Bring Your Glacier in Every 100 Years for a Tune-Up

I wish. Glaciers across the world are disappearing, and this article has the lowdown on some Alaskan glaciers. Before and after pictures provide stunning visual evidence for how much our world has changed already and hint at the transformation to come.

New York Times Profiles Alexander Shulgin

Alexander Shulgin, father of MDMA, psychochemical explorer, and all-around interesting dude, is being profiled in the New York Times. Read it, grok it, know it's good.

Get Out Your Hot Dogs

Rejoice in the power of the mighty barbecue!! Jesus provides eternal mound of burning poo for his loyal following in Nebraska! Grok the picture in this article and know in the depths of your sinning soul that those are not mountains, but the manure God gives to his flock. What was I babbling about factory farms yesterday? I take it back. Now go eat meat.

Bush EPA Gives Factory Farms a Free Ride

So here's yet another piece of evidence that, under Bush, EPA stands for "Encouraging Pollution Association." Factory farms, which stink up the Midwest (formerly a very sweet-smelling region) with their mounds of animal shit, are going to be exempted from the Clean Air Act for two years if they provide data about their emissions. Wow, good idea. Especially since the Clean Air Act already requires polluters to provide data about their emissions. Methane, one of the main emissions of these farms, is one of the worst greenhouse gases, so I'm sure this won't kill us or anything.

Ahh, yet another good reason not to eat meat. (And no, saving poor animals is not a good reason. We're omnivores, life feeds on life, and meat is occasionally delicious.) These farms are a direct result of our overconsumption of meat, and exist solely to keep the price of meat low enough and the supply plentiful enough so that the moo people can continue to buy McHeartAttacks for less than $5. There are so many problems with factory farms, I don't even know where to start. They pollute badly, not just with methane and other air emissions but the shit seeps into groundwater. Plus it's f-ing cruel to the animals. They're like concentration camps for pigs. (And just because I think it's OK to eat meat doesn't mean I think it's OK to mistreat animals. Our ancestors paid respect to the animals they killed, and we should, too, damnit. Eat free-range, people.)

If You Drive an SUV...

Can't you think of a better way to feel superior than scooting around in a mini-tank? FYI: Your kids are dead meat no matter how big your Bronco is, fool. But never fear, ye sinner: Jesus will forgive you for your ego trip. A new service for environmentally conscious drivers lets you buy CO2 remediation for your carbon-belching frankenwagon, paying in based on how much your car emits, with the money going toward programs to reduce CO2 emissions elsewhere. It's like a plenary indulgence, but it actually does some good and doesn't just pay for gold-plated pope hats.

We Are Fast Becoming Fast Food

Super-size me, baby. No, I'm not fat, but my country is. My country is also receiving the most nominations for this year's Cheap Styrofoam Containersies Awards. What do I mean by this? Well, it has dozens of subtle interpretations, I assure you, but the only one you need to remember is that GWB is making us a disposable country. "You're either with us or against us," Cowboy George said one night on the range. The world was listening, and they've been giving us their answer. Not in so many words, but in the increasing number of meetings, summits, trade blocs, and military alliances the U.S. is not being invited to. Check out this sobering article in the Financial Times for an analysis of our many recent fuckups. We thought we were the coolest kid in school, but we forgot the lessons of the many movies of the 80s, which taught us again and again that overbearing, too-handsome jocks always lose in the end to the nerds when their mundane malignancy is exposed to the rest of the school and their hot girlfriends dump them for a little geek action. (Who would our hot girlfriend be, internationally speaking? I'd say England, but they're more like our sidekick. Maybe Japan?)

The author of this awesome and sobering article (the one I linked to, fool--I'm the author of this awesome and sobering article) is Michael Lind, whom the rumor mill pegs as a former neocon turned rational. Amen, brother Lind. Welcome to the light.

Judge Not Thyself, for Thou Art Bad at Judging

I just read an interesting article on the APA's Web site about how people regularly fail to judge themselves and their abilities accurately. This is heavily influenced by culture, as in Western cultures it is more common to believe we really are great at certain things without actually having any evidence to back up these beliefs, whereas in East Asian cultures the tendency is to believe one is not adequately skilled (even if one excels at a skill), with the focus then being placed on self-improvement. I'm sure this is a generalization, but it is still interesting to learn about the ways we routinely deceive ourselves about our skills.

Incredibly Stupid

So you may have heard about some kind of "controversy" over Spongebob Squarepants and homosexuality. If you haven't, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson made a bunch of remarks at an inaugural dinner last week about poor Spongebob promoting homosexuality in a new video being sent to schools. It's totally ridiculous, and MSNBC columnist Keith Olbermann has a great article about the whole thing. The page also links to a feed of the totally innocuous video that started it all.

As Olbermann points out, there is NOTHING in this video that is even remotely sexual, let alone homosexual. The message of the video is nothing more than tolerating difference, which is the real problem these jerks have with it. They think there is only one right way to do everything--their way--and use their holier-than-thou attitude to damn anyone or anything that doesn't agree with them, or *gasp* suggests that maybe it's OK to be different than they are.

HAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh... Jesus.... Play this game. It's worth clicking the link for the intro alone, though the game is fun, too.

I Steal

Organized shoplifters calling themselves yomango are spreading their brand/meme through Spanish-speaking countries and, maybe, the whole world. Yo mango, by the way, means "I steal."

Free (Sort of) iTunes Music

Apple and Pepsi are launching a promo, wherein 1 in 3 marked bottles wins you a free download from iTunes. (That's about the only way I'd download something from crapTunes. I love iPod, and iTunes is a great digital jukebox, but up theirs if they want me to PAY for a track and then tell me how I can use it. If I pay for it, it's mine.) To find out how to ensure you get a free download with every bottle of sugary sludge you buy, look here.

Last Inauguration Post, I Promise

Since Bush and math were my two favorite subjects in school (not counting cheese), I now provide you, humble reader, with a few inauguration statistics.

Bush Inauguration Donors

Here is a list of donors to the Bush 2005 inauguration. Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Oh, don't buy things from these people or hmm... What is it that happens? Oh yeah, internal bleeding.

Speaking of el Bush

Some guy took a snapshot of Jenna Bush giving a hard-rock Satan sign at the inauguration yesterday and turned it into a t-shirt on Cafepress. I wouldn't buy one, but it's pretty funny.

(If I'm being honest with myself, I didn't actually laugh when I saw this shirt. I just thought "ha, that's funny" and decided to put it on my blog.)

Also, all the bands and musical acts who performed at the inauguration suck, without exception. Same thing goes for any inauguration, really, but especially this one. And David Spade sucks. He just isn't funny. But you already knew that, right?

Bush in Numbers

There's a great post on another blog with some stats about Bush's first four years in le Maison Blanc. They're skewed toward the economic end of things (I'd really like to see some numbers on the environment, such as air pollution indexes, acres of federal land opened to logging and drilling, and so on), but this is almost as good. It's not super dramatic, but the figures range from mild to major decline, not to mention the body count in Iraq. Thanks for voting for Bush again, Colorado! (OK, not that it would've made a huge difference, but...)

Diploma Mills and Distance Education

Distance ed is fine if your only goal is to learn for the sake of learning, but in no way does it pass for the rigorous training required for work in any professional or academic discipline. The hoops you jump through in academia ensure that initiates have a firm enough knowledge to translate their knowledge into real-world situations. Diploma mills, at best, teach only a basic grasp of theory and cannot teach the kind of mastery one needs a teacher-student interaction to ensure. At their worst, as in this case of fraud in the federal government, they issue fake diplomas from fake schools.

So how do "properly" educated people fail to notice that phony degree holders don't actually know what they claim? In this case, people did notice something was wrong, but it took a while. Part of it, I think, is that distance-ed institutions have risen very quietly in only the last 20 years or so. They take pains to distance themselves from traditional academia, and I think academics mistakenly assume that everyone knows ITT, for instance, is not the same as MIT, or that the University of Phoenix is not a real school, at least not in the same way the University of Arizona is.

But in the real world, people often don't notice the different. Part of it is that diploma mills sound like real schools, and part of it is that we, as a culture, are trained to be impressed by the letters "BA," "MA," and "PhD," well before we look at how those letters made their way to the end of someone's name. Part of it is that people just aren't getting good educations, even at real universities, and however many hoops they jumped through, many people would be hard-pressed to demonstrate much useful knowledge they have retained from their college educations. In an environment like this, it's much easier for holders of fake diplomas to bluff their way into positions they are really unqualified for. However, I maintain that a university education is far superior to an education, if any, that one receives through distance learning.

So should these kinds of schools be outlawed? I'm not sure. I think they are exposing a flaw in modern universities, which in their own way have become diploma mills, focusing more on numbers and statistics than on giving their students the best education they possibly can. Part of this is due to the job market, as the kinds of nontechnical jobs that once provided a solid middle-class lifestyle without requiring a college degree are disappearing (or moving to the Third World). This means people who might otherwise have been perfectly happy in these jobs are being forced to choose between a drastically reduced standard of living or a college degree. However, their hearts aren't truly interested in further education, just the attendant keg parties and the piece of paper that says they've done it. Part of it is due to funding cuts, forcing universities to sell themselves more, trying to attract as many paying students as possible both for their tuition and the greater levels of funds they'll receive from the state. (This of course doesn't apply to private institutions, but they have always been forced to market themselves, and even at world-reknowned institutions have been forced to deal with poor-quality students as a result of market forces.) But when the quality of the student is degraded, the quality of education must also degrade to account for the lower expectations and abilities of those who have no real desire to be in college in the first place.

Does this mean no one learns anything in college? Far from it. The opportunity for real education is still there, and many people pursue it. But it also means modern universities, especially state schools, have become more like diploma mills than I think they'd care to admit. Universities at present are a bridge between the ideals of a liberal education fostered by the schools of the past and the modern need for technical training even the relatively uninterested now have. Is the solution to separate these two camps, those who thirst for knowledge vs. those who want knowledge simply for a job, into two types of institutions? I don't know. At least in the modern university, the opportunity exists for students to move from one camp to the other. Separate is not necessarily equal. But I still think diploma mills point to the problems modern universities, public and private, have with the quality of their education and highlight the need for a solution.

Flogging Wes

So I went out this weekend to see The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I was intensely curious about, given Wes Anderson's previous films and the very mixed reviews the film has received from practically every quarter. After seeing it, I can understand why they were mixed. Let me just preface this by saying I enjoyed the film immensely, and then follow with a little criticism.

I enjoyed the film immensely.

But it was very unfocused. I wasn't sure, I'm still not sure, what Anderson was trying to say. I'm not sure he knew, either. It was such a mixture of humorous absurdity, tragic absurdity, and over-the-top whimsy that I saw more underlying noise than signal. It felt very personal because of this, as if he were translating both his fascinations and frustrations with life quite directly, more directly than previously, into the film, relatively unfiltered by a unifying structure. That is, it was much more self-indulgent than his previous movies.

What is the Wes Anderson universe? A children's book inhabited by adult characters OR children's-book adults living in an all-too-real world. Probably the former, given the goofiness of the pseudoworld Anderson has his characters romping through. Cate Blanchett's reporter character, 5 months pregnant in the film, says toward the end that, in 12 years, her child will be 11 and a half. "That was my favorite age," Steve Zissou replies. Apparently it's Anderson's, too, a time when his budding, precocious intellect found much fascinating but had not yet learned the sadness that infuses so much of his work.

Speaking of which... What the hell is with Steve Zissou? Emblematic of Anderson's character problems in this movie, Zissou's character is curiously one-dimensional. He spends most of the film wallowing in an antisocial depression whose superficial causes/manifestations are made clear but whose backhistory is never sufficiently explored. This prevents the the audience from developing any kind of understanding of or sympathy toward Zissou, even though one might normally be drawn toward his underdog status. Having said that, Murray does a good job with what he has to work with, throwing enough humor into his character to keep him from being a complete wet noodle.

At this point, I'd like to mention an interesting observation my fiancee made about Zissou and his relationship to Ned. She saw in their dynamic a reenactment of the Christ story, from a decidedly cynical perspective. Ned, who may or may not be the real son of Zissou, nonetheless follows his remote, unloving "father" on his mad quest, sacrificing first his money and ultimately his life for an ideal dad who doesn't actually exist. Christ, from the perspective of a cynical realist who nonetheless thinks there might be something to this God thing, may or may not have been the "real" son of God. God, if we look at the Old Testament, wasn't always the nicest dude. He was jealous, short-tempered, and frequently nastier to his followers than he was to their enemies. Nonetheless, in the name of universal lovingkindness, Christ embraced the concept of Yahweh, transforming him into a loving, forgiving God. He ultimately paid for it with his life. Both Zissou and God, it might be said, were softened by this unwarranted sacrifice. (Ok, please don't comment about all the nasty things Christians have said and done in the name of God. I'm well aware. It's the concept of God I'm talking about, people!)

Anyway, weak characterization is a problem with practically all the characters in the movie. Unlike previous Anderson films, they are not very remarkable in themselves, one-trick ponies who are amusing enough onscreen, but who fail to linger in the imagination the way practically all the characters from Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums did.

But again, in spite of all this criticism, the movie clicked for me. I liked it. I thought it was funny, I felt bad during the parts I was supposed to feel bad in, and I kept, I think, a head for the absurdity, unlike some of my fellow moviegoers, who stopped laughing as much as the film went on. Maybe they were bored, or maybe they were distracted by the admittedly heavy dose of melancholy running through the movie, or maybe I'm just insensitive. I don't know. Maybe you just have to have that precocious 11.5-year-old inside you still, waiting to be both fascinated and appalled by the adult world, to really enjoy this movie. But whatever structural flaws the film had, the feeling I have about it is still positive, and I would gladly watch it again to see whether my first impressions about the structural stuff are borne out on repeated viewings.

India Fighting Future Tsunamis... With Trees

Trees, long known by the sannyasin of India to make ideal seat covers, also have wave-fighting properties. Good for India for thinking of an environmentally sound tsunami countermeasure. One half imagines that if the same thing had happened in, say, Oregon, the response would be a big concrete wall or something equally dumb. Of course, trees are cheap, and that's why they're doing it, but it lends credence to the idea that some environmental innovations may be more likely to come from the Third World, since First-World solutions are often too expensive for them.

Iceland or Hydrogenland?

Iceland is planning on switching to a 100% hydrogen economy by 2050! Good for the ex-Vikings. Now what about the rest of us? Link

Mac Mini

Check out the new Mac Mini. This is what's known in technical circles as a "rad computer." It's the kind of machine that tempts honest men to steal. I can imagine brave but foolish people trekking across dangerous parts of the globe in search of computers like this. So naturally I'm considering buying one, though who knows when I'll be able to afford it. I hear the siren song of credit calling my name. Resist! Resist!

Flaming Lincoln, Part 2

So apparently C.A. Tripp, the late sex researcher whose recently published biography of Abe Lincoln alleges that Lincoln was a homosexual, may not have been as meticulously researched as it could've been. Or so says Philip Nobile, once co-author of said book with Tripp, in an article he published in the Weekly Standard. (Note that the Weekly Standard is a right-wing journal, so I'm sure they have no bias about homosexuality, especially regarding a Republican icon.) Basically, he claims that Tripp was setting out to prove something he already believed, and like any fanatic he made the evidence fit his beliefs. This so upset Mr. Nobile that he refused to finish working on the book with Tripp. Nobile is also upset that the finished book apparently contains material he wrote and Tripp continued to use, without his permission, after their partnership ended. Does this mean Lincoln was not gay? Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie pop, the world may never know. Although "tootsie" is kind of a fruity word, so maybe Lincoln was gay after all. See, I just proved it. Where's my honorary doctorate?

Great Books? Please!

Jonathan Rose has an awesome article in the City Journal about the importance of classic authors and art to the working classes. Most of his examples are from the late 19th and early 20th centuries in England and America, but his accounts of the joy and inspiration under- and uneducated people derive from classical literature, philosophy, and music blew a hole in my notions of who and what this stuff is about. It's not elitist, it's not irrelevant, and it's something that can apply to anyone at any time. That's why these things are considered classics.

Certainly we should examine the process whereby an author or work is declared to be a classic, something that was dominated for far too long by old, white men. But these books really are great, and by having a notion of certain works being considered classics circulating, it provides a well-demarcated path for self-educating readers to follow and branch away from at will.

The article goes into a lot of detail I don't want to recap here, but if you're at all interested in literature, it's definitely worth a read.

Shamefully Wasting Time

My girlfriend and I, who have a soft, squishy spots for medeival epics, decided this weekend that we wanted to see the Jerry Bruckheimer diuretic masterpiece King Arthur. So we rented it--from an independent video store! Down with the man!

Where was I? Going into the movie, we thought it would be bad, but perhaps at least mindlessly entertaining. Instead, it made lots of my internal organs, which usually I can't even feel, sear with pain. Including my eyes, though I can feel those. Oh my God, where do I begin?

1. Do not rent this movie. Ever. For any reason. Even if you get it for free, it is not worth the 2 hours you will waste watching it.

2. The acting is awful, over-the-top, and melodramatic.

3. This has nothing to do with history. It is slightly more realistic than the traditional Arthurian romances, but the nod to realism is totally voided by the GAPING PLOT HOLES.

4. They obviously paid their historical consultants about $7 an hour. Otherwise they would've known that chain mail, plate mail, crossbows, and trebuchets had not been invented by the 5th century.

5. I can't even go on. It is too shitty. Here is a review of the movie written by a houseplant we have sitting on our coffee table, an African violet:

I need water to survive. My roots burrow deep into moist, rich soil, pulling nutrients for me to survive. Light ignites fires in my leaves, burning CO2 into delicious food for me. I pull water and minerals from soil, energy from light, I grow more leaves toward the light, plump with water, racing with cholorphyll. More leaves, more light, more water, more soil. I need water, it is drying. There is not enough water. Now there is too much water. It is too moist. The water dries. I draw water from the soil. I live!

This review is ten times as interesting as the movie itself. If you ever feel like watching Jerry Crapheimer's King Arthur, read this review instead for two hours, over and over, and you will be suitably entertained.

A Scanner Darkly

Philip K Dick is/was an electric python who hid in a dark, dark cage for at least 20 years, burning the mice of lesser writers. Some do not believe in his existence, but the half-eaten, lightning-seared mouse remains littering the streets of the Bay Area to this day are testament to his achievement. What was I talking about? Three amzingly awesome screenshots on Ain't It Cool News from the upcoming film version of A Scanner Darkly being directed by Richard Linklater.

The UFOs Are Winning

Richard Gere hopes the Palestinian election will go smoothly. He is so passionate about Palestinian elections, he created a moving commerical that was broadcast, in English, in Gaza and the West Bank recently. Palestinians love the commercial so much, I believe they are now going to elect Gere their leader. A Palestinian man in the Yahoo! article expressed his enthusiasm for Gere: "I don't even know who the candidates are other than Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), let alone this Gere," Gaza soap factory worker Manar an-Najar told Reuters Wednesday. "We don't need the Americans' intervention. We know who to elect. Not like them -- they elected a moron."

Theodicy

This article from Rob Rosenbaum, a religious columnist for the New York Observer outlines the current debate in religious circles over the question of God's role in the tsunami tragedy.

As with any question of theodicy (the attempt to reconcile the notion of an all-powerful, all-good God who intervenes in the world with the unquestionable existence of evil), the argument basically goes like this:

If God is all-powerful, ever-loving, and willing to intervene in the world, why does he allow bad things to happen, especially to good people? This question has been approached in several ways (such as Job, where the answer is basically that God is inscrutable), but it is a terribly difficult question to address. Of course there are pat answers: "God is unknowable," "these people are better off in heaven," "God doesn't exist, so the whole thing is irrelevant," "God is punishing mankind for their sins," and so on. But the point has not been addressed: God made the mess, so God owns the mess. Even if we don't make God responsible for the mess (Deism), God is still the one who fubared the world.

Anyway, read Rosenbaum because I don't feel like going over this stuff in detail. I didn't like, though, the fact that his article lacked a real conclusion. His only real point was that 1) there are no good, easy answers to the question of theodicy, 2) the need so many people have to exonerate their conception of God from connection with the any form of evil belies their own doubt and incomprehension, 3) attempting to resolve the question of evil in the world is pointless. Or so it seemed to me.

In my opinion, this dilemma arises from a limited conception of deity. By conceiving of God basically as a super-parent, we are continuously confronted with the limitations of our own understanding. Why isn't our super-parent taking care of us?! we wail every time something bad happens.

But why do we experience such suffering? Satan? The Four Noble Truths? No good without evil? Can there be universe without deity? I mean, really, what kind of fucked up, Descartian worldview do we have that compares the universe to a watch? We need a new myth, really a very old myth (read the Upanishads), a biological myth for a biotech age: You, me, and everything are all manifestations of god's being. The universe isn't a machine, it's an organism. The tsunami, in a sense, was God scratching himself. This is a perspective that says "this individual life is not destroyed, but instead becomes another part of God," where such micro-level considerations as the individual life are less theologically problematic.

Of course, the need to discount the individual ego as the priviledged perspective arises, which the Hindus realized long ago. If one child is abused, does that child's suffering count for naught? The child is Brahman, we might say, and what it perceives is illusion related to its misconception that it is an individual, whereas it truly is all things. But I know this metaphor isn't complete. It might be partially valid, but it seems too callous. I would like to think that the experiences of individuals are of some account, but maybe this is wishful thinking.

Another minor gripe about this article: Rosenbaum quotes another author, who quotes the Dalai Lama. Asked about the suffering of a parent who has lost a child, the Lama replies that when you lose a child, you are constantly thinking of the child in your imagination. Rosenbaum thinks this means the parent is comforted by the child's memory, but I think he means something much more practical but cold. When you lose a child, that child is no more. It has no reality. The child exists only in your imagination, and your suffering is tied to what is essentially a phatasm, a figment of your imagination. If you recognize the nonexistence of the cause of your suffering, you can be freed from it. If this is what he meant, I can see why he might be ambiguous about how he says it. This is not the kind of thing you want to tell a grieving parent, however true it might be. If it's not what he meant, well, what a callous boy am I!

Lincoln, Kinsey, and the Violets of May

Gore Vidal has reviewed C.A. Tripp's new book on Abe Lincoln. I found the review fascinating, though I probably wouldn't want to read the book-length treatment of the subject. I've never been particularly interested in this topic, but it was intriguing to learn there's considerable evidence that Lincoln was homosexual, or at least bisexual. This is a conclusion that's been drawn before (Carl Sandburg, according to Vidal, noted Lincoln had a "lavendar streak" and a fondness for the "violets of May"), but apparently never in such detail or with such overwhelming evidence.

Tripp, one of Kinsey's former researchers, draws from Kinsey's material the fact that men who go through puberty early are less likely to have hang-ups about sex (and life in general) and, possibly because of this, are more likely to have homosexual experiences than late-bloomers. It is apparently fairly well-documented that Lincoln went through a massive growth spurt, evidence of puberty, around the age of nine. I found this fact intriguing. I'm thinking now about reading Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (and his follow-up, the Human Female) if it contains such gems as this.

Winter Driving Tips

It's snowing like mad here today (OK, not like mad, but it's coming down pretty thick), and I was thinking on the way to work of a few tips I could pass on to anyone who was interested, a few things you should definitely not do while driving in the snow.

1. Look at your new shoes to see if the snow melting on them is messing up the leather.
2. Admire the pretty pattern the melting snow on your rear windshield makes as it refreezes at the bottom.
3. Flip through your CD book trying to find the perfect music for the moment.
4. Daydream about playing blisteringly heavy rock to all the hippies at Woodstock and really blowing their minds.
5. Driving 20 miles per hour below the speed limit with a line of cars behind you when you're only a couple of miles away from the office, you jackass!

I hope these tips help you as much as they didn't help me.

US Tsunami Aid = 42.27 Hours in Iraq

I just saw this on Boing Boing. (I know, I need to stop reposting stuff from there.) Anyway, this was too good to pass up. This dude, Frank Boosman posted a very revealing calculation on his blog this morning. In short, the amount of aid the U.S. government has promised to tsunami victims in Southeast Asia is equal to approximately 42.27 hours worth of military expenditures in Iraq. Link.

So Tired...

I woke up last night about 2:30am and couldn't get back to sleep. Usually I sleep pretty well, but once in a great while this happens to me. With me, it has a lot to do with foreknowledge, the ability to plan and think ahead. By thinking about and ultimately fixating on the knowledge that I have to get up at a certain hour and knowing how tired I will be if I don't sleep, I catch myself in an unenviable feedback loop, where the longer I lie awake, unable to sleep, the more nervous I get, thus imparing my ability to sleep.

Eventually I did go to sleep, but it was only a series of micronaps. I drifted off several times only to snap awake after an unknown but depressingly short amount of time.

I tell you this, my humble reader, because I am still caught in this neurotic cycle, unable to do much other than fixate on my own weariness. I shall undoubtedly break out of this spiral tonight, when I'll be too tired to do anything but sleep, but until then...

My Top 7 CDs of 2004

This will probably change because I'll think of new CDs and configurations, and also because I still haven't acquired all the CDs from 2004 I'm interested in. But here, in no particular order:

1. The Arcade Fire - Funeral
2. DeVotchKa - How It Ends
3. Wilco - A Ghost Is Born
4. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Shake the Sheets
5. Joseph Arthur - Our Shadows Will Remain
6. M83 - Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts
7. Ray Lamontagne - Trouble

I'm also really interested in Franz Ferdinand, The Futureheads, Snow Patrol, Death from Above 1979, Flunk, and a few others I can't think of off the top of my head. They didn't make my list because I haven't heard those CDs much. If I had money or, ahem, I would probably have them already. Relative poverty has kept my stereo (relatively) empty this season.

Curry Fights Alzheimer's

Curry fights Alzheimer's! Quite well, too. Better than commercial Alzheimer's drugs. This may be one reason this isn't more widely known because this is not the first study to reveal the plaque-zapping powers of India's spicy foods. I remember reading several years ago in Discover about a similar study. Why isn't this more widely reported? More people should take their parents (and themselves) out for Indian food, especially if they have a family history of Alzheimer's. Plus Indian food is extremely delicious, so delicious it can probably give you psychic powers if you eat a lot of it.

SF Blog

Just found a cool Canadian SF Website and blog called The Website at the End of the Universe. Check out their free 2005 sci-fi calendar.