional 4%. there's no point of diminishing returns identified. So, if you exercise 7 hours a week, you become immortal.

The number of people I've met who are concerned with cell phone "radiation" are extremely limited ... and I don't recall any of their names. Purposefully.

By the time you realize you should be concerned, it may be too late. Thankfully, power levels have gone down in the last decade, but cell phone radiation is still suspected in the premature death of Lee Atwater.

The most recently made movie that I've seen that wasn't based on pre-existing literature is Inception, by Christopher Nolan.

AFAIK he wrote the original story, and had been thinking about making that movie since he was a child.

Hate to bust your bubble, but even if it's not an adaptation, the plot of Inception is too suspiciously close to that of a Donald Duck comic to believe that it's entirely original to Mr. Nolan.

If you were to blindfold me and place me in the middle of a Barnes and Noble or Borders it would be a 50/50 guess which store I'm in.

Go by the smell. In my experience, after you get past the coffee scent, Borders has some undertones of cardboard, where B&N is more "plastic-y."

Not sure when they *had* a "mom and pop" look? By the time I got to Ann Arbor in 1982, they were already "snobby U of M rich guy in a turtleneck." But, in their defense, it was also the only place in town that stocked The Curse of Lono.

Are they available as iApps?

You've probably already looked it up, but there's a free Z-code interpreter called "Frotz" in the iTunes Music Store.

Several Zork games were released by Activision as freeware a few years back, so the games are available here, among other places (I think there are a few links from the Wikipedia entry).

About the closest you'll get to "free" is one bundled with something you already pay for (e.g. through your ISP).

Where are the [irony] tags? My ISP (AT&T) bundles Yahoo for e-mail.