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So playing through Mario Wonder - and I know this take isn't as smart as someone saying it might think it is- I was wondering about the presumptuousness of Mario + Friends = Good, and all those eminently stompable yet rather adorable "enemies" = Bad. Like, Koopas don't seem to have a lot of malice when you drive them around a Mario Kart track....
I think in Wonder it's more noticeable than in some previous games because every stomp has a little written rating that escalates with subsequent hits - but even the most normal stomp is labeled "GOOD!" which seems like it could be a value judgement as well as a performance evaluation.
(And of course old timers would note these moral dilemmas go all the way back to the Super Mario Bros on NES, where the instruction manual mentions "The quiet, peace-loving Mushroom People were turned into mere stones, bricks, and even field horse-hair plants"... Mario breaks a lot of bricks in that game.)

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Finished rereading Vonnegut's Galapagos. It's a more engrossing read than much of his other stuff, a lot of drive to get to the end (heightened by a trick of putting a "*" by people's name if their death is eminent. And there it is a rather apocalyptic scene on several fronts)

Also he mentions a simultaneous device called the Gokubi and its successor the Mandarax, which ends up sounding a lot like a smartphone (well maybe without the connectivity) wired in with Google Translate, WikiQuote, and WebM, along with a calendar etc. Also solar powered which would be a nice touch.

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Like most Pathological Personalities, *Andrew MacIntosh never cared much whether what he said was true or not--and so he was tremendously persuasive.

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Of course I love you,
So let's have a kid
Who will say exactly
What its parents did;
"Of course I love you,
So let's have a kid
Who will say exactly
What its parents did; 'Of course I love you,
So let's have a kid
Who will say exactly
What its parents did--'"
Et cetera.

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For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold.

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This episode made me sorry to be alive, made me envy stones.

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Since rising at dawn, Cruz himself had been thinking seriously about going home. He had a pregnant wife and eleven children in a nice house out by the airport, and they were scared. They certainly needed him, and yet, until now, abandoning a ship to which he was duty bound, no matter for what reason, had seemed to him a form of suicide, an obliteration of all that was admirable in his character and reputation.

I can weirdly identify with that feeling about duty.

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Quoth Mandarax:
"Something there is that doesn't love a wall."
--ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)
To which I add:
"Yes, but something there is which adores a mucous membrane."
--LEON TROTSKY TROUT
(1946–1,001,986)

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you're tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren't alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren't alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

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Also from Wednesday, in the Boston Globe:
On my devblog, some thoughts on the life of companion devices, and their life prolonged via classic longevity vs reincarnation...

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It's a vulnerable time for a lot of these young dudes. They need to be taking care of their chicken right, you feel me? If it was me, or if I had an opportunity to let these little young (players) know something, I'd say 'take care of your money, African, cause that sh*t don't last forever.' Now I've been on the other side of retirement and it's good when you get over there and you can do what the f**k you want to, so I'll tell y'all right now while y'all in it, take care of your bread so when you're done, you go ahead and take care of yourself. So while y'all at it right now, take care of y'all's bodies, take care of y'all's chicken, take care of y'all's mentals. Because look, we ain't lasting that long. I had a couple players that I played with that they're no longer here. They're no longer. So start taking care of y'all mentals, y'all bodies and y'all chicken, so when you're ready to walk away, you walk away and you can be able to do what you want to do.

Via SB Nation on Beast Mode closing out a post-retirement stretch... I caught a few minutes of the game, and he was impressive.

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We are all here on earth to help others. What I can't figure out is what the others are here for.

My holiday-season product finally reached fruition: Timelines:

Its my best attempt so far to make sense of the decades I've been around, and clear out some of the natural fog of memory.

If anyone wants to make one of these for themselves I'd be happy to help them.

On my devblog I go over all the drafts that lead me to the final design.

One of those cases where I wish I had better channels to get it to even more people - at one point I had pipedreams of making this a product, but I recognize a lot of people don't have the raw dates or photos at hand, and maybe they are less interested in their history as I am in mine.

I wrote a very short story:
Charlie Brown looked at his ten year old son, still wiping the tears from his eyes. He knew what his son was going through, he had been through it all before. He wanted to tell him everything he had learned over the years, that sometimes people let you down but you can never let that stop you from trying. That kids can be selfish and mean, but if you let others define your self-worth, you'll never be truly comfortable with yourself. He saw his son looking up at him, eyes wet and open, searching for any comfort that his father could offer him
"Wah-Wah," said Charlie Brown, tromboningly. "Wah Wah wawaWAH, Wah wah wawa"

People who say 'everything happens for a reason' actually have no idea why it happened.

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To be honest I'm absolutely loving my extreme ambivalence about the Patriots. On the one hand - they're this town's team! And they win a lot so it's easy to be a fairweather fan, and Brady does great aw shucks talk. On the other hand both Emperor Hoodie and Pretty Boy Brady love Trump. So I'm not rooting against them or not, but I'm so much more relaxed about their fate.

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(My cousin Billy wrote "Yeah, talk about ambivalence.....it is troubling." and I said "It's great! I wish I could be so disengaged but entertained by everything I A. am interested in the outcome of but with no big stakes in and B. have no control over whatsoever)

The post-apocalypse, in popular culture, often represents a macho libertarian fantasy. There's no government! Finally, we can break out the family guns. What's the appeal of the now-prolific 'zombie apocalypse' genre other than that it provides a backdrop against which Ordinary Americans can justify shooting tons and tons of people?

I remember Ksenia had more sympathy for the zombies in those movies than I was ready to think about at that time...

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Every year, white people add a hundred years to how long ago slavery was. I've heard educated white people say that slavery was 400 years ago. No, it very much wasn't. It was a 140 years ago. That's two seventy-year-old ladies living and dying back to back. That's how recently you could buy a guy.

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Why So Few Violent Games - I've liked this little turnabout essay for a long time FWIW: After seeing this decade called "the '10s" and hearing it in my head as "the tens" I think we should agree to call the last decade the '00s, pronounced "double-O"s.

Also, it's kind of odd that we hear about "the '10s" a lot less than we heard about "the naughties" or whatever at the time.

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I'm hoping some large fraction of my Day 2 blehs is actually caffeine withdrawal that will respond very favorably to oral administration of 24 oz DD Iced Coffee.

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Even though it felt like every tourist in Central Park had one, I feel like I would be a sacrificing a tremendous amount of self-worth (or maybe a tremendous amount *to* self-worth?) if I were to ever own a selfie-stick. Neat and funny stuff, looks like they made some digital bipedal skeletons with virtual muscles and then let them evolve to learn to walk:

Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures from John Goatstream on Vimeo.

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FWIW it's worth I've been moving most of my middlebrow food buying from places that have calorie counts clearly displayed. doesn't stop me from being constantly a bit shocked by the calories in most panera bakery goods, though. My annual media wrapup. All my numbers for movies and books and games are about the same as the last few years.

I think I ended up giving out too many 4 stars to talk about them sensibly. So, 5 Stars: No movies in the theate, but I found out "i ♥ huckabees", indeed... great existential playfulness. TV-wise, "Pulling" is this terrific show, like a grungy british anti-Sex in the Season. Unfortunately the first 2 or 3 episodes aren't great, but then it hits its stride, and the second season is just brilliance, so worth the Netflix streaming... I'm still not playing many games but I was reminded how much I loved "BattleTanx: Global Assault" on the N64. Bookwise, Egan's "Zendegi" was a maturation of his sc-fi "what would uploading people be like" themes (as seen in "Permuation City".) "The Last Policeman" was also sci-fi; it's what I wish the movie "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" would have been. On the geeky side, "10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10" was a deep study on old computers and even older concepts of randomness and labyrinths, and on the comic-geeky side "MetaMaus" provided deep insight into Spiegelman's art and his relationship with his father, and being so many people's insight into the atrocities of WW2.

Anyway, stuff in Red was 4 stars or more, stuff in gray was disappointing...

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Movies at the Cinema (14)
The Hunger Games, The Dictator, The Avengers, Men in Black III, Casablanca, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises, Resident Evil: Retribution, Looper, Sinister, Rise of the Guardians, Django, Argo,

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Movies on Video(43)
The Kids Are All Right, Elizabeth, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Cowboys and Aliens, Another Earth, Borat, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Hangover Part 2, Gone with the Wind, The Help, Be Kind Rewind, My Week with Marilyn, The Descendants, Fantasia, Zoolander, Emmanuelle Through Time: Emmanuelle's Sexy Bite, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, My Dinner with Andre, Knocked Up, The Royal Tenenbaums, Caged Heat, Postcards from the Edge, Paper Heart, The Men Who Stare at Goats, My Neighbor Tortoro, Brick, Thelma & Louise, I HEART HUCKABEES, Tiny Furniture, i heart huckabees, Perfect Sense, 3 Idiots, Art Of 16 Bars, Before Sunrise, Moonrise Kingdom, Primer, Exotica, Goodfellas, Marjoe, Clue, 6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Swingers

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TV Shows (19)
Pulling Season 1, PULLING SEASON 2, Spaced Season 1, Party Down Season 1, Spaced Season 2, Sherlock Holmes (BBC), Enterprise Season 1, New Girl, The Office: Season 8, Parks and Recreation Season 4, Modern Family Season 3, Girls Season 1, Mad Men Season 5, Portlandia, Archer Season 2, Portlandia, Enterprise Season 2, Archer Season 3, Sherlock Holmes Season 2,

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Books (65)
The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness, 50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know, Closing Time, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), Distrust That Particular Flavor, 200 Brain Filling Curves: A Fractal Bestiary, The Illuminatus! Trilogy , 50 Mathematical Ideas You Reallly Need to Know, The Beginning of Infinity, Dragon's Egg, The Anthologist, Enter, The Most Human Human, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, How to Be Black, Letters from Hawaii, Down from the Top of its Game: The Story of Infocom, Basic Training, Love And Sex With Robots, The Magicians, Jacked, The Mirage, The Visible Man, Confessions of the Game Doctor, How to Do Things with Videogames (Electronic Mediations), Insanely Simple, The Postmortal, I Suck at Girls, Things my Girlfriend and I have argued about , Driving with Plato: The Meaning of Life's Milestones, Free Will, Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule our World, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, The Brain That Changes Itself, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Alien Phenomenology,or What It's Like to Be a Thing ..., The Children of the Sky, The Happiness Hypothesis, The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, Bird by Bird, B is for Beer, Why is the Penis Shaped Like That, Constellation Game Extras, Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong, 77 Love Sonnets, Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast , The Kobayashi Maru, Mortality, This Will Make You Smarter, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, ZENDEGI, The Last Lecture, God is Not Great, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality 1-35, The Size of Thoughts, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, The Last Testament: A Memoir, THE LAST POLICEMAN, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, METAMAUS, Mr g, Motorcyclus and Other Extremely Scary Stories,

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Comics (21)
Supergod, Drinking at the Movies, Time and The Batman, Too Much Coffee Man: Cutie Island, The Zen of Steve Jobs, X-Men Days of Future Past, Hulk: Broken Worlds, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge, All Hail Megatron 1, Are You My Mother?, Fun Home, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, The Indelible Alison Bechdel, Too Much Adventure, Smut Peddler, Poorcraft, Black Summer, Brunhilda, School of Hard Knock Knock Jokes, Empowered 7

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Video Games (9)
BattleTanx, BATTLETANX: GLOBAL ASSAULT, GTA3, Intec G5405 InterAct Complete Video Game Entertainment System, Grand Theft Auto III, Just Cause 2, Mansions of Madness, GTA: Vice City, Karateka

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Day 1 of a Couch to 5K. Need: goofy reflective vest. Want: iPhone holster, app w/o ads, reassurance about my knee.

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Guy working the alewife dunkies- at first I thought he might Belushi with less talent, but maybe it's Belushi without the cocaine

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SMBC is so smart.

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You have to understand, princess-- Prince Charming exists only in fairytales. In real life, there are only frogs.

see remake here (Java broke)
thermo - source - built with processing

A little app I wrote to help with a puzzle in the MIT Mystery Hunt. In the end it didn't help much, but at the time it helped make sure that the metadata of where the "thermometers" were was correct and then generated C++ code that was part of a larger brute force solver we were running on a server farm.

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MIT #mysteryhunt despite the game structure is opposite of gamification: the puzzles are so difficult, toiling has zero assurance of result

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The whole sadomasochistic vibe of puzzle makers over the puzzle solvers is starting at the MIT #mysteryhunt is wearing me down.

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Personally, I think the whole 'free will' thing smacks of entrapment.

In the future, time travel and simple "disguise devices" have both become commonplace and affordable to the middle class.

Resultantly, the past, OUR time, is full of slightly odd-looking people, stopping us in the street and telling us NOT to do things.

The laws and philosophy of time travel discouraged direct statements of instruction, so the odd-looking people talked around things.

It was never "Do not marry Sam," It was an oddly-familiar stranger cornering you in a room and angrily listing Sam's weak points.

The past (us) long ago figured out time travel was inevitable, solely due to the interferences of these well-meaning future-selves.

You couldn't eat lunch without three future-yous attempting oblique advice-drops, which you spurned out of spite, changing nothing.

I wish I had such coherent sci-fi stories in my dreams!

(She also draws the alt-history webcomic Templar, AZ)

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Remember, with great power comes OH MY GOD! LOOK AT ME! THIS IS AWESOME! WOOO! YEAH! IN YOUR FACE, REGULAR PEOPLE!

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http://is.gd/gWel1M - The war on Kinder Eggs. We are such a damn nanny state. Kinder Eggs are terrific.

Fillmore La November 25^th 1860

Old Abe Lincoln
    God damn your god damned old Hellfired god damned soul to hell  god damn you and goddam your god damned family's god damned hellfired god damned soul to hell and god damnation god damn them and god damn your god damn friend to hell god damn their god damned souls to damnation god damn them and god dam their god damn families to eternal god damnation god damn souls to hell god damn them and God Almighty God damn Old Hamlin to to hell God damn his God damned soul all over eveywhere double damn his God damned soul to hell
    Now you God damned old Abolition son of a bitch God damn you I want you to send me God damn you about one dozen good offices Good God Almighty God damn your God damned soul and three or four pretty Gals God damn you

And by doing God damn you you     Will Oblige     Pete Muggins

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Fruits, in descending order of how soon I'll get to them: bananas, clementine, pear, orange, apple -a mix of tastiness, ease, & durability

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Man, "OK" is such a great Americanism, our linguistic gift to the world. Just a nice understated expression of positive sentiment.

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The American was good natured, generous, hospitable and social, and he reversed the whole history of language to make the term 'stranger' one of welcome.

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http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/phd_students/backus/girlfriend - the author uses the Extra Terrestrial Life Drake Equation to explain why he doesn't have a girlfriend - real life XKCD!

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Where do people go to poke at and then buy laptops? Micro Center has a decent selection, Bust Buy is meh, where else?

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http://firstpersontetris.com/ - making the rounds. Dizzying! Poster of the Moment

--I'm no Obama! Make your own at Obamaicon.me.

Via Trunkbutt, whose only example with her baby-filled belly was much wittier and well done than my more prosaic effort:

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Great Gerrymandering Slideshow: http://www.slate.com/id/2208216/

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Retweet from cmg: WSJ commentary on the 7 most horrible things about Bush presidency: http://tinyurl.com/9qyhpq

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Watching some guys fixing the elevator in my building, I realize that the shafts have windows. Bummer that the elevators don't!

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Harper's Index on Bush: Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, and Lulz: http://harpers.org/archive/2009/01/0082319

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This whole eating/going to the bathroom thing is so weird. I think plants have the right idea... photosynthesis ftw!

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SakuraYule ends his FAQs' credits: "And a special thank you to whoever made life possible. I live mine with a smile.". Not a bad outlook.

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Is it just me or are the 3 Musketeers more known for being the 3 Sword Guys? And the candybar should go back to having 3 different sections.

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Tout le sang qui coule est rouge!

My company has a policy that any office above, say, 4-5 people needs a 24/7 security guard. My "developer's cubeland" suboffice I work in needs a guard even though it's just 10-15 people on a different floor of the same office building as the main, hipper office.

It seems like of silly... I know the guard is as much there for making sure laptops don't get legs as, I dunno, preventing some Die Hard-esque scene of violence and fisticuffs. Which is good, because one of the usual guards seems to be expectant. When I saw her taking her break to make some kind of personal call, I got kind of worried:

"Pregnant guard lady, you're not guarding us!"

I then realized chivalry ain't what it used to be.

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Video of the Moment

--Real Life Donkey Kong, from some mercifully short-lived show on MTV or something...Still, "A" for Ambition.

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Funny of the Moment

According to an fMRI of Jenkins' brain regions during the process of memory recall, his parietal lobe registers the same amount of activity when he hears the word "mother" as it does when he hears the words "Banjo Kazooie."

I think I was just impressed by the authenticity of the anecdotes. (Banjo-Kazooie was a fairly popular though now relatively obscure 3D platform game from around '97 or so.

My shoulder and neck, left side, have been hurting me for like a week now. I think I'm getting significantly darker rings under my eyes, just from the conflict of believing that sleeping flat on my back is going to be the best thing for it with my inability to not roll to my side at some point during the night. And the way that every time I do change position, I'm waking myself up to make sure I don't hurt myself.

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Music of the Moment
The surfer anthem Misirlou (massively popularized in "Pulp Fiction") made a return in that "Rayman Raving Rabbids" game for the Wii. I had no idea it was originally a much slower song about cross-cultural romance! this Dinosaurgardens page has links to some of the older, more folksongy version, as well as the most detail analysis of its history.

This is a video featuring Dick Dale who made the Pulp Fiction version, though this video lacks some things like the shouts that make that soundtrack so great...



Still, I love the lockstep swaying of the musicians. And the gal doing the Twist in front pf the group is surprisingly alluring.

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Quote of the Moment

It's odd to realize how big things can be and still fit in your nose.

He's speaking of the breathing splints he was using following successful nasal passage surgery. Luckily, it appears it wasn't actually his brain poking out into his sinus cavity, decades after a dramatic nose break.
Yay for breathing! And modern medicine in general! Funny of the Moment

Permafrost will keep the vault below freezing point and the seeds will further be protected by metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete, two airlocks and high security blast- proof doors.

Sounds like a challenge!

I'm forming a high skills mercenary team to go in and get those seeds.

I'll need an Olympic level biathlete , a demolitions expert, a Harrier pilot, a (preferably beautiful) horticulturist, an eskimo, a fence, and possibly an astronaut and/or a Mason.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Quote of the Moment

"Life is so short, it's like a vapor. Here today, gone tomorrow. And there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing at all. So I don't have any advice for anybody except appreciate your loved ones around you--your family, friends, or whatever, because death is quicker than you think."

This quote is the last bit from the last interview in the wonderful book Gig, which I finally finished...I must've started it in 2000 or 2001 and set it aside until relatively recently.

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News of the Moment
CNN had some coverage of cracks in the alliance among different groups of Jihadists. That's kind of heartening, but on the other hand, historically it has only taken a relatively small bunch of people hating us to do serious damage.

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Physics of the Moment
So I heard about that girl who had just done a project on tsunamis, so she was able to warn her vacationing family when she saw that all the water had been sucked away from the shore. (I guess she saw the boats bobbing as well.) And I've read about the physics of tsuanamis...but nothing that mentions or explains why the water gets sucked away before hand. Can anyone offer a layman explanation of what's going on with that?

In finding that first link I found Luke Simmonds' first hand account of the Tsunami and its immediate aftermath.

So, getting ready for divorce is an ongoing process. We had another "couples therapy" session last night--although it's already a bit of a fait accompli we find it useful to talk about things in that kind of setting.

On my over I was listening to some Christian (oh, err, "Family") Radio, which is kind of how I keep tabs on the American fundamentalist right. And to be fair, some of the shows on it talk more sense than others. But it made me realize that I do have some "old school" ideas about marriage. Two or three years ago I was definately in the "marriage isn't that different from being shacked up" camp, and I guess that's still pretty true on a day-to-day basis. But now I realize that it really taps into this unusually strong sense of commitment I have...I'm a guy with relatively few moral absolutes, but keeping to commitments is one of them. I accept that there are going to be some marriages that are so fundamentally messed up, abusive and what not, that they should be ended, but Mo and I both agree we didn't have that kind of problem...and I believe in the power to self-direct personal growth, and that one of the points of something like a marriage commitment is to provide a shelter for the tough times, to give people a chance to make changes that need to be changed. I really don't put much stock into that whole "well I've just grown apart" shtick. (Or for that matter Mo's "well I just didn't know enough about myself to make that kind of commitment back then" or whatever it is she was saying last night.)

But who knows. My views of couplehood might be skewed from the norm in other ways that make it easier to hold those opinions. Like, I see it as a partnership that ideally provides satisfaction an support on a few different fronts (emotional, physical, financial, karmic) but has this central role of being a support for the rest of what makes life interesting and fun and worthwhile. In that way, I see couplehood as almost as much of a means as an end. (Hmm, getting back to the Christian Right view, they probably would say the same thing, but as a support for kids and family rather than making life "interesting and fun".)

One random idea from last night: maybe I should look into joining Mensa and seeing if there are any cute brainy women there. I wonder if they're arrogant, or just fun and self-deprecating about the whole enterprise.

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Funny of the Moment
Bill noticed that long-time favorite Gone And Forgotten has reviewed a few new comics. Funny stuff. If you're in a hurry just check out some excerpts and commentary from the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe - Deluxe Edition.

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Essays of the Moment
Two articles from a solidier in Iraq, Mr.M Returns Live And Redirect From Iraq and one really dark followup on the "cartoonish buffoonery" that goes on there. The first article expresses the opinion that the war is justified by how awful a regime it was, though I do have to wonder, there are awful regimes and terrible conditions all over the place, aren't we picking and choosing our battles anyway?

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Quote of the Moment

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

Funny of the Moment

"Beautiful day, isn't it?"
"Yes it is."
"Hear the birds?"
"Mm-hmm"
"Sometimes...I like to pretend that I'm deaf... and I try to imagine what it would be like.."
"Right..."
...not to be able to hear them...
....it's not so bad."

HBO was having some kind of marathon.

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Article of the Moment
"The Spy Who Gonged Me -- Was Chuck Barris a CIA Assassin?" That interesting tidbits, plus high(or low-)lights from "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game". (Come to think of it, it looks like the wolf files may have cribbed from Salon the Salon article I previously kisrael'd.)

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Quote of the Moment

"If people really liked work, we'd still be plowing the ground with sticks and transporting goods on our back."

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Link of the Moment
It's the Budget Traveller's Guide to Sleeping in Airports, a guide to various cities and how happy you're going to be to sleep in their airports. Morbid Thought of the Moment
You know, despite disagreeing with him I on many issues I don't really wish him any harm, but I kind of can't wait for Charlton Heston to die, just so we can say "Woo hoo! Time to do us some pryin'!"

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Images of the Moment

Wow. This guy really has some biceps. He has his own website, BICEPMANIA. You look at him, and all you can think of is Schwarzenegger going "It's not a tu-mah...oh, wait, maybe it is."

(via Portal of Evil)

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News of the Moment
Ok, not so much someone who would kill me directly so much as order my mysterious "accidental" death, The President choked on a pretzel and fainted while watching a football game on TV. Quote from his doctor: "He fainted due to a temporary decrease in heart rate brought on by swallowing a pretzel." It might be related to him being the most fit president we've had in a long while, with a resting pulse rate between 35-45 bpm. Went with my Uncle last night to see the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he has season tickets. I feel the pull between my white- and blue-collar leanings there. It makes me realize that there aren't all that many things I go to these days where everyone is dressed up.

The advertisements in the program are a little disturbing, blatant pitches to Boston old money ("Fiduciary Trust: Personal Investment Management and Trust Services for Family Wealth. Why do prosperous individuals and families entrust over $10 billion of assets to our care?", some homes from Coldwell Banker Huneeman Previews International for a mere $1.8 to $6.9 million) and a large number of ads for Senior Care and Retirement Communities. (Quote of the Moment: "The sun setting is no less beautiful than the sun rising" over 4 images of women at different ages, in chronological order, an ad for "Life Care Centers of America". It's a nice thought, but kind of creepy.)

The most listenable piece last night was Stravinsky's Four Norwegian Moods. It was also the only piece with a tuba. I'm afraid to announce that I believe this is largely coincidence. Although I used to play the beast, when I hear it now it sounds rather... I dunno, blatty. The tone is very impure, compared to the string basses or even other brass, such as the french horn. And frankly it looks pretty darn goofy.