Today has been a little weird. I could not sleep properly all day, despite my sleeping pill, and I felt all weird and cold and depressed inside. Managed to get a little sleep just now, and so now I feel a little bit better. Time to get to writin’.

So for this entry, I am going to give you a grab bag of links that have been hanging around my browser for a while, waiting for me to find a way to use them.

Well, leftovers make the best hash.

So here they are, in no order whatsoever.

That’s harder to achieve than it sounds.

Firstly, let’s deal with a story guaranteed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, because it’s about love, friendly, and compassion amongst those warm and fuzzy on the outside.

It is about a cat named Pwditat (gack) who appointed herself as seeing-eye cat for a blind dog named Terfel (also gack).

Terfel was struck blind by cataracts, and spent most of his time bumping into things and had to spend most of his time in his basket.

Then one day, Terfel’s owner let a stray cat into the house (presumably figuring that a blind dog was not much of a threat to a cat) and something truly amazing happened.

The cat, whom I will call Puddy because, you recall, GACK, immediately went to Terfel’s basket and led him out into the yard. And the two have been fast friends ever since, with Puddy leading Terfel around all the time and the two even sleeping together.

As a cat lover, I find this particularly enchanting. I know cats can be quite compassionate, although not being a socially cohesive species like humans and dogs, they do not show it in the same ways, and so anti-cat people (and a lot of pro-cat people, sadly) conclude that cats are all sociopathic little assholes who don’t care about anyone but themselves.

But they do care. You just have to grok cats in order to see it. But for me, it is quite clear. Many times when I was a kid, I would be lying on the living room couch, sick, and suddenly the cats would show up to keep me company and be all sweet and cute and friendly and affectionate.

I would end up lying there surrounded by cats, and let me tell you, I felt loved.

Next thing! This video makes me angry.

Not that it isn’t funny. It is, in fact, damned funny.

What makes me mad (at myself) is that I had that exact idea for a way to make very funny content with zero production cost (all it takes is editing!), and I never did it, and now someone else has done it and it confirms the sad fact that I am a loser with brilliant ideas and no execution. Sigh!

Oh well, it is not like I am short of brilliant ideas. I get them all the time. I am just a little frustrated at my letting all these genius ideas pass through my fingers like so much sand.

I mean seriously. I need to develop at least a little follow-through some day.

Or at least I need to find some work at a think tank. I am not exactly sure what people in think tanks do, but from the outside, it seems like they pretty much just sit around and think about things and have long and detailed discussions of them and then produce impressive looking documents with their claims.

Hmmm, thinking, talking, and writing. Sounds good to me. I am good at all of those!

Like I keep telling myself in hopes it will stick, I have a lot to offer the world. I have amazing creative and intellectual skills, plus I am a heckuva nice guy, and I think that, if I could get myself properly socialized, I could have a powerful personality as well.

It is just a matter of covering the ground between me now and the me I want to be. It will not be easy, but I am making steady progress, and some day, I will grow wings and fly away.

Just need to get rid of this chain first…

Here is another really cool video. Technically, I could have saved this for Friday Science Whatever, because it does have the feel of a kickass lab demo, but meh. It’s really just about the awesome.

Wow, hot nickel in water is freaking awesome. I mean, what the hell happened there? I can’t tell if the ball of nickel is spinning, or if that is just a heat vortex swirling around it.

And how about those sound effects, huh? What the heck? Are they just a result of the heat and the water? Or is the nickel involved? They are definitely metallic type sounds, but that might just be the basin.

I can only imagine that doing this in a plastic bucket would go very wrong very fast.

And clearly, the bottom half of the nickel cools in this freaky cool upward spreading motion that I think is utterly beautiful. It looks like a cool computer demo, but it is happening right there in real life!

If I was a science teacher, I would totally be all up in that bitch right away. I would do the experiment enough times to be sure I could pull it off in class (seems simple enough, but science experiments are perverse and like to fail in public), and then it would just be a matter of figuring out how to work it into the curriculum.

“Today, class, we are going to learn about the laws of thermodynamics in relation to metals heated to molten…. aw, fuck it. You kids like Mythbusters? Then watch this, it’ll be AWESOME. ”

OK, maybe not that last part. But god damn it, that would be one day the kids would remember.

And honestly, the first duty of every teacher is to get their goddamned attention.

Seeya later folks!