First time? No, I've been nervous lots of times.

I found a rare dead spot in my day on this rainy Friday afternoon (no, I didn't just write that so you Seattleites will accept me; it really is coming down) so I decided to enter the blog.

Joe told me about this while I was drinking an $12 apple-cranberry martini. Yesterday, I got a $34 parking ticket for an expired meter (my specialty) from the Minneapolis meter maids; that was my second in the last three weeks. Awesome.

Anyway, you guys probably only wanted me in this so you could hear about PoisonPillGate 2006, but since I am a professional journalist and this is probably searchable on google, I will have to keep those discussions offline.

So, here's something fun to do if you have 10 seconds and a sense of humour (just in case John Cleese is reading) ... go to www.google.com and type "failure" in the search box. Then click on "I'm Feeling Lucky" instead of the usual "Google Search."

You'll find that the google engine is infallibly accurate in directing websurfers to the site that best fits their search.