Your hopes and dreams are all shattered. We're back.

It looked for a while as if the Mite would never return from the Gulf, what with the oil well proving especially pesky, not to mention all those hurricanes and volcanoes and earthquakes and generally inclement weather making things difficult. But as promised, he capped the well and has returned to his day job teaching at Tennessee Williams High School. I wish I had had such an exciting summer. I did get promoted to Assistant Manager in charge of the Miley Cyrus collection at the book store, but no one in Cambridge has ever bought a book about Miley Cyrus, so this is sort of an empty honor. Oh well, at least they didn't ask me to take a cut in pay.

Anyhow, as you can imagine, the Nostrumite is in a state of permanent depression over the whole Tea Party candidate business. It's not that he believes that everyone in Congress shouldn't be tarred and feathered—far from it, he'd like to do them, SCOTUS and the Executive Branch to boot—but he is extremely intolerant of intolerance. "There's too many people in this country complaining about too many of the people in this country not being the right kind of people," is how he puts it. As far as the Mite is concerned, the only right kind of people are the ones who think exactly like the Mite, and since those are limited to exactly one, and no man is an island, nor even a peninsula—nor, in some cases, a monadnock—he understands that other people need to be around too, if for no other reason than to answer the phone when he has a help desk question. So, he says, live and let live, and while you're at it, shut up. Better advice was never given.

Needless to say, we haven't returned to the fray of life in 21st Century America without bearing gifts, namely, both the yakkety-yak and the eyeball-burner versions of Episode 23. Ain't life great?