Upon hearing that a group of war protesters blocked foot and auto traffic in San Francisco's Financial District this morning, a Berkeley homeless man wondered aloud, "What's so special about that? I do that every day here and nobody cares."

How's this for a vote of confidence: President Bush with a big thumbs up as he entered his helicopter on his way to Portugal for a last-minute emergency summit with allies.

Today's Yahoo-worthy front page headline is that little sleep may be as bad as no sleep at all. Many nights of 6 or less hours is equivalent to staying up for two days straight, the study says. Really. Then what's to explain my eight hours of sleep at night contributing to my little naps during lectures?

Watching college basketball the last couple of days, it's clear that this has gotten much more exciting than its NBA counterpart. You've got dominating teams, cinderella stories, scandals, and a big tournament to wrap things up. All the NBA has had for the past few years is a big guy and a scorer dominating the entire league. Nothin' special about that.

The good box office people at AC Nielsen have figured out that Kirsten Dunst and Christopher Lee were the top-grossing actress and actor in 2002. Dunst starred in the popular Spider-Man movie and the less-than-popular The Cat's Meow. Lee was prominently featured in Attack of the Clones and The Two Towers. And while Steven Spielberg was the director of the most films last year (3, including the ET re-release), their combined gross could not surpass Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. Likewise, Charlie Kaufman's 3 screenplays could not surpass the gross of David Koepp's Spider-Man plus Panic Room.

So let me get this straight. After 7 months, Elizabeth Smart has been found. Yet, it's been described that she was being paraded around Utah and Southern California during those months away from her family, albeit covered up. But really, nobody recognized her? Elizabeth never recognized the flyers with her picture on it while just walking with her captors through Salt Lake City? It seems as though this could have been resolved in less than 7 months, but good news nonetheless.

UCLink, the Berkeley email service, had been down all week due to a technical glitch. It has since been fixed. A spokesman was quoted as saying that many machines break down and that this one wasn't any different. It's comforting to know that email is guaranteed to stop working at some point in the near future. Luckily, I wasn't a person with a username that started with the letters j-o. All their email was erased.

Finally, there comes word that spell-check software may not be as useful as the old brain itself. Researchers at Pitt did a study to see if it was advantageous to use spell-check software or not. Without it, a person with a high verbal SAT score made on average 5 errors per page while a person with a low one made about 17 errors on average. With Microsoft Word's squiggly lines, both types of people made about 16-17 errors per page. So I guess it pays to take those grammar classes.

But as usual, this post has not been spell-checked.