Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "I sure hope nothing bad happens to him."
¤ Usage: "Honey, I sure do like that Gollum guy a lot.  I hope nothing bad happens to him."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Origin: I made this one up some weeks ago, after reading in Entertainment Weekly that the main female prosecutor character on Law and Order:SUV was going to be leaving the show. I showed the article to Malaya as well, since we watch that one in reruns. That night when we were watching a rerun of it I started talking about how much I liked her character and how I hoped she'd be on the show forever, which cracked Malaya up.
¤ Notes: This catch phrase is uttered by me several times a week, and is almost sure to amuse us.  It's best delivered in an innocent and hopeful voice, when she and I both know for sure that something bad is going to happen to him, whoever him (or her) may be.  The humor comes from the earnestness with which I say it, and the cluelessness implied by not realizing how very wrong I am.

It can also be used to tease, if I know something and she doesn't, since once I say it she's consumed with worry for the future well-being of the character.  Like for instance since I know how LotR turns out, and she doesn't, and I said it about oh... Frodo.  Or Aragorn. -- December 6, 2003

I was up working on old articles and blogging until 6am.  I got up around 1 and showered and worked a bit on D2 site stuff, then after Malaya got back from the gym we were off to the Mac store in Pleasant Hill, and there she made a new G4 iMac hers.

True to Mac rumors of easy operation, she just had to plug it in and start it up and it was good to go.  Getting online through the router was effortless; she just plugged it in and the computer did the rest.  Contrast that to the hours of fiddling and fidgeting and adjusting that I required to get the 2 PCs working through the router some months ago.

To be fair (not that Bill Gates especially deserves it) the main problem with the PCs was getting the old one to work, and it was running Win98, while her new mac is running the brand new, router-ready, OSX.  Whether two machines with WinXP would have gotten online as easily as my WinXP and her OSX did is unknown, but I somehow doubt it, given my experience with past MS OSes.

So now I'm sitting here typing, or at least I'm trying to, given that the 15 pound Dusty is sitting on my lap with his head/neck resting over my left wrist.  He's actually not 15 pounds anymore, at least I don't think so.  He's visibly thinner than he was 3 or 4 months ago, with the weight lost mostly from chasing around with the Jinxers. You can't really tell a difference when you pick him up, but he looks a bit thinner and he leaps more easily; no longer shoving the TV back a foot and a half when he flies from the ottoman to the top of it with a "meroowf!" in mid-flight.

So we'll say he's 13 or 14 pounds and happy and healthy and all of that.

He regularly sits on my lap for as long as I'll let him when I'm on the couch, but then it's with my legs out straight on the footrest and him sprawled across my thighs, covering me from knees to belly with his ebony bulk.  He won't usually stay in my lap, or try to get there at all, when I'm sitting upright in the computer chair, but for whatever reason tonight he was yowling around behind us as Malaya and I are side by side at our desks, and I hoisted him up to my lap to be nice.

Well, not really to be nice, I like to pet him and I've grown more fond of him over time as he's gotten less whiny and bitchy since the Jinxers has been here, but I thought he'd just leap off of my lap after a minute at most.  That was ten minutes ago, and here he's still sitting, despite the fact that the tendons in my left wrist are flexing as I type and his head/neck is going up and down like a pigeon's head when it's in hot walking pursuit of a bread crumb.  And he's (Dusty, not the pigeon) even got his eyes closed.  Though his tail is lashing around quite a bit, as it almost always does if he's anywhere short of sound asleep.

Anyway, as I was saying before that pointless Dusty interlude, I've been up for 9 hours and even left the house, but it still feels like it's early in the day, for some reason.  I'm hoping to get some hours of work done yet tonight, as I'm pretty much over being sick and am eager to get back to sleeping less than 9 or 10 hours a night.  I never feel like I'm awake long enough to get a lot accomplished when I'm sleeping that much, and I'm usually fine on just 5 or 6 hours a night, with perhaps one day a week of 10 to catch up on things. I'm very motivated to work on things now, so it seems a shame to waste that energy dreaming.  Plenty of time to sleep on those days that I've got no desire to do anything and plenty of time to do it.

Some news.

¤ The US forces in Iraq have pretty much given up on looking for the fabled Iraqi WMDs.  You remember thos; the dangerous toys that Saddam was building to destroy the entire world with.  Or at least the important US parts of it. You remember the WMDs, those things Bush and others swore Saddam had tubs full of.  The things that were worth destroying world confidence in the US' foreign policy, that we spent billions of dollars and hundreds of US soldier lives (not to mention thousands and thousands of Iraqi lives) invading Iraq to destroy in the first place.  Those WMDs.

The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials.

The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.

I like that understatement, "might have lowered its sights"...  Uh yeah, that would be one way to describe it.  Sort of like how cutting the wings off of a plane slightly lowers the odds of it flying to Hawaii.

¤ Good article on the Mad Cow situation.  Good from the aspect of knowing the risks.  Bad from the aspect of, "I like beef and I don't care how bad it is for me and I don't want to know how likely it is that I'm eating Mad Cow infected flesh all the damn time."

Many experts on bovine spongiform encephalopathy now suspect that BSE/mad cow has been in North America for at least a decade, that the beef industry and regulators have fought proper regulation from day one, that the current surveillance system is a don't-look-don't-find model and that the public-health risk from contaminated meat could be greater than most are prepared to admit.

"We have to take some serious actions," notes Yale University pathologist and mad-cow expert Laura Manuelidis. "It's here now, and we have to do something about it."

Want more?

The first North American case of mad cow probably appeared in 1985, on a Wisconsin mink farm. That's when Richard Marsh, a veterinary pathologist at the University of Wisconsin, discovered that mink fed "downer cattle" (technically any cow that has difficulty walking) from local dairy farms, went crazy and died. Prof. Marsh took samples of these mink brains and inoculated and fed them to bull calves. Each bull developed holes in the brain. He then fed infected cattle-bits back to mink, which developed more spongy brains.

His conclusion: "There must be an unrecognized scrapie-like disease (BSE-like agent) in cattle in the United States."

Before Prof. Marsh died in 1997, he pressed for a ban on feeding cattle-bits to cattle, and he warned that waiting for the first case of mad cow was like closing the barn door after the proverbial horse had run off. "With a disease having a three-to-eight-year incubation period, thousands of animals would be exposed before we recognized the problem and, if that happens, we will be in a decade of turmoil," he wrote.

Prof. Marsh was vilified and denigrated by the U.S. cattle industry for his work. His grant proposals to test more cattle were routinely turned down by government. When a consumer's group sued the U.S. government last year for not banning downer cows from the food chain, the U.S. government, like the industry, retorted: "BSE has never been found in the country's livestock," and said that the threat was "not real or immediate." It was as if Richard Marsh's work never existed. Speaking to U.S. journalist John Stauber, co-author of Mad Cow USA, Prof. Marsh once confessed: "By issuing warnings to industry, I thought industry would do the right thing. How could I have been so wrong?"

I hope that Prof. Marsh there is speaking rhetorically. If not he's about the most cluelessly naive man alive, to think that any industry will do anything for the public health or wellbeing if not forced to do so by government legislation.

Anyway, read the whole article for some great info. And enjoy your next cheeseburger.

¤ Amusingly icky article about a doctor who came to a 5th grade classroom to put on a scientific demonstration.  And brought a human arm, freshly severed from a donated cadaver.  Some of the 9 and 10 year old children didn't take the sight so well, as you might imagine.

Meanwhile, Dr. Michael Horowitz was headlining a fifth-grade science lesson on the human body. His prop was a human cadaver arm, which he opened to show its nerves and other parts.

At least one child vomited; five children left the classroom feeling ill. Another child fainted almost immediately.

I think I would have found that damn cool, when I was that age.  But as you can probably tell by looking, I'm a pretty sick puppy.

The kids were told about it in advance, so it wasn't like he said, "Here's a cute puppy!" and then whipped out some guy's mangled forelimb, but that's still a bit much for elementary school children to face.  You might want to scale your material a bit to the audience, Doc.  This ain't medical school.

Those two things frequently overlap, but while I'm talking about both of them today, they aren't really related, at least not for me, at least not this year. I'm trying to exercise more, but I'm not making it a New Year's Resolution.  In fact I'm not making any resolutions at all, to cut right to the chase.

Last year I did, sort of.  I did mostly to fill some space while tapping away on the January 1st blog.  I said I'd spend at least 30 minutes a day on the blog in some sort of housekeeping or updating (archives, quote of the day, band names, article updates, etc), I'd spend an hour a day writing fiction, and I'd stop letting bills and papers and other such things pile up so much that they grew to a critical mass.

Looking back; I have accomplished the third thing on the list, though that's mostly since I live with Malaya now and she's very organized and enjoys paying bills and sorting that stuff away the minute she can.  So I have far few bills to deal with now (since she pays the cable, electricity, etc and I just give her half of the amount in a lump sum at the end of the month), and the ones that I still have to do myself, credit cards and such, I do in a few days since she'll notice if I have unopened letters piling up for weeks and months at a time, and since I just feel better getting them out of the way ASAP.  Having a good example in this case helps me get done what I need to get done.

As for the other two things; I didn't do either of them.  For the past couple of months I've spent a good amount of time writing fiction, though never as much as I want to.  But from January to October or so I did not do more than a few hours every couple of weeks, if that much.  Thinking about what I should be writing all the time is better than nothing, but not by much.

As for the 30 minutes a day on site maintenance, I'm not sure why I even felt a need for that. It would be nice if I did that, but I don't really see that much to do.  The daily archives take me an hour or two to do a month's worth, and I do that every 4 or 6 weeks.  And the quote of the day page is easy and pretty quick to archive.  I'm not really planning on ever updating the Band Names section again, other than in the form of feedback, since I've not listened to the radio or Mtv in about 8 months and have no opinion of anything musically at this point. I am working on updating the articles section now, but it doesn't seem like that huge a priority; I'm just in the mood to do it some now and while I'm in the mood for that and not for writing, I might as well get something done.  One thing if not the other.

It's interesting to see what I did change a great deal in 2003, that I didn't even consider in my resolutions.

As I now realize, I was very unhappy and lonely back in January of last year.  I hadn't been dating or looking for any sort of dating action for quite a while, and felt content with that.  I'd never been in love and didn't have any close friends, and I wasn't socializing with anyone other then my parents and the few semi-friends I saw at work.  And I didn't feel any need to change that.

Then in January the infamous, self-described "hot chick" K tripped over my blog and emailed me, showing so much interest in me that it took an incredible obliviousness to it not realize she wasn't just being friendly.  Fortunately for me, I really was that oblivious, and we were just friends.  The main benefit of her was that this close encounter with an actual female re-awoke my libido, and then when Malaya first emailed me a month later, her intelligent and interesting email, coupled with the fact that she was also a female, got my full attention.

Malaya is a far better match for me than any other woman I've ever known, and perhaps I would have been immediately interested in her and our relationship would have progressed as it did even if K hadn't come along a month earlier.  But there's no way to know for sure, short of a time machine and an alternate universe.

Anyway, the point of this isn't to say how Malaya and I met, it's to point out that by far the biggest development in my life over the past year was not something I even considered in my New Year's Resolutions.  Which begs the question; what might happen this year that I would never dream of resolving about at this point?

It also begs the question why I think the one interesting year in the past decade should be repeated just a year later, but that's just how humans are.  We like to think that a one time event signals a trend, and we like to think that we're special.  And if we can combine both traits into one event, well all the better.

As for this year and Resolutions, I don't have any.  I want to spend more time writing and less time watching TV and surfing pointlessly, I want to get back to exercising regularly and have a lot of fun on my snowboard, and I want to keep living and loving Malaya, though I'd be happy to do that in a larger dwelling.  Of course we'll need more money for that, and since I'm currently earning zero while having the potential to earn quite a bit... well, there's my other motivation for spending more time writing.

(Dusty just got down, praise the lord.  My legs were sweating and my left arm was half numb.)

As for exercise, I've yet to try out my new running shoes, and I regret that. I have a valid excuse; I didn't get them until several days after Xmas while on vacation in SD, and I didn't have any clothing or motivation to go jogging in/with there.  I got sick in the airport on the flight back and was in no shape to go running in the cold weather here for several days, and it's rained almost every day since I've been back here and not sick.  I was all primed to jog some on Friday, but when I got up in the early afternoon and went into the bathroom, the first thing I heard were raindrops pounding down on the skylight. And while I want to get some exercise and I'm not likely to dissolve in the rain, I'm not yet feeling quite so motivated that I'll brave 45 degree weather and rain to break in my new running shoesies.

The shoes are completely virginal; I have worn them to dinner twice and to the mall once.  I'm talking oh... perhaps as much as a kilometer of pavement passed beneath their nubby, white and orange gel-cushioned soles.  And a flight or two of stairs as well, if you can imagine.

Tomorrow is Saturday and there's playoff football on, but if the weather is decent when I get up I'm going out jogging.  And that's despite the fact that the early game is Carolina vs. StL, and that's on at 1:30 here, just about the time that I'll likely be rolling out of bed.  Oh well, this is the sort of thing that the Japanese perfected VCRs for, eh?  Malaya wants TiVO too, but so far I'm refusing to pay half of $350 for a glorified VCR when I don't want to watch goddamned TV anyway!]

The problem I have with jogging is that I get bored running on the street, or even on pavement.  It's just flat (mostly) and hard and there are cars and damn punk skateboarding kids whose knees don't hurt when they locomote in sneakers. But since it rains about 6 inches a week here, all of the dirt trails and paths that I'd prefer to go jogging on (both for scenery and terrain and my knees) are all mud pits.

I never thought I'd say it, but a gym membership is looking pretty good to me at this point. I could go and work out on a variety of machines, lift some weights, and do it all in under an hour.  If there were only one nearby us.  Well, one that was nearby and affordable.

Failing a health club or sufficient motivation to jog in the rain, I am at least getting back into doing lots of sit ups and push ups a day, and I'm stretching as well.  I'll be snowboarding at least a couple of times this winter, and that sport puts amazing stress on your legs, mostly on the quads (front of your thighs).  When I used to board all the time I always stretched out my quads, and they'd still get aching sore/cramping by noon on a day of boarding.

Sit ups and push ups and wrist exercises and grip strengtheners and some leg stretching is no replacement for a real exercise program... but like most of live, it's better than nothing.

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