Although the big surprise twist isn’t that much of one, The Skeleton Key is still a very entertaining and stylish supernatural thriller, with an all-star cast, wonderfully spooky scoring and great directing like they aren’t supposed to do any more. And what’s more, it gets the difference between voodoo and hoodoo right.

Kate Hudson and especially John Hurt absolutely sell the story, and the entire conceit of hoodoo not being dangerous unless you believe it teases viewers not to believe.

Recommended for fans of supernatural thrillers like the Serpent and the Rainbow, the Ring and the Sixth Sense.

The Internet scares the bejeesus out of the newspaper industry, as I’ve mentioned before. Although the industry’s current slump in circulation began before the birth of the World Wide Web, there’s certainly reason to be concerned: Even more than radio or TV, the Internet provides an immediacy that the daily newspaper, which once was the place where breaking news was reported, can’t compete with.

I’m a big advocate of newspapers competing by working smarter and harder. The Internet, at this point, does not cover all news equally, and some of it, it doesn’t cover at all. Newspapers, which have infrastructures and credibility, can and should push their ways even more aggressively into these areas. At the end of the day, a newspaper Web site is no different from a blog or a rumor site, except that the newspaper site can have a credibility and authority the others can’t match. (Obviously, if it doesn’t have that, fixing that is job one.) So pursuing, say, local news and politics — which regional media rarely does — is a key part of the picture.

But so is using the Internet to reimagine the news business. It removes a great deal of the overhead from taking on aspects of other media, and can potentially bring in more eyeballs and, more importantly, help develop more of a relationship with the eyeballs already there.

So what does this mean for the Hesperia Star? Well, the holidays will delay a formal announcement, but we will have what I think is a first of its kind for a weekly newspaper (maybe a first for local newspapers generally) announcement early in 2006.

Well, the past week made me think that maybe, maybe my symptoms from this flare-up were going to taper off without ever getting to the life-disrupting stage they got to last April. Inconvenient I can handle, have to work from home and sleep 18 hours a day, I cannot.

The respite was apparently a bluff, because this weekend, my symptoms came roaring in with a head of steam. My eyeballs are back to boiling, I have a persistent dry cough — the kittens in particular are upset by this, because they’re not sure what it means yet — and I’ve been having a lot of joint pain. I’m still not at the point where Jenn has to help me get up from a laying position and help me get my legs over the side of the bathtub to shower, but I’m now on that side of the bellcurve rather than the side of normalcy.

Ho, ho, ho.