AND SINCE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT OF COLLECTIBLES: I realized that I hadn't read one single piece of fiction in 2004 that wasn't a comic book, so I returned to Philip K. Dick, something I'm familiar with, to sort of get me started so I could say to myself that I read something. Dick is great in a lot of ways, but something I always found interesting was that Dick got a lot of things about the future right, not technological things but socioeconomic things. I mean--the obsession of the colonists in a bleak Martian landscape with their Barbie doll-like Perky Pat layouts in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch> arguably prefigures the entire adult collectible market in our own bleak--or to put it more charitably, frontier-like--American cultural landscape. Well, there's a lot of those little inversions in Dick and in science fiction is general (psychiatrists who make you crazier, but on purpose, firemen who burn books, adults obsessing with toys) so maybe it's just coincidental.