People are writing about elves, everywhere you look.

I understand that Cesperanza started it in some inexplicable fashion and now there are elves infesting every fandom in sight.

And torch, to compound the evil, has written not only elf fiction, but (may her tiny, little conscience kick her on the ankles and tell her she's naughty) P.G.Wodehouse elf fiction.

Of course, maybe I shouldn't get uppity. I got this whole attitude thing going about those "shack" stories and then it naturally turned out that some of them were delightful.

I'm not reading elf stories, though. I mean, okay, I read torch's and of course it was charming, even with my irrational prejudice against the concept because that's just sort of how torch affects me, but I refuse to get sucked into stories featuring elves in such disparate fandoms as Firefly, CSI, Oz, and Seaquest. I've seen each of these shows at least once and the thought of them in connection with elves makes my head hurt.

Well, maybe not so much Seaquest which I found pretty stupid. It would be funny if the elf was the dolphin, wouldn't it?

I do encourage the rest of you to go and read, if you haven't already, just because I'm mean. (And because I suspect, based on the list of authors, that many of the stories are well worth reading, of course.)

Yes, I'm still busybusybusy at work, but I'm tired of working. I could, of course, read about the development of tools for the assessment of depression or about knowledge integration across distributed heterogeneous data sources, but a little of that kind of thing goes a long way, don't you think?

I've been hard at it for the past seven hours or so. Take a look at this:

For example, the nature and incidence of depression varies across the lifespan; negative cognitive styles or negative information processing, when coupled with stressful events, place an individual at elevated risk for depression; a ruminative coping style is predictive of longer and more severe episodes of depression and appears to enhance negative cognitions; stressful life events predict the onset of new episodes of depression; hopelessness appears to mediate the relation between the cognitive vulnerability-stress interaction and depressive episodes; and primary depression has been associated with a variety of neuroendocrine, neurochemical, neurophysiological, and neuromorphometric abnormalities.

And people wonder why, when I sit and read things like that all day, I keep Advil at my desk.

Hmph. This really makes me long for the days when I sat around and doodled patterns for stoneware pots, okay?