First, I never heard from Wil Wheaton, which makes me kind of sad. Everyone was so encouraging that I wrote to him with hope, but so far no joy - oh well. What I really wanted to write about, though, is stickers.

• First: political bumper stickers. I participated in my friend Ryan’s Political Bumpers project around the time of the 2004 presidential election, so I got very interested in political-sticker-spotting. What I’ve been noticing recently, though, is that people still have those stickers on their cars. I’ve always thought political stickers, like tattoo’s of your current squeeze’s name, are a bad idea because they will grow out of date. But it seems that around here, at least, political stickers have turned into declarations of the car owner’s ideology. I have found that I now equate “Bush/Cheney” stickers with “I’m the NRA - And I Vote” stickers, Jesus fish, and so forth. Likewise, any “Kerry/Edwards” stickers are equivalent to Darwin fish and other left-wing ideas. The Bush/Cheney stickers have the added air of “nyah nyah” while the Kerry/Edwards stickers have an added air of…disappointment, I guess, or maybe “you suck!”
• Second: cell phone stickers, or “skins.” When I had a clunky old Nokia 3390, I had removable faceplates. I ditched the original gold one early on and used Hello Kitty faceplates for the rest of the phone’s life. But now that I have a Sidekick, I no longer get removable faceplates, so my device is very bland and gray. It’s possible to buy colored rubber “bumpers” to replace some of the buttons of the Sidekick II, and it’s possible to spend hundreds of dollars to have tiny crystals put all over your phone, but I wasn’t really interested in either one. Instead I designed a skin at My Tego. The back is going to have a picture of A all over it, and the front is going to have abstract rainbow stuff. (I also tried out Starry Night, The Scream, and Hello Kitty fronts, but I decided to go with the abstract one. It’s going to be slightly tricky to get the skin on properly, but I’m looking forward to having a fancier phone!