Inspired by the popular video game franchise, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) is a completely computer-generated film unlike any other. Final Fantasy is a complex science fiction drama with human-looking digital actors who, at first take, look astonishingly real.

Aki, the digitized female lead, is nearly impossible to tell apart from a live actress.

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Every day I receive spammer emails offering to sell me software that promises to let me find out nearly anything about anyone. Who cares?

Maybe this is an invasion of privacy issue, or not—but it smacks of totalitarian nonsense for people with too much time on their hands.

It would be much better to find out everything about your self—that is, if you’ve got the courage to take on such a journey. Better to live in a society where integrity is not only its own reward, but it pays to develop this quality.

As the sages have taught us: a wise man knows others; a master knows himself.

"I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.”

—Abraham Maslow (1908 - 1970), one of the founders of humanistic psychology

Instead of focusing on pathology, or why things didn’t work, he felt it was more important to study healthy individuals in both mind and body—and what made them tick.

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It is essential that we remember the veterans who fought on our behalf. If we forget them, we deserve the consequences.

While freedom may be an inalienable right under the law in the United States, it must be won and earned daily. Do not take what freedoms you do have for granted as they can disappear as quickly as the Berlin Wall fell down.

Let the government focus on providing services and let the people monitor their own morality—which cannot be legislated. The more laws a society has means that the government trusts the people all that much less. Soldiers did not give their lives or lose their limbs and health so that you and I should squander their legacy and gift.

In the April 30, 2003 edition of The New York Times, an article, Art Auctions Buffeted by Events, brings up distress sales and thinner catalogs from Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and de Pury & Luxembourg, in what may be an uncertain season—war and a “shaky” economy can also effect superrich collectors and sellers.

Renoir’s “In the Roses” is estimated to go for between $20 to $30 million; Pollack’s well-known drip “No.17, 1949” is expected to go for up to $7 million, plus “Dancer” by Degas may go as high as $12 million. Then, there is a self-portrait by Cezanne (done in 1895 when the artist was 55) that may fetch between $15 to $20 million, which may be a bargain since it had been on the market privately for $50 million.

For the artist, the article, while perhaps factual, is strewn with irony.

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