In Seattle...

Thirty minutes away there is a village in a world surrounded by trees, and it's called Redmond.
I am there, in a hotel room, and outside the window glows a set of shopping mall facades that ring me like a wagon train.
Under streetlights, coffee shops and Eddie Bauer outlets conduct quiet business. In a bucket near the hotel and at every street corner, free purple umbrellas are offered as protection against the rain.

Nintendo's headquarters are nearby, not far from Microsoft's. In fact, they're right next door.

Night has fallen at 6:00, and through the curtain I can see ghostly shapes of cars.

What happened in the news today? I have no idea. I played videogames all day long...endless sessions of Metroid Prime Hunters on the Nintendo DS in a warm conference room, followed by a slow wandering through endless walls of videogames and Nintendo peripherals.

Today I'm preparing for tomorrow...when a flight will deliver me back to Newark, New Jersey, on the way back to New York City. Land of a hundred thousand streetlights. And probably, several dozen Eddie Bauer outlets.

In the interest of news, I present this: I read on a blog that Anathasius Kircher developed a musical instrument made out of living cats sometime in the 1700s.

That, and Metroid Prime Hunters comes out on March 20.