There was a phrase in the previous blog entry on the 6-year-old kid, where I imagined the school staff: "Run in circles! Pull out your hair! Scream like a little girl!" Today Nancy in Illinois complained that was "sexist language".

I've been out of the office for the better part of a week, and am even farther behind on e-mail and other work than usual. Last Thursday I drove with a friend to Reno, where we were both speakers at the Mensa "gathering" put on by a friend of ours there. I'll have more to say about that later, but my talk went very well. We drove back Sunday, through a couple of snow storms and a sand storm in the Utah desert, and again straight through -- I only took over at the wheel for a few hours. (My paramedic buddy Norm is a road warrior!)

My e-mail address has been around online for many, many years, and it gets a lot of spam -- many hundreds per day. For most users, spam far outstrips legitimate mail. It was 1996 that I realized that spam would become a huge problem, which is why I wrote my Spam Primer to educate my readers about it. And sadly I was right: it's estimated that more than 90 percent of all e-mail transmitted is spam. And how many of them get to my inbox? Lately, I'm averaging less than one a day.

Now that Donna, the woman who was feeding them, is dead, sure enough: more bears are now invading town, breaking into houses far more than before to try to find food -- Donna isn't there to feed them, and what they now know is humans = food. Winter is coming, and they need to fatten up for hibernation; they're ravenous. Last week another of my friends had her place broken into; she has two teen daughters; one was home at the time, and came face to face with the unafraid bear.