Okay, well that’s about it.

Here’s a quick round up of angering things from around The World of News:

It seems like it should be funny, but it’s not: The United States Army asks dead soldiers to sign up for another hitch.

Toyota develops a feature only parents will love: A car that detects if you’re drunk and shuts off. Of course, it can only be a manner of time before the government starts requiring these in cars. My libertarian inner-child is twisted into a knot over the potential for yet more regulation.

More things to fear North Korea for: Seems that beyond their nuclear ambitions, they are developing an arsonal of chemical weapons. Generally speaking, these are not the guys you wanna get stuck with in the lunch line. Maybe Bush was right about them after all. But if so, why did we invade Iraq instead?

The cold war is over, but that’s not stopping the Russians from attacking us from space. But, of course, it was just an accident. And, incidentally, looks like we’ve attacked the Japanese, by ramming one of their tankers with a sub.

Looks like Castle Bran, the castle oft-rumored to have been the home of Vlad the Impaler (a.k.a Count Dracula) is up for sale. Post-communist Romania returned it to the descendent of the last rightful owner, who is now a graphic designer in the United States. But I guess he’s thinking the seventy-seven million dollars the castle is set to fetch would be a little more lucrative than heating a 57-room medieval castle “getaway” every winter.

Lastly, it’s going to be Roswell all over again, with United Airlines and the U.S. Government denying what seems to be an incredibly valid UFO sighting over Chicago O’Hare. Of course, it was only United Airlines employees who saw it, and since they did trademark “The Friendly Skies™”, maybe other airlines have kept quiet from fear of copyright infringement.

When I was growing up, my dad was really into popcorn and he was really into gadgets. As a result, our house had a constant influx of the latest, greatest popcorn technology. It started with the plug-in hotplate-style cooker that you could flip upside down and use as a bowl. Later came the air-poppers, constantly being replaced as improvements were available: first one where the popcorn danced around inside the whole time, then one that tried to feed the popcorn into a nearby bowl, then one that actually did. Several new models appeared just out of hope that the butter tray in each one was better than the last (they never were.) In my house, we were using bags of microwave popcorn before most supermarkets even stocked them.

We even had a few novelty poppers. There was one that looked like an big steel clam on a stick. It was held over the fire and “made popcorn the way the pioneers did.” It didn’t work very well. Neither did the Orville Redenbacher decorative oil popper that looked like a toy popcorn trolley. After two failed attempts, we discovered it really was only decorative. It sat on the counter, proudly, for years, stained with burnt vegetable oil more immutable than the plastic underneath it.

So, because of all this, I went into college without even the faintest clue that popcorn could be created with anything other than a specialty tool, carefully crafted for this purpose. And so for the first two and a half years I was there, I bemoaned my lack of a popcorn maker. But then, midway through my Junior year, a man was to change all that.

He was new to the college, but older than a freshman. I didn’t know much about his background. He came from a northern part of the mid-west, like Wisconsin or The Dakotas. He didn’t say much, but he always had a congenial smile on his face: the sort generated by the glow of inner peace. He was a big guy, a lug would be a good term. Large enough to rip a tree out of the ground, but soft enough to look cuddly.

I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember his name. Such an even-keeled guy didn’t stand out: He didn’t laugh much, or ever get angry. He was probably a good student, but I didn’t have any classes with him. And he didn’t last long. Like so many others that came to my school and realized the advertising was better than the product, he probably only lasted a semester. I didn’t take notice of him until one night, as I was sitting in the commons area of the small cabin-like dorm I lived in (and he did not), he walked in and told me he was going to make some popcorn and would I like any.

Would I? I really don’t think he expected me to jump out of my seat and crowd in the small kitchen with him. After I shoved my way in, I scanned the room for the popcorn maker. It was important, see, because the type of machine he had would tell me what sort of popcorn I was going to be enjoying in a few scant minutes. But, much to my confusion, there was nothing there.

I waited for a moment while he screwed with a large pot, much too big to melt butter in. Still, he was a big guy. He might have wanted that much butter. But I was completely unprepared for the next moment–which I can still see in my mind’s eye–when he dumped a little olive oil and a handful of kernels directly into the pot.

I immediately saw how it would work—much like any oil popper I’d ever used—but I still couldn’t believe it. I made him show me every step. I did again the next night. And the night after that, I had him guide me as I did it.

It became a routine of ours, and for a while we were two peas in a pod: Strangers, with little-to-nothing in common except his knowledge and my desire for it. I remember smiling in a way that made my cheeks hurt every evening when we headed to the kitchen. I remember a little game we made up, leaving the lid off until the first kernel popped, and then trying to catch it in the air. And trying to get the lid on before the rapid-fire explosion that was soon to follow. We rarely succeed in either, I’m sure there’s decaying popcorn in the cracks of that kitchen to this day.

I wasn’t a simple person, and I wasn’t given to simple pleasures. I’m still not. But this man, lost to me now, lent me his world for a few short months and I’ve never lost the insight that came with it. Or forgot how far two people can go with just one simple thing in common.

It sounds like an Onion headline, but it’s not. It turns out that that world’s largest largest retailer has been throwing their weight around in an effort to save the environment. How? By pledging to sell you (and your ilk) one hundred million compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) this year.

CFLs are those tiny little fluorescent bulbs that screw into your regular lamp socket. The tubes themselves aren’t much thicker than a pencil and they are bent, either just out and back like a pair of tuning forks, or curved into a shape meant to resemble a regular light bulb (or a pear, it’s hard to tell.) These little bulbs are wonders of science. For starters, they use seventy-five percent less energy than a regular bulb (for the light they produce.) That amounts to 450 pounds of greenhouse gases that aren’t produced per bulb! And with greenhouse gases, as with styrofoam peanuts, 450 pounds can fill quite a large area. Better still, even though these CFLs cost more to buy, they last so much longer than “your father’s bulbs” that you save $30 dollars over the life of the bulb. “Very few products are such a clear winner,â€? said Brown University professor Steve Hamburg.

So if all this is true, why do we need Wal-Mart’s help to get this product into everyone’s fixtures? Oh, wait. I know that one: Because they’re ugly. Really, I think that’s pretty much the only reason. Americans will dress their kids from Old Navy, use the plastic lawn chairs as indoor furniture (only when there’s guests), and make the Ford Escort the single most popular car during the entire 80s, but we suddenly get real particular when it comes to our light bulbs.

Meanwhile, in other who-is-the-real-bad-guy events, it seems Greenpeace decided that Apple is creating too much waste. So how to make their point? They went down to the 24-hour Apple Store in Manhattan and shined sixty high-powered battery-powered floodlights on the store. Green-colored lights, of course, because that’s half their logo.

I can’t decide if this is shameless self-promotion on Greenpeace’s part (everyone is jumping on Apple’s coat-tails now that they’re popular again) or if they’ve finally reached the level of brain-drain that General Motors has after decades of being too bureaucratic and boring to attract the good new designers. Seriously though, these environmental guys need to get their act together. This Greenpeace “protest” falls on the same year the Sierra Club put Apple at the top of their list of Forward Green Leaders for “excellence in environmental efforts.”

I’m not surprised, though, by Greenpeace’s confusion. To me, Greenpeace has always been more successful at spreading crabs and hair lice among teenagers than saving the planet. And I have to ask: after shining sixty floodlights on Apple all night in order to protest against the company’s chemical waste, what did the protestors do with all the dead batteries?

I dropped a contact this morning and before I even thought about it, I was down on the floor, inspecting the tile at the base of the not-yet-flushed toilet.

After I thought about it, I got up and closed the door.