A recent study in England found that the most commonly used computer passwords are names of family members, sports teams and pets. A dumb idea, since the very point of having a password is using a code that's not easily guessed by others, so that you can keep your information secure. But what do you expect, since the information was gleaned from the 71 percent of people stopped in a rail station who gave their passwords to pollsters when offered candy bars?

Not being a naive dumbass, or a lover of chocolate (even if it's free -- hell, as someone who grew up during the '80s, especially when it's offered by a stranger), I'm not going to divulge anything about any of my passwords other than the fact that none of them are the names of family members, pets, or even my beloved Chicago Cubs.

However, I think it's OK to divulge the passwords anonymous acquaintances have abandoned. A techie friend in college had about 30 passwords for various accounts, all of which she cleverly derived from favorite fast-food fare. I'm pretty sure if I was a stranger trying to log in and change her Web page, M3atL0v3r$p1zz@ wouldn't instantly leap to mind. On the opposite end of the spectrum there are people like a parent who will remain unnamed, who until rather recently used his anniversary as a password not only for every account he had, but also for his briefcase and gym locker, and a former boss who used "password" on workplace machines containing sensitive information because it was easy to remember.

I know it's tempting to have a short password and use the name of your pet or significant other, but don't forget there are reasons for having a password. Ideally, your information should be protected by something with at least eight characters containing both uppercase and lowercase letters along with numbers and symbols, and that isn't easy to guess.

Needless to say, if you haven't taken precautions to ensure your password is impossible to guess, don't give it out to people who approach you on the street and offer you candy.

Finally, if you just can't resist the lure of easily-deduced passwords and strangers with candy, I just happen to be doing a study right now on how social security numbers break down in relation to mother's maiden names. If you would like to participate in this important research, please drop me a line and I will return the favor with a frosty, satisfying virtual beer.

It's an understatement to say that I enjoy spicy food. I laugh in the face of wasabi, drink curry as if it were a milkshake, and nonchalantly devour my uncle's famed habanero candy. However, yesterday I finally met my match.

I really didn't expect a restaurant called Thai House II to be anything exceptional. I did lunch there only because it is situated a mere stone's throw from my domicile, and because you can never go wrong with Thai food.

My order was innocuously titled "Spicy Garlic Tofu." I expected it to be spicy and garlicky like the Mongolian barbecue at Golden Palace is spicy and garlicky: Just enough to clear my sinuses and irritate my stomach, but not quite enough to singe the hair of nearby diners every time I breathed.

The first several bites weren't out of the ordinary. The tofu was spicy yet tasty, and definitely garlicky. Yet within 30 seconds, I realized this was no ordinary tofu. Much as happens when one eats raw serranos, nothing happened at first and then all of a sudden, the next thing I knew, my mouth exploded. My tongue screamed in superheated agony, and my lips burned like the fires of Hades. The cucumbers served with the dish were little consolation, as they only brought the inferno down to a five-alarm fire. With three-foot flames shooting from my scorched lips, I asked the waiter politely for two glasses of water, then resumed my quiet whimpering. It took at least a half-hour to recover from the initial blast, although my recuperation wasn't exactly facilitated by my insistence on continuing to devour the tasty tofu. Once all of my taste buds had been neatly cauterized by my delicious dinner, I gobbled up the entire plate in mere seconds.

Although my breath handily removed all the old lead paint from my apartment walls and created an invisible 6-foot barrier around my person, I had clear sinuses and felt fabulous all-around for the rest of the night.

I know where I'm eating the rest of this week.

The combat death in Afghanistan of Pat Tillman is sad, to be sure. The NFL has lost a strong player, and the Army has lost an elite soldier. News organizations are salivating over Tillman's story of tragedy and heroism, but let's not lose sight of reality in our effort to make sense of the death of a celebrity. Pat Tillman died doing what he wanted to do and fighting for a cause he believed in. There is heroism, yes, but little to grieve in living and dying like a Samurai.

The real tragedy is that there are hundreds of Americans who have died in Iraq -- Americans who aren't celebrities, who didn't get a chance to live out their NFL dreams. Among their number, some Americans who didn't want to be there. Americans who didn't believe in the cause they were fighting for. Americans who signed up for Afghanistan and got the ol' bait-and-switch. And a lot of Americans who doubtless paid for a college education with their very lives, because the universities they attended, like mine, were spending most of their scholarship dollars on athletes like Tillman.

Choosing death on one's own terms is a luxury rather than a tragedy. The thing we should be grieving over as a nation is the fact that the U.S. doesn't care for its poor, driving thousands to gamble with their mortality in hopes of affording health care and education -- rights that are afforded to every citizen in countries such as Sweden and Canada. How many of those people would have joined the military had free college tuition been offered them?

There's no doubt that there is heroism in dying for what you believe in. But what is more heroic than fighting with every ounce of courage you possess, even though a violent death for a cause you oppose is not what you signed up for?

As the pundits wax poetic over the life and death of a celebrity athlete, let's not forget the 705 other U.S. servicemembers who have been killed in Iraq since March 2003. Most of them probably didn't get to live out their dreams before they died in a desert nightmare. Most of them didn't leave a lucrative and celebrated career to fight in Iraq. Most of them died deaths that were downplayed, a sidebar to some story about how Iraqis welcomed us with open arms, illustrated by a nicely-composed picture of Bush playing soldier in a flight suit, inviting Iraqis to kill a few more American soldiers with his cocky "Bring 'em on."

I'm sorry the NFL celebrity died in action. But my heart really goes out to those soldiers who didn't know what they were getting into, those who didn't have as many other options in life. My heart goes out to those less-willing young men Bush wants to draft now that he's running out of low-income twentysomething volunteers to send to slaughter. My heart goes out to hostage Matt Maupin, who wanted to be home with his 10-month-old. Those, not fallen Samurai, are the real tragedies.

Awhile back, there was a movie about some guy who (for reasons known only to himself and the five people who actually paid money to see this fine cinematic offering) went 40 days without partaking America's favorite pastime. I didn't watch the movie, first because it looked stupid, and second because -- like the cute but skeevy Colin Farrell -- while going 40 days without a hookup is distasteful at best, it's perfectly doable if necessary.

The real challenge, my friends, is surviving for 40 days and 40 nights without high-speed Internet. In an effort to cut costs, I have been using dial-up since moving into my new apartment. As of right now, that is exactly 40 long, sorrowful days. Days full of lagging video, five-hour download times, and cursing the day I was born when I accidentally hit the "back" button.

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is my payday, and Cox Communications is the sun! Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious dialup connection, who is already sick and pale with grief that thou, her maid, hast far more bandwidth than she.

Yes, after having survived the Ultimate Challenge of blogging, webcamming and banking online with 56K dialup, I rise victorious. In a mere two days, between the hours of noon and 3 p.m., I will rejoin the world of high-speed Internet bliss.

Now that is something to brag about waiting for.

I usually ignore whatever celebrities say, just on principle, but it's nice to see a young entertainer make a point so incisively and with such timely examples. Especially when she happens to spend a lot of time in my CD player anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with politics. Here's what my girl Pink had to say about America's sexual hypocrisy in this month's Gay Advocate:

If you wanna marry Joe Millionaire, go ahead. If you’re a celebrity and you wanna marry your high school sweetheart for 55 hours, go right ahead. If you’re J.Lo and you wanna marry 18 people, for six days each, hey! Go right on ahead!

But if you happen to be reasonably (sic) minded and have fallen in love and wanna marry your soul mate and make a life of it, and you just so happen to be the same sex, then NO! How dare you! You demon creatures! We’d rather you just buy gasoline and support our war and continue to consume and fear in our country so we can make money off you. But do us a favor — don’t hold hands in public. Love, Pink.

Go Pink! You may be a hazard to yourself, but keep it up and you'll soon be an even bigger hazard to the homophobic right.

Vicky's, you have broken my heart.

Two weeks ago, I was browsing that pink-hued womb of lingerie goodness that is your Penn Square location. Nothing really caught my eye until my gaze came to rest upon a most adorable little green-and-pink bra and panty set from the "Such a Flirt" collection. I'm a sucker for green and pink stuff, and and an even bigger sucker for the "Such a Flirt" collection, so naturally I planned for us to be together forever. But I didn't have the $10-off gift card that I got in the mail to thank me for shopping at your retail locations so very much. That was my undoing.

A mere two weeks have passed, and yet when I entered your doors this morning, the adorable springlike undies were nowhere to be found. For a fleeting moment, I thought about using my card on other purchases, but my hopes had just been dashed and I was upset. Too upset even to look at the new 5 for $20 summer panties. Yes, Vicky's, I was that upset.

I don't know how I'm going to get over this, I really don't. Perhaps with time, my wounds will heal. (Although it's hard to imagine living happily ever after without a green-and-pink bra and panty set.) Or perhaps I will make the trip to the Vicky's at Quail Springs Mall, because I am completely at your mercy (or lack thereof).

As the great American poet John C. Mellencamp once wrote, "Come on baby, make it hurt so good. Sometimes love don't feel like it should."

I dedicate today's post to the fine people at the IRS, the user-friendly software TurboTax, and of course to our esteemed President Bush, who is spending my tax dollars not on creating jobs or educating our youth or ensuring that everyone has access to medical care, but on a war that will ultimately only rally our enemies against us and line the pockets of his big-business cronies.

Happy April 15, America.

So maybe I'm still finishing up my undergrad courses, but I have proven beyond question today that I am already a healer with significant skill.

World, meet Heather, currency surgeon.

Yes, today I resuscitated a dollar bill that I had just yesterday received, mutilated and near death, from a Sonic carhop. The fine people at my favorite drive-in burger joint could do nothing more for this mangled and useless shadow of once-crisp currency, but they gave the grievously mutilated bill to the right person.

I knew my patient would not pass its physical (a.k.a. be accepted by the Coke machine at my office) in its current condition. In fact, without some kind of first-aid, its days as legal tender may very well have been over. Its sides bore deep, jagged wounds and it displayed signs of atrophy where someone had bent it over and done God knows what to it.

Sure enough, the vending-machine test came back positive for disease. However, I wanted to validate this downtrodden dollar bill's pathetic existence by allowing it the pride of being exchanged for consumable goods. With this noble purpose in mind, I smoothed its torn edges into place and gently slid it back into the exam slot. No dice. The diagnostic machine indicated that my crippled currency was still not in fighting form.

Like Dr. Pratt on ER, screaming "Don't die on me!" dramatically while applying the paddles for two hours solid, I tried again and again to resuscitate my patient. At last, there was only one treatment left to attempt. I told my dollar bill it would be risky, but this therapy was its only chance. Gingerly, I spat on the bill and pressed the gashes together, cementing the paper together temporarily with my own body fluids (not acceptable medical practice, but I am a weak and proud person and just wasn't ready to pronounce time of death).

Miraculously, the experimental therapy worked. The machine pulled the dollar bill all the way in, paused ... and then a Coke tumbled out. Medicine is such a rewarding profession!

What happened to my patient after it left my care, you ask? Patient-dumping is a time-honored tradition in this field, and that is someone else's problem now.

Years ago, I had a job that paid next to nothing. In addition to making less bank than the average assistant manager at one of our fine local taco or burger establishments, I also worked 10-hour days. Or rather nights, and quite often, early mornings. And I almost always had to work weekends. This job entailed many deadlines each day, and there was rarely time to take a lunch break and even -- during the latter half of my 10-hour day -- much-needed potty breaks. Holidays were especially hard to come by, as this particular profession does not take holidays. However, the work was fast-paced and often exciting, and I always felt as if I had my finger on the very pulse of the world.

A few years ago, I took a job that offered normal hours, good pay and low stress. Unlike my old office, where I worked at a messy desk separated from a vast sea of other messy desks by tiny half-walls, my favorite co-worker and I recently got our Very Own Cozy Shared Office, which we decorated lovingly with the obligatory Cute Little Plants. The work itself was about as interesting and rewarding as pulling out my eyelashes one by one and sorting them according to length and mascara buildup, but hey, I got off at 5 and had a week and a half off during the winter holidays. And most importantly, got to eat and pee occasionally.

So, when my old boss looked me up a few weeks ago, I did what any normal person would do. I took the job in the slave ship old office.

I confess I am an adrenaline junkie, and I will readily admit that editing code and talking to the people down the hall for hours on end on unduly long Coke breaks is not for me. I need that rush you get from having regional competition to beat, seeing more work pop up on your screen at 9:40 p.m. than can be humanly done in the 20 minutes before deadline, and knowing that any mistake you let slide is going to prompt a bevy of phone calls from retired schoolteachers. The official reason, of course, is not that I'm a complete masochist, but rather that this job works better with my school schedule.

So here I go, back to the trenches. (Granted, I will now be making what I was at the hated tech job. Yay for progress!) If I should seem a little bit hungry or tired, or speak of taking a trip to the rest room as if it is a two-week Hawaiian vacation, it's just because I love Big Brother my job.

The fashionistas at Vogue may be doing it. Madpony Kristin may have done it. And now, my prime-time secret-agent hero Jennifer Garner is the latest to follow the trend.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to make that unkind cut. No siree, WYD Heather is never going to have bangs. Ever. Again.

Sure, it looks cute on models and Madponies. A little Audrey Hepburn-like fringe never hurt anyone, one is tempted to think. Really, it's almost just a shorter version of the "face-framing layers" my hairdresser Brenton is so fond of, one might reason.

However, I tried that bangs thing when I was a little kid, and it didn't work for me. The blunt fringe combined with my big chubby cheeks took years off my age. A good thing when you're 40; not such a good thing when you're 4. Just to make sure, I tried it again when I was 12. Unfortunately, I did not enlist the aid of a hair professional, or even my mother, and consequently bore a striking resemblance to the title character in "Joe Dirt" for approximately one day before my entire 'do was repurposed to hide the one-inch bangs.

At 13 and 14, I had bangs I thought looked good. All photographic evidence has been burned, of course, but let it suffice to say that when it comes to hair, bigger is not necessarily better. I soon saw the error of my ways and grew the horrific mess of product-caked, ratted perm into something sleek and vaguely presentable.

I laid off the bangs this time for a record eight years until 1999, when I got thin, eyebrow-grazing bangs that resulted in much ID-carding. Not only at nightclubs, but at the movies. PG-13 rated movies. And let me just say that when junior-high boys hit on you not because they're pervy, but because they think you're in junior high too, it's time to rethink the haircut.

So bangs people of the world, eat your hearts out. I am happy for you. I'm sure your bangs look great. But my dear friends at Cosmopolitan magazine, do not suggest that I, WYD Heather, get an oh-so-trendy fringe of my own. You say the "new bangs" are different. That they're not ugly like the "old bangs." Well excuse me if I don't buy that. I already fell for the bright-blue eyeshadow scam of '00 and I don't buy your pickup lines anymore. If bangs look bad on you, they look bad on you.

Just as the unfortunate witnesses to my ultimate fashion sin of leaving the house looking not unlike Mimi from "The Drew Carey Show" can tell you that I don't wear glittery azure lids well, I suspect that anyone who saw me during the '80s will agree that bangs are not my friend. Blunt or wispy, long or short, I'm not gonna do it. Even if it means I can't be a sexy superspy.

Nothing says "hardcore" like delivering your own baby. Unless it's this latest twist on Xtreme birthing -- performing your own Caesarian. I think this tops even the story about that hiker who sawed his arm off with a pocketknife. However, for sheer unnecessary self-mutilation, Amanda Fielding and her fellow trepanation fanatics still take the prize. I need that kind of therapy like I need a hole in the ... oh, never mind.

Paris in the springtime may be scenic, but if you'd rather enjoy wind and debris than wine and cheese, Oklahoma in springtime is something you just can't afford to miss. Visitors from the north are often incredulous when we tell them that not only do we have special sirens for tornadoes, but that they are tested on a weekly (or daily, depending on the city) basis.

Yes, twister season is upon us, and what better time to check out CNN's tornado special and test your tornado trivia or brush up on your knowledge of the Fujita scale? Or for a more lighthearted look at deadly storms, see how Oklahomans interpret meteorological terms.

Now, if you're from outside the Sooner State, and especially if you don't live in Tornado Alley, you might find twisters frightening. Not us! If this isn't a slice of Oklahoma, I don't know what is: One of my co-workers, originally from a town of 1,500 people in rural OK, broke his ankle during the devastating storms of May 3, 1999, when he ran outside his Midwest City home to move his Ford pickup to a safer spot and got carried 12 feet by the wind. Those are priorities for you!

Sure, people are warned to stay in a basement or storm shelter or find an interior closet or bathroom until the twister has passed, but it's hard to stay away from the majesty of the tornado. I hate to admit it, but I'm among those hardcore Oklahoma types who have been known to watch this awe-inspiring weather phenomenon from the porch (or in my case, an apartment balcony). I'm always poised to dart inside and curl up in the bathtub, of course, but ultimately logic and reason are no match for the primal lure of powerful vortices kicking up clouds of debris against the backdrop of a green sky.

Yes, springtime in Paris is something we're told we shouldn't miss. However, Oklahoma in springtime is quite unforgettable in its own way. Even after years of therapy.