Check out the future of batteries : the metal-air battery.

It could drive your electric vehicle 1800 km (or around 1200 miles for you Americans) on a single charge, and all with a battery that only weighs 100 kg (220 pounds, or the weight of one slightly overweight man).

It does this by one of those acts of genius that seems obvious in hindsight : it gets its oxygen from the air instead of lugging it around in the anode of the battery.

I had no idea until now that batteries carried their own oxygen supply inside. All I know about batteries is that when you have two different kinds of metal in the same acid, the difference between the conductivity in the two metals creates a current.

Or something like that. It’s been a long time since Grade 9 science.

So I am not sure where the oxygen comes in. But the company responsible for this breakthrough, Phinergy, assures us that this is true and that their solution fixes that problem.

I have heard about this kind of thing before, but never in so effective a form and, and this is very important, never in a form that relies on something as cheap and plentiful as aluminum.

The Earth’s crust is loaded with aluminum, until rarer stuff like lithium, and aluminum is cheap, easy to work with, and marvelously recyclable to boot.

With that kind of range, the biggest hurdle for electric vehicles is cleared. A car with the Phinergy system would have two batteries, a small lithium-ion one with a 50 km range (more than enough for urban driving) and the larger aluminum-air battery for longer trips.

To be honest, people’s objection to short operating ranges for electric cars is mostly irrational. Unless you have a very long commute, 50 km is enough whether there’s a bigger battery for longer trips there or not. Most people could commute, run errands, and be back home with range to spare, and just plug their car in overnight.

But if a much longer range than they need is what it takes to get enough people to buy electric cars that it is worth it to invest in the infrastructure to support them, I am all for it.

Imagine a future where your car drives itself and you never have to worry about running out of power because it automatically parks itself on a charging pad when not in use.

Sounds pretty awesome to me.

Moving on, it turns out that Thomas Kinkade was a drunk.

For those of you unfamiliar with the late mister Kinkade, here’s the precis : he painted super happy, warm, life-affirming paintings filled with glowy sunshine and bucolic imagery like cottages and lakes and flowers.

Stuff like this :

And as we wind on down the road/ our shadow’s taller than our soul…

And because his paintings were happy and harmless and easy for anyone to like, the artistic establishment hated him. And not only that, he had the gall to make paintings that the Wrong Kind Of People, namely evangelical Christians, liked, and made a heck of a lot of money doing it. So the artistic establishment hated him with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.

To me, that is entirely wrongheaded. I like his work. There is nothing wrong with making art purely to make people feel good. Art does not have to challenge and perplex.

It can just set out to be pretty and nice to look at. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Do we forget all the revered artists who painted nothing but sunflowers and starry nights?

As for him being a drinker and a tail-chaser, I suppose that would be a shock to people in the self-sealed evangelical Christian movement, but to people like myself who are more versed in the lives of artists and writers, it is not a surprise at all. We artists are a high strung and intense bunch, often with profound personal demons hounding us, and it is no wonder that so many of us end up lost to one form of addiction or another.

Being an artist isn’t easy, and I am not just talking about how hard it is to make the actual art. Just having the necessary combination of sensitivity and imagination can be quite the burden, and some of us turn to substance abuse in order to dull our sensitivity and quiet our demons for a while.

Myself, I have avoided life, and therefore I have avoided the sorts of stresses that turn us high strung artistic types to addiction. I am keenly aware of how easy it would be for me to fall into addiction, and so I am extremely paranoid about opening the door to it even the tiniest bit.

As a result, I have fewer bad habits than a lot of fat dudes my age. My main addiction is food, and even that is not so bad compared to others in my demographic because I am by no means averse to fresh fruit and vegetables and I have never eaten a lot of greasy foods.

If only I could kick this carb addiction, I would practically be a health nut.

Anyhow, I have realized recently that I really am kind of high strung. I don’t think of myself that way, but it’s true. I think of myself as all mellow and laid back, and that’s true to a large extent.

But when I look back over my life and the sheer amount of tension and stress I have felt in fairly normal circumstances,that does not paint the picture of a mellow dude.

So in some ways I am mellow and in other ways I am a tightly wound rubber band ready to snap. I think it is important for me to realize and accept this instead of pretending part of my personality just doesn’t exist.

Well, that’s it for my ramblings for today, folks. I will talk to you again tomorrow.

In the meantime, think happy thoughts.

We’re back in the personal mode for tonight. Good news and bad news tonight.

The bad news (I always start with the bad news) is that today has been a pretty rough day for me, health wise.

It started with lunch. I was happily eating lunch when suddenly it felt like the bottom fell out of my stomach and left a morass of aches and acid in its wake. Just like that, I went from feeling normal to feeling ill.

And that was bad. But I have had Irritable Bowel Syndrome for twenty years now, and so I am somewhat prepared to handle these little upsets. They don’t get me down. I just go to the bathroom and get rid of whatever I can get rid of, then relax in bed with the fan pointed at my forehead and do my best to drain my sinuses and make sure my ears are not clogged.

Seems weird, but those two things, sinuses and bowels, are intimately connected with me. Somehow.

Anyhow, I did all that and my tummy felt better eventually, and so I did the sensible thing and went to sleep. I figured that what I was dealing with was a run of the mill IBS attack and resolved to make sure I didn’t eat too fast in the future.

But when I woke up from my nap, my body was loaded with aches and pains. The only part of me that didn’t hurt was, ironically, my head. Everything else ached, especially my joints, but also in the major muscles of my arms and legs, in the pit of my stomach, and in the back of my neck.

This was way worse. I was feeling pretty lousy. That kind of pain really makes life miserable. That is bad enough for a healthy person but for someone like me with depression, it was a constantly struggle not to let the pain push my mood into a really dark and bad place and just weather it.

Luckily, I remembered that I had a huge bottle of acetaminophen, and took a fat dose of it (2000 mg, or 2 grams), then eventually also remembered that I still had that Volteran joint pain remedy gel stuff too, so I applied it to the worst places for pain, and it seemed to help somewhat.

The really weird and worrying thing is that after a little while, I realized that the pain was far more severe on my right side. I have no idea what that means. But it was exactly like I was in one of those ads where they treat half of the body with Brand X and half with Awesome Brand.

The aches and pains are still there even now, but thank goodness, they are far less intense.

I have two theories (of course I have theories) as to WTF is going on. One is that I have contracted something flu-ish and the aches and pains are just the first symptoms to arrive on the scene. It’s the wrong time of year for the flu and I have had summer head colds before and they never came with muscle and joint pain before, but it is still possible.

My main theory, however, is that the heavy amount of pollen in the air today (from the landlord FINALLY cutting the grass after letting it grow to about two feet high) triggered a very severe allergic response in me, which in term set off a body-wide inflammatory response which I felt as aches and pains in my muscles and joints.

If so, the good news is, that can be fixed with time and antihistamines, as well as more anti-inflammatory acetaminophen.

And speaking of good news, I finally got my order of sugar free candy today. It had been held up because they were out of one of the things I ordered, and I needed to give them permission to substitute something else.

So candy in hand, despite my pain, I tried out a few of them in the cotton candy machine. I tried out starlight eppermint, lemon, and orange.

Starlight peppermint is apparently just Russel Stover’s fancy pants way of referring to those round peppermints with a sort of pinwheel of red on a white background. It was pretty good as cotton candy, although getting, as it were, two entire peppermints at once via the cotton candy, the result was rather curiously strong.

The lemon was quite nice. Again, a little on the strong side, but still a wonderful little bit of lemon fluff.

But my fave was the orange. I have always liked orange flavoured things like candy or Popsicles and the cotton candy form of that artificial orange flavour was wonderful. Like a whole orange Slurpee all at once.

I still have a bunch of other flavours to try, including four Jolly Rancher flavours. There’s apple, grape, cherry… and WATERMELON. I love watermelon very very much, in both artificial and natural form, and watermelon is hands down my all time favorite flavour of Jolly Rancher, so I am stoked.

I will save that one for last for sure!

I did get somewhat depressed about the whole thing, probably from the pain. I found myself wondering why the heck I had paid fifty bucks for such a ridiculous toy that will just end up joining the breadmaker and the slow cooker that I never use any more and are just collecting dust now.

But that’s a “me” thing. I have trouble accepting the transient and I am always looking for things that last. Even if all I get is a month’s fun out of the cotton candy machine, that’s still a month more fun than I would have had without it, right?

And if I am willing to admit that I will never use them again, I could easily sell the slow cooker and the breadmaker and recoup some of my losses.

Whether I keep them or sell them or give them away, though, the last thing I should be doing is letting inanimate objects make me feel guilty because I lost interest in them.

I mean, how fucked up is that?

See you tomorrow, folks.