Monthly Archives: March 2012

The Worst Thing

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{The following is presented as-is, as I wrote on Saturday, the tenth of March, 2012. It was not long after the incident in question and when I wrote it I was very depressed and upset and disoriented and my blood sugar was very low on whack, and I wrote it in order to purge myself of all the bad emotions that were overwhelming me at the time. I just want to assure you all, then, that I feel fine now, food and textual catharsis did wonders for me, and so don’t go getting worried about me because of all that I say in here. The storm has passed and I am fine now, or at least, back to my usual level of illness anyhow. Read the following with that in mind. }

I had the worst goddamn thing happen to me today and I just have to tell someone about it, and none of my loved ones are available right now, so I will be telling it to you nice people.
Not that I don’t love you people but… well, you know what I mean.

It is a very unique kind of tragedy, very personal, very idiosyncratic, very “me”.

And it’s all about a microwave oven and my lousy connection with the real world.

Let’s start with my day.

I napped last night, a little on the couch, mostly on the one bed in the room after Joe and Julian were off grabbing some stuff from home in Richmond.

Now being extremely poor and barely even a real human being, I do not have a watch or a cell phone. Agoraphobics like myself have no0 need for cell phones and watches are for people who are not in an apartment full of clocks all day.

But hey, there’s a microwave in the room and it has a clock on it, so I am covered, right? wrong.

So I am planning my entire day around a clock that it turns out is behind by five hours or more.

So I show up at a panel thinking it is slightly before noon, and after being at the panel for a while and noticing that it seemed to be entirely the wrong subject, I raised my hand and asked about the panel I thought SHOULD be going on, I find out, quite publicly, that said panel happened many hours ago, and that it is five hours later than I thought.

And everyone laughed at me for being such a clueless tard.

I lost five hours of my life, I was humiliated in public, I feel profoundly dislocated and alienated. and depressed, and I completely missed panels I wanted to attend and all kinds of people I liked were wondering where I was, and I apparently slept through an entire day, more or less, and now I am here in our room feeling paranoid and depressed and trying to figure out what the hell to do next.
the
I efeel really horrible. I thought about going and having dinner in the hotel restaurant, but I could not face hacing dinner all by myself when I am feeling like this.

What I really need is a sympathetic person who will not laugh at me when I tell them all about my fucked up life because of my fucvked up self and fucked up being.

I hate myself right now. This kind of chit doesn’t happen to sane and decent people, it could only happen to a fucked up lloser like myself. I feel so much like my life is pointless right now.

I wantr my life to have meaning and content and substance. Instead, it’s a series of bizarrely bathetic tragedies that make me feel like the bigger loser in the world.

I amk going to have to talk with my therapist about this on Tuesday.

I will try to rejoin the convention this evening. But I don’t know if I can.

God it sucks to be crazy.

{For the record, I did rejoin the convention, I had a wonderful time, and a lovely buffet, and like I said above, I am feeling much better now. The memory of the incident still stings and it will be a while before the incident fades into “anecdote space” where it is just a funny story I tell to illustrate what a lovable goof I am. But give it six months, and it will be there. }

{Oh, and I plan on buying a watch soon to make sure this kind of thing never happens again. }

Friday and… whatever.

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Very alert readers will note that I am doing this entry much earlier in the day than normal. That is because I will be heading off to Vancoufur, the local furry convention, sometime in mid-afternoon (hopefully), so I have to do my writing a little early today.

As I mentioned yesterday, I will be at said convention all weekend, so odds are, there will be no posts for Saturday and Sunday. Sorry folks, but I am taking a rare vacation from my blog. Don’t worry, I will be back Monday with the usual semi-coherent drivel.

Also, as you will soon see, I am not doing my usual science reportage today. Sorry folks, I really wish I could do it, but I am super sleepy due to my sleep issues, and I just do not have enough of my marbles together to do it. I will have to catch up next week.

I had some extraordinarily detailed messed up dreams as a result of being in one of my tired periods, though. Here are some of the highlights :

  • Being chased by a mad scientist who was trying to catch me to experiment on me, and who had a big gas gun that shot big person-sized spheres of knockout gas that he would shoot at people to subdue them. I dodged the spheres of gas as he pursued me, and eventually tricked him into firing into the wind, which promptly brought his own gas back onto him, knocking him out. Served him right.
  • I kept seeing this giant (as in, a victim of gigantism) who I somehow knew in the dream was an expert at building things, and who kept building himself increasingly elaborate mechanical exoskeletons to help him with the problems caused by his disease. In the dream, I remember thinking how great it was that he was using his mind and his skills to make his life better, and I wished him well.
  • At one point, I was traveling around the world via something called the Secret Railroad, which only certain people knew about and which could get you anywhere you wanted to go way faster than any other way of transport. You had to know a bunch of secret signs, gestures, and so on in order to get access to it, and you had to sign documents saying you would keep the secret and not show it to anyone. This was ironic, because I was traveling with a guide, who was the person who had told me all about it. Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything about how this mode of travel actually worked, except for a vague memory of something kind of like a very high-toned subway system. Too bad. I am kind of curious to know how the heck that worked. Dream magic, I guess.
  • At one point, I had been given a thick wad of bills and notes written on notebook paper by someone (my guide? my roomie Joe? Dunno) and so I went to a bank to try to figure it all out. (Nitpick : I was in LA in my dream, but the money was clearly Canadian. ) I met with a very handsome and understanding bank manager, who showed me great patience while I emptied out the contents of my pockets and tried to put together the handwritten notes with forms ha had given me so I could access money in a bank account, and deposit the cash there as well. In addition to the money and the notes, there were these weird plastic fake-feeling slick things that were the size and shape of a one hundred dollar bill, but which looked more like a high security credit card, complete with a big hologram sticker. When the bank manager saw it, he rolled his eyes and said “Oh, that must be Wednesday’s edition. ” I think this was my brain’s impression of the new high tech plastic currency that will be taking over eventually. Anyhow, as I tried to figure out what to do, the usual dream confusion kicked in and I can’t ever seem to get my minds on all the notes plus the forms that need to be filled out at the same time. I just keep looking for things in my pile of stuff (which grows bigger all the time) and losing things and growing increasingly frustrated and embarrassed as I dork it up in front of this very professional and together kind of guy. At one point, while I am on the phone, the bank manager nudged me then dropped half a pill into my hand. I asked him what it was, and he just shrugged and smiled and said “Ask me when I get you home. ” And that was creepy. I then explained to him that I couldn’t take the pill because we aliens never knew how we would react to Earth drugs designed for humans. I think at that point in the dream I was a Tenctonese from Alien Nation the television series.

Sadly, that is where the dreaming ends. Just when I was an alien with a lot of money! Why do these things always end just when things are getting good? Oh well.

One last thing to share for today, a video for the British paper The Guardian which takes a rather novel approach towards depicting the modern world of social media and the rapid news cycle.

Namely, by showing an investigation into the Three Little Pigs and their grisly murder of the Big Bad Wolf. For those who don’t know, in the classic version of the fairy tale, after the Wolf discovers he can’t huff and puff and blow the third brick pig house down, he decides to sneak in via the chimney, but the clever third pig sees this coming and has put a big pot of boiling oil in the fire. You can figure out what happens to the wolf when he jumps down into the boiling oil.

Because classic fairy tales are harsh, man.

Anyhow, I thought it was a cute and attention-grabbing way to illustrate their point without actually delving into a real modern issue that might prove divisive or distracting.

That’s all. Seeya soon!

A Bag of Mystery

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When I was a kid, I was totally a sucker for those mysterious “grab bags” of candy (and who knows what else!) they would sell in candy stores and grocery stores. They were opaque bags around the size of a small bag of chips, and if you picked one up and shook it, their contents always had an intriguingly various and heavy feel to them, perfect for making a young me wonder “What could possibly be in there?”

The answer was invariably “a handful of random penny candy, a few weird foreign packaged candies, and a cheap plastic toy or two”, and as I grew older and more sophisticated, I realized that these things were cheaper if bought separately and I was never going to find something really amazing in there.

But for a while, I could not resist their allure. Why, just about anything could be in there!

And that’s what today’s entry is going to be. A mixed grab bag of ultimate mystery! Sure, it will likely have the same sorts of things that you normally find in my little missives.

But for right now, the bag is unopened and the possibilities are limitless.

There could be a big shiny golden coin in there!

Granted, it will probably be chocolate on the inside, but still! Mmmmm. Chocolate.

An Important Bulletin

First off, the local news : I will likely not be able to post on Saturday and Sunday, as I will be off at yet another convention. I will, in fact, be at VancouFur, the GVRD’s first ever furry convention, and so my access to a computer will be limited, plus, to be honest, and don’t take this the wrong way, my dear readers, but I plan on having too much fun to be bothered to sit down and write words for you people.

So sorry, I am taking a small vacation from posting. It still might happen, mind you. I will be lugging my ancient laptop with me, and I often have trouble sleeping at conventions so I might end up awake in the wee hours of the morning with nothing to do but make those word things happen.

But I just thought I should warn you nice folks beforehand that there might be a brief interruption in the regularity of my postings.

I am sure you are all devastated. But with faith, hope, and cuddles, the healing can begin.

Of course, this also means the cat (and the fox, and the wolf, and the bear, and the… ) is out of the bag regarding me being a Furry. Yes, one of those people, just like those freaks you saw in that one episode of CSI! Weird, huh?

Actually, we are nothing like that, and as a group, we generally hate that god damned CSI episodes. Us members of freaky little subcultures tend to prefer obscurity to that kind of erroneous and sensationalistic exposure, to be honest.

There is great freedom in being part of something that nobody from the outside world knows exist. You can just do your thing and there is nobody around to judge or interfere.

Of course, the tiny but highly visual minority of us who dress up in costume do tend to attract attention and make that whole “underground” thing more problematic.

But oh well. We can easily withstand being in the rapidly moving mainstream spotlight now and then. There are worse things than being the Freaks of the Week.

After all, it only lasts a week.

Bad Things Happening To Evil People, Part I

Moving on to the larger news-scape, we come to some truly wonderful, succulent schedenfreude, this time delivered by the self-proclaimed “Queen of Mean”, comedienne and Friar’s Club Roast stalwart.

Seems that because of Ms. Lampenelli vigorous and open pro-gay stance, those perennially petulant pricks at the notorious hate church the Westboro Baptist Church have been picketing her shows.

Because, you know, otherwise they would have to go get jobs or find something meaningful to do with their lives or even find a healthy, positive motivation for living instead of just hating the hell out of everything and anybody.

In response to their presence, Lisa Lampenelli came up with what I think is an absolutely brilliant counterstroke : she vowed to donate $1000 to a gay rights charity for every member of the Westboro Baptist Church who picketed her next performance.

She judges around 44 protestors were at said show, so she has donated $44,000 to Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an old and well-established anti-AIDS charity… and the best part is, she donates it in the Westboro Baptist Church’s name.

This, to my mind, instantly makes her the Queen of All Fag Hags. Way to go, Lisa!

Sure, not many of us could afford to do the same. But I bet we could do even better with a crowdsourced solution. Have enough people pledge to donate a dollar per protestor, and you could get some serious cash coming to the GMHC, and all courtesy of the WBC.

Wouldn’t that be grand? Heck…. wouldn’t that be many, many grands?

Bad Things Happening To Evil People, Part II

And finally, I would be sorely remiss if I failed to touch base with the continued complete and total destruction of Rush Limbaugh.

The link above is really one worth checking out, because it links to a marvelous list the nice folks at The Atlantic Wire are maintaining of all the advertisers who have yanked their ads from Rush’s shows due to his wildly evil and wrongheaded throwing around of two of the most emotionally loaded words in the English language, “slut” and “whore”.

Those are third rail words, you feculent formation of fulminating foam. You touch them and you die. People are saying “But he’s said all kinds of horribly foul, vile, and evil things before… what is so special about this time?”

Easy question. The answer is that “slut” and “whore” are, to women, the equivalent of “nigger” or “kike” to Blacks and Jews, times a million because of the incredibly deep psychosexual issues involved.

It doesn’t matter what other words were in that broadcast. It doesn’t matter what other words were in that sentence. Call any woman a slut, let alone a white, educated, completely and totally respectable thirty year old woman, and people will come down on you with the very kind of white hot unreasoning mob rage you right wing types have been exploiting for years.

And the best part of it is, this is a completely nonpartisan kind of rage. Even hard core right wingers will balk at calling some random woman a slut and a whore. There are some things you just do not do, and that is definitely one of them.

You finally did something too awful to ignore, Rush, and I could not be enjoying your public death any more. I blame you personally for starting the trend that completely destroyed American public discourse. You are the one who started the whole “war on liberals” meme, and it is decades beyond the time you faced a reckoning for that.

Roast in pieces, you sack of shit.

Are the rich evil?

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And if so, why?

In this modern era where the struggle between the rich and the average has solidified into talk of the struggle of the ninety nine percent versus the one percent, it has become increasingly clear that those ivory tower billionaires whose wealth and power makes them de facto rulers of the world have behaved in ways which are not merely selfish and short-sighted, but actively hostile to the ethical standards of free world. They seek every opportunity to subvert democracy, curtail freedom that is not their own, demand bigger and bigger slices of the pie to slake their everlasting greed, and in fact, use their ill gotten power to try to take the world back to the age of the robber barons, if not even further.

In such a political milieu, those of us unburdened with billions might be tempted to reflexively answer “Hell yes!” when asked if the rich are evil. It’s an easy thing to say, it feels good, and it’s the sort of thing that very few people outside of Fox News and the GOP will disagree with.

But if that was all there was to it, it might well simply be dismissed as a popular prejudice from a troubled age. However, as it turns out, this view actually has some science on its side.

Here is the gist of the article :

As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers find that the wealthy are more likely to cheat, lie and act indifferently to those in need than those financially less well-off.

“Elevated wealth status seems to make you want even more, and that increased want leads you to bend the rules or break the rules to serve your self-interest,” says Paul Piff, a UC Berkeley graduate student, who is the lead author of the joint study with the University of Toronto.

Some of this is thing that everybody already knows from experience, like findings that confirm that the rich are more likely to cut you off in traffic or be rude to servers.

But what strikes me most is that this clear tendency towards acting in their own self-interest above absolutely anything is shown even when they are reporting on themselves and what they would do in hypothetical ethical situations.

So not only do they lack basic morality, they lack even the self-interested self-awareness to pretend to have it. They are evil, and they do not see a problem with that.

But why? What is it about a high level of wealth that does this to people?

Here are a few potential factors to consider :

Selection Bias. One possible factor is selection bias. Perhaps the real story is that it takes a ruthless and amoral person to become rich in the first place. This would certainly explain the callous attitudes of the nouveau riche and the self-made man (or woman).

The infantalizing effect of privilege. The more wealth or power a person has, the greater their ability to have everything be exactly how they want it to be, and the less incentive they have to socially cooperate. In effect, this causes them to revert to a pre-moral emotional state, as if they were once more self-centered spoiled children. And indeed, you will find that, like such children, they are often angry, petulant, demanding, unreasonable, selfish, unwilling to share, and extraordinarily short-tempered and impatient.

The isolating effect of wealth. The extreme power differential between an average citizen and a wealthy person creates a strong isolating effect. An average person cannot help but see the wealthy person as an opportunity more than a person, and the wealthy person in turn cannot afford to trust that average people are acting out of pure motives and can be trusted. This creates a terrible barrier between the wealthy and the average, and leads many of the wealthy to conclude that they have no choice but to only associate with those of their level of status and income, regardless of any egalitarian impulses. This forms the basis for a group identity and the rich acting as a class.

The instinctual primate response to status. Our modern pluralistic, capitalistic democracies do a good job of masking our species’ basic hierarchical nature. But every human being has a set of instincts which are entirely about power, status, social dominance, and maintaining a strict hierarchy. One of those instincts has to do with status. We naturally feel that with status comes dominance and privilege. It is basic to our natures to feel that being higher up the status tree means we are special and deserve both to have the best of everything and to rule over those below us. This instinct runs deep into our primate natures, and yet, because of the flattening of the formal hierarchy that occurs in modern society, most of us do not achieve a very large increase of status in our lives, and hence, we never experience these instincts very strongly. Hence, the way wealth and status changes people seems alien to us, and it is easy to imagine we would behave differently in their shoes. And perhaps we would. But we should not simply assume it will be so.

Obviously, these are just a few of the potential factor that go into a complex and multifaceted sociological phenomenon like this tendency of wealth and status to be antithetical to moral behaviour.

And it should be carefully noted that what I am speaking of in this article is a broad trend, not a narrow prejudice. Nothing in this article should be construed as a blanket moral condemnation of all wealthy people. As individuals, they are no doubt as various and diverse as any other human beings. We speak only of a broad sociological trend.

That said, this trend is supported by scientific evidence, and as it bodes very poorly for the future of freedom and democracy, it behooves us to study this trend very carefully, and see what can be done to counter it before it is too late.

Some picture and some words!

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Was going to do the usual after therapy blogging thing today, but… nah. Sure, it was a good session and I feel like I continue to release some long buried dark emotions with my therapist’s help, and that is sure to help me big time in the long run, but nothing particularly noteworthy came out on this particular day, so fuck it. Plus, I am getting a little tired of my own stuff lately, and so I figure I better lay off talking about it for a little while.

You can’t spend all the time up your own… uh, navel. You have to get some fresh air and perspective now and then, or you just end up choking on your own fumes.

So what the heck, let’s do some funny pictures!

Like this one!

It's true. They are.

Hardly groundbreaking news. Wetness is to women what hardness is to men. I am positive this is why so many products for women are all about moisturizing. Women fear going dry like men fear going soft. Thus, all these moisturizing products prey on this fear od dryness. Whatever the problem is, the solution is to make some part of you more moist.

One gets the feeling some of these ladies have gone past moist, through slick, and into downright gooey.

Back to the pic : what I love about it is its simplicity. Someone just took two signs that we have all seen a million times before and juxtaposed them. Nothing was added or taken away. They just put the two together and voila, a joke.

A fairly obvious joke, but still, a joke. I bet whoever put that together was real proud of themselves and thought there were quite clever. Well, good for them! More or less.

Hey, they’re trying!

And speaking of killer juxtapositions, how about this (presumably accidental) one?

I love definitive doubt, don't you? Kinda?

I love that kind of humour. When the marquee signs just happen to align to provide a whole new meaning unintended by either filmmaker.

Who can forget “Crouching Tiger Snatch”? I certainly can’t.

Plus, of course, it’s hilarious how it comes together to contradict itself. There Will Definitely Be Blood… Maybe is actually a pretty good title for a movie. A hilarious rom com about the early days of oil. People will remember the “sipping your milkshake” scene for years!

Next up…. I am pretty sure that I declared a previous All Time Winner At Planking, but if I did, then I have changed my mind, because I am pretty sure this guy has it.

And look, he's already dressed for the award ceremony (click to enlarge)

Yup. That is about it. I realize it lacks the usual “suspension” aspect of the better planking attempts, but for sheer awkwardness, I still think this one is a winnar.

Besides, apparently “planking” is dead, and now all the hip kids are “stocking”, which means doing your own reenactment of a funny and/or awkward stock photo from one of those stock photo websites.

What is it with kids today and doing reenactments of things? Do something creative, dammit! Add value.

Then there’s this friendly little bit of healthy advice :

Not necessarily this box, though. Any box. Click to enlarge.

Well, some people need practical advice. You know, “open box before eating pizza”, “lift lid before pooping”, “don’t pour sulfuring acid on your genitals”. Little helpful hints for the reality challenged. Factoids for those enjoying a low information lifestyle.

You know… morons.

Of course, I can just see that pic showing up on one of those “stupid instruction labels due to our overly litigious society” type sites, even though it is clearly meant as a joke. Presumably, some hip little pizza place thought this would make their pizza stand out in people’s minds, and hey… when was the last time you got a joke with your pizza?

Nothing can make up for bad pizza (contrary to what some say, pizza is not good even when it’s bad), but if the pizza was good, the little joke would make me feel like ordering from that place again.

Comedy moves product. Think of how much people like the factoids under Snapple caps!

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t share this little pic with you :

"Hah. Stupid n00bs. Nobody camps a cat!" (click to enlarge)

So now you know. This is what your cat does while you are work. It grabs a controller, logs on to Live with your credit card, and uses its vastly superior reflexes and object tracking ability to completely dominate all the n00bs on Call of Duty.

A telltale sign that you are losing to a cat : A GamerTag that has “meow”, “mouser”, “hunter”, or “tuna” in it. If you find yourself being dominated by MeowTunaHunter, you can be sure you are up against either a cat, a 12 year old Japanese girl, or a 37 year old guy who thinks he’s a 12 year old Japanese girl.

No matter which is true, you probably should be a little scared.

Oh wait, I have one more picture to share, a tribute to a legend who was taken from us far far too early and who is dearly missed by his fans.

This escalator is now stairs. Sorry for the conveniece.

We miss you Mitch Hedberg. You were the freshest, funniest motherfucker to come out of the comedy mills in a long damn time, and you died just when people were finally beginning to realize it.

Even seven years after your death, it makes me sad to think about it. Fucking drugs.

And on that happy note, I will leave you, my faithful readers, for today.

Remember kids, don’t do drugs. You will die, and before you die, you will spend thousands of dollars on your habit and that will just be to feel like you feel right now.

Except for weed, of course. Smoke that shit all you want, it’s good for you.

What I am not writing about

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I was going to write about this whole incident, but I can’t. It makes me too damned angry to even think about being able to write about it. That makes me feel like a bit of a failure as a writer, but writers are human beings too, and sometimes something is simply far too painful to write about.

Maybe when I have more years of writing experience under my proverbial belt, I will be able to take even something like that into myself and retain the ability to remain articulate about it, and fulfill my duty as a public articulator of opinion. But that day is not today.

And it’s probably not going to be tomorrow, either.

So let us stick with lighter news today, and move on for now to happier themes.

Like, how about seven minutes of completely kickass science fiction made just for the hell of it?

This Is Not A Trailer

That is the only bad thing about it… despite all appearances, that is not a trailer for an upcoming movie. That is the whole movie, right there. Although I would not be surprised if someone offers the makers a movie deal just based on how good that looks and the quality of the acting. I thoroughly enjoyed it and so, according to the YouTube comments, did a lot of other people.

That is the sort of thing I would notice, were I a venture capitalist.

Admittedly, the actual plot is corny as hell. Oh no, the perfect killing machine designed by evil scientists starts to remember its humanity and kicks some ass. Been there, done that, a million times.

But that doesn’t really matter because it’s just so damned well done.

And the best thing is, it was done just to do it. The people involved have done other work in big Hollywood moves, but Archetype, they did just for the hell of it.

And what do you know, when you let creative people do what they want, you get great stuff.

If only the money people were capable of understanding that. But they see the world through an entirely different set of lenses.

Girl Scouts United

Next up, we have this fun little story about some Girl Scouts who did not take the theft of their Girl Scout Cookie money lying down.

Instead, they beat on their assailants some, and while the thieves still escaped with around $200 in Girl Scout cookie money, at least they have the painful humiliation of taking a few hits from some nine year old girls first.

Of course, the obvious question that screams from this story is : what kind of a piece of shit steals money from Girl Scouts? How low in the human dignity hierarchy do you have to be to even consider stealing Girl Scout cookie money? How badly do you want to get beaten when you are caught, and then beaten again (and worse) when they find out “what you’re in for” in prison?

And well, there is definitely the possibility that these girls somehow lost their cookie money and came up with this exciting story of derring-do in order to cover it and not get into trouble, and it just snowballed out of control from there.

After all, the Salem Witch Trials started with some little girls stories, too.

Still, I hope it’s true.

How To Offend

Then there is this fun little guide to offensive hand gestures from all around the world.

Of course, I am not recommending you actually use any of them. I offer the link purely because I find it absolutely fascinating as an avid student of humanity and all its marvelous expressions.

I had no idea there was such a wealth of ways to be rude without words in the world. And I am sure the list is far from exhaustive. But even so, the sampling offered is rich and various.

Like this one :

Write-off

Meaning: I am ignoring you
Used in: Greece

The literal translation of st’arxidia mou, the phrase that accompanies this gesture, is “I write it on my testicles.” And while there may well be people who, out of a strange psychological compulsion or simply boredom, actually write on their testicles, here the threat is simply metaphorical and tells the subject you’re ignoring him. One needn’t possess testicles to use the gesture, which is employed by men and women alike.

I am impressed at how well developed such a gesture is. Outside Greece, if we want to say we are ignoring someone, we don’t involve out genitals at all. We just turn our back on them, or look away, or plug our ears and say “La la la, I can’t hear you, la la la!”

Clearly, for the Greeks, those are not nearly specific or testicular enough.

But my favorite one is this one :

Idiota

Meaning: Are you an idiot?
Used in: Brazil

A South American gesture indicating stupidity, this requires improv skills and an actorly flair. To perform, put your fist to your forehead while making a comical overbite. The gesture is most effective when accented with multiple grunts. When executed correctly, you will be rewarded with appreciative laughs, though not, perhaps, from your subject.

I figure this is the equivalent of the North American “Well, DUUUUUH”, but with far more of a Latin American flair. It’s like you suddenly do an impression of Hagar the Horrible’s best friend while making Tim Allen noises.

You have to admit, that really puts some oomph into your sarcasm.

I can only imagine that it makes people from the countries neighboring Brazil think Brazilians are, well, kinda dickish.

End of File

Well, that’s it from me for today. I managed to make it through this blog entry and come out of it in a good mood, despite the terrible news and the fact that the wind is making all kinds of spooky sounds outside my window tonight.

Off now to have a nap and possibly weird spooky dreams. Seeya tomorrow after therapy, folks!

Not like us

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In today’s dire E entry, I am going to be covering some ground I have covered before, but this question I will be exploring has, for some reason, come back to mind lately, and so I feel the need to dig deeper into it and hopefully maybe unearth some useful truths.

Basically, the question I plan on exploring is this one :

Just what the fuck was wrong with me as a kid?

That is pretty much how the question exists within me, word for word, verbatim. And in that form, the question increasingly haunts me and torments me like a ghost.

Put in less emotionally charged terms, it would come out something like this : what, exactly, led to my being so strikingly different from my peers as a child? What was the isolating factor? What force led me to lie so far outside the usual bell curve?

What made me such a weird kid?

I find myself asking myself this a lot lately. I see something in a movie or a television show featuring kids acting like, well, kids, and I wonder why I was never like that. Why I was never like them. Why I was such an oddball seemingly from square 1.

Or maybe not quite square one. I know that during that golden time in my very early childhood, roughly between the ages of two and four, I was not a socially isolated kid. I had friends… the girl next door and the girl across the street. We played in the street. I had my older siblings as well, as a hang of surrogate parents. I was a photogenic kid, with red hair and freckles and a knack for charming adults. I remember being pretty happy overall.

So how did I go from that to the intensely, deeply withdrawn and socially isolated kid I became?

But even back then, I was always a little detached. Even when I was a happy little kid, there was always a part of me that stayed a little apart from others, a little aloof, not quite entirely there. I did what others did, but I did it in my own way, and there was always this space between me and them, like I always had one foot on the door.

And I needed that space. I have an intense need for autonomy, and I think I always have. I need to feel like there is always an escape, that if I don’t like what is going on, I can just leave. My safety lies in my maneuverability and my speed.

And as long as I feel I can leave whenever I want, I can stay and play. I can, in fact, go a long time without revealing my need for an escape route. Because if you have one, there is no need to ever bring it up, right? You just have it there, in your mind, and it helps you stay calm.

Besides, if they don’t know about it, they can’t block it. Right?

So I can see that there was always the potential for isolation, right there in my emotional core.

But lots of people have that need for space between them and others without ending up like me. There has to be more than that in play.

Well, there was my intellect. That was the primary thing I blamed it all on for years, but that seems like a fairly weak factor to me now. Sure, I was ridiculously bright. It might even be said I was way off the bell curve in intelligence, far brighter than even the other bright kids. And that has been known to have a socially isolating effect.

But that does not seem like it to me. Surely mere intellect cannot doom one to social isolation. Surely not all really bright kids end up like me. I refuse to believe that.

That leaves the obvious thing : the sexual abuse I suffered from my father, Larry Donald Bertrand, that fateful day when I was so very young.

Perhaps that was the shattering factor, the thing that caused the fatal transformation from the sort of person who can handle things into the sort of person who responds to pain or challenge by shrinking from it, by giving up, by curling up in a ball and waiting for the pain to go away.

It seems like a plausible enough theory. Sometimes has to account for my extraordinary passivity. I can remember at the time of the abuse making the decision, as so many other victims of sexual abuse have made, that this wasn’t happening, I wasn’t here, I would take my mind far away and make this not be happening to me.

And that ability, to blur out the focus and withdraw into myself, became my primary coping mechanism, and a bad one at that. This was further reinforced by the reality of the classroom for a super bright kid, which was that the work was extremely easy for me, and so I was stuck there most of the time with absolutely nothing to do but daydream.

Add the bullying to the equation, which made me need to hide and be still and try not to be noticed at all just for my own physical safety, and the stage was set, I suppose.

But I can’t help also wondering about that factoid that high intellect couples tend to raise Asperger’s children, and so maybe having such intellectual parents was a factor as well.

And then there’s that whole “not going to kindergarten” thing.

And even with all that, I feel like I am missing something big, something important, some deep factor that would illuminate the entire question and help me understand myself better.

Well, I will bring all this up with my therapist on Tuesday, and perhaps between us, we will be able to wrestle this missing factor out into the open where we can deal with together.

I am sure, at this moment, that this is an important factor for my recovery.

Now to go lie down for some serious introspection.

News from Under the Sea

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No, not this “Under the Sea” :

… no, not that one, but my usual casual keelhauling by the forces of super deep sleep.

Yup, it’s been one of those days. One of those days where I spend more or less the entire day in that special deep dark sleep that leaves me feeling drained and disoriented and dizzy, and yadda yadda yadda.

This is a good sign, that I am at the yadda yadda stage with this phenomenon. Those yaddas mean progress! Specifically, progress toward overcoming my futile resistance to this phenomenon and my worse than pointless panicky angry depressed reaction when it happened. Like each time it happened was a fresh and brutal tragedy, to be mourned anew.

Yeah. Fuck that.

Sure, I could bitch about how I had plans to accomplish useful things today, like writing my LOC for the latest issue of BCSFAzine (which, incidentally, had one of my stories, One Average Meeting In Space, in it), and getting a good start on my project to go through the archives of this site and submit links to the good stuff places and archiving said good stuff to be part of my writer’s portfolio, and catching up on my correspondance, and blah blah blah.

But you know what? They are just plans. They are not the laws of the universe or edicts from God. Plans are great, and I will always be a planner. When you don’t handle the unexpected well, planning is more or less your only option. But they are just plans. If things don’t work out that way, you just make different plans. You cannot truly control the future via planning.

It just gives you a better chance at handling things.

So I will do all those lovely things eventually. Just not yet. Soon. But not yet.

This is a far more useful and mature attitude than previous catastrophic ones. I am glad that I am getting over feeling like each time this happens, it’s horrible.

It’s not horrible. It’s at best just irritating. Sure, maybe I don’t operate like other people when it comes to sleep, but then again, I don’t operate like other people in damn near any way. I am a one off unique creation, denied the comforts of the herd but given my own special brand of magic in return.

It is not necessarily the road anyone would gladly choose, but it has its own strengths.

And I am slowly working my way towards believing that it just might be… enough. Not a lot, in many ways, and a far more eclectic collection of bits and pieces than the standard model of life, but still, when you add it all up, it just might be “enough”. Sufficient.

I might just deserve to live after all. And that is a bold new concept for me. Me, an actual worthwhile human being, not just a worthless useless thing hiding from the world and trying to beg, distract, or charm the world into letting me live just a little bit longer, even though I clearly don’t deserve it.

To be honest, part of me wonders if I can take the pressure.

But then again, I’m gay. I’m different. Just like these :


As for the usual dream harvest from these periods, this one is a little sparse. I only remember one part of one of my dreams, and it’s not particularly dramatic, although it is, of course, quite weird.

I was having one of my dreams where I am wandering around some enormous mall, looking for someplace to eat (I woke up real hungry, too… must have been low blood sugar), when suddenly I stumbled across Bill Cosby sitting at a cheap plywood table, like the type your church community center uses for meetings.

Yes, Billy Cosby. That Bill Cosby. Comedian, 80’s sitcom legend, temporary total embarrassment, and current rather impressive social activist for higher educational standards. That guy.

He was sitting there kind of like this was a book signing, although there was no books around, and there were people sitting at the table with him (the table was perpendicular to me) but I don’t recall any of them. They were just background.

So I end up within a meter of Bill Cosby, comedy legend, and a lot of possibilities flash through my mind (like telling him how much I admire his standup work, or asking for his autograph, or maybe trying to ingratiate myself so he will recommend me to someone, or whatever) but instead, what comes out is me telling Bill Cosby that I feel really terrible and depressed and ill, and I do it in this weird whispery little kid voice.

That is when things get weird.

He immediately gets up and takes out one of those flashlight things that doctors use to check your eyes, and checks my eyes, and mumbles something about my conjunctiva and this being a classic sign of something. He does more medical type testing of me, and the next thing I know, I have been admitted to the hospital and I am in some kind of mental ward.

How did we go from mall to hospital? Dunno. How does Bill Cosby have the power to admit me to a hospital? Dunno. I mean, he is, technically, a doctor, but he’s not a medical doctor. His doctorate is in, of all things, physical education.

Even in my dream, I wondered about that. I remember thinking “Wait a minute, he’s not a REAL doctor!”

I don’t recall much about the mental ward besides wondering what they were going to do to me and some vague impressions of the droolier kind of mental patients. But then somehow, I ended up wandering out of said hospital, and lo and behold, it is a hospital (or at least a psych ward ) located in that very same mall I was in earlier.

And I can’t find my way back to the hospital. So it turns into one of my dreams about trying to get back to where I just was, but now I can’t find it, it’s disappeared.

One last thing : this mall somehow not only had a hospital in it, but it had a store where you can buy equestrian products, including the actual horse, and a place where you could rent a horse and ride it around in an indoor park.

Oh. And it had an airport.

And that’s where the dream ended, me lost, trying to get back to the safety of the mental ward.

Mental wards hold a terrible fascination for me, so I am not surprised to see one in my dreams. Part of me thinks it would be so very nice to be in one, and have that kind of official permission to be withdrawn from the world, taken care of, given care and attention and therapy every day, and never have to worry about coping ever again.

But that, to me, would be a kind of suicide. I want to go in the other direction, towards the world, not away from it. I want to wake up, not sleep deeper.

It’s just that there’s so much to do, and I’m tired of sleeping.

It’s Friday. It’s Science. It’s a thing.

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Like my period-rich, tough, dynamic wording of the title of this feature? This is science with balls. Science with machismo. Science that has to stand three feet back from the urinal or it will shatter.

This week, we have something that is surprisingly edible, the most fucking Michael Bay ready piece of technology you will see today, possibly the coolest scar ever, and growing diseased brains in a jar.

For science, of course. And not just because it sounds like the perfect thing to cackle over while you rub your hands together in fiendish glee in your secret underground laboratory.

And what better way to punctaute that thought than with a bolt of lightning?

The Lichtenberg Man

I am not one hundred percent sure that this is truly what this Reddit link says it is, but according to Reddit, the following is a picture of the scar that some dude got from getting hit by lightning.

Can this be real? Click to enlarge.

I mean, how likely is it that getting hit by lightning would give you a picture of lightning on your arm? Well, it’s not quite as ridiculous as it seems.

If it’s legit, then that is an example of a living Lichtenberg Figure, which are figures created in materials by electrical discharges that, lo and behold, look pretty much like fork lightning does in the sky.

You can even create these neato figures in soft plastic if you have the time and the patience to mess around with the two for a while.

So it could be that this guy has an actual Lichtenberg Figure on his arm from his brush with death.

Or, he could have done it himself with a pin.

Either way, it’s an awesome scar with a killer story and probably gets him laid.

So, happy ending(s) either way!

Food Coloring 2.0

Now this is a fun little invention : edible spray paint.

OK, I admit, put that way, it sounds gross, but that’s the way the article describes it. I prefer to think of it as “sprayable food coloring”, but that is just me.

Anyhow… so what does such a thing, whatever you call it, look like?

It looks like this :

You did say it should be a GOLDEN brown, right?

Is that not bizarrely wonderful and wonderfully bizarre? But for sheer chic, elegant plate appeal, you have to go with this pic :

They're like Chistmas decorations you can eat!

Hard to believe that’s still food, huh? But it totally is. The spray paint is as edible and harmless as regular food coloring, and yet, it can make things all shiny!

Technically, it comes in four colors : gold, silver, red, and blue. But really, who cares about red and blue? We can make food that color already!

I admit, I have an odd fascination with food that does not look like food, so I might be biased toward this product a tad.

But just think of the eye-popping effects you could achieve for your fancy restaurant with this stuff!

Growing Your Brain

Scientists in Edinburgh have come up with a way to grow brain cells from the skin cells of people with various mental disorders in the lab, thus making it a lot easier to get them for study without having to get them from animals or cadavers.

This, to me, seems like a fairly amazing leap in stem cell technology. We are up to turning skin cells into brain cells already? That is huge, huge news! If we can grow new brain cells with someone’s own DNA in them, we might just be able to “patch” brain injuries that were previously completely untreatable.

And heck, we might even be able to give people extra brain capacity. Recent revelations about brain plasticity have made it clear that the brain can route its activity around an injury, reassigning rasks and resuming function almost seamlessly.

So now there’s talk that perhaps the brain could use that same flexibility to learn to address and use extra lab grown brain matter incorporated into its structure for the purposes of, quite literally, expanding your mind.

I am not sure if that would make you any smarter. But it might become necessary if we start expanding human lifespan past the point at which our mental address table can handle it.

We might need the extra memory space.

Fire And Iron

Finally, to finish of this week’s entry with a very big bang, we have this story about the American Navy’s latest railgun weapon.

What is so cool about that?

Watch this clip, and you will know.

It belches fire like a dragon and throws what looks like a futuristic anvil at speeds of up to 5,500 MPH with the combined energy of 32 one ton cars hitting a brick wall at 100 MPH, that’s what’s so cool.

I mean, is that the most Michael Bay invention ever, or what? Fire. Speed. Destruction. Baygasm.

Check out the future plans for this thing :

The eventual goal is a ship-mounted 20- to 32-megajoule weapon that shoots a distance of 50 to 100 nautical miles. It shoots projectiles using electricity instead of chemicals, which would theoretically be safer because you would not have to tote dangerous gunpowder on a ship. It uses an electric field to accelerate a metal conductor between two rails and launch a projectile.

I love that it is a purely kinetic weapon. No payload, no propellant, no guidance, no need even to rifle the barrel. Just a hunk of metal moving at speeds that MAKE AIR CATCH ON FIRE.

That is pretty freaking awesome in my books. I wonder if it creates a sonic boom? Not to mention the shockwave created by pushing the air ahead of it so damned fast.

Is it wrong to find a weapon of death this cool?

Well, that’s all for this week, folks! More cool science when next we meet! Ciao!

Gathering some moss

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Time to clear out the browser again. Maybe I should make this a separate category of post. Put it under “links” as “dump”.

It sounds gross, but if my StumbleUpon is any judge, an awful lot of people put “link dumps” and “pic dumps” on their blogs without even thinking about it twice.

Anyhow, got some keen things awaiting inclusion clogging up the old Firefox right now, so I figured it is time to line them up, kit them out, give them a stern talking to and a big hug, and then send them out into the world to fend for themselves.

Letting go is always the hardest part.

A Very Interesting Question

A fascinating article over at TechCrunch (where did the E go? or is that a totally different site?) asks a highly pertinent question for our time : Is printing a gun the same as buying a gun?

Not that long ago, this would have been a completely nonsensical question. “Printing a gun” would be as absurd a concept as making yourself rich by drawing pictures of gold bars. You could no more print a working, functional, real world gun than you could print a living dragon.

But with the rapid advances in what used to be called “rapid prototyping” and is now called, much more sensibly, “3D printing”, things are not so clear.

People are 3D printing out all kinds of things. I mean, you can download and print a freaking Stradivarius, for crying out loud.

But somehow, despite my even mentioning the printing of rifle parts in the above linked article, the issue of people being able to 3D print dangerous things never really occurred to me before now. (I guess I was too distracted by the Stradivarius thing. )

The potential implications are vast. The law certainly has no way of coping with this. The entire structure of gun control laws revolves around controlling the manufacture and sale of firearms. The idea that someone without a whit of gunsmith training might just decide to print themselves out an AK-47 and some ammo was never envisioned.

Before we get too excited, I must caution, this is not happening right now. 3D printers print things in plastic polymers, and fairly soft ones at that, so they would make pretty lousy guns. But this is something that we may have to deal with in the near future.

This sort of thing has the potential to make all kind of laws meant to keep dangerous things out of the wrong hands completely obsolete.

A sobering thought, and something to chew on.

The Ultimate Silencer

And while we are thinking dark thoughts about the future, let us talk about this weapon that makes it impossible for people to talk.

Now, the story is a tad sensationalistic. It acts as though this is a magic “silence gun” that could make a whole room full of people unable to talk like it was some kind of mute button on life, and it is nothing of the sort.

Instead, it just plays a single person’s voice back at them with a slight delay. This seriously disorients people and makes them instinctively stop talking to clear up the confusion.

This is no big leap for science. This is technology so basic that I used a similar device at the Ontario Science when I was a kid in 1978. At the time, this Delayed Auditory Feedback was considered a possible explanation for why some people stutter. They hear their own voice echoed back to them.

So anyhow, relax, this is not some totalitarian superweapon. It could only ever work on one person at a time, and a determined enough person could, I think, shake off the effects.

What interests me is the stated purpose of this weapon, to wit :

The researchers were looking for a way to stop “louder, stronger” voices from saying more than their fair share in conversation. The paper reads: “We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking. However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions. Furthermore, some people tend to jeer at speakers to invalidate their speech.” In other words, this speech-jamming gun was built to enforce “proper” conversations.

To me, that just bristles with the rage of the shy and the unassertive. Like some perhaps mildly Asperger’s engineers got so angry at being verbally bullied by hecklers and highly articulate people who were NOT FOLLOWING THE RULES that they invented what amounts to a “shut the fuck up gun” to insure they would get a chance to speak.

Seems downright mad scientist to me, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But you know, you could take an assertiveness class, or get a better chairperson for your meetings.

I’m just sayin’.

How “Now” Is This?

Finally, a story for this exact moment in history, about how that modern demon known as “autocorrect” actually prompted a major police incident.

Damn You, Autocorrect, indeed.

For those of you who don’t know, “autocorrect” is a feature mostly used in texting via cell phone, where the phone tries to guess what you meant to type and replaces what you typed with said guess.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn’t it? Well, it is. And in this case, it actually caused a high school to go into lockdown for two whole hours before the situation was resolved.

It all started when a student tried to text a friend “Gunna be at West hall this afternoon”. Seems simple enough, right?

But autocorrect, in all its dubious wisdom, turned “Gunna” into “Gunman”.

And the recipient of said text, instead of say, texting back asking “Did you mean to say gunman??”, freaked out, told the authorities, and madness ensued.

To me, autocorrect makes things worse far more often than better. It is way easier to simply absorb a typo (we cna figrue otu thigns pretyt esaily) than to deal with a completely wrong word in a sentence.

I mean, compare “I have to see you after clsas” with “I have to see you after Callais”.

I rest my case.

But people get caught up in this because autocorrect is turned on by default on most cell phones, and people don’t know they can turn that shit off.

Although after an incident like this one, they might take the time to learn.

That’s all for today, folks! Seeya tomorrow, with SCIENCE!