Monthly Archives: May 2013

The usual linkstorm

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Well, enough navel probing over being 40 years old now. Back to reportage!

First, some video content. Some very special and extremely unique video that lets you know what it would look like to have something very bad happen to you while you stay safe at home.

Warning, the following video is disgusting, frightening, and hilarious.

See what I mean? This is as close as most of us want to get to the actual experience of being eaten by a bear. If Stephen Colbert saw this, he’s shit himself so hard, he’d deflate.

Yes, I said “most”. I know of people for whom that would be wildly pornographic.

But then, what isn’t porn to someone? I am sure some people beat off to the Antiques Road Show and climax just when he says how much the thing is worth.

I find I can only watch the video around a minute at a time. Any more than that and the disgust starts to overwhelm me and I find myself beginning to try to imagine what his breath must be like.

I mean, look at those teeth. Ewww. No such thing as a dentist for bears, I guess. On the other hand, his palate and uvula look nice and healthy. We get a nice long look at them.

The most amazing part is that the camera survived undamaged! Whoever makes GoPro cameras should totally use this fact in their advertising.

Fast. Fun. Functional. Feature-rich. Bearproof. GOPRO.

Also in video content, something even more disturbing and horrifying than the last one.

Apparently some chick known as Tan Mom made a music video.

And it is one of the worst things I have ever seen.

Seriously. That is so bad it would not make an episode of Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show. Even their most strenuous efforts to make things which are deliberately as awful as possible can’t keep up.

I have no idea why she is called Tan Mom or why that makes her famous.

I just know that I feel violated.

Moving on, let’s talk news. First we have this item about how the nurses who are treating Dzhohkar “The Boston Bomber” Tsarnaev feel about the experience.

The part of this that really struck me was this :

“You see a hurt 19-year-old and you can’t help but feel sorry for him,’’ one nurse told reporters. She said she and another nurse had to form a pact after she accidentally called Tsarnaev “Hon,” and they agreed to alert each other if they used a term of endearment with him again.

The nurses also declined to use their names in the interviews, fearing judgment from the public. Others said they felt guilty for doing a good job treating him.

“When you’re in the room, it’s just a patient. You’re here to . . . make sure they’re feeling better,” a 29-year-old nurse who initially treated Tsarnaev said. “When you step away, you take it in. I am compassionate, that’s what we do. But should I be? The rest of the world hates him right now. The emotions are like one big salad, all tossed around.”

And I just wanted to go on record as saying nobody should expect a nurse to be anything less than completely professional and compassionate. That is their job. It is not their job to pass judgment on those they treat and decide who deserves sympathy and who does not.

And really, this goes straight to the heart of my feelings about the spiritual nature of compassion. At this point, he really is just a hurt 19 year old boy. Human beings rarely turn into monsters in order to make it easier for us to hate them for what they did.

The worst villain you can imagine is still just a fragile, confused, imperfect human being who deserves compassion just like anyone else. That is why we call them human rights. They are the rights of all human beings, and nothing you or anyone else can do will ever change that.

I know that people get angry and when we are angry with someone we want to punish them. The easiest thing in the world is to decide people who have done terrible things are not human beings any more. Then we can do whatever we feel like to them and not feel bad about it.

But what can be more evil than hurting someone who is helpless before you, just to make yourself feel good? The line between them and us is thinner than we would like to believe.

For all we know, Dzhokhar thought he was punishing evil people who deserved whatever they got because their crimes meant they were less than human now.

I am not saying he is innocent or that he should go free. Justice must be served and he needs to be put someplace where he can’t hurt anyone any more.

I am just saying that the true test of our compassion is how we treat those we have every reason to despise. And if our ethics be true, we will treat them just like anyone else.

Lastly, we have this story about a school district dealing with a budget crisis in the most extreme way possbile : by just plain shutting everything down.

All the schools, all the classes, shut down as of now. They are not even going to finish out the school year. And I, for one, applaud this decision.

With the best of intentions, people in caring professions like nursing and education enable the abuse of those people in their care by always managing to make do with less every time their budget is cut.

This protects Philistine politicians from any and all consequences of their callous and thoughtless actions, and insures that their bad behaviour will continue.

The only way people will get the message is if they are the ones who will suffer for it, and that means no longer protecting them from the consequences.

And nothing lights a fire under parents’ asses like suddenly having to find and pay for a babysitter in a town where demand has suddenly shot through the roof.

There will be hell to pay. Heads will roll.

And because the teachers won’t even be teaching any more until the budget is fixed, the people’s wrath will have only one target : the budget-slashing assholes who caused the problem.

Society costs money, people. Civilization doesn’t come for free.

Grow the fuck up.

Life and Death at 40

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Well, today’s the day. I am officially forty years old now, and thus, I am dead.

Obviously not in any literal sense. After all I am still here writing this, and unless I have become a very literal ghost writer, that sort of implies I am still around and my bucket is, as yet, unkicked.

But the pre-40 me is dead, dead, dead. I have decided to treat turning 40 years old as the demarcation point between my previous life and the life I want to lead now.

This date shall serve as a big thick heavy black line across the ledger of life, and everything before the line will be nothing but a terrible dream, a long illness from which I am recovering, and when it is gone I will be ready to go back to living my life as it was supposed to be, before I got sick.

My therapist recently reminded me of some advice I have given to myself (and others) many times : I am not my illness. I am not merely a depressive.

Sure, I have been sick a long time and it’s kept me on the sidelines of life. But I am no more my disease than a person with long term cancer.

I am a normal, healthy, valid human being who happens to have contracted a nasty illness called depression in my early twenties and have suffered from it ever since. But it no more defines me than my shoe size or my eye color.

It is very tempting to cling to one’s diagnosis. After all, before your diagnosis, you had no idea what was wrong with you, and being able to name your demon is almost infinitely better than not knowing.

After that, the diagnosis becomes the identity that you desperately need because of the way depression has of suppressing your true identity. It seeps into all the empty spaces the disease leaves in your psyche until, eventually, it becomes hard to remember that things were not always this way.

You were not always depressed. You were not always sad and fearful all the time. You didn’t always hate yourself. That is the disease talking, not you. You are a real, valid, worthy person with a disease that happens to be good at making you feel like shit.

But you are not shit. You are a wonderful person who happens to feel like crap right now. And no matter how long your disease has been around and no matter how long it lingers in the future, that will never change. You and it are separate things.

Remember the last time you had the flu. Sure, you felt terrible. Sure, it kept you from being an active part of the world for a while. Sure, you had to do things to manage your symptoms and speed your recovery. Sure, the symptoms were often really gross and disgusting and there were times when it felt like the damned thing was going to be around forever.

But you knew it was only temporary, and that all you had to do was take care of yourself and endure the symptoms and eventually, it would all be over and the experience would fade into just another bad memory of something that almost feels like it happened to someone else.

Remember what that was like, and hold on to that experience. This too shall pass. Depression is an illness and not a part of who you really are.

And no longer how long it will last, no matter how long it has lasted, that will never change.

So today, the old me dies. The sun has set on the previous version of me, and risen on a new and improved version without the accumulation of errors and memory faults inherent in the previous version.

But don’t worry, my faithful public. All the features that you know and love from the old version will be retained. The changes will be mostly under the hood stuff. Mostly to fix that tendency of the mood and self-worth subroutines to crash one another. That is definitely not a feature. It’s a bug.

This suicide of mine is purely metaphorical. All the wonderful features like my sense of humour, my wit (not the same thing), my kindness, my gentle spirit, my empathy, and most of all that big old brain I lug around with me will all be there.

But I plan to expand my ambition, my imagination, my courage, my enthusiasm, and uninstall all that tired old bullshit about being worthless and useless and a drain on others and blah blah blah.

I am a wonderful person with a hell of a lot going for me. Other people would be tickled pink (and spanked red) to have all the neat brain powers I have.

So I am not very good at physical things. I am clumsy and uncoordinated and there is a missing gear somewhere between my hands and my eyes. So what? That is a tiny thing in this modern virtual world. There are more ways to make a living (or at least a life) using only your brain and a computer keyboard than ever before, and they continue to grow.

All I have to do is go out there into the warm and sunlit world and get myself noticed. Obstacles will be circumvented, navigated, and even, if absolutely necessary, bulldozed over.

I am wicked awesome and it is time I embraced that fact, held it close to my heart, and made sweet, sweet love with it until it and I are one.

Time to shed my skin and bask in the sun till I dry out. Toss out all the heavy baggage I have been lugging around and travel light, with nothing to hold me down.

There will be depression. There will be fear. There will be doubt. There will be times when I feel like just giving up.

But I will never give up. I will just keep on believing in myself till my dreams come true.

This, I swear to you, to the Universe, and to myself.

Time to be born!

Nudity and Bill Nye

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More link n’ load tonight. (Lock and link? Nah. )

First, one I have had hanging about and mixing with the wrong crowd in my browser for almost a week now, the charming story of a family of four that went for a little bit of a walk down the road.

Completely bare-ass naked.

This is a highly quotable article. For example :

Another witness, Charlotte resident Jill Mead, told the paper that the sight “blew [her] mind.”

Really, dear? That’s all it takes to blow your mind? The sight of an old lady, her daughter, a toddler, and an infant walking down the road in the State of Grace, clad in glory, popped your noodle?

I find that adorable. But then again, I have lived with nudists and I am a sexually deviant pervert. So my frame of reference might be a little different.

Here’s one from the officer in charge of the case, Captain Rod Farley, regarding the conclusions drawn from the medical and psychological examination of the two adults :

“It didn’t appear that they had any problems short of that they didn’t have any clothes on,” Farley said.

Don’t you just love that gift for understatement many people from the South have?

But the true beauty comes from the simplicity of the explanation :

As for the inspiration for their public nudity, the women gave as good a reason as any: Farley said they told police, “the Lord told them to get naked and walk down the street.”

Kinda hard to argue with that.

Now the kids, they will be fine. Infants barely even know clothes exist and toddlers are not sold on the concepts yet either. This odd excursion will do them no harm.

But as for the adults, apparently, both women agreed that God had told them to walk naked down the streets, and that’s what really blows my mind.

What was that conversation like?

Grandmother : Well, God just told me we should walked down the street naked with the kids.
Daughter : Yup. Me too.
Grandmother : Well, best get to it, then.

And then they just shucked down and went for a stroll.

The alternative is that one of them talked the other into it, which I find equally hard to believe.

And what about the officer? What kind of day did he have? There he was, on his third Krispy Kreme, and he gets a call from dispatch.

Officer : There’s a what on Providence Road? You’re kidding. And all of them buckass naked? Not a stitch on? Alright, this I gotta see. I’m taking the call. But send backup. With blankets.

It must have seemed like a gently amusing dream. Just one of those odd little things that happen in life. I can’t imagine a single person being truly upset by it.

Frankly, the whole thing strikes me as adorable.

Of course, the police often have to deal with nudity.

Nude Police Lineup by Bob Newhart

Bob Newhart is a hero of mine. His gentle style of comedy is, to me, absolutely beautiful.

The other news item I wish to address is this latest teapot trapped tempest.

Here is the headline as it is making the rounds on Facebook : Bill Nye Booed (not Boo’d, you knobs) In Texas For Saying The Moon Reflects The Sun

And as such, it is perfect Internet bait for all of the Asshole Atheist crowd to crow about and point out how stupid and superstitious all those inbred yokels down in Texas must be.

So that set is falling all over themselves to post things like “And to think, these people vote!” and “No wonder these people have Rick Perry as their leader” or the always elegant and original “*facepalm”.

Yeah, good thing us cool people aren’t smallminded bigots intolerant of those different from ourselves while patting ourselves on the back for being The Right Kind Of People, right?

And that’s how the Asshole Atheists and Sadistic Skeptics would like you to interpret the article that foes with that headline, but that is not the truth at all, and I can show you the smoking gun.

Here it is. Emphasis mine.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

Note the important words there. He brought up. Nobody asked him a question. Nobody was suggesting teaching Genesis 1:16 as science in schools or making it part of Texas law.

He was the one who brought up the Bible in the first place.

In other words, Bill Nye The Asshole Guy started the fight. He is the aggressor here. He deliberately attacked these people’s faith and now is acting all disingenuously butthurt because they got mad at him for it.

What the hell did he expect to happen? They would look at him and say “Gosh, you are right, Science Guy. My faith is a sham and the Bible is a pack of lies. All hail Bill the Science God!”

He knew exactly what was going to happen. He poked these people in the eye, and not even to make a point, just to generate this kind of bogus news story so he and all his bigoted atheist skeptic friends could masturbate their egos over it.

Tell me, Nye, would you have done that in a synagogue? Or a temple? Or a black Baptist church?

In doing shit like this, all you do is confirm to these people that scientists are out to get them and there is no possibility of middle ground between you and them.

You, sir, are no humanist, secular or otherwise. You are an abusive bigot religion-bashing just to score points with your bigoted friend, and that makes you no better than the people who you oppose.

In fact, you are worse than them, because you are smart and educated enough to know better.

I had a hard time forgiving you after that detergent ad where you sold out your credibility and your responsibility to teach the truth to children just to make a quick buck.

You chose money over science, Nye, and that is something I will never entirely forgive you for. What were kids supposed to think when they saw you shilling for some megacorp?

Still, over the years I got over that, mostly. After all, I loved your show, I loved you on Almost Live, and I have enjoyed your recent work.

But this erases all that and puts you further into the red than ever.

You are a bad person who did a bad thing Bill. You have fallen in with the Richard Dawkins, Ayn Rand, Neil DeGrasse Tyson bunch of tiny minded “skeptics” whose idea of science is to shit on all beliefs other than your own and close your minds and your hearts to the vast majority of humanity.

And that is just plain unacceptable.

You are dead to me until you renounce your wicked ways and come back into the true light of promoting understanding, cooperation, tolerance, and acceptance in humanity.

That’s what a real humanist does. It’s what a real liberal does.

It’s what real human beings do.

Come back to being human, Bill, before it’s too late.

Friday Science Concentration, May 17, 2013

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Guess what, science fans! It’s SCIENCE TIME again!

And this time, we will be doing our science roundup in two parts : non brain science, and….

…wait for it, wait for it…

….actual brain science.

No extra points for getting that right so you can all put your hands down now.

Our first brain unrelated items comes from the fascinating world of DNA and the almost as fascinating world of carnivorous plants.

It turns out that recent developments in sequencing the genome of a plant called Utricularia gibba (or “Uggie”, to its friends) have yielded some very interesting results.

Turns out that Uggie baby’s genome consists of 97 percent active genes and only three percent “junk” DNA that doesn’t code for any proteins.

This is a sharp contrast to us naked beach apes, whose genome consists of only 2 percent active DNA and 98 percent rubbish DNA that just lays about without coding a single protein.

Thus, the puck is pushed back into the “junk DNA truly is useless” end of the rink and away from the “junk DNA is somehow very important even though it codes for no proteins” side of things. After all, it seems you can at least have a complex multicellular plant with almost no junk DNA.

The article (and the research) assumes that Uggie has somehow “deleted” nearly all junk DNA but I consider that assumption unwarranted. It may never have had junk in its DNA sequence in the first place, in which case the question is, why does any species have junk DNA?

My armchair scientist theory is that adding new DNA without getting rid of the old and just changing which genes are active allows for a faster rate of stable mutation and hence benefits species which have had to adapt to various conditions, like people, or our food crops.

Next up in the brainless science field (so to speak), we have this story of a natural reservoir with billion year old water in it recently discovered in Ontario.

Scientists found it while working 2.4 km under the ground and chemical and isotope analysis show that the water in this underground lake has definitely not been in contact with Earth’s atmosphere for at least a billion years, and is abundant with hydrogen and methane, two of the building blocks of life.

This is exciting news because it means that somewhere in that reservoir may be life that has not been part of Earth’s surface biosphere for a billion years. Who knows what strange and previously unheard of avenues of evolution such life could take?

It might even be its own shadow ecosystem that works on different principles than our own.

However, don’t expect anything multicellular, as I can’t imagine what the energy inputs for an ecosystem like that would be. Chemical? Geothermal? Who knows.

For those of us in the primary biosphere, it’s sunlight.

OK, now on with the brain science!

First off, we will talk about recent progress made in the scientific understanding of individuality.

A study has shown that mice who explore more develop more new neural connections than ones who do not. This difference in neurogenesis provides an important clue in the mystery of individuality, because all of these mice were genetically identical. Forty mice, all twins.

And yet, there were differences. And the mystery really takes off when you realize that there was differences in behaviour in these genetically identical mice before they even started the study.

So obviously, individuality is not a solely genetic thing. There must be another factor that somehow tells us “you are bold and exploratory” or “you are cautious and neophobic”.

And if that factor is not in our genes, then where the heck is it?

I would like to know if these differences in temperament appear even in genetically identical mice raised in isolation with one another.

It might be that somehow we communicate with others of our species (via pheromones, perhaps) and “negotiate” who has what job in the community.

“You’re already bold and exploratory? OK, I’ll be cautious and sensible. ”

And if that held true in humans, it might be that this genetic negotiation happened when we were all sitting in the maternity ward together.

As a distinctly cautious type, that prospect both intrigues and disturbs me.

And now, onward to the edge : University of Oxford scientists think they may have come up with a way to make you better at mental arithmetic.

And all you have to do is train for five days while they use something called transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS) on your brain.

After that, you will have a sharper, faster brain that manipulates numbers more easily than ever before, and the effect will even still be there six months later.

Frankly, this smells a tad off to me. Nowhere in the article does it say there was a control group that had the stimulation without the training, and without that control, you cannot say the transcranial stimulation had anything to do with it.

Maybe five days’ training is all anyone needs to get better at maths.

But who knows? The science of transcranial magnetic stimulation is still quite new. Maybe they are on to something after all.

Still quite spooky to imagine a bunch of kids studying math with brain stimulation helmets on, though.

Plus, this caught my eye because I have had a lovely resurgence of my own mental arithmetic skills lately. I used to be quite food at it as a child but as I grew I somehow lost the ability.

And now it’s back! Wow, I wonder if I can get my old singing voice back too.

On a more serious note, scientists from the University of Adelaide and the University of Colorado have collaborated to create what might just be a cure for heroin and morphine addiction.

Turns out, they both bind to the same receptor in the brain, and the scientists thing they can create a drug that blocks access to those receptors, and thus eliminate the craving for the opiods.

That would certainly shoot the main mechanism of addiction right between the eyes. No cravings, no addiction, basically. And it might even lead to a cure for another serious problem, morphine tolerance.

Patients with long term intractable pain often develop a high level of resistance to morphine and its derivatives, leading to the inevitable point where the only dosage strong enough to stop their pain is one that would be fatal.

If we could cure the cravings for the morphine, we could slow down the development of tolerance and thus give the patient more time where the drug works for them.

And that… would be awesome.

That’s enough for this week, folks! But stay tuned, more brain science soon.

The recent election

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British Columbia had an election last Tuesday, May 14.

To everyone’s total shock, the wrong people, namely the incumbent provincial Liberals (liberal in name only LINO bastards) won with a majority.

The polls all predicted a landslide by the other major party around these parts, the provincial NDP.

But historically low levels of voter turnout handed the election to the Libs instead, and that is profoundly depressing to me.

Full confession : I did not vote. I was having a very poor mental health day and I could not imagine facing the social anxiety acid test of going to the polls.

Really regretting that now. Not that my vote would have made a big difference to the election, but it would have made a big difference to how I feel about the whole thing right now.

It would have been worth it to be able to say “I did what I could”. But I didn’t.

And here’s the thing. Everyone is wondering about how the polls could have been so wrong. But I think I know, and it’s not a pretty picture.

I think there were far too many people like me who believed the goddamned polls that predicted that Andrian Dix and his NDP would win by a landslide, and so they thought “Well, the right thing will happen whether I vote or not, so why bother?”

And thus, the old adage about evil requiring nothing but the inaction of good people comes true. Left wingers are historically a lazier group than conservatives, and far less inclined to band together and work hard toward a common goal, especially when it requires such an illiberal thing as doing what you are told or restraining your rampant self-expression, and that is all conservatism needs to be able to overcome the political system with their superior organization and dedication.

So we are stuck with these bastards for four more years. Fan fucking tastic.

Of course, there is a another, much darker explanation for how the polls can be so drastically wrong.

The side that won did it by cheating. They rigged the election, stuffed the ballot boxes, subverted democracy by turning it into a mere show to make the masses feel like they are in control.

When you think about it, how would we know the election was rigged? The only way to tell would be if the election results were radically different than what the polling suggested, especially the exit polls.

And I am quite certain that the forces of political evil are willing and able to do it. After all, if you think 47 percent of the voters are mindless parasites, it would be ridiculous to let them really be in charge. So why not steal the election?

It’s for their own good. They have no idea what is good for them.

And the warning bells clang louder every day. The entire Canadian federal government is under investigation for enormous amounts of vote fraud.

Down south, there was all kinds of hanky panky in their last election too. People have forgotten it by now because Obama won. But that should not keep the truth from being revealed.

So who knows? Maybe the powers that be have truly given up on democracy. Maybe they have perfected the art and science of tipping elections in their favour no matter what, and the kinds of governments now running the world are exactly the type they like : incompetent, partisan, dogmatic, elitist people far, far removed from the life of ordinary citizens and hence unlikely to feel like one of the people any more.

After all, they are one of the elite now, and act to protect their own group above all.

How would we know? And even if we knew, what could we do about it?

I would love to do a massive post-election poll where you ask everybody “Who did you vote for in the last election?”.

Allowing for a certain amount of self-reporting bias, it would still be a very useful yardstick for measuring the accuracy of the election.

If the results were in line with the pre-election polling and not the elections results, I think that would be enough evidence to launch an investigation into just what went on.

Because honestly. How else would we know if the results of an election are accurate? It would take only a little corruption of the system in just the right places to sway an election, especially if it’s close.

And have you noticed that all elections have been getting closer and closer over the years? The difference between winners and losers is often less than five percent, over and over again.

Are the people truly that evenly decided? Or are we only told that we are so the powers that be, the One Percent, can pick the winners without it being too obvious?

I have no proof or evidence of any of this. I only have questions and suspicions. I think it is worth looking into by someone far better at research than I am.

And seeing how far politicians have gone in completely ignoring the will of the people on dozens of issues, who can doubt that somehow, somewhere, something has gone disastrously wrong?

Every day, people grow angrier and more disillusioned and frustrated. The feeling that the average citizen is powerless against a system that is run by the One Percent, for the One Percent is growing.

I am convinced that this is, in an indirect way, the reason why there has been so many acts of random, senseless violence all over the world recently. Sometimes, all it takes to push an unbalanced person from thinking about it to doing it is a rise in the frustration level of the zeitgeist.

People do crazy things when they feel they have nothing left to lose. It’s how tragedies like mass shootings and bombings happen.

And it is also how revolutions happen.

Maybe it is time for another one of those. People need to demand democracy, and if they do not get it, they need to be ready to tear the whole system down.

That is the only time when the powers that be are scared enough to make real change.

We need to make their afraid for their lives again.

Caine stands up

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Tonight we start off with a very powerful and moving video.

But before you watch it, please read this.

SEVERE TRIGGER WARNING for all of of us who were bullied as children. Caine talks about his experience and it might just be a lot like your own, so fair warning, make sure you are ready before you watch this.

I can tell you that it’s worth it, but I must warn you that it is rough.

That duty discharged, please watch the following video.

Caine is a very brave young man. I am not sure I would have had the courage to do what he did when I was his age. I was only able to understand and articulate my problems that well when I was much older than him.

When I was 11, I was just trying to survive. both physically and emotionally. The idea that what was happening to me every school day was deeply wrong would not have occurred to me, let alone the notion that I could do anything to protect myself by talking to adults.

All the adults in my life had failed me. When I was 11 years old, I was at least three years into giving up all hope that there was anyone, anywhere, who in any way cared enough about me to go to the trouble of protecting me from the violent abuse I faced every day.

I tried to tell my parents. They shut me down immediately. I tried to tell teachers. They said various unhelpful things that were supposed to placate me but really just gave me the message that they really did not feel like actually doing anything about it. Same with the principal’s office.

Never thought of escalating it to the school board level. I doubt I would have been able to summon the courage anyhow. I was a crushingly shy and timid child in many ways.

But the real point is that saving myself was not my job. I was just a kid. My job was to go to school, get good marks, stay out of trouble, and be part of a family.

It was not my job to protect myself from the vicious assaults and humiliation of my peers. Every day of my elementary school life, I was exposed to things which would be easily recognized as serious crimes if it happened between adults.

But somehow, between kids, it was considered “normal”.

I will never forget one day when I tried to tell one of the teachers who oversaw the playground during lunch and recess about the horrible beating I had just suffered not ten feet directly in front of her.

I don’t know who she was. These ladies were often not the regular teachers at all. For all I know, they were parent volunteers, or just people the teachers hired so they would have some peace while the kids went out and played.

Kids in a playground. What could be more wholesome than that, right? The sound of it still takes me instantly to a very bad place. Trigger city, big time.

Anyhow, so I tried to tell this playground monitor what happened, but I had not gotten two words out before she just glared at me and jabbed a finger back at the playground.

It would have hurt less if she had jabbed her finger directly into my heart. And that would have healed a long time ago. Not this.

I guess that told me where I stood. She was mad at me for even trying to talk to her. I find it hard to believe that she did not see the crowd all gathered around where a bunch of bullies where having loads of fun kicking me and stomping on my head as I lay helpless on the ground.

I suppose that if she had let me talk to her, she might have had to face the fact that she just let me get brutalized right in front of her and did nothing about it, and then she might have had to ask herself why, when I am entirely sure that if I had attacked one of the popular kids, she would have been on me like a flash of lightning and I would have been in the principal’s office before the dust settled.

Things like that, and like young Caine’s video, make me really wonder just what kind of effect that kind of abuse has on a child. The damage is impossible to calculate.

All the feeling of security that a child should have and internalize is gone, destroyed. All faith in others is gone too. In my childhood world, there were savage peers and apathetic adults and that was it.

What choice did I have but to withdraw deep, deep into myself? Where else could I go? What else could I do? It was my only means of escape.

So in a way, it is amazing that I grew up to be as sane as I did. Somehow I held it all together enough to get through school and not end up killing myself or anyone else in high school.

Again, thank you so much, Doctor Klein. Having someone to talk to in those times probably saved my life, even if I could only see you every three weeks and you were not, objectively, that great of a therapist.

But people dying of thirst are not going to notice or care if the water is a tad brackish.

Looking back, I realize that I did not just have one or two childhood traumas. I had hundreds. Thousands. Every school day was a fresh hell.

And like with poor Caine, a good day for me when I was a student at Parkside Elementary in Summerside was one in which everybody leaved me the hell alone.

There is something seriously wrong with a child’s life when their greatest wish is to go one day without anyone noticing them.

That’s usually reserved for children in war zones, isn’t it?

Or at least it should be.

Letting go, diving in

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Lately, I am doing my best to reprogram my brain.

It’s more or less cognitive therapy that I am administering to myself. Cognitive therapy is, of course, the easiest sort for a fanatically cerebral sort like myself.

One might argue that something more based on emotion and the darkness between thoughts would more directly address my problems, and that is probably true.

But that sort of thing is mighty tricky to self-administer if you are the logical, rational, verbal sort like I am. We overgrown front lobe types refuse to accept as real anything which cannot be explained and/or understood my the conscious, rational mind.

This can be very powerful, and at the very least can make you sound very smart indeed because you are so articulate and fluent. The demand for rational sense and expressable thoughts creates a deep and powerful pressure in the mind for articulation and the development of a high live of capacity for creative expression. If that is the only way the feeling can get out, they will work hard to get out that way.

Even if you never share this articulated thoughts (or emotions, or ideas, or whatever) with anyone, just the need for them to pass through the barrier between the conscious and unconscious minds in order to find expression pressures the mind towards developing its expressive capacities.

In my case, that means verbal expression. Language. I have no talent for the visual arts and I lack the proper mindset for programming or technical jobs.

But boy, do I rock the wordsmithery.

However, being the meticulously thorough and honest philosopher I am, I am fully aware that, as dazzling as all this verbal jimcrackery can be, the restriction of conscious expression can be quite damaging.

Being unable to deal with your deeper, subverbal self without making it go through the slow and painful process of finding rational expression means it is very hard for someone like me to get at what is really going on inside this noggin of mine.

Consciousness is, after all, merely the shining, glittering surface of the waters of the mind. Most of who and what we are lives far beneath the surface and trying to deal with that from a point of view that says only the surface of the water is real is like trying to understand marine biology entirely based on what you can see from shore.

I could never let myself be so limited. I am the sort who seeks the truth of things over everything, and that means that I expand my find to fit the truth, whatever it may be, whatever the cost.

Most people, it seems to me, shrink the truth until it fits their mind.

So I recognize the truth of the limitations of the rational mindset, especially when dealing with one’s own mental issues, which are often far away from rationality and in some causes may ever be caused by it, or at least, an overzealous and ignorant application of it.

And for a while, I was stuck there. I knew there was far more to me than my rationality could hope to grasp, but I was still limited by this rationalist mindset and so it seemed like I had no idea how to proceed. All my tools were rational. I was stuck on the shore without a canoe.

There is simply no rational approach to dealing with irrational emotions (and that’s most of them). You have to set your rationality, with its externally defined realities and powerful incisiveness and blindingly bright light, aside.

You have to instead enter the murky, internally defined world of your own true emotional self. The person you would be even if you didn’t have that big bright rational mind dragging you around in circles. The person you were as a child, before all the bad things happened, before you learned to use your rationality as both sword and shield, before you hid yourself away from the world and learned to blinker yourself so that you never noticed how tiny and cramped your hideout had gotten.

And that’s not easy. For someone like me, all our instincts are wrong. This is not a truth that can be pursued down a long chain of reasoning and deduction like cops using dogs to find a criminal. It is not the sort of thing that comes from long rational contemplations that result in neat, encapsulated insights you can share with others and have them be entertained and informed.

It comes instead from just opening up your mind and your heart to find out what is there, and learn to accept it and deal with it on its own terms.

And I am learning to do that. It’s slow going but I am learning to accept my mystical, poetic, spiritual side. And that is vital to my becoming the more integrated, solid, together person I want to be.

Compartmentalization is the enemy. Integration is the goal. The walls have to come down. The waters have to be allowed to flow together and merge and find their own level, and this process cannot be controlled, predicted, or directed.

All you can do is let go and let it happen, with the only thing left to you is faith.

Faith that after the waters reside, you will find peace, inner harmony, understanding, and the calmness and stability that you have always wanted.

Faith that this unpredictable, uncoordinated, unplanned, uncontrolled process will lead to greater happiness in life.

Faith that only by letting go of control can you ever hope to truly live the life you want.

Faith is very hard for those of us who want to know where the road goes before we set foot on it. Our rational minds have always been our best protection from the world. To us, emotionally, the unpredictable is virtually identical to the negative because we always assume the worst.

But the world is not against us. Frankly, it doesn’t care about us.

And that means anything is possible.

Dive in. Let go. Find out who you truly are.

So much stuff!

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No diary stuff today! Well, except for one thing.

Got my new glasses with the anti-fatigue lenses and a slightly stronger prescription today. Only took them two weeks to make them. Whatever happened to “in about an hour”?

Anyhoo, I have been wearing them all day and so far they are cool and froody. When I first put them on, everything looked really shiny and it sort of felt like my eyeballs were changing shape.

But now I have settled into the new groove. I am not fully adjusted yet by any stretch of the imagination but the weirdest part is over.

And now… STUFF! We will start with the cute and innocent and gradually share to the perverted and obscene.

Doesn’t that sounds like fun, kids?

Up first we have this utterly adorable example of the amazing work fans of the latest My Little Pony show are doing on their own.

It stars a critter called Fluffle Puff. You will soon see how it got the name.

It’s like someone crossed a Pony with a Tribble and filled it with love!

My favorite comedy beat is the one where FP gets cupcake, gasps, then faceplants into it. Excellent timing and very smooth, yet dense. It really shows good animation chops because the animator has to really understand the comedy of little nuances, expressions, and gestures very well to pull it off.

The sort of stuff Chuck Jones (hallowed be his cels) was good at.

I also love the one that ends with FP and that odd looking blue pony rolling around like a tumbleweed. That is just plain adorable AND hilarious.

All in all, way too awesome not to share.

Next up, something to completely mess with your mind.

I love that he does the trick both ways, subtracting the ‘extra’ blocks and then adding them back in. That really helps to sell the trick and I found both ways equally fascinating to watch.

I had never seen this done in three dimensions before, only with paper cutouts. And theoretically, I should not be surprised that it works in “the real world”, and I am not, exactly.

But it is a whole lot more impressive with that additional physical reality to it. Plus I have never seen it done in three stages like that. Wow.

Now there are many videos to explain how the trick works and I will likely watch one eventually, although all the explanations of it I have read before have failed to penetrate this soggy old brain of mine.

But for now, I will just enjoy the magic and the wonder of it, and pleasantly contemplate just how freaky the world of topological transformations can be.

And now, things get just a little darker. Check out what happened across the border recently.

So much for “good fences make good neighbors”, huh? In my experience, fences are exactly the thing that neighbors get into these crazy feuds over. The sweet little lady that lived behind us when I was a kid tried to take us to court because she thought the fence my Dad built in 1980 or so was six inches on to her back yard that she never used.

Granted, she didn’t go nuts with a bulldozer. I think I speak for all of us when I say I can maybe understand ripping out the fence.

But this Swegle asshole destroyed a lot of things that did not belong to him or the people who built the fence, and that is just plain wrong.

Assholes with short fuses should not have access to heavy equipment.

Next up, we have the slightly naughty but mostly super sparkly fabulous Louis Virtel with some words of wisdom (a day late) for Mother’s Day.

Get More:

Very funny and fun stuff. I have thought about it, and if I was a heterosexual parent with no connections to the gay community and my kid came out to me, I think I would say “I want grandkids. You’ll adopt. Otherwise, fine by me!”

Is it weird that I always imagine myself to be the mother in that scenario? I’m so maternal!

My coming out was a shock to absolutely nobody except maybe my father. My siblings all knew, my college friends all knew, distant acquaintances knew. I was in a cellophane closet and I had no idea!

Next, a whole bunch of pretty naughty things. Ignore the fact that it says Banned Commercials 2013. Many of them have never been banned at all and a lot of them have been around for ages.

And one of them is very obviously a skit and not a real commercial.

So just rename it “a bunch of funny commercials”, and enjoy.

My favorites include the Bottle Opening Challenge (very clever and very well executed, if lowbrow), and the one with the father caught in an awkward position (definitely not banned, I saw it on TV a dozen times) is also very well done.

FYI, in the full version of the ad, the father responds to the cop by saying “I’m her… Daddy?”

Oh, and “When are you going to get out of here?” (also never banned. saw it many times) is a work of genius. I totally fell for it the first time I saw it.

And of course, how can I not love this one? Hey, they are both getting what they want, right?

Hate the cowboy hat, tho. Seriously.

And we all know what this kids needs, right? Bam. Like a thunderclap. No warning. No negotiating. Smack. Then you go about your business like nothing happened.

Finally, we have… this. This is most likely NSFW wherever you are. Possibly even in the place the picture was taken.

Click me to enlarge!

I really don’t want to know what you have to do to make it go around and around.

Click to enlarge…. IF YOU DARE.

I really want to live wherever this was taken, because they have to be some seriously cool and relaxed people if they leave things like this out in the open for kids to see.

Curse of the overcharge

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Well, I am all out of links to share and comment on and I don’t really feel compelled to talk about anything in the news right now, so I guess I will have to go back to my trusty old talking endlessly about myself and my mental problems routine.

Or at least, giving a State Of My Recovery address. This blog of mine is supposed to be a diary at least some of the time, and I have been sort of avoiding that part of it for a while now, preferring the use links and TED talks and so on as interesting distractions from dealing with myself for a while.

And it’s not like those other kinds of blog entries are somehow worthless. I like sharing my thoughts with the world. It helps me develop both my thinking and my expressive skills. Plus, it just feels good to exercise these writing muscles of mine.

Like I have said for a long long time, I need ways to harness and express these creative energies of mine in order to fumble towards some kind of sanity. Both times I have written a 50,000 word novel for the National Novel Writing Month in November, I have found that it is very satisfying to have something to do that absorbs so much of my energies. It is a lot of work, but the work makes me happy.

And a lot of that has to do with no longer having so much pent up potential energy filling up all the empty spaces in my brain. When I strive harder to harness my energies, and put them out into the world instead of keeping them in all the time, I am a happier, calmer, more relaxed person who finds life much easier to deal with.

So why don’t I do that all the time? Why is there only one month out of twelve where I live this happier and calmer life?

I have all the information I need in order to make the choice that will clearly, according to all available evidence, make me a happier and saner person. But instead, I plug along at 1000 words a day, which is enough to keep my creative wheels greased and all, but not nearly enough to actually discharge the extraordinary buildup of electricity that is the usual state of being in my mind.

And that might be clue one as to why. I am so used to having all this neurotic energy in my mind, just waiting to amplify the smallest stresses into gigantic panic attacks, that I am afraid to let it go.

Because like I said before, this overabundance is not just a curse, it’s also somehow my safety blanket. All the potential thoughts, emotions, ideas, and so forth are added like bricks to the wall inside my mind which protects me from the world.

Even the energy itself contained within these notions of mine is used to clamp everything in place instead of being used to actually motivate me to do things.

So perhaps a primary reason why I do not live as though NaNoWriMo is every day of the year is that somewhere deep inside, I am afraid that if I discharge that energy, everything in my mind will fall apart and I will be left in chaos and vulnerability.

And when you live your entire life in order to avoid vulnerability, it paradoxically makes you very vulnerable to all kinds of things. Like loneliness and isolation, for instance.

That’s what happens when a person’s fundamental sense of safety is violated in early childhood. They become so paranoid about the world coming to get them that they become obsessed with avoiding the faintest trace of vulnerability, regardless of the cost.

I have certainly paid an extremely heavy price for my inherent mistrust of the universe. It has robbed me of all hope I had for a normal life.

Normal people leading normal lives accept a certain amount of risk and vulnerability as a cost of living. They have a healthy balance of both caution and coping skills, and this allows them to navigate through life in a confident and calm way.

But for the likes of me, our terror makes us hide away from the world to the point where it becomes nearly impossible for us to cope at all with anything but the most heavily mediated reality.

Like the Internet, for instance.

Still, this thousand word a day thing is just not cutting it any more. I find myself getting bored and frustrated with all the time I spend doing pointless things online.

And that is a good thing. I am cultivating this restlessness and dissatisfaction. Only by letting it develop and grow will it become a force for change inside me.

Comfort can kill. Seeking discomfort can be the only way to escape a bad (but comfortable) situation. It is a hard lesson for a comfort-seeking creature like myself to accept. My strongest instinct is to always flow in the direction of maximum comfort and then stay there.

This results in a life without even the possibility of change, and so if I want to cover the distance between where I am and a new, better normal, I am going to have to voluntarily move from a state of greater comfort to a state of lesser comfort.

Life does not provide many escalators between where you are and where you want to be, and you can waste decades of your life holding out for one.

Oh, wait, this just in : the most amazing link I have seen in… maybe forever.

Like someone said in the comments, this could have been cheesy and terrible. Instead, it is so far beyond mere awesomeness that it defies calculation by even the most robust super-infinite tensors.

I don’t even care at all that he changed the lyrics to one of the best songs ever. That is completely fine by me. He couldn’t very well do the original song as written, it ends with Major Tom’s capsule floating off in space forever (or something). People on Earth would be flipping out.

And the new lyrics are quite good!

I think… I think I now worship Commander Chris Hadfield a little now, and not just because he did a great version of a Bowie song and I already worship Bowie a little.

No, I worship him because he did Major Tom in motherfucking space and did an incredible job of it. He is the coolest human being to ever be in space, period.

And he’s Canadian.

That pretty much maxes out my ability to absorb awesomeness right there.

Time travel sucks

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No idea what to write about tonight. I have been having a lot of sleepy days recently, and that combined with the decidedly unseasonal (and unreasonable heat) has left my poor noodle utterly fried.

Mmm…. fried noodles.

Anyhow, when in doubt, share stuff. So I thought I would share this with you all.

It’s a video starring two puppets named Glove and Boot, and they are here to tell you all the reasons why time travel actually sucks mongoose taint.

Yup. Puppets again. But unlike the ones from Felt, these ones actually look great.

Wasn’t that two tons of fun? I love, love, love this vid. The energy and enthusiasm are contagious. The production values are superb. Everything looks fantastic. Great use of modern digital techniques. I love to see new technologies applied so well.

Too often, people get overwhelmed by their love of the technology and use it in a way that more or less just shows off its basic capabilities, and to me, that is dull, dull, dull.

The interesting stuff comes when people with talent and imagination harness the technology to their drive to create and in doing so, stretch the technology and really make it work.

And of course, the vid is all about one of my own science fiction pet peeves, time travel. I have a lot of objections to it myself. Granted, mine are more about the near impossibility of writing a time travel society that is actually logically consistent and that does not drag in a whole bunch of unspoken assumptions that are completely unsupported by the narrative, but still.

I think most of Glove and Boot’s objections are valid too. I thought the “in the future, you are gross” thing was a legitimate concern that they wasted on a cheap bathroom joke.

It would have been funnier to have a bunch of future people look at the puppet I assume is Boots and say “Eww, it’s covered in fecal germs!” and have Boots look horrified and say “Who? What? Me?”

And I don’t care if I don’t think my past self was cool. (Trust me… he wasn’t.) It would be worth it to get to tell him to fight like hell to stay in university.

Of course, if I had stayed in uni, I would not have become the person I am today, and therefore I would have no desire to go back in time and tell myself to fight to stay in uni, and therefore I would never go, and so then I would be back to wanting to go back in time, and therefore…

See what I mean about time travel? The simplest ideas instantly fall into irresolvable paradox. And I am a crotchety enough science fiction fan/writer that I demand all stories pass the basic logic test. Either your narrative circuit is complete and I can enjoy the story, or it is not, and it short-circuits and I have to start caring less about the story in order to continue with it.

And that means you have already set a hard limit as to how much I can enjoy the story because you have limited the amount I can invest in it.

let’s see… the “Ha ha ha, I can’t break a twenty” is total bullshit. Come on guys, that’s the best you can think of? The real problem with going back ten years and trying to spend money is that odds are, all the money in your wallet was minted within the next ten years and is therefore going to look mighty suspicious to people of the past.

But maybe they won’t notice, right? I mean, who looks at the year on bills?

That leads to the second problem, which is that, in order to stay ahead of counterfeiters, bill designs change relatively frequently. So your money likely will not look right to the people of ten years ago even on casual inspection.

As for spending money in the future, it’s not likely that inflation will ever be that high. But it’s eminently possible that by then, we will have abolished cash completely and trying to pay for a McRib with a twenty will be greeted the same as we would greet someone trying to pay their phone bill with sheep.

The past is definitely gross, though. I really don’t want to visit any of history before the era of modern sanitation and antibiotics. In the past, especially in cities, everything smelled like shit all the fucking time because there was shit everywhere all the fucking time.

I mean even in the steampunk era horses were dropping “road apples” (whoever came up with that term is a sick, sick bastard) all over the place.

So no. I don’t really want to go back much further than the period between WWI and WWII. And even that is dicey, what with all the influenza strains ripping through the population.

So even if I was to go back to kill Hitler (or better yet, get him laid and get someone to buy his art), I would not really want to linger.

Well, maybe just long enough to visit some steamy gay cabaret in Paris or something.

As for the whole “you’ll hate the music” rap, well, maybe if you have super narrow genre based tastes. But musical gourmets like myself have developed wider, deeper, richer palates than that, and I am pretty confident that no matter what era I was in, I would find music I like.

Honestly, I would worry more about losing my tiny mind from MP3 collection withdrawal.

I mean, in the past, you actually had to have like, physical media for all your music! And further back than that, you had to hope you liked whatever was on the radio.

And further back than that, the only way to hear music was to be within earshot of actual musicians.

I am pretty sure I would go completely bonkers without my constant access to my thousands of MP3’s.

I would end up being some sad sucker with a large collection of music boxes!

So yeah. Time travel sucks.