the shrewdness of apes

sometimes, things get to looking a pretty gray: the weather sucks, your favorite team's shortstop is going to miss the first month of the season, Iraq continues to resemble the 7th level of hell, et. al. but inevitably, something comes along to brighten things up, and today that thing is GMail, Google's new e-mail service which promises 1GB (!!) of free e-mail storage and advanced searching capability. it's still in the test phase, but you better believe t.s.o.a. will be all over this once it's officially launched. the fact that 15 rapid-fire copies of the same spam messages have been inundating our accounts over the last few days makes the choice that much easier. the fact that the service will include "relevant text ads" is slightly worrisome, but Google has always been at the forefront of unobtrusiveness, so we doubt it will become a problem. a few of the more exciting parts of the FAQ:

*Gmail automatically groups an email and the replies to it as a conversation. That means you always see a message in its proper context.

*Your email should never be held hostage by a service provider. In the future you will be able to access Gmail messages from non-Gmail accounts for free or at a nominal fee.

now, the struggle to come up with a clever user name.