This mixing in links and pics and stuff with my usual psychotic ramblings might be becoming a habit. Why is is that no matter how much I try to avoid the restrictions of regular features so that I can always write whatever I feel that day, I always seem to fall into habits anyhow?

It is like they crystallize out of the rich and complex primordial stew that is my brain and its constant Brownian motion without my even having to will it. In fact, it would probably be nearly impossible to keep order from spontaneously occurring even if I tried really hard.

That is just how creativity works, or at least, how mine does. Everything that comes in gets broken down, dissolved, and absorbed into the mix, and then subjected to constant mixing and remixing by the metaconscious processing layers, until something becomes big enough to be caught my the various strainers constantly straining/stirring the broth, in which case it is brought up into the consciousness (sometimes at exactly the wrong moment) and if it is good enough, it gets used somewhere.

If not, it goes right back into the soup.

All kinda gross sounding, admittedly, but that is how I roll.

Meanwhile, here is something to make you lose sleep at night.

His eyes! They burn into your soul!

Sorry for any resulting nightmares, but the pic was just so hilariously disturbing that I had to share it. Just had to do it. Felt oddly compelled.

(Help Gary Busey In My Mind Please Help Must Regain Control Of Aaaaaaaargh)

Today has been better than yesterday. I still do not feel wonderful but I feel better than I did before. Maybe I gained some psychological insight by writing out all my pain and badness and despair. Or maybe I am just riding the high from the emotional release. Yay catharsis! Catharsis rules.

Or maybe this is all just the random effects of cosmic radiation on my neurotransmitters and I have no more input into how I will feel in the future than a cockroach has on the orbit of Mars.

Depression sure as hell feel like that sometimes. Like you have no power in the world, or at least, no power over the only thing that truly matter, whether or not you will be happy or sad. When you think about it, everything we do is an attempt to control that single variable, the one where the positive numbers are happiness and the negative numbers are misery.

And us depressive, we feel like we have no control over that variable, and that someone has their finger on the scale and is pressing hard towards those negative numbers. Like we have this huge heavy weight that we carry around that nobody else can see and that keeps us down down down in the negative hundreds while other people rarely ever see a number below +10.

And they can’t understand why what works for them can’t work for us.

Of course, in a sense, that weight is real. It represents the neurochemical reality of the disease known as depression. With our screwed up serotonin levels (as well as other neurotransmitter levels), we are truly, physically, chemically less able to be happy than others.

That is why the modern era of antidepressants has been so important to the treatment of depression. The SSRI drugs help fix the chemical situation, and only then can you hope to treat the psychological disorder caused by it.

Depression can make it feel like you are falling, always falling, falling in slow motion…. kind of like this little science trick.

OK, not the best segue ever, but whatever.

Pretty nifty effect, huh? Means the magnetic pull of the magnet is so strong that it can partly overcome the strong pull of gravity on what is basically a huge cylinder of metal, when given a ferrous (copper) cylinder to fall through.

Looks like magic, but is just extremely visually awesome science.

Sometimes I wish dealing with my depression was as simple as stepping into a magnetic field that gently aligned all my particles so they worked in harmony with one another, and changed all my negatives into positive, and grounded out all this crazy energy I have inside me so I can be happy, calm, neutrally charged, and solid.

Instead, I often feel like there is a powerful electrical storm inside me at all times, with high winds, massive waves, and me lost in the fracas somewhere, drowning.

I know that the solution is for more of that energy to escape my tiny pocket dimension of a soul and flow into the world. But that is harder than it sounds. I get the feeling that I have achieved what fragile equilibrium I have inside me by pitting the various energies against one another in a kind of high energy stasis, and so releasing any of it releases a lot more of it into my inner weather system, and only makes things worse in the medium term.

But in the long term, of course, I am far better off. So I continue to seek sweet, sweet catharsis. If I coudl let it all out in one big ring explosion, I would, and deal with the consequences after.

Speaking of before and after…

This just show that TEXT RULES MOTHERFUCKERS!

I am not a cell phone user myself, but this comic bears the ring of truth to me.

So in conclusion, today feels better than yesterday, and hopefully, tomorrow will feel better than today. I still do now know how one psychologically adjusts to a fundamental lack of stability in one’s inner world, but I get the feeling it involves an awful lot of letting go and learning to just take things as they come, without expectation, prediction, or attempting to control everything.

You cannot control the ocean, the weather, the waves, or the reefs.

You can only steer your boat as best as you can.

This will be a potpourri jambalaya gumbo kind of diary entry, because I have links I want to share but I also have diary type stuff to talk about.

Like, for instance…. yay, my ice cream maker is here! I had to get my roomie Joe to go pick it up for me, because Canada Post does not let you pick up a package without Photo ID, and I have none. So he went in to the postal outlet at the Shopper’s Drug Mart next door, then I carried it from there to home.

As I expected, it was not that heavy, but large and awkward to carry. Luckily, a nice person opening the door to the apartment building for me. That was going to be the most annoying step.

This is why I dislike getting my online purchases via Canada Post, though. They attempt delivery exactly once, then give up and leave it at the postal outlet.

UPS, on the other hand, will try like three or four times before giving up, because they do not have the option of just leaving it next door for me to come get.

And usually, it takes that many to get us at a point where someone is awake and within earshot of the door. We are a random lot.

And all they ask of me is a digital signature. For all they know, I could be a burglar. But seeing as the odds of that are pretty low, I think I prefer their system.

Laziness aside, there just something magic about ordering something and having it show up at the door. The transition from virtual to real, a few clicks turning into an actual physical thing in my hands, is just so cool.

Having to go fetch it myself is not nearly so magical.

Oh well, at least the unboxing has been a breeze so far. Not like with these people.

Look, I know that anecdote is not the singular of research and so the fact that like seven different people had a lot of trouble getting the damn thing out of its package does not necessarily mean that it is a piss poor package design, but I do notice that the troublesome middle stage that caused most of the problems had people grappling with a featureless black brick, like they were trying to open the fucking Monolith from 2001, and I cannot help but wonder if there is not a page in a packaging design book somewhere that says to very specifically never ever do that.

I mean, sure the black brick looks cool for maybe half a second, but, and I know this is hard for designers to grasp, but usability is more important than aesthetics. Nobody will care how cool the inner box of something looks if it is viciously thwarting their every attempt to actually use the thing they paid for and presumably are eager to see and touch and use.

All it will do is make them seethe with hatred for you, the company you work for, and black rectangular solids in general.

Back to ice cream. I have not actually made any yet, because you have to freeze the inner ring of the ice cream maker before you can make any ice cream.

This is presumably way more energy efficient and compact than any refrigeration solution, and a million times better than futzing around with ice cubes, water, salt, and a thermometer that people used to have to do to make hand-cranked ice cream.

(The salt was to regulate exactly what temperature made the ice turn to water and vice versa. It was not part of the ice cream. )

The amount of fiddling and fussing it must have taken to make ice cream in the old days must have been phenomenal. You can understand why the “ice cream social” became such an event. It took a lot of labour to produce ice cream, way too much to be worth it for just a few people.

Work like that could make a person crazy.

Just like the world’s quietest room can drive your crazy. ^[1]

The technical term is an “anechoic chamber” because it is designed to have absolutely no surfaces which reflect sound. In normal life, we are surrounded by sound reflecting surfaces, and that reflected sound is, actually, most of what we hear.

So while a normal “quiet” room has an ambient volume level of 30 dB, inside the anechoic chamber, the level is a highly counterintuitive -9 dB. ^[2]

As we human beings can only hear sounds above 0 dB, to us, the room is completely silent.

And at first, that sounds good to a quiet type like me. Might be a nice place for a nap.

But as it turns out, our bodies make a lot of noises that, under normal circumstances, you can’t hear over the background noise of life.

So suddenly, you can hear your spleen. Not good.

Add to that the fact that was discovered in sensory deprivation tanks : that the human nervous system, deprived of stimulation, creates its own in the form of hallucination.

It is no wonder, then, that most people cannot stand to be in the anechoic chamber for long at all, and the longest someone stayed in there was forty five minutes.

I imagine that before long, you would be “hearing voices”.

And I have to admit, the paranoia about this being used as a form of torture seems justified. It is not hard to imagine the Cigarette Smoking Man saying this at the end of an episode of X-files :

“After all, Agent Mulder, we didn’t even touch your talkative friend. ”

(REVERSE ANGLE CLOSEUP, BACKLIT)

“We just found him a nice… quiet… room. ”

I could go further into the whole long-form brooding thing again, and I am sure you would all really enjoy that (he said, voice dripping with sarcasm) but tomorrow is a therapy day and I am all tired and sleepy now (cannot get sleep right bad robot) and not in the mood to dive into my navel lint and root around, so instead, I will just share some stuff with you and tomorrow we get get back in the pool.

Even though I slept all day, I totally want to get back into bed right now. God damn it all.

First, an apt neologism, and for once, it is not one of my own dubious confecting.

Instead, it’s from a place with the delightful name the Oxford English Fictionary, which aims to collect words which are not in the English language, but should be. In other words, apt neologisms. Neato!

The one that caught my eye is this one :

Anticoagulatorical (adjective): characterizing a speech, essay, presentation, etc. that pursues multiple directions and creates multiple threads, but fails to pull it together in any semblance that makes any sense.

A bit of a mouthful to work into everyday conversation, admittedly. So it loses points on that. But I think we have all talked with someone who has this problem. Someone who, viewed charitably, has so many thoughts that they want to convey, and the thoughts occur to them so rapidly and so violently, that it is all they can do to start one before another jostles its way in to get started, and so forth and so on, till the whole thing collapses in a pile of unfinished mentation.

Uncharitably, one could say that the person is dimly aware of speech being about saying things, and so, parrotlike, they mimic the sound and style of interesting conversation, but being simple creatures, they have completely missed the parts about having a point or going somewhere with what they are saying, and hence annoy the heck out of people who actually listen to what other people are saying and who have therefore come to expect such luxuries as conclusions.

Personally, being a writer and being also both heavily media saturated and narratively driven, I have noticed this most recently in television and movies. Take, for instance, a movie I watched recently, The Fourth Kind.

It had all the modern horror movie elements : emotional rawness, innovative scene composition and cinematography, decent use of music, and so on. And indeed, the movie knew how to seem very intriguing and really give you the impression that this was all leading up to something.

But alas, it was not. The movie’s ending was a total dud, concluding nothing and just leaving me saying “So… that’s it, huh?”.

How very anticoagulatorical of them!

Meanwhile, this is totally what it looks like when a fox smiles :

Who could say no to a face like that? Click to enlarge.

Just when I thought foxes could not get any cuter, I find this. I mean, don’t you just want to pick him up and cuddle him and pet those perky ears?

Of course, if that is a wild fox, he would probably bite your face off.

But still, you would want to do it!

OK, after that marvelous little tonic, we are ready to deal with the somber but interesting subject of whether or not Alan Turning’s death was a suicide.

The standard story is that Turing committed suicide via a cyanide-laced apple after being hounded by authorities for his homosexuality and forced to take hormones to “cure” it. As narratives go, it is satisfyingly tragic and cohesive, and makes Turing an excellent example of historical injustice, homophobia, and ignorance.

But a Turning expert named Professor Jack Copeland argues that the evidence surrounding the great thinker’s death does not support a verdict of suicide, and suggest that it may well have been an accident caused by incautious experimentation.

If that is the truth, let it be known, though honestly, I think the public will continue to think it was suicide simply because that is a much better end for the story than “oops”. We would hate to think such a great person, a person who arguably won World War II for the Allies by cracking the Enigma code, could die in such an absurd and ridiculous way.

No, I suspect we will keep on thinking it was suicide. After all, nobody would blame him.

Then we have this fun clip from the folks at Improv Everywhere :

I like this one because while it not as marvelously elaborate and amazing as some of the Improv stuff, it makes up for it via sheer geekish appeal, and more importantly, by causing such obvious delight in the impromptu audience. And that is really what it is all about. Wonder, and delight.

I thought the lady playing Princess Leia did a very good job with her lines, especially considering that she (like Carrie Fisher before her) had to delivery them wearing enormous ridiculous cinnamon rolls in her hair. Still, I have to admit, they frame her face well.

Maybe those Alderan chicks knew what they were doing after all.

Our Vader does not do quite so well with his lines, but in all fairness, his lines are what actors call “complex” because he has a lot of words in complex sentences to deliver, and as someone who has done a little acting, let me tell you, those are a total bitch.

That is why the people who play the science exposition type characters on genre shows deserve extra recognition as skilled actors, because they have to deliver long lines full of techno-babble and pseudo-science all the time, and do it while looking like they know exactly what they are talking about, too.

And when it comes to science fiction, it is not even possible for them to know what they are talking about. It’s fictional technology! You can’t actually learn how a warp core works. Nobody knows!

I assume that past a certain point, they just stop thinking about what they are saying and just concentrate on the acting part of it, and the sad part is, that makes them more believable.

Mkaes you think about who in the real world we believe just because they are good actors, doesn’t it?

OK, today, I swear, I am going to take a break from the long form brooding and verbal self-abuse (and not the fun kind of self-abuse, either) and just share a few cool things and maybe gab a little.

First one from the field of Science. I did not get to it yesterday, as other priorities intervened and hence there was no Friday Science Roundup this week, but I feel I must share this now as by next Friday it will have lost some of its relevance.

The big news is that an object conceived by humans, designed by humans, built by humans, and launched by humans has left the Solar System.

Voyager 1, a satellite launched in 1977, when I was but four years old, has now, thirty five years later, left our Solar System and is entering interstellar space.

Now just think of that. We wacky naked beach apes, using just the materials available to us here on this ball of mud we call home, made and launched an object capable of leaving not just said mudball but the entire solar system in which it spins.

And we made it in the freaking Seventies. Imagine what we could do now!

It is one heck of a first step towards a distant brilliant future when we ourselves slip the bonds of the orbit of Sol and go off to visit a neighboring star or two.

But first, we need to build a colony on the Moon. If we can live on the Moon, we can live on Mars. Mars is far more hospitable to life than the Moon.

It just has a much longer commute time.

Moving along, we have a wonderful piece of natural comedy via two housecats who have not quite shaken of the effects of anesthesia yet :

Major LOL. Poor kitties, we human beings did something weird to the world on them and nothing is working right. And to top it all off, there we are with the camcorder giggling at them.

But you have to admit, it’s hilarious. Seeing those kitties weaving about, trying to aim themselves at their food bowls, and to their credit, eventually getting there. Presumably, they used the tried and true drunk’s method of aiming for the one in the middle.

As I have mentioned before, I love animals and I especially love cats, and I am big on animal rights, prevention of cruelty to animals, and so on. But even I reserve the right to derive occasional amusement at their expense.

Like when the cats I grew up with would come in from the snow with a little bit of snow still on their paws, and as it melted, it would bug their little paw pads, so they would do this hilarious little dance where they would take a step, lift a paw and shake it to get the water off, take another step, life another paw, and so on.

Or how some of our cats would paw at the kitchen linoleum after they finished eating, apparently obeying some deep instinct to bury their food. So just for fun, my mother, ever the scientist, would distract the cat, then take the bowl away when the cat was not looking, just to see what their reaction would be.

And the cat would sniff the area where the bowl had been very thoroughly, and place a tentative paw there, and seem confused, as though part of them thought this was exactly what was supposed to happen and the other part knew it made no damned sense.

And eventually, said cat would wander off, looking distinct puzzled and unsure. At which point, my mother would replace the food bowl.

And the cat would turn to look, and just stare at the food bowl for a long time, then nibble a token kibble, stare a little while more, then wander off again, far away from confusing realty warping food bowls and strange instincts.

Now that, my friends, is entertainment. Sure, we love our kitties, but that does not keep us from messing with their little minds every now and then.

Why do you think we buy so much catnip?

Finally, what do you get for the billionaire on your shopping list?

How about an entire Scottish village?

Now ghost towns are nothing new, but the truly unique thing is… the village in question, Pollphail Village, has never been inhabited.

That’s right, an entire village, suitable for a population of around 500 people, just sitting there, unoccupied, for 35 years. It was originally built by the Scottish government for 3.3 million pounds in order to house some 500 miners that never, it seems, showed up.

When it was built, it had a bar, a laundromat, a canteen, a games room, and around 120 apartments. And if it still had all that, pristine and intact, it would be quite the attractive property.

But sadly, in the intervening 35 years, it has been completely gutted, trashed, and covered in graffiti by vandals, and so it is not much more than an historical curiosity now. I can’t imagine why anyone would want it for anything but the land.

And that is a damned shame. It would be awesome to own an entire little village, complete with apartments and facilities and whatnot. It would be the perfect thing for my fantasies of experimenting with alternative ways of living.

I am very interested in lifestyle exploration, especially as pertaining to small community scale projects. We in the modern world have been living more or less the same way since the end of World War II, and I think it is time to explore other options. Nothing too radical… I am no anti-consumerist zealot or starry-eyed neo-agrarian.

Just some fine tuning that lets us build a sense of community and commonality once again. Nothing forced, of course. You can’t force community any more than you can force someone to fall in love.

But perhaps you can create the conditions for community to form naturally.

I would love a chance to try to make that happen.

Feeling even more lazy and self-indulgent than usual, I feel this is the time for me to throw some links at you and say whatever pops into my head about them.

First, let’s break the ice with some down-home country comedy from a funny ol guy who calls himself Golf Brooks. It’s not exactly well honed high brow comedy, but I like it.

Obviously, this fella plays to the golfer crowd at his local Nineteenth Hole, and he looks about old enough enough to remember when all those kill were just bumps on the ground, so we can forgive him a rather amateurish performance, a little deficit in the bell-like tone department, and the lyrics sure could do with some sanding and painting. Kinda clunky there, old timer.

But lack of refinement aside, the song is fairly funny, and the old wheezer is quite likable, so I decided to share him with you folks. Myself, I have had “senior moments” and “brain farts” all my life. I started out absentminded and clueless and stayed that way. So the way I got it figured, either when I go senile nobody will notice, not even me… or when it happens, I will have so many years experience dealing with my own cloudy head that I can take it in stride.

Of course, the third possibility is that I will be absolutely enfeebled and live a life of terror and crankiness and confusion. But I prefer not to think about that.

Surely all this mental exercise all day is good for something!

Next up with have a fairly thought provoking and on point article about American politics. The title of the article is Running On Empty and it’s by Gail Collins over at the New York Times.

Its basic thesis is that the Tea Part, and the kind of frothing inchoate insanity it represents, is the latest expression of the rural thinking versus urban thinking divide that we have been struggling with since the time of the horse and buggy and the sistern well.

The idea is that it is natural for someone who live in a rural area to see government as an outsider, an intruder, a stranger who comes in and tells you what to do and makes you give them money. Farmers tend to think of their land as a state unto itself, following the same sort of territoriality rules that keeps one ape clan away from another. And in this miniature nation, the head of family is the head of state, with a heavy sense of their responsibility to their family, who are in a sense the aristocracy, and the hired hands, who are much like the day help of yore.

Hence, the conservative’s constant falling back on ruralist sentimentality. They have a foggy but fervent idea that somehow, farmers are the “real people” and all those city folk are weirdos who live terrible lives in unnatural conditions that make them do crazy things.

This point of view has been promulgated ever since the shepherds and hill people who would one day be Christians were bewildered and horrified by the big cities like Rome and Babylon, and declared them evil whores worthy only of Biblical destruction.

And it survives all the way to this day in the form of talk of “Real America”, even though the vast majority of people in the modern world live in cities, including the vast majority of those calling for a return to the values of a simpler time.

But civilization is citification. The entire thrust of civilization has been to build larger and larger communal groups, from families to clans to hamlets to villages to towns to cities and all the way to the modern megapolis, where millions live together in remarkable peace, law, order, and harmony.

The primitive mind rebels against this, and declares it unnatural. And it is indeed unnatural… for an ape or a money or a pygmy marmoset.

But it is the most natural thing in the world for human beings.

In fact, as I grow older and theoretically potentially wiser, it becomes clear to me that conservatism is the force of anti-human, primitive, barbarian, anti-civilization rage. Their basic problem is that they are old and they do not adapt to change as well any more, and the days seem to go faster and faster and feels like it is spinning out of control as they fall further and further behind the present,.

And so, instead of simply having the humility to realize that the problem lies not with the world but within themselves, they raise a mighty hue and cry and demand that not only should progress cease immediately, but we should actually back up to their childhoods, which their addled minds now idealize.

Luckily, this has never, ever worked. Progress continues and the world leaves them behind, and all they get from trying to pray back the tide is wet feet and humiliation.

Going back to the article, Running On Empty (yes, I still remember it!), I feel that Gail Collins writes very well. Her writing style is highly readable and entertaining, meaning it goes down easy, which is vitally important in an opinion peace. I wish I wrote so well.

But I think she makes her points too broadly and without precision. I think she is too aware that she is writing to a sympathetic audience in the New York Times, and so she does not really land her points about Empty Spaces thinking versus Crowded Spaces thinking. She just sort of floats them out there, assuming the audience will gladly fill in the blanks because they are already politically aligned with her anyhow. Sloppy.

One last thing : here is an image guaranteed to cure anybody of not fearing clowns yet :

Can’t sleep. Clown will eat me.

Click to enlarge… if you dare.

As if clowns were not inherently horrifying enough, now we have broken-toothed clowns (who look a little like Garry Shandling) drinking heavily because they have the mad deep liquor jones.

And we all know what that leads to, don’t we?

Sleep tight, folks!

Oy. Another of those deep dark sleepy days. I feel punch drunk and drunk on punch. Bad punch.

Today has been remarkably rough for a day in which, technically, I did absolutely nothing. Or well, I did nothing outside my brain.

Inside Brain Central, it was a madhouse.

As I tend to say at these times, I have come to accept these null days with a certain amount of grace and equanimity. They still annoy me, because I would honestly prefer to be be awake and doing something rather than sleeping my life away, but still, I don’t freak out about them like I used to do. I just grumble and endure.

Grumbling makes enduring easier.

Not a heck of a lot notable about the dream festival so far. I remember I was at some sort of lecture and/or concert in some kind of university amphitheater, and I was quite enjoying it. I was one seat from the aisle, and the guy between me and the aisle was a large fellow like myself, so it was a little too cramped for comfort. But whatever it was we were attending, I was enjoying the heck out of it.

Then there was an intermission, and the guy next to me got up so I had some room, and I noticed that there was all this stuff for sale by the university. T-shirts, buttons, snacks, that sort of thing, But in my dream, I was almost totally broke, and I still needed to have money for the bus home, so I knew I could not buy anything. But I really wanted to buy stuff.

Interestingly, during this intermission, all the music being played over the PA system was relatively obscure stuff I know and love. And so while I wandered around looking at stuff I could not afford to buy, I would stop and exlaimed “Hey, that is such and such song by so and so band!” delightedly.

I guess it is easy to get great music on the PA when your brain is the DJ.

I remember coming back to my seat, and looking around to see if there was a better, more comfortable seat I could steal while people were milling around. (I am definitely bolder and more selfish in my dreams. ) I decided there was not, but to get myself a little more breathing room, I took the coat the guy next to me had left behind, and moved it to the seat behind me.

What a little bitch!

I don;t recall anything more of that plotline. I remember that in my intermission wanderings, I came across what seemed to be a combination DJ booth and info booth for the event. And I remember asking them why all the items had two numbers for the price, and they didn’t know. Then I suggesting that maybe one number was the student price and the other was the non-student price, and they said “That must be it. ”

So even in my dreams, service people can’t answer simple freaking questions. Sheesh.

And I remember that what prompted me to ask was this really cool looking watch that had three tiny but surprisingly high resolution screens on it that played video slots. I really wanted the watch in the dream, but of course, I could not afford it.

Other dream plotlines followed a familiar “I am eating all the wonderful sweet things I am not allowed to eat in the real world due to diabetes” theme. One new thing : I have distinct memories of the highly accurate flavours of some of the things I ate. Like, for instance, a lime Slurpee. Normally, my dreams do not do the sense of taste very well. I guess the cravings have gotten bad enough that my dream life has had to up the detail level of the fantasies to compensate.

And I really do crave the sweet things I can’t have. I see other people eating and enjoying them, and I think “You people have no idea how good you have it, being able to eat whatever you want from the massive world of sweet sugary foods!”. And I resent them.

Of course, those foods are not good for those people either. But at least they can indulge in moderation without it killing them. Me, not so much.

Ever since the finger infection, I have avoided the Bad Stuff entirely. It was the least I could do given the extreme consequences of too high a blood sugar level. A massive infection from just a little nick in my cuticle? Sugar in my urine?? Those are definitely serious warning signs. And I am trying like hell to heed them.

I have also eliminated carb rich snack foods from my diet. No more chips, pretzels, and so forth. For me, it is nice low carb protein rich nuts for snacking from now on.

So my carb intake has dropped a fair bit. It is still a little high, but I think I have gotten my blood sugars down to a safer level. Now, when I skip meals or am late with meals, I get distinctly hungry and even have experienced mild hypoglycemia a few times. I take that as a sign that the base level is down to the same level it was when Avandia had my diabetes under control.

I have actually been a lot hungrier overall lately. It is frustrating to eat exactly how much you normally eat and still find yourself hungry. But I think that is just the carb craving talking. My body is still craving the much larger doses of carbohydrates it used to get, and it will take a while before it is convinced that it is just not getting that any more.

The theory is that it will then begin to burn fat to get what it wants. I sure hope so. I am still not getting any more exercise, but I can at least do the diet part right.

And who knows? If I get my body working better, maybe I will feel like being more active!

It could happen.

Another day, another themeless entry.

I don’t know why I am so hard on myself about not writing fiction or essays or such. Maybe I am worried that I am getting my creative itch scratched too easily and I would be better off writing publishable top grade content and not just a thousand words of blah blah blah every day.

But you know what? I am fed up trying to figure out what I ought to do. Fuck it. Whatever I do, I do. Maybe it will work out. Maybe it will not. But I am through trying to find the one door into happiness amongst an infinity minus one of pain.

Geez now I am bummed. I need something to perk me up.

I know… cute animal content!

Feed Me Nao!

A guy has two cats. He is going to be away for a couple of days, so he gets one of those cool auto-feeder systems that puts out a certain amount of cat food at fixed times of the day, and figures the kitties will figure it out.

And they do. Especially one of them. He figures it out and then he figures out how to game the system.

And lucky us, we get to watch.

Major LOLs from me. It is not that while the owner is away, the kitties play, and figure out how to get the cat food out of the autofeeder. It is not just that their owner apparently had the forethought to set up not one but two cameras to catch the action, one actually inside the feeder.

No, it’s the fact that to get the food, the cat is willing to throw him or herself bodily at the thing, doing basically a full body shoulder check to the damn thing. That is what makes it comedy gold.

I mean, talk about your perfect slapstick!

(Oh, and the plates on the floor are from some wet cat food the owner left out before leaving for their trip. I learned that from the comments. )

Well that worked…. somewhat. But not quite. I need more animal cuteness. One more good, strong, concentrated dose ought to do it.

I know… how about this?

Wait Up Mama!

No, I wanna go THIS way!

Awwww. Is that not the cutest thing you have seen all day? I try not to indulge my taste for vulpinity too much here on this blog, but when I came across this image, I just knew I had to share it with all you nice people on the Web.

From my own perspective, it looks like the little fox is trying to make sure he does not get left behind no matter where Mama goes. After all, if he has her tail, and her tail goes where she goes, how far away can she possibly get?

The caption on the page I stole it from said “This little fox has not quite learned to chase his own tail.” Well, to be fair, he has not got much of a tail to chase yet.

He probably will chase it once it is long enough to be just this thing he catches out the corner of his eye now and then and can not, for the life of him, figure out how it follows him around all the time.

Then comes the loss of innocence that comes to all tailed animals where they finally catch that thing and give it a good bite for being so naughty, only to find it bites back at the exact same time, and bites somewhere very sensitive too!

How long it takes the critter to figure out that this is because that is actually a part of themselves they are biting makes for a good rough estimate of the animal’s intelligence.

I know people who are like that too.

Only In Russia

Finally, he is a very fun, and somewhat nerve-wracking, compilation of things that the compiler things are only possible in Russia.

But first, important warning : you are going to see a lot of people do very dangerous things. Don’t worry, nobody gets hurt or dies, so you can watch with confidence.

Some of my favorite moments include :

0:27 – I don’t speak Russian, but I am pretty sure the guy is saying something like “Holy shit, that’s a fucking tiger! Roll up the window! ROLL UP THE WINDOW!”. Still a strikingly beautiful creature though.

0:48 – This is what happens when you combine BASE jumping, bungie jumping, the boredom of a long Russian winter, and of course, way too much vodka. Looks fun but too crazy for me.

2:16 – I would really like to know how this happened. Was it an accident> Did two heavy equipment operators get into a bit of a tuff and use their machines to duke it out to a standstill? Or is this just another boredom and vodka thing?

2:37 – Okay, that is freaking epic. I have seen some crazy clips of people who have “fixed” their vehicle in shall we say counterintuitive ways, but it takes a real brass pair to drive your vehicle like that. And the thing is, it’s a trailer. And there’s nothing in it. He could have just left it home. But no. Trailer goes forward. Trailer fixed. Now we go to the lake like I said we would. What that smell?

3:21 – Sure, taking down icicles this way might not be totally safe. But it is safer than climbing up there to get them, and way safer than having them fall and impale some poor unsuspecting Moscovite. More fun too.

3:30 I absolutely love this kind of sheer insanity. I bet they laughed their asses off when they watched the video they made, and that made it way more than worth it. Genius in wackiness. I love it.

4:19 – OK, forget Trailer Guy at 2:37. THIS is epic. Part of me hopes this guy is on his way to the auto body shop. And part of me hopes he isn’t. What problem? Car go forward. Car OK. Is only a little dent. Cosmetic damage only. I fix next weekend maybe. What smell?

6:05 The only thing that could make this clip more perfect would be if at the end, the camera stopped for a few beats, then went back to the upside-down car really fast. Sort of a “Wait a minute…. ” take.

7:05 – And finally, we have a clip that tells a pretty scary story. Luckily, the barrel of the artillery piece seems to have penetrated the middle of the bust, so I imagine it missed the driver and the passengers.

Must have been one hell of a bus trip though.

That’s all for today folks. See you with more random crap tomorrow!