Just a few quick notes for you today.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I so often bring you news of doom and danger what with the vampires and seals and zombies. Today I have only a very little of that. Today, I shall take a more optimistic tone, for as you will see, the future starts today.

1) Ghosts: Since the dawn of man, ghosts have been a thorn in man's side: refusing to be dead, being invisible, shutting doors, and making us cold. I suspect that currently ghosts are plotting something big. As CNN reported, a ghost was recorded in a gym. This could give us cause for alarm. After all, we don't know why this particular ghost is bulking up. Is he planning some sort of attack or does he simply feel self-conscious after allowing himself to become so pale? Regardless, I will not play the doomsayer in this, but rather look at the positive. We have reached the point technologically where even public sector security cameras can now detect ghosts. The private, classified technologies are no doubt substantially better at ghost detection. Thus, we may not know what they're up to, but rest assured that someone is now keeping tabs on these bumps in the night.

2) Jetpacks: Yves Rossy, a Swiss pilot has successfully flown across the English Channel in a jet pack of his own design. What does this mean to you and me? First, those jet packs we were all promised we'd have by now... we still don't have yet. But another person does, so percentage-wise, that's an enormous increase. If the number of jet packs increases steadily according to the percentage and not the actual raw numbers, we should all have jet packs in no time. That or we should really be concerned for the economy, because Rossy's transit is essentially a wing and an engine. Why can't he afford the rest of the plane? Does this mean we'll all be in go-carts soon? No, no. I said I would remain positive today. Only fifteen more years until we each get our own jet pack. Unless it's more.

3) Aliens: A news crew for MSNBC has been stuck in the arctic for three weeks. It seems on five separate occasions they have been unable to leave the ship patroling the arctic as they reported on the ice free Northwest Passage, which has only been ice free twice in recorded history. Here's the thing. Or rather, here's The Thing, a John Carpenter movie from 1982 in which a team of scientists and one helicopter pilot named R.J. MacReady are stranded in Antarctica with an alien that can take over and perfectly imitate any living thing, which in turn was based on The Thing from Another World from 1951. What I'm getting at is that everyone knows that shape-changing, paranoia-inducing aliens can be found at the polar regions of the world. The first movie was set in the arctic, the second the antarctic. Clearly the thing made its way from one pole to another, perhaps in a rogue iceberg. With global warming, who's to say that such a frozen piece didn't make the trip back and infect the Canadian team the news crew was stationed with?

You may be asking yourself, "Mr. Truth, how is this possibly optimistic of you?" First, the "Canadian" team hasn't "been able" to let the news crew leave. Translation: they news crew hasn't been turned yet. Further, aside from the fact that an iceberg not melting between Antarctica and the North Pole shows global warming can't be that bad, we must consider timelines. The events of the first movie took place in a rather short time. The second movie happened even more quickly, a matter of days. That the news crew has been on an "over loaded" ship in very close proximity with aliens, constantly eating food prepared for them by said extra-terrestrials ("the ship's pastry chef...is trying to kill us slowly with desserts"), and they still have not turned speaks to either a weakening of alien resolve (good for us), or an improved anti-assimilation constitutions in us (still good for us). In other words, if these parasitic creatures can't overtake us in their most ideal conditions, they have no hope of conquering this world any time soon. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is good news.

You have been informed.