I’m not going to tell you who to vote for. I’m just want to remind you to vote.

I know that sometimes people divide their voting habits into two categories: Presidential and everything else. And although I’m glad you vote every four years, usually it’s the “everything else” that will affect your day-to-day life.

The President can only change so much on his own. There are three branches of government and it’s important that we decide who represents us in congress as well as who is in that coveted corner-less office.

Oregonians have it made. We don’t even need to leave the house to vote––they mail our ballots directly to us. All you have to do is make a mark in black or blue ink, seal two envelopes and stick it in your mailbox. Presto democratic process achieved.

If you honestly don’t know who to vote for consider reading about the candidates online or in the voters pamphlet. If you can’t be bothered I suggest just writing my name in on that little blank line. I must warm you my last name is long and I am completely unqualified. But, hey, I am looking for a job.

What? You haven’t heard of the UWC? It’s only the hottest up-in-coming neighborhood in Portland.

I can’t believe you don’t know about it. Don’t look at me like that, I’m not judging, just surprised. I thought you knew Portland better than I did.

Anyway, the UWC is jam-packed with great places:  coffee shops, community gardens, nature parks, public libraries. Most of the high schools put on a fairly good musical each season. I wouldn’t really say everything is within walking distance, but, if you like walking you could do a lot of it.

The best thing about the UWC is that people like to just stay home, you know? No one judges you when you watch Star Trek on Netflix until two in the morning so Mr. Spock can keep you company while you attempt to make a rudimentary stop-motion film. If you want to read you don’t have to do it in some coffee shop where everyone is judging you by your book’s cover. In the UWC you can scratch getting dressed and answering the same asinine statement-question of, “Oh, you’re reading a book by Murakami? I love him,” off your list of things associated with reading.

In the UWC you can stay in bed and eat ice cream while you read. We live like kings.

They recently put in a couple of new traffic lights. It speeds up the commute in the morning and gets you home faster after work. Let’s you spend more quality time doing puzzles in front of your fireplace.

I can’t believe you haven’t heard of the UWC.

These future doctors, lawyers and politicians had to sing, dance and parade on stage in a bikini to win.

A friend and I watched with utter dumbstruck fascination. We concluded that all the white gowns were probably going to double as wedding dresses. Also that it is strange that Miss America has to wear a crown at all of her public appearances.

Miss America gets to do a lot of cool things: meet the President, speak at important events and travel the country promoting her chosen platform.

The thing is she has to do this while wearing a crown.

In other words this intelligent, confident woman seeking a higher degree looks like a little girl playing dress-up.

Regardless of your opinion about the fact that these women were judged on their looks as well as their talent, it takes a lot of guts to get up on stage and let the world see your every flaw. It’s a very elaborate and public job interview –– kind of like running for president, except theoretically the presidential candidates  are not judged on how “pretty” they are.

This year’s Miss America is Laura Kaeppeler. Like all the ambitious Miss Americas that came before her she doesn’t need a crown to prove to the world that she is worth being heard. And confident women everywhere shouldn’t have to wear one to get people to listen.

The phrase attempts to celebrate women but comes off more as putting them in their place. It is also full of lies.

This is not a man’s world: it’s an ants.

Bare with me.

The Earth is home to many creatures and plant life. The weight of these things is calculated as biomass and in the large scheme of things, 7 billion human beings don’t weigh a lot.

The total biomass of all humans on Earth is equal to the total biomass of all species of ants. This means that for every human alive on Earth there are roughly 1.5 million ants crawling in and around their stuff.

Other creatures that outweigh us: termites, squid and krill.

I’ve never seen a termite in person and I don’t live in a body of water, so what concerns me the most are the ants.

What’s not to fear about ants? They are everywhere. They are very organized. They always have hoards of back up and they adapt easily. Multiple times ants have crawled out of my computer.

Now I’m not suggesting that there is not an unwanted hierarchy based on race, gender and class in human society (there is). All I’m saying is that regardless of who is on top of human pyramid we are all just living in an ant’s world.

For more frightening facts about ants visit Youtube and prepare to spend approximately 20 hours listening to David Attenborough tell you why we should be very afraid.

For me it is especially nice since although I have motion sickness riding any other mode of transportation (train, car, bus, boat, horse, piggyback) on an airplane I feel nothing except for when we land.

At least that is what I thought until last Wednesday when I flew Southwest Airlines from Florida to Oregon. I had a layover in Denver so I was prepared for two unsavory bouts of nausea during my day of guilt-free vegging out.

But by the time I realized we were landing in Denver we were a foot from the ground. My stomach was not queasy but my mind was blown. That was quiet possibly the best landing I had ever experienced in my life.

I wanted to congratulate someone, give him or her an award. They wanted to shuffle me out of the flying apparatus in a succinct and timely manner. Luckily for me the cockpit door was open when I exited the plane. The captain was leaning nonchalantly against the door.

“Great landing,” I said incredibly sincere. (I may of even given the thumbs up sign.) But the pilot (or co-pilot or some dude just chilling in the cabin in a uniform) looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Have a good night.” I realized I may have sounded sarcastic, but seriously Southwest Airlines Flight 330 on Jan. 11, whoever was flying, thank you.

For the sake of science I thought, well, maybe this smooth landing had something to do with Denver’s elevation.

I paid special attention to the landing when I arrived in Portland. Usually the same tailwinds that get you in 20 minutes early when approaching from the east make it a bumpy ride. Although not as smooth as the last one I felt no nausea at touchdown.

Not wanting to freak this pilot out I said nothing but goodnight on my way out of the airplane.

Are the pilots of Southwest Airlines just that much better than the rest? Maybe. Am I inexplicably cured of my motion sickness for life? I wouldn’t sit behind me on a roller coaster if I decide to find out.

All I know for certain is that I got to sit down for about 9 net hours to read, relax, listen to music and enjoy one hell of a beautiful landing.

What I’m getting at is that producing a physical book is out-dated, cumbersome, and consumes resources and capital.

Don’t get me wrong, I love books. I slept with books in my crib. My Mecca is Powell’s City of Books. But the thing that I like more than books is reading and in today’s modern world there are simply better ways to read. Just like you wouldn’t carry a record player or Walkman around anymore to listen to music you shouldn’t have to carry around a heavy, clunky book.

And you shouldn’t want to. E-readers provide you with a slim light-weight device that can hold more books than will fit into most people’s houses. You can download books right to your device, you can share them with friends, you can check them out from the library. You can do everything you would with a regular book only faster, quicker and without reading a book covered in coffee and food stains.

Talk about a reading paradise. And a reading paradise should be a publishers paradise.

Case study: I rarely bought books before I got my e-reader and I would never subscribe to magazines because as a college student I was constantly moving from place to place.

But now that I have an e-reader not only are books usually $10 cheaper in ePub format but when I buy one I don’t have to think about moving it up and down three flights of stairs every 3 months. Better yet I don’t have to worry about managing my magazine subscriptions because all i need is a WiFi connection and they download directly to my device.

So you have more people buying your product and it costs less to produce it? I haven’t taken a math class in four years but I’m pretty sure that sounds like winning.

And with less money at risk maybe publishing houses can branch out into more experimental genres and publish more books? If they don’t budding authors are apt to self-publish and make a million dollars without the middle man.

The losers of course will be the factories that print books and the stores that sell them. Just like the monks who transcribed books by hand were out of luck when the printing press was invented. But the thing about humans is that they like to adapt.

Yes, this new way of reading will require an “entry fee,” to buy a device that allows you to access the books. But over time competition will drive down the cost of e-readers and many people already own other devices that read ePub files like computers, or smart phones.

We should stop wasting time worrying about the demise of the physical “book,” and embrace ePublishing and all it has to offer. We’re on the cusp of something great.

I am very excited about the future of publishing. Because the winners in the long run, aside from trees, will be everyone that loves to read.

Your motivation for massacring these creatures is that they’re terrorizing villages and killing them makes you stronger and a hero to the local towns people. Hooray groupies.

I’m never one for animal cruelty but I figured if you must kill majestic beasts to save yourself, you must.

Then I found out that these dragons can talk.

This whole time I thought it was just untamed wild beast against civilization. But the more I looked into it the wiser the dragons seemed to be. They have their own language, for one, and they are smart enough to taunt you in English as well.

The reason people enjoy playing Skyrim is that there are so many options for game play. I think one of them should be diplomatic negotiation.

In this path no one gets hurt. Instead of working on your strength and buying fancy armor, players exercise and practice their inter-species negotiation skills.

What are the Dragons demands? Why are they bent on destroying the human race? Are they bent on destroying the human race?

This is probably all a large misunderstanding.

Maybe the dragons blind rage is covering up a soft interior who is justifiably upset because you killed his sister, brother, father, mother or other kin. Perhaps the spot the townspeople decided to build a village was his favorite stomping ground when he was a kid and is sad to see it taken over by deforestation.

These dragons are probably swooping down not to attack but to find some comfort and love.

Side note: Villagers, you should really try building your houses out of fire-resistant materials. You live in dragon country, adapt to your environment people.

Skyrim players, ahem Dragonborn, I challenge you to take the future of dragon-human relations into your own hands. The game is already leading you in that direction. Despite being able to do some despicable things –– break-in and rob your local tavern, kill villagers and pick pocket your friends –– you can’t hurt the children, because the children are our future.

Let’s create a world where we all live in peace and no one has to take an arrow to the knee.

[In a survey of Skyrim players (read: Alejandro) 100% disliked the reference to the arrow joke. But 100% of me liked it.]

I keep seeing trailers for this movie so everything I am about to say is based off of these 30-second clips.

What I can ascertain is that it is a story about a little boy whose only friend is a horse. They go to war together and spend roughly 10 years there, hence why the boy changes into a man. (I don’t know, who pays attention to commercials?)

The horse can “pull through anything.” I imagine this means he can walk through mud, sleet, snow, automatic weapons and piles of dead bodies. The movie is directed by Steven Spielberg –– a commercial that appears seconds later informs me that he also directed the very creepily rendered “Adventures of Tintin.”

Obviously this is a big name in the movie business. I know that, but frankly without using Google all I can confidently say is that he directed “E.T.” A movie I had to stop watching halfway through when I was 8 because that wonky little alien freaked me out.

I’m pretty sure he also directed another classic horror movie: Jurassic Park,

The trailer says Spielberg has directed “critically acclaimed” movies and “War Horse” is destined to be one of them. But it doesn’t sound all that riveting.

I’ve never really understood the appeal of movies about horses. There is something about the animals that I find inherently disturbing––at a very impressionable age my brother told me that if I was alone with one it would eat me. They are incredibly large yet fragile creatures that eat plants and if you boil them down they turn into glue. How does that even work?

Here is a movie whose main character is a horse and the supporting lead is a child solider. The story is supposed to be about love and friendship between a man and a horse. But can you call captive servitude friendship? Let’s face it, the horse is just this guy’s friend because he feeds him and gives him shelter.

That’s kind of a twisted love, but maybe that’s why what makes the movie so good?

I will not be watching the film so I may never know.

I Googled a list of movies directed by Steven Spielberg here are the ones I like: Catch me if You Can and Indiana Jones. I haven’t seen like 70% of them. I don’t watch a lot of movies.