Disks in Rotation:
DVD • Silence of the Lambs
CD-ROM • WinXP
CD Player
• Marilyn Manson - Portrait of an American Family
• Mad Season -  Above
• System of a Down - Toxicity
• Metallica - Garage Inc.
• Metallica - The Black Album

Books Lying Open
• The Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were, Michael Page & Robert Ingpen

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Too much free time.

When I Grow Up:
• Disconnected phones will be a cause for concern.

Curse of the Day:
• May your bowels refuse to cooperate.

Daily Update
Football today. Well, not for me in person, since I'm working at the last Padres home game of the year, and will miss most of the televised f'ball because of that.  I'm sort of getting interested in the Chargers this year, despite myself.  They are 2-0 to start, and I can guarantee you that if they were 0-2 I'd be paying them zero attention. If they were 0-2 it would be pretty funny, since they've played probably two of the worst three teams in the league so far.  That's a good way to get off to a hot start, and they certainly have, boasting a two game score differential of 58 to 9, and having by far the best defensive stats in the league.

My impression is that both of those are largely flukes, brought about by the quality of teams they've played thus far. And I think both will change this week.  They're playing Phoenix, who aren't any good, and will be lucky to go 6-10 this year, but they have a good quarterback and will at least put up some yardage.  I think San Diego will win, providing they don't totally self-destruct with fumbles and other stupid mistakes (like letting kick returns go for TDs, which they're looking real likely to do this year thus far) and they could get ahead early and rack up another blow out.  Or they could fail on pass defense and hobble themselves with an overly-conservative offense, and lose badly.  Which is what makes predicting the outcome of sporting events such a difficult thing to do.  Nevertheless, I'll say Chargers,  27 - 13.

I'd like to point out that I advocated sterilization, imprisonment, and kidnapping as appropriate measures to combat the scourge of devoutly-religious people in modern society.  Number of outraged emails: zero.  What the hell do I have to do to get some hate mail around here?  Everyone go tell their Southern Baptist aunt to read this site, or something.  I want emails like this.  *pouts in heretical fashion*

News here, blogging-style babble below.

• Interesting article about the conduct of air marshals.

"That's when they started hollering," Dorothy Rajcoomar said of the marshals. One of them rushed to the divider between the first-class and coach sections and leveled his pistol at the coach-class passengers.

"He took control as if he was a terrorist himself," said Bob Rajcoomar, who was then sitting in a first-class aisle seat directly in front of the marshal. "He says, 'Nobody move, nobody look down the aisle, nobody take pictures or you will go to jail, nobody do anything.' He basically hijacked everybody."

One passenger, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge James Lineberger, said marshals "were yelling at passengers to keep their heads and hands out of the aisle... . I couldn't believe they would do such a thing."

Join me in feeling safer already.

• Good news on the Chris Cornell/Rage Against the Machine project.  It's back on, they have a new name, Audioslave, new management, and are planning on releasing their album November 19th. I am quite curious to hear what they sound like.  Some of the Rage songs were pretty good, but I always thought the backup music was far better than the singing.  Rap never blends well with real music; all you hear is the yelling.  Rap is good on top of samples or repeated beats, just as a sonic background to the vocal(s).  With real music it's a distraction.

And of course Chris Cornell is one of the best singers in rock music today, holding long notes effortlessly.  A great contrast to how Zack de la Rocha was in Rage. I'd be interested in hearing existing Rage songs done by Cornell, actually.  Just to hear what a huge difference it would be singing rather than scream/rapping.  I imagine it would take attending a concert to hear that though, which pretty well rules me out.

• Another article about the guys who attacked the first base coach in Chicago has more details.  The father is the one in trouble; the son is only 15 so seems likely to get off with just some juvenile detention.  Dad is facing a possible 3-5 year sentence if convicted.  His real mistake seems to have been calling his sister long before he ran out there, and telling her to watch him on the news that night.  He also handed his wallet and other valuables to one of his kids (not the Eminem-looking one who ran out with him) before the attack.  Those things together ruin any chance he had of getting off on the "I was drunk and lost my temper." defense, used after every bar fight in the history of mankind.  Premeditated crimes are always punished more harshly than spur of the moment stupidity.

I think that most everyone is going to recognize the necessity of making an example of this guy.  He needs to be grossly overpunished, sentenced to the maximum possible, fined, etc.  His head on a pike must serve as an example to others who might crave a moment in the spotlight while lacking the common sense to seek it in a more acceptable fashion.

The daily prospectus on BP is about the same thing.  Sort of.  Read the first couple of paragraphs at least, they set up a nice joke.

• The shark Messiah is born!  Well, hatched.  The article tells about eggs laid by a female shark that have hatched.  This isn't a big shock, other than for the fact that the female in question has never been in contact with any male sharks in her entire life.  Hence the "Jesus shark" comment.

It sounds like this type of shark has sex, gets fertilized eggs, and then lays them on the sea floor.  Sort of a combination between live birth, and the "drop eggs, hose with sperm" technique that most fish use. (Watch a nature show on salmon runs sometime, they live for underwater sperm cams.)

The article posits various explanations.

The mother could have both male and female reproductive characteristics and able to self-fertilize its eggs. But Sweet said this would be "an even more unusual occurrence."

The most likely scenario -- though thought to be very rare -- is that the shark somehow stimulated the eggs without sperm. This complex process, known as parthenogenesis, is the ability of unfertilized eggs to develop into embryos without sperm. It is very common in snails and water fleas, but becomes more unusual in higher vertebrates.

"It's kind of rare, but how much do we really know about the reproductive habits of bamboo sharks?" Sweet said. "It may be happening out in nature all the time, and we don't know it."

My thought was that perhaps the water in the aquarium is circulated between tanks, and they have male sharks in another area.  I don't suppose the odds are very good that some drop of sperm from one tank floated along and happened to hit the eggs in the other tank, but it's not much worse than their theories.

Bonus facts: The god or other famous character being spawned by a virgin birth is an ancient archetype in religions/myths.  Jesus was far from the first to allegedly originate in that fashion; that Biblical story was apparently adapted from pre-existing tales from other cultures, like most of the rest of the "historical" stuff in the Old and New Testaments.

Either that or all of the older myths from other cultures inspired Yahweh to cause those things to actually happen, so he could then inspire later scribes to write about them as facts.  What do you think?

itching about work, talking about pets.  Could this get any more like some guy's home page, or what?

Work is nearly done. Today (Sunday) is the last baseball game of the season in San Diego, barring 2/3 of the other teams in the National League dying in fiery bus crashes and being forced to forfeit their playoff spots.  Possible, but I wouldn't exactly start printing up the Milwaukee vs. San Diego NLCS tickets yet.

A week or two or three or six ago, I'd have thought I would be bubbling with glee at the imminent arrival of almost limitless free time.  Perhaps I will be in a few days, and I'm just too tired from working so many days in a row to appreciate it now, but I'm not happy, as I sit here and type.

Reality is creeping in.  Reality in the form of no income, and no prospects for good income from short hours of work.  Last Fri-Sat-Sun I made over $650 in about 13 hours of work.  If I got a job making $10 an hour I'd have to work 65 hours to make that over the winter. Full time for a week and a half.

I don't really care about money on the micro-scale I'm dealing with now.  I want to have millions of dollars so I can have great cars, mansion, take vacations, make movies, etc.  Short of that I'd like to have say $100k a year, to afford a nice place to live and lots of DVDs and other useless impulse purchases.  Short of that, I really don't care. I could double my income and it would make almost no difference in my life.  I'd just save more, since I don't really spend anything now.  I just do without, never buy clothing, weigh prices on every food purchase, buy about a DVD or CD a month, get all my decent toys for birthday or Xmas, etc.  The things I'd like to have require so much more money than I possess that it's not like I can save towards them now, or obtain some limited portion of them.

My car is okay, I like to drive fast, but I can't afford a ticket, and in any event, nothing short of a Ferrari-type vehicle will ever really satisfy me.  Scraping together enough to get something like a used Acura would just be a painful reminder of how my life is but a pathetic imitation of what I truly desire.

In other words, I don't make the effort to improve my life financially in any small ways, since that won't get me anywhere near what I really want.  My journey of a thousand miles is going to begin with a private jet, apparently.  Either that or running in place.

It occurs to me that I have a nearly identical approach to dating.  I want Nicole Kidman, or some woman similar in supermodel beauty.  She would ideally be brilliant, witty, rich, independent, self-sufficient, childless, sterile, an orphan, and able to suck a billiard ball through 10 meters of garden hose.  Short of that, I'll just not make any effort to ever meet a woman or date again, and be happier alone.

I'm fully aware that neither of these attitudes are at all realistic approaches to life.

Anyway, I was speaking about work ending, before I wandered off on that tangent.  After today's game (which I need to arrive at work for in less than 5 hours, so I really should stop typing here and go to sleep) I'm off until next Saturday/Sunday, for a couple of football games.  After that, however, I'm off for two weeks, which is when it really begins to sink in that I'm not working.

The challenge will be, as always, to stay focused.  It's so easy to say, "I've got weeks off and months of little work! There's plenty of time to write that novel/learn that ASP/stop playing those mindless video games." while never actually doing any of the planned things. I've gotten off to a good start on this, by doing absolutely nothing at all productive the last 3 or 4 days, other than blogging about this or that right here.  I was supposed to be finishing the Band Names page, and doing some updates on the D2 site, now that I have the #1 computer working again.  I did at least put both machines back together and under the desk, (It doesn't look like this anymore.) so I have plenty of space to fill with stacks of magazines and empty tumblers and glass jars of salty snacks.  Since my work is 90% in my head, 9% on other files on my computer, and 1% on paper or other things I could put on my desk, having a clear work space isn't a real big deal to me.  A fact which is obvious by looking at my desk, usually.

I think I will write up some goals and tape them to the computer; listing things I must get done by a given day, or just things I need to do each day.  I can so easily get to surfing and reading various sites, play a short strategy game every now and then, surf news and write some comments up for posting here, etc.  After a bit of that I'll check the time and wonder where the last 5 hours went.  Which pretty much describes my last 3 nights, come to think of it.

But that will all change starting Monday!

On a different subject, I've been playing with the new rats more, and they're getting to be fun.  Babies are fun, but sort of like having a giant ant farm.  Giant ants, not normal ants in a giant farm, if you see the difference.

Baby rats are cute and they scamper and eat and you can pick them up, but they are so tiny your fingers are trees and your hand is like a freight elevator to them. They know you are something, as opposed to being an inanimate object, and they'll sniff and climb into your hand, but just as a ladder.  They don't have a conception of your size, with your scale so much larger than theirs.  Plus you can't really do anything with them other than set them somewhere and watch them scoot.

Adult rats aren't a great deal more interactive, but they do know the big hand is part of the same thing as the big foot, and the shoulder they sit on, and that the hand likes to pick them up and is okay to let pick them up.  The babies don't know that much at this point, but they are growing rapidly and are cool being out in the open now.  They'll run right across the middle of the floor, and climb up on me when I'm sitting down and stretching, and you can play with them a bit.

Adults get feisty at times and will bite and maul you, in their playful not-very-sharp-claws style.  The best way to get them riled up is to rub them the wrong way, especially their heads. You just lightly brush them from the shoulders off the end of their snout, and if they are game they'll leap back a step, sort of snort, and then leap at your hand, trying to wrestle you down like they do to each other.  I'll also get the adults fired up by tossing them onto the bed.  Hold them so their back legs are on your hand, and give a little flick of the wrist, propelling them forward as they leap.   They'll fly onto the bed and land, then charge back and leap at you.  They seem to enjoy the throwing; my little orange one will run back to be tossed/leap again eight or ten times in a row, before getting too charged up and ripping off to run a lap or two around the room, or to attack another rat.  They do like to wrestle.

Peaches girl

Chubby boy

I took 37 pictures of them in about 5 minutes, and of those 37 shots, these are the only two that are at worth posting.  I've reduced them greatly in size in a probably-unsuccessful attempt to disguise how terribly out of focus they both are.  The camera chose to focus on something about a foot from the edge of the bed, while these shots are from rats just past the foot of the bed.  They need to be about 18 inches further away, in other words.  The lack of manual focal depth on my digicam is beginning to annoy me about it, I must admit.  Granted, they probably don't design them to take photos of small, fast-moving vermin in a very dim room at 4am, but since that's primarily what I use mine for (same as Dick Cheney) it would be nice if it were more suited for that purpose.

I'd like the camera to have an option for focal depth, and you could set it to a given depth, like 3 feet or 5 feet, and it would take every picture at that depth, like it or not.

The rats play a lot and are fun to watch, but they do not stay in the same place for more than a few seconds, and they aren't large, so there's not much for the camera to train in on.  Plus I'm taking most of my shots after dark, and the only light in my bedroom is from a weak bulb in a lamp over the bed, so the camera's CCD can't see well enough to auto-focus, and it's basically guessing when it stores the image in time with the flash.

Furthermore, "Babble babble babble mumble mumble mumble." as we say at work when someone is going on and on about nothing.

 

So the little ones, of which there are three (the brown/white female is not pictured above) are little scooters and fun.  They run all around and sniff everything, and climb on my legs when they encounter them. It's important to not scare them and to always put them down gently at this point.  The little boy can play some, since he's pretty game and comes right at you when you push him down.  The two girls would just be surprised and not know you were playing if you tried it with them.

The peaches one is far smaller than her siblings, which is odd, since she was one of the bigger ones a month ago, when they were quite tiny. Despite that, she's the boldest and most friendly, and is quite content riding around the apartment on my shoulder, and is the bravest to explore a new area.  I therefore handle her more, which makes her calmer and more friendly, which makes me handle her more, etc.  I'm trying to pet the boy a lot also, since he'll likely get less attention over time, especially once he's in the male's section of the cage, and sleeping 23.278 hours a day.  As my two adult males do now.

Lastly, the orange female is definitely pregnant, and starting to look a bit swollen.  She's 16 days now, and therefore due in just 5 or 6 more.  I don't expect she'll have very many babies. I sort of hope she doesn't, since she's just not big enough, and isn't eating that much, so if she has a dozen in there they'll be very small and probably have a high mortality rate.

I look forward to their markings also, with her the pretty solid orange, and the father a semi-peaches.  If there are is a really pretty girl or two I'll probably keep both of them, and do away with all the males I have now, not needing to do any more breeding for a year or more with so many fresh little ones.

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