Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Being replaced by her clever fingers.

Life's Too Short For:
¤ 0% maple syrup.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your bullet points prove overly-fancy.

As a result it's now 3:30am and I'm ready to go straight to sleep, and not blog some non fiction whatever.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, I did some surfing Sunday morning and found a number of interesting news items to chatter on about.  And if you scroll down this page, you'll get a chance to read them.  And if you don't like it, better luck tomorrow.

There is one minor change, in that the "When I Grow Up" daily line has been removed, since I pretty clearly wasn't going to grow up.  It's been replaced with a "Life's Too Short For" item, which will likely be pretty much interchangable, and disliked/ignored just as much as "When I Grow Up" in just a week or two.  I'm getting sick of the "Soul Devouring Worries" also, so their days may be numbered.  Oddly, the "Curse of the Day" is the one thing at the bottom of the nav bar that is never under any circumstances funny or remarkable, and yet it's in no danger of being replace.

I suspect some payola, personally.

Here's some news stuff.

Yes, you'll see a larger sized version of the JLo shot to the right.  Yes, she's got a very pointy titty. Yes, it's smaller than you would expect from seeing her in all of those wild awards show gowns. No, it's not a news shot.

So how does it tie in?  You'll see.

¤ Interesting article about Introverts in the new Atlantic, which I saw linked to from here, via here.

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

If so, do you tell this person he is "too serious," or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?

If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren't caring for him properly.

I can't decide if I am one or not.  I guess I am, but sort of borderline. I match up with a lot of the traits exactly, but I guess I go into the large group "actor mode" described in the article more easily than most.  When I'm at work I'm usually talking to 5 or 6 or 10 people at a time, and I'm usually on fire.  Stand up comedian style, rapid fire jokes and banter, and I enjoy it and get into a groove and an up mood.

However, I don't seek that out, just do it when the opportunity arises, and I don't go out to parties and clubs and such, and I always prefer quiet time alone with a person I'm interacting with to shouting at him/her over a noisy band.  I also like to be alone and tend to be more thoughtful about what I say.  But I don't really feel the need to recharge privately after being out in public.

I'd have to say that I am in introvert, without some of the common introvert tendencies, and with a few of the extrovert tendencies.  One small quote in the article that really got me was at the end of this paragraph:

Extroverts therefore dominate public life. This is a pity. If we introverts ran the world, it would no doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of place. As Coolidge is supposed to have said, "Don't you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?" (He is also supposed to have said, "If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it." The only thing a true introvert dislikes more than talking about himself is repeating himself.)

I can not tell you how much I hate to repeat myself.  Drives me totally nuts.  And the thing I find most annoying is when another person repeats themselves to me, over and over again.  Nagging me is the surest way to make me not do somthing I didn't want to do in the first place.  My problem is that this extends this to real life activities, such as paying bills.  I don't want to do it, it annoys me, and if I don't they just send me more fucking bills at greater frequency with their "last chance to pay before disconnect" bullshit.  Which just makes me more annoyed and less inclined to pay.  Die die die.

¤ For years there have been major news stories about the dangers foreign tourists face in the crime-infested Miami and South Florida area.  German tourists getting driven off the road and gunned down for their traveler's checks, that sort of thing. The local cops have been hard at work stopping this sort of thing, and looking to force the criminals back into lower income areas where they can kill poor local people, a type of crime that falls below the media radar.

Apparently some cops are tired of not making the news, and tired of the criminals having all the fun, and have taken it upon themselves to step up the body count, and eliminate the criminal middleman entirely.

Miami Beach police officer George Varon was driving a marked sports utility vehicle along the crowded shores, searching for two robbery suspects believed to be on the beach. He apparently didn't see two French sisters lying in the sand, police said.

Stephanie and Sandrine Tunc were taken to a hospital, where Stephanie, 27, died. Sandrine, 26, was listed in critical condition Saturday evening. Police said the sisters, who lived in Britain, were on vacation.

Several witnesses said the officer's actions were reckless and that he wasn't using a siren.

"The cop was just running around like a crazy man," Stacy Kandell told WPLG-TV in Miami. "I don't know what he was doing to run over two girls."

If you decide to vacation in Miami and would like to leave alive, here's a hint. Stay in the airport.

¤ Article about the local Venetians being pissy about all of the rich tourists coming over to Venice for the various costume balls this time of year.

"If I have to fight past another group of glitter-painted Japanese tourists giggling at each other and taking pictures in masks, I think I'll kill somebody," scowled 27-year-old Franco Panin, a born and bred Venetian.

As costumed parades kicked off carnival this weekend, disgruntled Venetians sat grumbling in bars, sought refuge in their homes or headed for the hills to ski in the nearby Dolomites.

"It's a nightmare," said Tomaso Tagliapietra, a gondolier who relies on the main April-to-October tourist trade to keep him going for the rest of the year.

"Carnival used to be Venetian, but the masked balls are well out of the reach of our pockets and we just get masked discos or open-air concerts."

Here's a hint guys.  Cab drivers and street peddlers and flower sellers can't afford to go to nice parties in the rest of the world either.  Get a real job so you can afford to party, or shut up.  The money you gouge from tourists is the only thing keeping your sewer-infested city from being entirely abandoned to sink beneath the Aegean Sea.

¤ The poor girl who got the wrong blood type heart/lung transplant died two days after getting the correct type, and they are planning an autopsy to figure out exactly why.  Her brain stopped getting oxygen at some point, and after a full day of no brain activity there was no point in keeping her alive on machines, since she'd be a permanent vegetable.

And yes, you're better off dead at that point.  And no, I don't care what your religion says.  Neither does the Duke University Medical center, apparently.

The new organs performed well, but Jesica's brain had swelled and was bleeding Friday. She was declared dead after more than a day without brain activity.

Duke doctors took Jesica off life support before her family could contact other physicians to get a second opinion on her condition.

It's a tough case.  There is surely going to be a law suit filed, since obviously someone screwed up by not checking the blood type.  It's hard to believe, as long a wait as there is to get anything in transplant, that someone wouldn't check to be sure it was the right blood type match before this type of operation.  It's also nice that the hospital is admitting to human error, rather than hiding behind endless weaseling and blaming someone else, the way, say, Dubya would.

What makes it tough is that heart/lung transplants are seldom successful under any circumstances, and the girl would surely have died without the surgery, and quite possibly even if they hadn't screwed up on the wrong donor organs the first time.  Plus the family has no money, everything was being paid for by donors and charities.

¤ A study of the infection rates of swallowing fellatio-ers shows that none of them have reported HIV from their tasty non-dairy treat indulgence. I would imagine pretty much everyone is excited to hear this news, being as most everyone reading this either has a cock, enjoys sucking them, or perhaps both.

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, who heads the sexually transmitted disease prevention effort at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, bases his conclusion on a new study of 239 gay or bisexual men who reported no anal or vaginal sex and no injection-drug use in the prior six months. Ninety-eight percent said they had given head without condoms. Twenty-eight percent said they knew their partner was HIV-positive, and of those, 39 percent said they had swallowed semen. None of the men became infected.

The risk of HIV transmission via oral sex, Klausner maintains, "is very, very, very, very, very low and may be zero."

A 2002 Spanish study supports Klausner's view. Researchers there followed 110 women and 25 men, all HIV-negative, for 10 years. Each participant had an HIV-positive partner. The investigators estimated that over the course of the study, the couples engaged in 19,000 acts of unprotected fellatio or cunnilingus. None of the negative partners converted.

There is some dissent, however.

Klausner's comments set off Rex Wockner, a journalist whose syndicated news stories and commentaries have appeared in the gay press for 18 years. "I know four people who I believe when they tell me that they seroconverted from sucking," Wockner told the Voice. Of those four friends, Wockner notes, one is now dead.

"It's great news that guys in San Francisco are out there sucking dick and they are all still negative," Wockner says. "The unfortunate thing about this study is that nobody asked them how many times they did that. Doing it only once and staying negative doesn't prove a thing." Kimberly Page-Shafer, the San Francisco study's lead author, did not return phone calls from the Voice.

And of course, it's not all good news.

It is indisputable that oral sex can transmit syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, warts, and other diseases. (The city's health department recently noted a 50 percent increase in syphilis cases, mostly among gay men.) However, when it comes to HIV, researchers have two different missions. One is to document risky behavior for individuals; the other is to establish which practices could change the course of a deadly epidemic. Some researchers argue that if gay men adopted fellatio as their sole sexual behavior, the AIDS epidemic in that population would disappear.

You'll note that I have almost entirely refrained from any bad pun-type jokes for the duration of this news item.  And yes, it's killing me.

So just to drop one in, I was discussing oral sex and penis size with a woman last week, and she was asking me how large I was when erect.  I didn't want to tell her, since we were teasing and joking around and she wouldn't tell me what size her... wait, why am I explaining this?

Anyway, I didn't tell her, but told her I was so large she wouldn't believe it if I gave her a number.  She asked again, and I said, "No, you'd never believe it.  It's too hard to swallow it."

I then ran a victory lap for my successful delivery of the worst pun thus far in 2003.  And no, no one else has thought this story was funny yet.  See "swallow" = "believe", as well as um... you know.  Okay, do I at least get a bonus point for thinking of it with bang-bang timing during the conversation?

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