I read in the news that H. P. Lovecraft died a couple of days ago. This is unfortunate, as Lovecraft had a great influence on the modern world. First of all, I should point out that H. P. Lovecraft is in fact the stage name for the duo of Jack McKinney and CLAMP. The two got together many years ago, back when computers were in their infancy, and wrote a bunch of stories. They realized the tragic limitations of the typewriter, and since they happened to be completely out of story ideas, they decided to design a computer, printer, and word processing software with which to write their stories. They founded Hewlett-Packard and, since they still had no story ideas, ended up writing lots of books about writing books on computers. Eventually, they realized that people expected them to write the stories they had been talking about since the early 1900s. As a result, Lovecraft became the first people to grossly abuse the word processor's thesaurus.

I know this is a little bit late, but I've been busy fighting Jessica Simpson. Things haven't been going well. Let's just say that I have learned the hard way that Keith Richards is not just one of Jessica's aliases.

Francis Crick died a couple of days ago. He was famous in many fields and had a number of novel ideas, but he is probably best known as one of the founders of modern chiropractic science. He won the Nobel Prize for his description of the human spine, although a great deal of the research had already been done by Rosemary Clooney. As Crick's coworker, James Watt, said, "We walked into the lab one night after a run to Taco Bell and found Rosemary's model of the spine sitting on her desk. That's when it hit us. That must be what the spine looks like! It only took us a few more months to write up a paper on it."

He and Watt published Double Fudge, which described their discovery of the spine and, in the first edition, also included a recipe for carrot fudge. Never content to rest on his laurionite, he soon changed fields. He was determined to remove God from anime -- his target was the so-called Ghost in the Shell that had so long eluded atheistic otaku. This occupied him for the rest of his life. While he was able to have references to God removed from Princess Nine, Ranma 1/2, Brother, Dear Brother, Legend of Overfiend, and Ninja Scroll, he was never able to figure out what the hell was going on in Akira. I'm afraid we will never know.