First off, this might be one of the cutest fox pictures I have ever seen.

Arf? *wag wag wag*

Click for the full sized version. It is totally worth it. Squee!

I mean, just look at that adorable little face. The face, the attentive expression, the head tilt, the slightly stunned expression… everything about this picture makes me want to scoop him up and hug him and cuddle him and pets him and kiss him right between the ears.

Or her. Might be a vixen. Can’t really tell from that angle. Either way, super cuteness.

So it’s April Fool’s Day. Not really my favorite day of the year, as I am not particularly fond of practical jokes. I do enjoy the silly things otherwise respectable (ish) outfits get up to on these day, though.

Like this little bit of genius from ThinkGeek :

Now one can argue that this is both an April Fool’s joke and a potential product pitch, because I cannot be the only person who watched that vid and said “I want that! I would totally buy that if it was real, it looks awesome!”. Especially with the aspect of using your fighters to “intercept” your opponents’.

That would make the old “toss the bag into the hole” game a lot more interesting. And the Star Wars aspect appeals to my nerdy side, which is one of my best sides.

To truly make it work, it would need sound effects. Then it would totally be like a game from the board game boom of the late 70s… which is when Star Wars came out!

Another one from ThinkGeek that a lot of people will wish was real : The Play-Doh 3D Printer.

A 3D printer that runs on Play-doh would sell huge. It would be great for art and sculpture. Sure, you are not going to print anything practical with it, but a lot of people (like me) want to mess with 3D printing just for the sheer fun of it.

And soft sculpting agrees with me because it is very forgiving. Nothing is committed forever until you sire the thing. So you can just keep trying until you get the shape you want or the effect you want, and if it doesn’t work the first time, you just smooth it out or rip it off and try again.

Plus, sculpting is very tactile, and my sense of touch is way more reliable than my eyes.

3D printing would be even more forgiving, of course. So someone built this thing already!

Google traditionally goes all out for April Fool’s, and this year is no exception. A bunch of their many divisions (or “apps”) have put out their own little gag videos, and while I don’t like all of them, I thought this one struck the right tones of not-quite-plausible silliness.

I especially love the bit of gobbledygook about “intersecting photons with ultrasound waves to temporarily align molecules”. That is a beautiful bit of technobabble there, because all the parts of it are real things that actually exist. No random-greek-letter-ion waves or deflector dishes or anything else that is pure science fiction invention.

And so it passes the first “sniff test” and you have to actually think about it for a bit to realize that this is not actually plausible.

Plus I love that they thoughtfully included a SafeSearch option. If Google Nose was a real thing, that would be an absolute must. There are a lot of things nobody really wants to smell, at least not without a warning that this smell has been rated “icky” by at least ten thousand users.

With user ratings, you could even find out what the best smell in the world is, once at for all. Fresh baked bread? Movie theater popcorn? Fresh mowed grass? Or some dark horse candidate that nobody sees coming, like some obscure kind of wood or exotic spice?

But enough of that April Fool’s jive. What’s up with me?

As usual, not one heck of a lot. I may need the dentist soon, which makes me sad.. I keep getting this intense ache in the lower left part of my jaw. It seems to be radiating from the teeth all the way over to the left. So far I have been able to fight it off my making sure my left ear is clear of obstructing ear wax (pressure in that area from full sinuses is BAD) and picking stuff out from between those teeth to reduce the pressure that way, but my feeling is that this won’t be enough forever.

So I might have to go to the dentist soon to get it looked at. Not that this is a big ordeal. My dentist’s office is right across the street from this apartment complex, and it has certainly been long enough since I went there that the paltry sum that the province allots for my dental health has been replaced.

But nobody likes going to the dentist, and so I am hoping a really good vrushing of that area to get all the popcorn husks from out of there will do the trick.

Even if that does not work, it would worth it to brush the hell out of my teeth and get as much of that crap out of there as possible, because if I am going to end up going to the dentist, I do not want a repeat of my last trip there, where I was acutely embarrassed by the reaction of the dental hygienist to all that popcorn debris between my teeth.

The world of self-neglect is filled with shame.

As for my mental rather than dental health, it’s hard to say. I feel fairly depressed a lot of the time these days, at least when I am by myself, and I have to admit that part of me wants to go back to the 35 mg dose of Paxil again.

But I will endure. Maybe a month from now, when I am more used to the 30 mg and have been on the Wellbutrin for a month and change, I can make that decision in a more informed way.

But right now, I feel pretty raw and vulnerable.

Gah, my brain does not feel like making words for my fingers to type right now.

I feel positively thick in the brain. My usual lightning crackle of thoughts is reduced to molasses on a slow boil being stirred by listless goblins in a minor cave under a forgettable mountain.

Nice to see that the metaphor factory is still churning out products as a fearsome rate, though. Apparently, those just come out of me like the carbon dioxide I breathe out. No special effort needed.

It would honestly take more energy to hold them back at this point, I assume.

At least I know why I am slower witted than usual right now. Judging by how thirsty I am, and the fact that I just got up from an afternoon nap, I am probably quite dehydrated.

I tend to sweat a lot when I sleep, and that goes at least double for when I sleep in the afternoon. And all that sweating depletes my body’s water supplies, so I wake up all dehydrated and incoherent and stupid.

But I have a big glass of water in easy reach now, and so over the next little while I will gradually hydrate myself and hopefully that will at least perk me up enough to be compis mentis.

What else. Well, here’s something I have been meaning to share for a few days now. I was originally going to put it in with the Friday Science stuff, but it’s not really a story unto itself, just something very cool related to science. So I will just stick it in here, now.

I was going to embed it all cool and integrated like, but the embed does not seem to want to work with this version of WordPress, so I will have to just link it like some caveman from the 90s instead.

Click this link to go to Mars.

Or as close to doing so that any of us will get any time soon, anyhow. Click the link, then click on the panorama, and boom, there you are on Mars.

Get your ass to Mars.

You can’t move around, but you can look around, and if your computer can handle it (mine almost can!), I highly recommend going fullscreen for the full effect.

Breathtaking, isn’t it? Boom. Mars. You are looking around just like you are sitting atop the Curiosity rover in your spacesuit, gawking.

What strikes me is how much like part of Earth this alien planet’s surface looks. It looks just like some slab of raw desert from some extremely arid part of Earth. Maybe a high mountain plateau somewhere, too high and too cold and too dry for anything to live there.

And it all looks so… muddy. I know it isn’t muddy… after all, mud requires water, and if there was that much water on Mars, it would basically be Earth or close to it.

But I look around and all I can think of is dry, cracked mud. And who knows, if the theory that Mars once had free flowing water on the surface is true (and the evidence is building on that), maybe that really was mud thousands or millions of years ago.

Still, it looks like it would be fun to walk on because it would go crunch under your feet in a very satisfying way.

Even the sky looks Earth-like. Looks like any overcast day in a dry part of the world. Sort of hazy and a little yellowish and totally opaque. I have seen skies like that.

And yet, there we are on an alien planet. I suppose I could be disappointed that it doesn’t look more, well, alien, but instead I find it fascinating.

It makes me wish we had something like Curiosity on the Moon. Surely that could not be that expensive, right? I mean the Earth is way closer to Earth than Mars, and there would be only a small communications delay, and it would take way less fuel, and there’s not any atmosphere to deal with or anything.

So how come we don’t have a semi-autonomous vehicle up there right now, rolling about and taking picture and mapping the surface and looking for water and all that good stuff?

It’s like we, as a species, just declared the Moon to be “like, SO over” and completely lost interest in it once we had been there. And that pisses me off.

We have this whole planet right next door to us that we could be exploring and colonizing and finding ways to turn a profit from, and we completely ignore it.

The only time you hear about it is when people are talking about using it as a launching pad for a trip to Mars. And don’t get me wrong, Mars is cool and all, and I totally want us to go there someday.

But we could be doing such cool stuff with the Moon right now, and instead we mostly ignore it.

Oh, one last cool thing to do while you are on Mars : point the camera nearly straight up, and gaze upon the tiny white ball that is the Sun.

Puny little thing, isn’t it? And its size is actually being exaggerated by the light scattering cause by atmospheric haze. In reality, if that haze was not there, it would just look like a very bright star.

Oh, but don’t get too excited by the white arrows on the ground, they just lead to other panoramas on the same site. Those are cool and all, but they are not Mars cool.

Well, one is, the panorama the Spirit rover took. Check that one out too. It actually has TWO colors!

That’s it for our trip to Mars for today. Makes sense that I wake up all dry from sweating too much in my sleep and then we go to the desert planet of Mars!

Kinda makes me want to read Dune again, actually.

It would only be the fifth time!