I read with great disappointment, the article on businesses entering Second Life in the Friday edition of the New York Times, which I read through the International Herald Tribune in real paper and the NYT Web site online.

I wasn’t disappointed because it was a bad article, only because it came at the end of a week after explaining in vain to my desk editor about the dynamic developments in Second Life and how maybe I should write about it.  This was the second time my idea on writing about Second Life was turned down; the first one was about education institutes setting up education programs in the virtual world, with Harvard’s CyberOne being one of the most recent examples. Of course, that was turned down too.

My editor, being a very logical person (though he does annoy me sometimes because he has long bangs and he flings his hair to get the hair out of his eyes and the movement is so “loud” it is very distracting…sort of like having a shuge sheepdog shake out the water on emerging from a pool.) agreed that the topics were certainly very interesting, but he didn’t see any reason why we should run it in our paper. Unfortunately, I had to agree with him. Or rather, I had no choice but to give up my article pitch, because our paper is distributed with the International Herald Tribune (the two papers are folded together) and therefore we are only supposed to focus on domestic news; in other words, not supposed to write anything that is unrelated with Korea. Even if we do write about something foreign or global, it is because Korea is involved in some way or another…if not, we simply don’t write about it, because it is up to the IHT to cover the international news.

Because of this, I have been unable to write about a number of interesting topics, which I might arrogantly add, were cooked up and ready to go before I noticed any other media writing about them. Thus my depression.

Today, I wrote about a joint team of Korean and American professors who have created embryonic stem cell depression treatment for mice. It is sad that scientists know how to deal with depressed mice and not depressed human beings. Poor mice. Maybe some of them enjoyed being depressed and now they can’t because their brains are injected with cultured neural cells that supposedly produce “happy” chemicals.