Ye know what me Sean used to say, God rest his soul? He said, 'A friend will help ye move, Katie, but a really good friend will help ye move a body.

I suspect that many of us, if given the chance to make one person in our lives love us more, would have no trouble in choosing where to point a finger. We are all needy, all vulnerable, all terrified that perhaps that person has an excellent reason to withhold affection. We shape our purposes to make ourselves worthy and often do not see until much later how it was love-or perhaps the lack of it-that both picked us up and dropped us off at crossroads.

There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane.

That's right, there's free beer in Irish paradise. Everyone's jealous.

Bring it,muthafuckas.Bring it.

Silly dark elves. Earth is for Druids.

I tend to vacillate between belief systems. Right now I'm kind of checking out the whole buffet, you know, and maybe in a little while I'll decide on what I want to put on my plate and chow down on.