One of my great regrets this year was having to cancel my planned trip to Comic-Con in San Diego. Having heard so much about the convention, Jill and I had planned to go, but setbacks and circumstances were just too much to overcome.

While watching the coverage of the event from home, I was struck by three news items that came out during the convention, one of them involving the event itself.

The first one was Russell T. Davies dispelling the rumors about the possible casting of Johnny Depp as The Doctor in a proposed big screen version of the show. [Editor's note: This news came out around the same time as Comic-Con, but Davies was not at the convention, and the remarks were given weeks ago, but were just recently published.] Frankly, that was a relief to this writer. While I have no doubt that Depp, if he got the part, would give us a good interpretation of The Doctor, I am of the school of thought that there is one man who has earned the right to play The Doctor one more time, in a big screen version. That person being David Tennant.

The second item was the reaction to the protesters from Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. In my column before Comic-Con, I advised to ignore the folks when they came to do their little protest, proclaiming things that no follower of Jesus who actually reads his teachings believes. However, when I saw Michael's video of the counter-protest and, I will confess, I absolutely loved it. My hat is off to all of those who sent Fred Phelps and his followers the clear and present message that they were not only not welcome, but dead wrong in their statements and did so very well.

The third item is very troubling to me, as it should be to anyone who attends conventions. Of course, I'm talking about the stabbing that took place on Saturday in Hall H. Stabbing a person over a seat in a convention? I'm writing this 24 hours removed from the reports and I'm still in shock over such a senseless act.

I hope this is simply a very isolated act and not the forerunner of more trouble in the future.

Then again, after this incident, I hope people now realize why I'm so concerned with the laser I wrote about a while back. I shudder what could have happened if the individual in question had been packing one of those.

Think about it.