Our downstairs rooms are filled with that nice sour smell of new paint.

Mary and I have been painting our master bedroom the past few days, and although it's going well, and I haven't yet fallen off our twelve-foot stepladder (one of the yellow warning decals on the side of the ladder shows a man, all in black, plummeting head first towards the ground), it is more exhausting than I thought it would be, plus I've been writing a new short story this week, which is almost finished, the story I mentioned here a while back, about a man trapped in the mountains late at night, a hard rain falling, so, anyway, I'm too tired to write more of a new Lately, I apologize for this air kiss entry, but next week I'll be back with thrilling tales of my bravery on the stepladder, and with all the white paint washed out of my hair.

In lieu of a longer column, I'm including a link to an interesting site.

In November of 2000, a man who identified himself as "John Titor" began posting on different forums.

According to Titor, he was a time traveler from the year 2036.

Time travel in 2036, although still controlled by the military, has become fairly common. He himself predicted that by 2045, time travel would be made available to the general public.

Although he refused to answer many of the questions posted to him over the ensuing months, he did talk in some detail about what the world is like, thirty-three years from now.

A long civil war has taken place in America, one which appears to start around 2004 or so, and ends in 2015. 130 million Americans die in the struggle. In 2015, a world war begins. Three billion people are dead by the time it's over, and there are large areas of America, and the rest of the world, that are poisoned by radioactivity and/or biological weapons.

Europe is a mess. In America, people generally live in small, self-supporting communities. The average lifespan is now sixty, although "we're working on that". Much time is spent trying to repair the environmental damage caused by so much warfare.

The United States government still exists (the U.S. Capital is now in Omaha, Nebraska, after Russia bombed Washington, D.C.), although federal power has been greatly replaced by local government. There is still an Internet, vastly better than this one, and people still go to football games. Most corporations no longer exist, since the majority of products are now made locally.

All of this sounds like absolute nonsense, of course, but it is interesting to read. One of the participants in the on-line discussions with Titor has created a website which archives Titor's comments, located here.

Titor himself announced on March 24, 2001 he was returning to 2036. He hasn't been heard from since.