For this cartoon, I had to do some (ahem) research. It was all Frank's idea, honest.

There is some debate about HD porn. It is a little too real for many actors involved, who dread all the extra-close shaving and plastic surgery that all-seeing plasma screens will neccessitate. But the first porn title, Camp Cuddly Pines Powertool Massacre, has been released on HD-DVD. It seems porn has embraced this format over Sony's Blu-Ray. Sony announced that it would not allow factories using its technology to produce porn. Ease of manufacturing is what made VHS win over Beta -- and, as with most technology we use on the Web, the choice of pornographers was instrumental. History will likely repeat itself, and life will never be the same.

Meanwhile, the Pill is causing male fish to switch sexes. Common earthworms are destroying our forests. And we've got 10 years to reduce our carbon emissions by 90 percent or risk setting off a chain reaction that will send the planet into a total meltdown.

BTW, Horst is wearing a Flick Off T, gear from a campaign to make fighting global warming cool. I'd question buying gear to fight climate change (are there offsets for the fossil fuels used to manufacture and deliver it?), but the Earth needs all the help it can get. If irreverent slogans help to spur action as well as attitude, great. (I saw a woman selling bread at Future Bakery wearing one, which is how I ended up at the flickoff.org site, where there is a clock showing the time we have left to cut significant amounts of CO2 before the Earth goes enters an irreversible civilization-destroying trajectory. As I type, it's 9 years, 3 months, 11 days, 16 hours, 39 minutes and 14 seconds. So I should stop typing and flick off this power-guzzling 'puter.)

10 Years Ago This Week: May 22, 1997
At a time of widespread stock-market fraud, weird poll results are causing an uproar -- and may indicate fraud in the polling industry. How else to explain that yogic flyers may form the Official Opposition?