It's easy to miss hidden meanings in the information stream. News photographers consider themselves artists, and try to frame their subjects to convey as much meaning as possible within a single photograph.

For example, someone did a study of the number of "halos" there seemed to be hidden in the photos of the campaign trail. I really need a link to that, since it's kind of hard to explain. The photographers often try to arrange themselves and the subject so that some kind of circle is behind their head, simulating a halo, as in this picture of Howard Dean:

So I wondered what the hell the guys in the newsroom were trying to tell us with this weird-ass picture of Kerry from last week:

Until, of course I remembered what the POW*MIA flag looked like. Unbelievably, the Kerry campaign seems to want to associate itself even more with the Vietnam War than it already has, which is almost completely. They should probably stay away from the whole POW angle; the Viet Cong actually used Kerry's "Winter Soldier" testimony to torture American POW's, after all.

What a jackass.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've seen swimmies. Those are the little things that swim around in your vision when you look at uniform surface, like a wall or the sky. They look exactly like the little bubbles you see when you look at something under a microscope. Does everybody see those, or is it just me?

It's gotten pretty bad lately; not only are the little amoebae running around, but there's little sparks that show up and go around in circles. Maybe it's because I used to sit around in the dark and poke my eyelids so I could see the pretty lights. We were too poor for real firecrackers, I guess.

The lights you see when you push your eyeballs are called phosphenes, by the way. I'm not sure why I know that.