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I haven't been to see "Avatar" because I have feared it would make me depressed. I have feared I would be depressed that so much money had been spent on a movie which, like "Titanic," made me manicure the fingernails of my right hand using the fingernails of my left.

It appears, however, that I am not alone in experiencing "Avatar"-related dysthymia. According to the erudite CNN discussion I have embedded, thousands of people have been flooding "Avatar" chat sites and saying that the movie did, indeed, depress them. But their reasons are somewhat different than mine.

They seem to feel miserable that the idyllic world of Pandora is nothing more than a box of 3D tricks. They want it to exist. They are sad that it doesn't.

CNN quoted one depressed post-"Avatar" poster who wrote: "It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning." On the Facebook Avatar-Forums group, a wall poster called Paul Neumann wrote: "ALL I SAID WAS " I DON'T WANT TO BE ON EARTH AND HUMAN ANYMORE, I JUST WANT TO BE ON PANDORA WITH THE NA'VI!"!"

Jo Piazza, a CNN entertainment writer declared: "I think the depression is widespread enough that it is an actual phenomenon."… Read more

General Motors has taken away his cars. Perhaps it was something to do with his driving record.

Accenture has replaced all those entertainingly spurious images of him in their ads with a picture of an elephant on a surfboard. (Which rather finely describes the balancing act he allegedly tried to perform for so many years.)

However, EA is not going to be moved so easily to distancing itself from Tiger Woods. The company has already said that it will release a new "Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online" game.

Now, Kotaku has discovered that EA wants to know just … Read more

I am sure there are many of you who inhale marijuana for purely medicinal purposes. Your pains might be physical. They might be psychological. But you feel as though your world is going to pot, so you turn to pot.

Now, an enterprising man called John Lee has decided to bring a little online rigor to your smoking vigor.

Sonoma, Calif.-based Lee has created PlainView Systems, a remarkably non-hippie name for a venture that, according to CNNMoney.com, he describes as the Amazon of pot.

That would be Amazon.com, rather than the never-ending river.

A visit to the … Read more

When you become president of your country, you walk into crises from the very first day.

Threats to your country's security may abound. Some of your cabinet ministers may be enjoying risky extramarital relations. But perhaps no newly elected president has ever had to confront as difficult a situation as Ivo Josipovic, Croatia's new head of state.

For, according to Reuters, he is tearing his rather impressive hair out at the thought of having too many Facebook friends.

"I have 5,000 friends, which is the maximum allowed on Facebook. I also have another 7,000 waiting … Read more

Given that Mark Zuckerberg has explained to you that privacy is no longer a social norm, your first thought this morning was probably, "How can I get more of my information to be public on Facebook?"

Your second might well have been something to do with improving your current relationship with your beloved.

In a heartwarming analysis of Google searches, Dan Ariely, author of the beautifully named "Predictably Irrational," revealed just how different boyfriends and girlfriends are, when it comes to asking the Google oracle for ways to solve their relationship problems.

Taking the search "… Read more

I am sure that Facebook will endure until well beyond our being twinned with the Planet Tush.

Facebook employees will, as the years go by, leave the company to enter politics more frequently. They will be elected with landslide majorities and they will be extremely popular as they will anticipate people's needs far quicker than the conventional gray-haired folks who buy ill-fitting clothes at expensive retailers and currently sit in the Senate.

How can I be so sure? Well, I just watched this video of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg being interviewed by a very nice man in a suit.… Read more

It's one thing for a man to be denied his opportunity to work. It's quite another for a man to be denied his opportunity to Twitter.

The microblogging site, a bastion of free, spontaneous speech, has lost one of its more amusing denizens.

Perhaps you have been buried so deeply in the machinations of your new Nexus One to breathe, wipe the pizza stains from your shirt, or notice that Gilbert Arenas, the slightly waning star of the Washington Wizards, has been suspended indefinitely without pay by the NBA.

The Wizards' hometown Post has described in some delicious microdetail … Read more

I know there is a fondness for games among many readers, so here is today's. What is your No. 1 word of the last decade? Might it be "divorce" or "Warcraft" or perhaps even "pants," "Rush," or "Miley"?

This question is especially timely today because the American Dialect Society, which studies the stumbling attempts of English to take hold in America, has declared that the one most important, significant, rousingly symbolic word of the last decade is "Google."

According to CBSNews.com, "Google" beat out … Read more

There's a delightful song in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life" called "Every Sperm is Sacred."

That's how people used to feel about every Google home page. Google.com paid homage to everything pure and noncommercial in the world.

No more Mr. Pure Guy. For no sooner had Google launched its shiveringly competent foray into mobile telephony than up popped a little ad on the altar that used to represent the tabernacle of all things Google.

Please look and ponder how the world has turned. Not only is Google advertising its new phone … Read more