In other words, yet another Just Some Stuff I Thought Was Neat edition of this rambling missive.

First…from the very bleeding edge of science, we have fun uses for those metamaterial hyperlenses we all have lying around in our junk drawers, just gathering hyperdust.

The headline for that story just sounded so cool, I had to link to it. Plus, it talks about wireless power transmission, a subject I find very interesting.

But what the hell is a metamaterial?

According to the wiki article, it’s a substance engineered to have properties not found in nature. Uh, thanks, that’s like…. most of what we humans make, right? I mean, if nature had the properties we needed, we would never have invented tools, for crying out loud.

So I am calling “bullshit” and saying the real definition is “really cool materials that do amazing freaky things and hence needed the kind of name that attracts funding”.

Anyhow, the idea is that with one particularly snazzy metamaterial made of microscopically thin loops of the same copper-fibreglass blend used in printed circuits to make an extremely precise lens that could focus the energy transmissions so tightly, it might actually be safe to transmit power at higher levels than what we currently have, which is just barely enough to activate an RFID tag.

See, the problem with transmitting any serious amount of juice is that you have to be really, really, really sure that nothing else will pick up that transmission, or Serious Bad Things happen.

Imagine someone is transmitting power enough to run a television, and your amalgam fillings plus the lemon poppy seed muffin you had with your chai this morning just happens to create the ideal conditions for receiving said transmissions…. and you get a major zap just as you drive by on the busy freeway…

So as cool a thought as wireless power is, nobody has come up with a safe way to do it yet.

Also in the realm of big deal modern science, turns out that Watson, the Jeopardy winning artificial intelligence made by IBM, is doing what people with vast amounts of intellect and knowledge always do… he’s becoming a doctor!

Well, sort of. What they are going to do is take all the amazingly advanced artificial intelligence they developed to allow Watson to interpret human speech as spoken by Alex Trebek and then find the answer in its vast database of knowledge, and use it for something a little more practical than winning Jeoprady!, namely medical diagnosis.

After all, it would be a great boon to doctors to have a computerized diagnostic assistant who knows all the latest news about all diseases and treatments, and can take a plain language question containing all the known symptoms and respond with some high level analysis resulting in some likely diagnoses.

It would not replace the doctor, of course, because for one thing, it completely lacks judgment, but it could take a lot of the cognitive burden of knowing and marshaling such an enormous amount of constantly shifting information that makes the practice of medicine so difficult today.

Theoretically, if such a system was incredibly effective, it could take the job of medical practitioner from the high level professional specialty it is today to something more like a higher end technical job.

No word yet on whether or not Watson will be programmed to understand doctor’s handwriting.

Moving over to my other favorite category, Bad Things Happening To Republicans, turns out the Paul Ryan budget, despite having passed the House ages ago, is so unpopular that Republican senators are coming out of the closet and saying they will vote against it.

Finally, moderate Republicans are sensing the way the wind is blowing and deciding that if they want to actually get re-elected, they had better come out in defense of Medicare and Social Security right now.

In other words, there’s blood in the water, and the sharks are going to start seriously ripping into one another soon. Or, more charitably, the remaining moderates in the GOP have finally been handed something so odious and politically insane that they feel relatively safe in coming out against it and staking their territory as the Not Quite Totally Insane wing.

There’s just no way the party can hold when it is so clear that the inmates are running the asylum. All this Tea Party libertarian shit is pure political poison when translated into actual policy.

And we get to watch them finally die of their terminal stupidity and outright evil.

Should be fun.

Where the heck did the afternoon go?

I just laid down for a nap at 1 pm or so, blinked, then poof, it was 6 pm.

I hate it when this happens. Luckily, it’s not that frequent, but nothing quite jars my sense of reality like this absurd and surreal nonsleep. It’s not like a nap at all, it feels more like an error in the video tape of my life.

Back up. We skipped a bit!

It makes you realize that, despite what you might think, we have a distinct sense of time passing in our sleep. Or at least, we do when our brain is working properly. Obviously, the usual wet chaos that is the workings of my mind while I sleep never gets tired of coming up with new ways to screw with my waking life and prise another of my fingers off of the death grip I have on my slender and delicate connect with reality.

No wonder I have such trouble focusing and getting anything productive done. The ground beneath my feet is always shifting. My mental landscape is tectonically unstable and in constant flux. It is all I can do, some days, to keep my head above the surface of the sand.

Getting the hell out of this hellish desert of quicksand and mirages is out of the question.

Spending the whole morning playing Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii probably doesn’t help, either, with that whole “sense of reality” thing. There’s something to be said about the long term effects of experiencing so much of one’s life as a series of nonreal events (video games, videos, books) instead of real actual events that actually happen to a person and its effects on one’s sense of connection to the real world and hence one’s sense of connection to the real world.

The something said is probably, however, “get the hell out of the apartment and do real things for a change and you will feel better!”. And that sounds great. But I don’t see it happening too soon.

Reality is just too… real. Too intense, too sensory, too stimulating, too much. Perhaps that is the real root of agoraphobia, or mine at least. Staying in your nice safe familiar home environment, where most of the sensory input remains the same and therefore your senses become completely habituated to your environs and they might as well not exist any more, is a great way to arrange things so that you can live more or less entirely in your head, with only the absolute minimum “reality business”. A “perfect solution” for someone like me, whose development has been so completely unbalanced in favour of the intellectual that often I feel like I am one of those creatures that are all brain with a tiny body.

You know, the Creatures from the Land of Very Subtle Metaphors.

And how did I get to be such an absurd creatures? Why, by staying home and doing nothing but reading and playing video games and watching television, of course, from my friendless childhood till right this second.

When you look at it that way, the pathology is obvious. I have a life long pattern of reality avoidance, and once there was no external stimulus to force me into the real world in the form of schooling, there was nothing to keep the pattern from taking over completely.

Knowing this, however, does nothing to lessen the paralytic fear that keeps me here. It does nothing to make the real world less frightening or my comforts and controls and distractions any less appealing.

I might get tired of my low impact meaningless life sometimes, but my fear is far stronger than any puny discontent that my weak and atrophied spirit is capable of generating.

So here I am, a total spectator in life, and rapidly approaching forty without having done a single god damned thing with my life.

Perhaps the best thing for me would be to simply accept that this is my role in life, whether I like it or not, so I might as well just get used to the idea and stop beating myself for not being into that whole “reality” kick that the young people are so damned fired up about these days.

After all, I might not have a life, but I have a pretty amazing brain, and surely I can teach it a useful trick or two eventually, or at least, train it out of some bad habits.

after all, it works for me…. right?

Had kind of a rotten afternoon, and it has put me to thinking.

No, nothing bad happened. I didn’t get bad news or get in an accident or anything. Just the usual randomly produced feeling like absolute shit for no apparent reason. I woke up in the afternoon after a brief and unpleasant nap feeling like death. I could barely breathe, all my joints hurt, I had a massive hadache, I was covered in sticky sick-sweat, and I had a ringing in my ears that I could feel in my bones.

Napping is so much more exciting when it’s so much like playing Russian Roulette.

Mao mao diddi mao. BANG.

I did a bunch of the breathing exercise I have invented on my own to try to get my breathing back to normal after some very bad sleep apnea sleep. Generally, these involve deliberately and slowly emptying my lungs as much as possible to get rid of as much “bad air” as possible and make as much room for new, fresh, oxygen bearing air as I can. I am not sure if it is scientifically accurate, but my theory is that somehow, I have a problem with incomplete exhalation. I don’t breathe out quite as much as I breathe in, and so over time, carbon dioxide builds up in my lungs and displaces the lung volume I need to get a decent amount of oxygen into his big body of mine.

I am not sure why I would have a problem with incomplete exhalation, but I suspect it has to do with the massive weight of my huge gut pulling down on my whole chest, making it take more energy and muscle to empty the lungs than to fill them.

Maybe I have a weak diaphragm? I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.

Anyhow, after emptying my lung, holding my breath (dunno why that helps, but it does), and doing short runs of deliberately rapid breathing, I was able to drag myself at least part way out of the miasmal funk, and thus able to stagger to the bathroom and fill my big ol water glass (it’s a Double Gulp, which I think you will admit is the classiest of the Gulps) and stagger back and hydrate myself, which took me most of the rest of the way out.

It’s days like this that remind me that I am not at all a well individual. I’m a sick person, in the true sense of the word (amongst others), and I don’t think I give myself credit for that a lot.

I often feel very bad about how little my life has amounted to, but consider how ill I am, I suppose I should be glad I can do anything at all. It’s not impossible that my health will continue to deteriorate as I enter middle age and in seven years, when I am 45, I will look back at this time and well up with nostalgia at the freedom and autonomy I enjoyed.

That’s a comforting thought. Enjoy the moment, folks, because it will only get worse from here!

Better than wallowing in your misery, I guess.

I feel like part of my problem in dealing with my life is my inability to truly accept the cyclical. I am by nature very cognitive-forward, very left-brained, very linear, very goal-oriented. That is great for some things, especially things which can be thought through or otherwise solved via planning, but it is not at all good for dealing with instability, unpredictability, and the changing nature of my subjective reality.

I think I am fundamentally unstable. I don’t mean insane (thought I am that too) but instead that I am not the sort of person who can ever expect his inner life to be a calm and steady train ride through gently rolling verdant countryside, no matter how badly I want that.

Instead, I think that due to my intensely overdeveloped inner life, my incredibly deep and passionate search for the truth regardless of what said truth or its pursuit does to me, and my extremely sensitive nature, my inner life will always be somewhat of a pell-mell minecart ride over rickety bridges and steep inclines and constantly zooming in and out of darkness and light.

And it’s useless to try to prevent it, or to resist it, or to bemoan it and constantly try to find something to cling to when the winds and the tide are just going to tear me away again.

Better to learn to surf, and steer with the current.

Today is my birthday. At midnight, I turned 38. 40 is coming for me, I can feel it.

And just in time for my special day, the news cycle has served me a nice big slice of cake. And it’s in my favorite all time flavour : Republican pain!

And the ice cream on the side : it’s the pain of a dipshit from the past, Newt Gingrich, whose barely a week old Presidential campaign has already crashed on the rocks of his own inability to speak in public without saying something completely stupid.

And boy, did he top himself this time. He appeared on heavy duty respectable Sunday political interview show Meet the Press, and just happened to both disparage Paul Ryan’s evil Libertarian social engineering budget, and endorse universal mandate health care!

And that’s bad enough right there. You want the Republican nomination and you go completely against the key piece of legislation the Republicans are defending right now in Congress, one that is extremely unpopular with the general public because of its attacks on Medicare and programs for women and children and one supported by all but four Republican Congressmen? And then you are surprised when this makes the whole rabid dog pack turn on you and rip you apart with their eager, slavering jaws?

And the thing is, it’s not a bad policy statement in and of itself. He said he didn’t like right wing social engineering any more than left wing, and said Ryan’s budget was too radical. That is a perfectly acceptable moderate libertarian view on the matter.

But I don’t know what Republican party he thought he was addressing during these fatal moments, but it sure wasn’t that sorry lot that makes up the American Right right now. Maybe there was a time when there was space for a little public dissension amongst prominent American conservatives, but George Dubya “Dissent Means The Terrorists Win” Bush and the massive cognitive dissonance demands on the public conservative psyche supporting such an embarrassing and incompetent leader placed on it have long closed that gap and then welded it shut with an acetylene torch.

Now, the slightest bit of off-message messaging gets brutally punished, as is always the case when the aforementioned cognitive dissonance load makes the people carrying it feel extraordinary pain in the brain whenever anything stimulates it. When your psyche is basically now a big red throbbing sore the size of Texas because of all the cognitive dissonance you are suppressing, the slightest breeze makes it howl with agony, and you find yourself desperately hunting down any opposition with the same sort of manic fervor that a desperately sleepy person shows in hunting down that dripping faucet keeping them awake.

Into this scenario comes Newt’s remarks, which is, in this analogy, like suddenly starting up a full brass marching bad right next to our sleepy friend’s eardrum.

That said, if he had simply made the remarks and stuck by them, asserting his right to have his own opinion and staking out his territory as a less-crazy-than-average conservative who appeals to the Republicans who are not happy with how things are going, that would have allowed him to retain some honour and dignity, and might even have given him a chance to stay in this Presidential race as an outsider candidate.

But of course, that sort of honor and integrity and character is completely foreign and alien to the modern American Right. So immediately after the interview, he starting backpedaling, and now, quite paradoxically, he’s claiming that asking him what he thought of something was some kind of gotcha journalism and that anyone who accurately quotes said interview is actually lying.

To me, the funniest part of this for us who remember the 90’s is that people are even vaguely surprised that this is what happens when Newt talks. I clearly remember his rapid rise to prominence…. and his even more rapid disappearance. The moment he became Speaker after successfully executing his Contract On America, he started saying bizarre stupid shit in interviews that made the whole Republican party look bad, and lo and behold, suddenly, you stopped hearing from him entirely.

He is obviously a guy best suited for intellectual behind the scenes leadership. Put a microphone in his face, and he makes Quayle seem like the picture of poise and gravitas.

And with him cutting himself off at the knees, and Huckabee and Trump bowing out, the Republican race shedding frontrunners at a furious pace.

I can’t wait to see who stumbles next.

Serious navel gazing time.

So I am chatting with some folks online, and holding forth on a fave topic, how badly I want to find someplace where all the gay intellectual types hang out so I can land me a smarty type boyfriend, when I say something along the lines of “I need someone who can keep up with me intellectually, and that’s a depressingly small percentage of the population. ”

OK, I recognize that this sounds kind of arrogant, if you look at it that way. I can see how someone might think I am claiming to be incredibly and phenomenally smart, and basically tooting my own horn in the paper-thin guise of complaining about my romantic prospects.

That’s not at all how I meant it, in any way, on any level. But, that’s how a bunch of people took it.

So now I have a bunch of people getting all offended and attacking me for being “egotistical” and “arrogant”, even though the very next thing I said after my first statement (because I realized how it sounded) was “Not that I am claiming to be the smartest guy in the world or anything. I’m just an intellectual. ”

But it was too late, people had already become offended by what they thought I meant, and were going to let me have it because I had somehow hurt their feelings by suggesting that I actually knew I was intelligent.

And this is a sore point for me, and has been since I was a kid.

See, for a great deal of my life, I felt like my intelligence was more of a burden than anything else. I was bored out of my mind most of the time in class. Teachers and administrators either treated it as an inconvenience that made their lives more difficult, or decided it was a license to ignore me, figuring if I didn’t need help learning, I didn’t need them at all.

Looking back, I can see the role I played in that, because I found the work very easy and did nothing to conceal that fact.

But why should someone have to hide their virtues anyhow? And that’s the nub of the issue with my argument in the chat. So I said I was intelligent. I never said “And you all are MORONS compared to me!”. I never even said “I am incredibly intelligent”. I just said I was a fairly intelligent person.

And it’s true, damn it. Why should I be made to feel guilty about a true statement that does not put anyone down? Why is it that I can’t say “I am fairly intelligent” without people taking it as a statement about them?

I firmly believe that people should be allowed to enjoy, or at least plainly state, their own virtues. To make someone feel ashamed of their strengths simply because said strengths might make someone else feel bad for lacking them seems to me to be horribly backwards and wrong.

What’s wrong with just letting people enjoy what they have, as long as they don’t use it as an excuse to put other people down or think themselves superior?

I’m a smart guy. It’s empirically true. I taught myself to read at the age of 2. I showed up at school already reading at a grade six level. I got good grades without even studying. Blah blah blah.

I don’t go around bragging all the time. I don’t go out of my way to make anyone feel stupid. I don’t consider myself better than everyone else because I am so darn smart. It’s not even necessarily the most important thing about me, although it is one of my primary assets.

So why should it be some kind of crime to just acknowledge the fact?

And the things people read into my single comment were astounding. That I was arrogant, that I thought I was better than everyone else, that I did this all the time, etc. and so on.

One guy even starting making personal attacks on me, completely ad hoc ad hominem, like he had to prove he was actually better than me despite my asserting that I was fairly intelligent.

Am I wrong to think that if you feel you have to attack somebody’s entire status and sense of worth just because they say they are intelligent, it’s you that has the problem?

I am sick and tired of this soul-destroying notion that we all have to pretend mediocrity just to keep from maybe making someone feel jealous or insecure. No wonder low self-esteem and depression are rampant. People are made to feel ashamed of even the good things about themselves.

Well to hell with that. I’m smart, I’m nice, I’m funny, and I see no reason to pretend different.

And I am sure you have wonderful virtues I would love to hear about too!

Although this one is of my own making, because I stayed up till 10 am this morning playing video games.

Or rather, video game, specifically, Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii. The game is really addictive to me, because is has tough mission based play (I am currently trying to slay a beast called a Darroth, and it’s winning) and plenty of opportunity to go back to previous missions and gather the resources you need to upgrade your equipment and then give it another try.

For a goal oriented, resource oriented person like myself, this is crazy addictive.

So this being a drowsy day, I have already had some really fucked up dreams. The weirdest of which has to be the bit with the ducks.

This is so weird and messed up that even I, wacky funster that I am, am a little embarrassed to relate it, but here goes : I dreamed that there was a product out which was a bowl a duck soup with an actual, living duck in it. A tiny one, obviously, but yup, it was alive.

And in my dream, I had one of these duck bowls, and I loved it. Somehow, the duck was like a pet who swam around in your soup and quacked and gave all signs of being a very happy little duckie. Kept you company while you ate the soup, I guess.

Thankfully, I am nearly positive you didn’t eat the duckie itself. I think it became your pet once you were done. Oh, and if you added more soup to your bowl (from where? dunno), the duck would somehow heat it up for you.

Near the end of this dream thread, I was just about to explain this wonderful new product to someone and has basically said “You know what is really cool?” but then paused a little too long, and they said “You know what’s not cool? They have this new product where you have a live duck in your bowl of soup!”.

The last thing I remember, I was explaining to the person how it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. No, you see, the duck loves it in there!

Even for a dream, to me, this is all unspeakably weird. I am a very sensitive animal lover, the sort of person who feels a great deal of empathy for all living things, and so to have a dream that has such a bizarre take on a living creature like a duck really leaves me scratching my dream soaked head.

Plus, I mean, why ducks? I have vague impressions that there were ducks in the dream before it turneed into a soup question as well. I have no idea what the hell ducks “mean” to me, what the iconic resonance of The Duck is within my musty old mine.

I have never had any particular like or dislike of ducks. I can’t recall any duck related traumas or triumphs from my childhood. I have seen ducks, both on television and in person at parks, but while I found their waddling crabbiness charming and amusing and their swimming lovely in its effortless efficiency, I cant’ say they made any kind of big impression on me that would lead to them playing a starring role in a very disturbing little dream.

Maybe it was all just because I was hungry. We’re a little low on groceries right now and I have had to improvise, and my improvisations are filling but not all that nutritious, being mostly carbs.

I am really disappointed that, despite Joe cheerily assuring me that a trip to Costco would happen this weekend on Friday night, here it is, well past closing time for Costco on Sundays, and he’s asleep. Obviously, it is just not going to happen, and I had to send Julian for a few stopgap supplies, which I can ill afford.

Plus, we are out of fruit, and whenever that happens, my mood suffers. I must really need the fructose and the vitamins in my diet to keep me healthy. Now I am wondering if I will have to do without fruit until next weekend. That is a prospect I do not relish.

If I had the money and the mobility, I would just go get my own groceries. But I am not, so I am forced into a state of dependence, and as such, I don’t feel I can very well complain, or demand.

Guess I just have to take what I get, and make do, like I always have.

Another day, another random collection of stuff I find interesting or funny or cool or whatever.

First, a short video clip filled with suspense, intrigue, drama, and fur.

You can't sneak up on a ninja!

All cats are ninjas! Never forget it.

Quite the little movie, isn’t it? The first time I watched it, I was hooked. What is the dog doing? Will the cat sense him coming? What will happen when the two meet?

And to the dog’s credit, for a dog, he’s being amazingly stealthy. I have never seen a dog sneak up on something quietly before. In dog terms, he’s a commando.

But it avails him naught, because like I said, all cats are ninjas, and canine stealth will never be a match for the inborn mad kung fu skills and lightning like reflexes of Cat Fu.

I had a similar experience as our canine protagonist when I was a kid growing up in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. It was a simply glorious summer afternoon, and I discovered one of our cats, Trigger (I didn’t name him), sunning himself on our front lawn.

The Devil caught hold of my soul, and I decided to see if I could sneak up on a cat. So I slowly and silently sank down to hands and knees, and crawled over the grass towards him, expecting him to perk up and look at me at any second, because after all, he’s a ninja and I am a great big loud fumbling giant.

But the magic effect of warmth on cats must have had him in its grip, because I made it all the way across the lawn till I was right over him, and to complete my mission, I reached out and placed my hand on him.

He whirled around and landed me a solid smack on the forehead. I still remember the THOCK! sound it made. And that was fine… what else did I expect when I startled a cat? I wasn’t mad.

But immediately he looked so embarrassed and ashamed of himself that I felt awful about playing such a trick on him. Poor thing, it must have been quite a blow to his ego to have, of all things, a human being sneak up on him. And in public, no less!

I gave him lots of petting and praise to make sure he knew I wasn’t mad at him, but he slunk away anyway, probably just hoping, knowing that little Lothario, that no chicks had been watching.

Staying in the realm of the cute and fuzzy and wonderful, we have a tale of one lone depressed woman and her therapy kangaroo.

You read that right. She has a kangaroo that lives with her for therapeutic reasons. And it goes both ways. He needs her as much as she needs him.

Here’s the two of them together :

You taste good, Mama!

Her name is Christie Carr, and she was volunteering at a local animal sanctuary in her home city of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, when she met her future therapy roo, Irwin, named after the late Steve Irwin. Sadly, a week after they met, Irwin was in a terrible accident which left him partly paralyzed and brain damaged.

She took him home to nurse him back to health, and they developed a bond. She had been suffering from depression, and having a sweet baby kangaroo to care for and nurture did her a lot of good. And Irwin certainly needed a lot of care.

But inevitably, the neighbors noticed the kangaroo in the neighborhood (she takes him around in a child car seat, in a T-shirt, no less) and now this poor woman has to plead her case for being allowed to keep her beloved kangaroo despite her township’s worried that Irwin is “dangerous”.

Granted, he doesn’t seem very dangerous as a helpless 25-pound joey. But a full grown kangaroo can be over six and a half feet tall and weigh 200 pounds. At that size, they do not necessary make cuddly indoor pets.

So while I am loathe to sympathize with the busybodies and NIMBYs of the world, they do have a point in this case. Irwin will be man sized some day, and while his injuries will insure that he is never as robust or mobile as a health adult kangaroo, he might still pose a danger to her and to others.

Still, I hope they are able to work things out and she gets to keep him.

He’s just so cute!