"Obviously, my dream of making millions through poetry is dust."

My dad sent this Tom the Dancing Bug strip to me the other day, reminding me that I'd originally sent it to him in August 2000 after it appeared in print and online. Tom creator Ruben Bolling is wickedly funny and smart, and he gave good e-mail when I wrote him as a fan later that year.

Now that I'm studying library science this strip is even funnier, although the record industry's fate now seems much more dire than it did a decade ago, when Napster was the only music-pirating bug that needed to be squashed. And these days e-publishing, aided by ambiguous forces of good and/or evil such as Amazon.com, threatens to wipe out the traditional publishing industry, taking down bookstore chains like Borders in the process.

Everything's cheaper now, but we're all paying the price.