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4 star:
* Firestarter (Torre Florim DE STAAT)
Very odd lounge-y cover of Prodigy's Firestart, used in the intro to "Just Cause 3"
* On the Road Again (Live) (Willie Nelson)
Always loved this song as a kid. (Once upon a time I thought the lyric was "my wife is making music with my friends" and he just wanted to split and get away...)
* Walk on the Water (feat. Ruby Amanfu) (The Chosen, Matthew S. Nelson & Dan Haseltine)
"The Chosen" is a pretty thoughtful Christian show, great rocking Gospel-singer theme.
* Stick Season (Noah Kahan)
Heard this the night job lobby... guess it's making the rounds. First time I heard a pop song referencing COVID.
* Yes No Okay (Charli XCX)
From the kind of middling movie "Bottoms"

3 star:
* Moon Patrol (Tanuki Suit Riot)
Interesting cover of a video game I play all the time in Band...
* Pitfall (The Louvin Brothers)
* Gee, Officer Krupke (Eddie Roll, Grover Dale, Tony Mordente, David Winters, Hank Brunjes & West Side Story Ensemble)
* The Man (Aloe Blacc)
* Alone Too Long (Daryl Hall & John Oates)
* Annie Oakley (Lizzie No)
* Tim to the Rescue (Leo Birenberg)
* Rio Antigo (Camarão)
Possible song for JPHonk.

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New cartesian dualism just dropped.

People are like "these animals have exoskeletons and these ones have endoskeletons" but no. It's all exoskeletons, your exoskeleton is protecting your bone marrow which is where your soul (which is you) is. The rest of the stuff is extraneous decoration that Big Pharma wants you to think is important/
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Why do you think there's so few ghosts around? Why are most ghosts people who died violently? You gotta crack the bones to let the soul out. Most souls are trapped alone in the dark and silent ground (or teaching hospitals) for hundreds or thousands of years until the bones eventually start to break. People who are cremated get their whole soul released and it can reincarnate. But if someone dies violently then maybe only a couple of their bones are cracked and a little scrap of the soul escapes but it's incomplete and confused. Can't figure out how to leave, gets obsessed with its own circumstances, repeats actions, CANNOT be reasoned with. PROOF that the soul is in the marrow.

See I know what I'm talking about.
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Sin is stored in the teeth btw which is why young children are innocent (they'll get a do-over with replacement teeth) and the elderly are shameless (once you have no teeth to remember your sins, you have nothing to fear).
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Upon review I think that maybe vodka isn't for me.

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Aging bites a bit harder when you're not fond of the parent you resemble.

	je t'appelle (acid radio edit) Armand Van Helden feat. Sahara	Clubby electronica From my friend Arun's collection.
	Bull Jine Run Odetta	A Black folkish/spiritual version of a kind of sea shanty? Found after looking up their version of Battle Hymn of the Republic.
★ ★ ★ ★	Plastic Jesus Kenny 3	Funny countrified song. "I don't care if it rains or freezes / Long as I got my plastic Jesus / Riding on the dashboard of my car." I remember this from my youth but it was recently mentioned on an episode of Baby Geniuses podcast.
★ ★ ★ ★	Happier Than Ever Billie Eilish	Dreamy mournful ukulele-ish piece. From her appearance on SNL.
	Tools AKA Me	Female pop. I think some incidental music on "This American Life"
★ ★ ★ ★	Beautiful Machine The Shrinks	Funky little... not even sure of the genre, kinda rock, kinda indie, maybe a shade of punk.
★ ★ ★ ★	Arrow The Irrepressibles	Such a beautiful gay anthem. You must watch this video... the gayest thing I've seen, in the loveliest sense of that word.
	Blue Monday Orgy	Classic club song (sigh Man Ray), guess it's not quite the original. The podcast 99% Invisible had a piece on how the floppy disk album cover for this single was super expensive.
	Alligator Dance (Seneca) Leslie Bowen, Avery Jimerson, Richard Johnny-John, Herbert Dowdy, Sr., Johnson Jimerson & Marty Jimerson	Seneca music featuring Richard Johnny-John, who sang when my folks were ceremoniously adopted into Seneca clan families.
★ ★ ★ ★	Words of Advice Material	In the spirit of "Everyone's Free (To Where Sunscreen)", sardonic advice with a beat. Something from "This American Life".
	Spaceman Harry Nilsson	Kinda corny 60s rock. From end credits of the first season finale of "Space Force"
	Zinda Rehti Hain Unki Mohabbatein (From "Mohabbatein") Lata Mangeshkar	Music that sounds like it's from Bollywood musicals, starts with percussion I dig. From this tweet about WFH
★ ★ ★ ★	Goldeneye 007 (Trap Remix) [Mission Status N64 Pause Screen] Trap Remix Guys	Cool cover of the old N64 video game pause music, with an appealing little skittery skritch of trap music. Sought out a version after this clip on a "watching people die inside" video... it's so much more of a lowkey banger than it needs to be!
	Streets Favorite Capone	Mediocre hiphop sampling overwrought 60s song "(Remember) Walking in the Sand" background on one of these watching people die inside clips.
★ ★ ★ ★	Power of Yet Janelle Monae / Sesame Street	Funky little piece about the power of persistence...

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Melissa and I brought the nieces to see the Dino Safari thing at Quincy Market (someone else's kids in the red photo but just there for scale) Sometimes reframing a necessary, repeated task makes it seem less onerous.

For example, I make a pot of coffee every other day, refrigerate it, and that's my morning beverage over the next two days. Somehow, it seemed like less of a burden if instead of thinking "ugh, every other day I have to make coffee" I frame it as "ah, now that I've finished off this pot, I should make a new one for myself for the next two days"

Similarly, daily physical activity can feel like a chore. In that case, I really liked hearing Willy Nelson saying he frames his daily walk or jog of what not as "paying for the day" - somehow that "pay as you go" sense, bit of gratitude seems much friendlier to me than a more typical "do it to benefit your future self!" while still acknowledging it often isn't something the current self really wants to do.

It's interesting that in one case it feels better to think of it as helping my future self, and the other as payment for where I am already, a debt owed by my present self rather than TO my future self.

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Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

It's getting kind of hard
To believe things are going to get better
I've been drowning too long
To believe that the tide's going to turn
And I've been living too hard
To believe things are going to get easier now
I'm still trying to shake off
The pain from the lessons I've learned

Having you here now
I see things are going to be brighter
Oh, and feeling you here now
I know I might make it through
Oh, loving you this long
Has made me believe in forever
And with you, these dreams
I'd forgotten might somehow come true

And knowing your embrace this well
Just makes me want to be better
And knowing your heart this well
Makes me wish mine would grow
(Oh my love)
And loving you this much
Makes me want to write sweet songs forever
With a little love, babe
We could make the whole world know
How much I love you

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

And when I see your face
I will swear to the Lord I was dreaming
And when I hold your hand
I watch time disappear into air
(Oh my love)
And when I speak your name
I can feel I just said something sacred
While saints pray for heaven
I thank God I'm already there

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Two decades ago I excerpted a lovely bit from "Getting Over Homer" by Mark O'Donnell, a funny, wistful short novel I just reread- I can imagine seeing so much of my mid-20s, only-semi-requited-lover self in it, and its story of gay men either dying or being hyper vigilante about AIDS is poignant as well.

Anyway, here are some bits that are either terrific, or weirdly stuck in my head for decades, or both...

Crawford joined us. "That Deco poster is very valuable. He shouldn't hang it where the sun is going to bake it like that. It'll fade. Red is the most fugitive color."
"Fugitive?"
"Fugitive, it flees. It's the color that fades quickest with time." I thought of the ads in the window of the candy store where Dad was shot. True enough, the ice cream and potato chip images, and the smiling, outdated teen faces adoring them, had been sunburned to unappetizing, faint blues and grays.

For some reason "red is the most fugitive color" has really stuck with me.

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I think of a story Sean brought home from CYO camp, about an Indian brave so in love with a maiden from the tribe across the lake he tries to swim over to her and drowns. The punchline is, And from that day to this, it has been known as Lake Stupid.

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Life is a traffic jam of crosses to bear.

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It was a little clammy in his darkling living room, but Sean sat without turning on a light.

I did not realize "darkling" was a word - "growing dark or characterized by darkness."

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"Your eyes are different, too. Like if you had been kidnapped and raised by a different tribe." I heard that. Life may be a river, but more exactly it's a river delta, and every branch you choose or are swept into changes your course. Some jostling in the womb, a few minutes between births, a few playroom power struggles, and we who were one were already on different tributaries.

I like that description of "the butterfly effect"

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"Well ... You know what they say, Blooey. Experience is the ability to recognize a mistake--when you make it again!"

An oldie but a goodie...

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The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence.
Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

Whoa, they kinda chopped off an important part...

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I know I'm more of a in-the-family, fair-weather fan of the Red Sox than a die hard, but This Mookie Betts thing sucks out loud. School of Honk's Ghostbusters Sunday - tuba duet at 2:30 :-D

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25 scenes, 25 years - personal recollections about some of the most influential movie scenes of the last quarter century. Also some really sharp webpage work.

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It's funny. When you look at someone through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.

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"Win or lose today, the most important thing is that you tried your be-"
"Shhhh! We can't let the others overhear that we tried out best!! What if we LOSE?"

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What's the cost of the parade? Like net, overall... does it pull in tourism bucks or is it just a cost of doing business politicians get us to pay for 'cause people love them some winners in sports? Does the city get any of that sweet cash from sports jerseys and what not, or is it all just in "warm fuzzies"? Given that I've always been a bit of a fair weather fan, and that it's my original hometown that one, I'm not too distraught about the Patriots/Eagles... but the way Gronk and Brandin Cooks got helmet-to-helmeted in back to back games... I really do wish the sport was played by robots like in the arcade game Cyberball 2072... I mean, "has a cannon for an arm" shouldn't have to be figurative.

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Yesterday Melissa pointed out that at some point Apple iPhone added an optional "return to last camera mode" setting for the built-in iOS Camera app - very useful for people like me trying to grab spontaneous shots for "One Second Everyday"

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Things Philly Pholk did after the Eagles won. Yeesh.

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Dow Jones taking a cue from Bitcoin?

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Our upcoming nearterm future of faceswapping videos... Jokes on them at least for people like me who are a bit face blind (at least face myopic) Nicolas Cage in that shot? Sure, whatever you say. Lady Gaga is like a one woman force for all those NFL Halftime Show Illuminati Conspiracy Theorists.

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Is it just me or is Edelman '17 looking a lot like Welker '12?

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february loveblender

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Man all that smooching of the trophy... all I can think is hope Bill's fever blister ain't acting up.
And here come all the Goodell Boos...

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On my bdevblog: gripe: bad second guessing ui I just finished the book "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" by Marie Kondo - it seems to be kind of trendy at the moment. There's an explicit overtone of Shinto animism to it that I enjoyed ("Express your appreciation to every item that supported you during the day" she suggests and she means it quite literally -- speaking out loud, or at least in your head... also "Greet your house every time you come home.")

The core of the book is "we should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of" and what we keep should are things that give us a palpable "spark of joy" when we physically touch them. She argues

To get rid of what you no longer need is neither wasteful nor shameful. Can you truthfully say that you treasure something buried so deeply in a closet or drawer that you have forgotten its existence? If things had feelings, they would certainly not be happy. Free them from the prison to which you have relegated them. Help them leave that deserted isle to which you have exiled them. Let them go, with gratitude. Not only you, but your things as well, will feel clear and refreshed when you are done tidying.

Later she starkly triages our options:

There are three approaches we can take toward our possessions: face them now, face them sometime, or avoid them until the day we die.

(My mom has explicitly referenced a similar concept; she has some memorabilia from trips that bring her pleasure to have around but wants to make sure that I don't get hung up on keeping once she's gone.)

Kondo suggest a specific category-based order for tidying (and her repeated use of the word "tidy" and "tidying" is charming, or rather, almost starts to take on charm-like properties.)

Start with clothes, then move on to books, papers, komono (miscellany), and finally things with sentimental value.

The books thing is interesting. Prior to this I was second-guessing myself in terms of thinking that maybe books were unfairly targeted because of their bulk, when really they can be stacked quite neatly. But maybe they are a fair-target, when using the "spark of joy" rubric:

Imagine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love. Isn’t that image spellbinding? For someone who loves books, what greater happiness could there be?

And on the point of books:

Their true purpose is to be read, to convey the information to their readers. It’s the information they contain that has meaning. There is no meaning in their just being on your shelves. You read books for the experience of reading. Books you have read have already been experienced and their content is inside you, even if you don’t remember.

That's a lovely and forgiving footnote - "even if you don't remember".

And on my burgeoning "to get to" pile:

If you missed your chance to read a particular book, even if it was recommended to you or is one you have been intending to read for ages, this is your chance to let it go. You may have wanted to read it when you bought it, but if you haven’t read it by now, the book’s purpose was to teach you that you didn’t need it .

Of course, I have to square all of that with my vision of "oh, I might want to show this book to someone someday" - or the even more ego-centric concept, that my big shelves full of books help convince people of my intellectual bona fides. Amber had me go through one deeper than usual purge a few years ago, and I guess I'm grateful in retrospect.

Things are slightly more complicated because I share a space with Miller... in fact, 5 of my bookshelves are in "his space". I would love to minimize that and arrange a few other things so that I could bring them into my own spaces, and/or swapping for the contents of two bookshelves he has in the common hallway.

Kondo's book is a brisk read. It goes on to suggest some specific patterns of tidying; besides the order of categories recommendation, the recommended technique is to gather everything in that category in one place, so that the laying of hands/spark of joy litmus can be properly conducted. (It's a bit pathetic that when I think about what currently most clearly provides that spark, it tends to be Apple products. But they're physically and virtually so well-designed, providing gateways to people I love and information I find critical or fascinating, as well as helping me keep track of my day-to-day life, that I shouldn't beat myself up about that.)

Another important concept, then, is the end goal, why tidying is so important. In the author's opinion, it clears the physical and mental space that will let us get closer to the life we want... practicing discernment in what gives us that "spark of joy" is critical rehearsal for finding that out in the rest of our lives, and acting accordingly. (In practice, there can be a "first world problems" aspect to the process; one has to recognize that being able to pare down and eliminate redundancy is a luxury... if you're fortunate enough to have money, you can keep your backup supplies in the store until you need them.)

Anyway, recommended. http://www.asymco.com/2013/10/10/the-five-year-plan/ Kind of a boring article on how Windows PCs are less and less important, proportionately speaking, but what I wonder about is how much they still outsell Macs. Considering I only 100% "switched" last year I guess that might sound rich, but it seems like at least 2/3 of laptops I see on the T and at coffeehouses are Macs. So I'm just wondering if that's more of a Boston-area thing, or a nerd-on-T-and-Coffeehouse thing, or a personal vs business thing (even though Macs are pretty much the standard w/ the hipster companies I'm around these days)

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G: Someday I want to go to space
Me: You want to be an astronaut?
G: I'll stay in the spaceship. I want you to hold me when I'm an astronaut
G: But we will have to buy astronaut suits.
Me: That's ok.

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

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The heart wants what it wants. Unless the loins have a say in the matter.

click for fullsize Not quite sure where I got this from...

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"When you're wearing riot gear, everything looks like a riot." Even a big group of peaceful protesters. #occupyDC

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The offense really dropped the ball on this one. Never been so grumpy at Welker.

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This is what happens when you lose to like both of the >.500 teams you play in the regular season.

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What, Boston is supposed to be reigning champ in just one of the four major sports at a time? Screw that. #patrots2012equalsrevolution2007 Aw well on to more meaningful pursuits. Would been nice for Boston though; half my sports passion is thinking New York has enough in general.
via

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It is never a sound policy to harbour a grudge or even to resent an injury, except when inspired by sheer malice.

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Intermission at the Buckminster Fuller show at the A.R.T- cool stuff. Plus I dig that you can have a beer and take it into the show

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Whoa Lightning Thunder and Heavy Rain over the snow and slush!

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http://projectionpoint.com/ - neat test; less about the accuracy of your T/F answers, more about how accurately confident you are - I got 81

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I'm relieved but a bit weirded out that Boston doesn't seem slated to get the "Snowmageddon" the mid-Atlantic is bracing for.

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http://slatest.com/ - this might be my new favorite way of keeping up with the news. On the dating site OKCupid I've been e-mailing with one gal who probably runs a bit more conservative than I do. She brought up some of the sex lessons that had been brought up in a youth group she went to: how blue clay and pink clay is inseparable once mixed, and if it mixes with too much just turns brown, the construction paper glued together that can't come apart without ripping. This is some of my response, it's been a while since I've monologued here, and also I wouldn't mind to know where other people are coming from with this.

Object lessons can be powerful, but ultimately they are just similes. I mean, lesbian pink clay would never get brown, no matter how much other pink clay it rolled around with! And I had heard about the glued construction paper bit. But people are - obviously - not pieces of paper, and once you get past simplified and visceral lessons for teens, I think it's worthwhile to think clearly about the underlying message -- and I'm not taking the stance that it's an incorrect message, just one that people don't necessarily think of deeply enough.

I've encountered two main themes in "true love waits" kind of messages; one is fundamentally Theological: sex and our bodies are sacred, marriage is an institution established by God. The other aims at being more pragmatic (and sometimes uses its pragmatism as support for the idea that it is Divinely mandated by a caring God); there are nasty viruses and unplanned pregnancies; youth in particular may not able to make mature decisions about who they do and don't sleep with; in the case of the clay and paper metaphors, that it is fundamentally wrong to achieve that kind of connection in a relationship that in all likelihood is not permanent.

(There's a great Garrison Keillor quote I couldn't quite find, but paraphrased it's "when I was young there was a fearsome raging river between us and the promise land of sex and only the church had the keys to the ferry boats; these days the river runs smooth and narrow and there are all kinds of rowboats and what not and at some places you can even wade across")

Historically, the Church had established a principle that only sex that was aimed at-- or at least not hostile to-- making babies was acceptable, that the pleasure that accompanies the act was a bit suspect, but maybe a gift from a God who urged us to be fruitful and multiply. This view is now only generally made explicit these days in certain Catholic quarters, so it's not necessarily fair to let it be used as a strawman for the views of pro-Abstinence type people, but I think it is fair to note that this kind of thinking still informs the "Pro-Traditional-Family"/"Anti-Gay-Marriage" and "Gayness is a Fixable Condition" groups.

So what are the arguments on the other side, for a more relaxed outlook? I see two main branches: the Hedonistic and the Hippy. The Hedonistic view points out the obvious; sex (can) feel really really good, and if we're creatures on this Earth only for a while, other factors aside more pleasure is better than less pleasure. (Though it's also reasonable to expect one to take a reasonably mature view of pleasure as a goal, and strive for a balance in that as in most things.) The Hippy view says that the traditionalists are right, that a strong connection IS made during sex, but the arguments for restricting that strong connection to a once-in-lifetime partnership are weak, that we should embrace the chance to connect to other people on such a fundamental and important level, and that that's part of the human experience.

So, that's where I'm at. I guess I'm at risk of becoming one of those "the way it happened to me is how it should happen to everyone!" - high school romances with fooling around but no sex, sex for the first time during a fairly important college relationship, and then as part of future relationships once they start getting "serious". I'll be frank, the last few intimate relationships I've been in, I think I've tended to be a bit of a slowing force in terms of how soon sex was part of the connection; between concerns about diseases and birth control and then even a bit of recognition of the fundamental connection-ness of sex (as probably being of greater import than the relationship might be having in its early days.) What I've found though is a woman who likes me enough to want for us to share our bodies like that is a bit impatient with my neurotic and post-Sunday School/"Hippy" yammering (and is possibly concerned it is cover for a rejection of her in toto) and my willpower ends up yielding to the moment. But I'd be reluctant to go the chaste "'kissing, hugging, holding hands' - all ok; anything else, not ok" point of view; I do think high school /college set my vision of the ideal; a ramp up to increasing levels of intimate contact, but sex still on more of a pedestal.

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The impulse items next to the Microcenter check out lines is a geek wonderland...

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http://fmylife.com - f*** my life, twitter meets a raunchier "curb your enthusiasm". Amazing reading-there's a french version, viedemerde.fr

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"We're going to have to try to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town." --Obama on D.C.'s wimpy snow reactions. Great phrase!

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Getting a strong visceral negative reaction to unknown phone #s calling me. I'm busy looking into personal contact leads; hate more pressure

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Ugh, one of those "it's almost 2 alreday?" kind of days. Exercised, finished laundry... phonecalls w/ recruiter types are so draining.

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AHA! The stupid scrolling widget that shows up when I mean to center click is Firefox specific: "autoscrolling" under Advanced Props- b'bye!

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(Seriously, for me reading is jumpy, not gliding along at steady (if adjustable) rate - that firefox scroll widget was just annoying.)

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Using my tablet PC's handwriting recognition. It's surprising how good it is. Weird to be handwriting a twitter. Got up this morning and voted for Obama. (I hadn't heard much about the other levels of campaigning going on so I declined to guess and vote.)

My reasons for supporting Obama are a bipolar mix of the cynical (Unfair as it maybe, I think Hillary Clinton would be too much of a rallying point for the opposition. Plus, Obama is a handsome devil, and I am PROFOUNDLY cynical about that aspect. Plus I think the USA lets itself be more sexist than racist.) the high spirited (Obama does seem to represent what I'd like to see as a new zeitgeist in politics, and I've seen more grassroots campaigning inspired for him than any other candidate. One friend sent me this Washington Post editorial Obama vs the Phobocracy.)

Tangent: Obama's campaign appears to have raised the bar for yard signs. They've gone up from small little pickets to mini-billboards.

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Bryson Critique of the Moment

This 500 page volume isn't an exposition of science. It's a bumper book of jaw-dropping facts transformed into a jaunty narrative by a professional writer. There is almost no attempt to explain anything that could be called a scientific principle or to show what follows from it. Newton's universal law of gravitation gets a paragraph; thermodynamics is covered in a footnote. And a number of errors make one wonder whether its author always grasped what he was told. Peter Medawar once epitomised a virus as "a piece of bad news wrapped in protein." Bryson calls it a memorable phrase but by misquoting it as "a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news" robs it of both sense and wit.

Now, I have to say I'm not sure I agree with the assessment of the rephrasing; it's catchier, and as far as I can tell still makes sense. (Yes, it probably is the nucleic acid that forms the "bad news", but I think there's some leeway there, since the delivery mechanism is certainly part of the badness.) Also I'd be surprised if Bryson came up with the rephrasing himself.

I do confess that his science is a little spotty at places, I myself noticed when he brought out that old "you can see that glass is a liquid because old Stained Glass windows are bigger at the bottom" myth.

I'm going to pretend I have some kind of sense of privacy and not go into a lot of details here, but Ksenia and I actually broke up in December... (I guess a lot of the regulars here already knew that, but I figured there might be a few stragglers.)

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Quote of the Moment

"We have to believe in free will. We've got no choice."

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Technology of the Moment

--Boingboing linked to this article on a uniwheel tank idea. Turns out modernmechanix is a very cool site, a long with the Retrotech Museum, which is like a steampunk wonderland of what-mighta-been technology. Still, you think these things would be difficult to stop in a hurry.

So I'm off to D.C. I preset the week with a daily quote and image, the images I picked out of Cellar.org's Image of the Day a long while back.

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Atheism Quote of the Moment

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O....

I don't know if it's as clearly an either-or as he implies, and I'm sure many would argue quite the contrary, but still.

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Fun Links of the Moment
Via Bill the Splut, the 100 Best First Lines from Novels and then a quicker read, Spider-man, Dr. Moreau and a werewolf watch the State of the Union.

Subversion of the Moment

--Brilliant! The Cuddly Menace takes some old "Little Golden Book" and turns it into instruction manual for young Zogg alien invaders who must transform the earth into a Nitrogen rich resource for the coming Zogg invasion.

Milestone of the Moment
The engagement ring I gave Mo. Her mom insisted that she give it back. We signed the papers for seperation last night at the most banal location imaginable: a "The UPS Store" (formerly Mail Boxes Etc), where they had a notary who works later than 9-5. I decided it was as good a time as any to stop wearing my ring and she followed suit a bit later. (Maybe I was trying a bit too hard to make a dramatic gesture.) There was crying by both parties, more by her, at least that night. The small stuffed frog that's been riding in my car all these years (since '96, almost as long as I've had the car and longer than my romance with Mo) gets to wear the wedding band I was wearing. He's always liked silver things.

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Quote of the Moment

"The reason we say 'fell in love' is that it makes it sound more like an accident. Men act like, 'I was walking along and fell in love. I tried to get my boys to pull me out, but I got all tangled in the ropes and sticks and I couldn't break free.'"

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Poem of the Moment
Incidentally, today's title is from the National Lampoon poem Deteriorata, which is a parody of Desiderata. Each is worth a read, albeit for different reasons.

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Music of the Moment
As an online toy it's rather limited, but sometimes I like setting up the Weeblmixomatic as background music to listen to. I'm looking towards adding a per-day comment section to kisrael. Of course, those things can be depressing on moderate or low traffic sites with a bunch of "0 Comments" links, but hey, it might foster some interesting discussion.

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Game of the Moment
Been a while since I've posted a fun link, but here's one now: Ranjit's company gamelab has come up with another super clever concept: Crash. (Not to me confused with the kinky Cronenberg movie of the same name and roughly similar concept, except, you know, with a lot of extra sex.) At first I thought it was another variation on the sliding "Rush Hour" (like Traffic for Palm (Thomas Jentzshe even managed to make a modern-day port to the Atari 2600 called Jammed)) but it's a lot more kinetic and dynamic than that. You're an "omnipotent god of traffic" who can click to make cars scoot along (and then again to slow them down) as you try to keep traffic flowing at a double highway intersection. Though I dunno, seems like a pretty limited form of omnipotence to me...still a cool little game.

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Insight of the Moment

"[Oprah] is so fundamental to Ameri-think. She's all about self-esteem and perfectibility and viewing yourself as a work in progress. The whole psychology of that is that you must believe that A) improvement is possible and B) that it is actually possible to get it right. You are your own best project. And because we're Americans we somehow think that everyone else in the world thinks that way too, and of course, nothing can be further from the truth. They don't."

Interesting piece, I love this kind of analysis. (Worth the Salon rigamarole...and I think everyone should be a Salon member anyway.) I think my attitudes tend to fall sort of in the center; I have the America idea of "I can change myself" and the British wryness that "...but I probably won't".

And, as Dylan pointed out, there's the whole punctuation-outside-the-quotes thing.

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Hint of the Moment
If you want a hand with Dylan's latest sidebar, checkout this cryptograms tool. Inspirational Thought of the Moment

USA! USA! The Fox pre-game show, with rap stars, former presidents, the patriotic and commercial mixed--the flashing FREEDOM! sign next to the BUD LIGHT sign--was quintessentially American. That is, poignant and ridiculously excessive at the same time. TMQ thought two things:

1) The enemies of freedom hate this sort of display because they cannot understand the notion of letting people decide for themselves which part of a dream to believe.
2) Because the enemies of freedom cannot understand it, they can never defeat it.

I'm not sure if I buy the "one cannot defeat what one doesn't understand"--after all, we hope to defeat the terrorists without fully understanding them--but I think it's a good thought anyway.

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Image of the Moment
At one point during the 1980s, American Pop Culture almost achieved critical mass in California. The resulting explosion would have destroyed the "right coast", leaving only a smoldering ruin of mediagenic debris. A picture of that event can is displayed below: A larger copy of this image is available at http://www.prinnt.com/godspeed/best_picture_ever.jpg. The fullsize image should serve as a warning to the present and future generations. Watched Terminator 2 the other day. Man, that has some nightmarish scenes, especially where Sarah Connor is dreaming of the nuclear blast, and you see the wall of fire taking out the buildings, blowing apart the ashes of the people on the playground... yikes. Also when that one programmer guy (Dyson) is on the dead man's switch to blow up the building, hyperventilating from fear... it's unusual to see a hero in a movie like this who shows emotion other than gritty determination.

Hey, my company starts up at the Arsenal Office Campus today. Should be an interesting place to work. I don't know if I should walk it or drive it. I feel lame driving it, but if I walk it I might get the impression that that's enough exercise for the day, when really I'm not even breaking a sweat.

Link of the Moment
Got the Valentine Edition of the loveblender up yesterday. It took a bit longer than I expected (well, I also had to wait for Mo to download some sun java tutorial files. She seems to be getting the core ideas pretty quickly.

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Joke of the Moment
>> Please give me the top ten uses for silk scarves.
>> I need to know for a report I am writing. Well,
>> that and Zixia is arriving in 10 days.
>
>TOP TEN USES FOR SCARVES:
>
>1. Dance of a thousand scarves (Highlights package)

I must have missed that issue when I was last at the dentist.

SILK SCARF STRIPPERY AND FOREPLAY WITH GOOFUS AND GALLANT:

GOOFUS just whips all the scarves off while dancing and gets instantly naked.	GALLANT teases and hints with the scarves, leaving those he dances for increasingly aroused.
GOOFUS binds the wrists of his victims to his bedpost with silk scarves, just before stabbing them with an icepick.	GALLANT blindfolds his partner in the kitchen, and seductively shoves strawberries, bananas, and other food products down their throats.

--Dean Lenort via alt.humor.best-of-usenet via alt.religion.kibology