I’ve thought long and hard, and I’ve decided that this is the end of the column called MWC. Now don’t get excited, I’m just changing the name. I will still be around every 5 months to make fun of dead people (see below). From now on, the column will be called ePokemon.com. I expect this change to cause every reader to send me several thousand dollars. I will take checks, but like your congressperson, I prefer cash. By the way, is anyone concerned about the Pokemon craze? I did a little research (a column-formerly-known-as-MWC first!), and apparently, "Pokemon" means "pocket monster." This is great for you parents out there. Try sending your child to the park alone sometime. "Hey kid, I’ve got a pocket monster I bet you haven’t seen before."

Another thing that’s kept me from writing this fall is a pursuit called "Fantasy Football." This is a game where you choose actual National Football League players, unbeknownst to them, to be on your team so they can "score" "points" for you. Each week you select certain of your team members to be in your starting lineup to play against another team in your league. Then on Sunday, you lie on the couch all afternoon and watch your players go out and sustain career-ending injuries.

At that point, proper procedure is to shriek at the TV that if that player doesn’t GET UP RIGHT THIS MINUTE, you will FLY OUT TO DENVER and personally KICK HIM IN THE OTHER KNEE until he REALLY HAS SOMETHING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT. The key to a successful Fantasy Football season is being able vent your spleen like that without disturbing the can of Great-Tasting, Less-Filling Lite brand beer from ePokemon.com sponsor and all-around good corporate citizen Miller Brewing Company that’s resting on your stomach. The can is resting on your stomach, I mean, not the Miller Brewing Company. Your stomach is not quite that big. Yet.

I’ve also spent quite a bit time recently attempting to try out for the popular ABC television program "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" mostly because of the possibility that I might be able to give Regis Philbin a crack to the head. After calling the toll-free number for 146 consecutive hours, I finally got through to Regis. Unfortunately, while I was able to put the words "It," "Play," "Again," and "Sam" together in the right order, I was unable correctly to order horror writers Shelley, Stoker, Poe, and King alphabetically by the penultimate words of the titles of their second books. As Regis told me at the outset of the audition call, the questions increase in difficulty.

Beyond my life, though, much has been going on in the news recently. Just last week, John and Patsy Ramsey, parents of the late JonBenet Ramsey, who would have been 23 on Sunday, broke their silence and gave an interview to a Nashville television station. They courageously stepped in front of the cameras despite the very real possibility that by doing so, they would be able to cash in on their daughter’s death by informing us about their new book. In the book, the Ramseys attempt to help others who find themselves in similar situations by explaining how they survived the terrible ordeal of the continuous and viciously biased media reports that have plagued them ever since JonBenet’s 1982 death. The book, on shelves in time for holiday shopping, is called "How To Kill Your Daughter and Get Away With It."

Also hogging the news lately has been the crash of EgyptAir flight 990. The black box, so named because of the high visibility of its orange color, has been found, and interpreters have been working on the cockpit voice recordings to translate them from Arabic. Controversy arose this week when NTSB translators announced that 59-year-old relief pilot Gameel al-Batouti was heard to say, "No, no, Payne Stewart’s plane went like *this*." [Note to self: Consider replacing punchline with, "Hey, look! It’s JFK Jr.! Let’s get him!"]

In other tragedies that I plan to make fun of, at least 12 Texas A&M students have died because, in a school-sanctioned event, they tried to build a 55-foot tall pile of logs that was to be set on fire on Thanksgiving night. The bonfire collapsed, although bonfire advisor (which is *not* a tenure-track position, despite the Texas A&M jokes you’re already making in your head) Rusty Thompson had felt "comfortable with the safety measures that were in place," although with scintillating insight, he acknowledged in today’s "Dallas Morning News" that "something went wrong there within that stack."

The bonfire, which will not be lit this year, is part of a 90-year Texas A&M tradition of field-testing the principles of Charles Darwin.

Until April...