I should cover a couple of things before I move on to the main story. First of all, a quick note about the repair of seemingly defective fourth generation iPods: it may not be so hard as you think. Mine was about ten months old when it began to crap out on me. It wasn't a battery issue; the hard drive seized up every four or five songs and required a manual reboot to work again. The problem grew worse until, finally, it wouldn't boot up at all. It would grind, click, whirr and show a sad iPod icon. I can't remember exactly what the reasoning was behind my decision to throw it against the wall, but that did the trick, temporarily at least. For a few days, it was back to the four-songs-then-crash situation, which was better than no songs at all. I settled into a pleasant routine of throwing the iPod against the wall every once in a while, and things were working out more or less all right, but then Rob passed along a blog post that suggested the problem might be solved once and for all by re-seating the hard drive cable. At that point I was sort of looking for an excuse to buy a new iPod (with a larger hard drive, yum), so I took a screwdriver, cracked open the case and took the iPod apart. Re-seating the cable was actually quite easy - in my case, it was only a matter of massaging the various bits of adhesive and blowing away the dust, NES-style. No high-techery at all. I put the case back on and the iPod has worked perfectly ever since.

Apple's repair charges and the drive towards spiffy new versions of the device have created the impression that one is better off replacing an aged iPod rather than repairing it, but that's not necessarily the case, and I say this not so much to you as I do to frustrated web searchers in the weeks and months to come.

Hey, pop culture, tilt your head back - I'm sending panda sex-bombs with love:

The panda's reading material has been restricted to Harlequin romances. Leave him alone! He'll reproduce when he's ready. I have it on good authority that this panda was having a perfectly nice afternoon among the tech manuals before they dragged him over here. These romance novels are so thin, printed on such cheap, pulp-y stock; hardly a match for a thick, delicious tech manual. Oh! Yum.

And now, on to the news:

(news) North Korea set off an international furor on Wednesday when it tested seven missiles, all of which landed into the Sea of Japan without causing any damage. The blasts apparently included a long-range Taepodong-2 that broke up less than a minute after takeoff and splashed into the sea.

What nobody seems to understand - even though this shit is, frankly, basic - is that those missile launches were not tests. Kim Jong Il is at war with fish. That little bitch sincerely believes that defeating fish will intimidate observers worldwide. There are more fish than people, and purely by numbers alone, he reasons, a victory over fish is impressive, and racks up his win total; also, he accuses fish of collaborating on sushi and sashimi with Japan, which he hates. When it became obvious that the Western media was not going to run casualty numbers for the fish, the desperate little men in the DPRK press office decided to start spinning the attacks as missile tests.

Unfortunately, John Bolton, who has been objectively measured as not knowing shit, is in charge of the diplomatic response from the United States. Bolton has failed both in bringing about an effective, useful consensus from the U.N. Security Council and in showing any awareness that Kim Jong Il's mother vomited the first time she laid eyes on her infant son. Bolton is dangerously incompetent, much to the same extent that Kim Jong Il is desperately incontinent.

I think I'll run that photo every time I really zing someone. That fist pump says it all to me. I should find out if that guy actually got elected. I can't see why he wouldn't.

It's been said that, to be fair, I need to lay out a set of conditions under which I will stop making Kim Jong Il cry. At first, I was reluctant to do this, but then I realized that if I can't set aside my rage, I am no better than he is. Actually, that's not completely true. As long as I am not a freakish half-man who had a puppy and a kitten until they formed a united front against him and committed suicide Romeo and Juliet-style rather than spend another minute in his presence, I am way better than he is, and so is everyone in the world. But rhetorically, I would be no better than he is. Except that even though Kim Jong Il had all of the other contestants put to death and installed his cronies as judges for his school spelling bee, he still came in second to a ham sandwich. So I'm way better than he is rhetorically.

Okay! Peace terms. If Kim Jong Il allows the media into his palace, provides an accurate accounting of how many adult diapers he goes through per day, resigns as dictator, leaves North Korea and gets a job as a school janitor in Nebraska, I will let up on his bitch ass upon confirmation of his first employee of the month award. If the Nebraska school system does not hand out employee of the month awards, then too fucking bad, Kim. Keep scrubbing until they do. Right now, he's getting ready to submit a counter-proposal whereby he resigns, moves to Thailand and gets a job wiping the upholstery in the pleasure booths at the Bangkok chick-boy shows. But I will not accept his counter-proposal, because I know he would be really into that.

Yeah, Kim, you know how this ends. I will always win.