Naps are evil

I just woke up remembering a high school church weekend retreat. Looked through the old posts and can't believe that I never blogged about this, how traumatic it probably was, and how much I hate my mother for making me go. I still don;t remember a lot of the details. I just remember it was something related to our Presbyterian church (though I remember absolutely no actual religious stuff actually happening like prayers or such). I am not even sure how old I was but I suspect right at the bad age, 12-13, just before high school. For some reason I think John M. was there, but my memory may be confused.

Anyway, I remember a school bus, being shipped off to an actually really cool old mansion somewhere out in the PA wilderness where I refused to participate in just about everything just to be a contrary little angry bitch boy. But I did find a hardcopy of a book containing the Asimov story 'Nightfall' which may have been one of the things that changed my life (along with my mother tossing the seemingly randomly-chosen library YA book 'Zero Stone' on my bed when I was sick with strep one time and I needed something to read--this maybe even more influentual, little did she know).

Anyway I managed to avoid the rest of the kids most of the time except for bed, which is just a blur of underwear and matressess (and probably my poor hormones freaking out). But we played some games at the end where I had to participate, but they were arranged where I was never the butt of the joke. I only figured this out later. I guess by then the asst minister by then figured out I could not talk any kind of teasing.

And there was a hayride. I still remember no praying or anything. Actually later when I was more comfortable and in bell choir, we never prayed either that I remember. Presbys were pretty minimalists as far as religion.

No Dreams to report...

...for a change!

Instead, we have actually had several days of beautiful dry weather with highs in the 70's F. Unfortunately, it also triggers a sore throat and allergy cough. And on one level I love the shorter days, but on another, I suspect I have a little bit of SAD which exacerbates my dysthymia. Ah, well.

On the brighter side, I have almost no money in the stock market. I have a job that I actually like, I pay my nice low fixed-rate mortgage on time. I feel bad for middle-class retirees with money in stocks who are seeing their money evaporate, but there is a certain amount of schadenfreude in thinking about a lot of the really wealthy also seeing their value plummet. Though some people never learn. Apparently AIG spent some of its government loan cash to take its 'best performers' (huh?) out on a spa trip. Grrr.

I almost feel sorry for Barack Obama if he wins the election, because he is going to inherit a complete mess. On the other hand, there is a very good possibility that the Dems will capture 60+ seats in the Senate, which (assuming they vote as a block, which they rarely do) is a filibuster-proof supermajority, and actually get things done. Oh and I hope they kick that traitor Leiberman off his committee.

Dreams, coincidences and Cynical maneuvers

The last few nights I've had dreams about my credit cards getting stolen and being the victim of identity theft, and last night my car being stolen. In a weird coincidence, the other night I dreamed of an old roommate, Paul W., and on NPR's morning edition, they had a story where they interviewed a guy in Annapolis named Paul Bain; another old roomate of mine. Hit sure sounded like Paul, but I just checked the story, and it was Paul Bayne, so not the same guy.

Finally, I'm sickened (though not that surprised) by McCain's cynical maneuver about 'suspending his campaign' to concentrate on the economy. He saw that he was falling in the polls because he's weak on the economy and thought he could pull this stunt (like picking the Wicked Witch of the North--she shoots wolves from a helicopter!--as his running mate). Meanwhile the leaders of both houses (yes, Dems) say he's not helping (Chris Dodd called it 'political theater'). If he is a no-show at the debate tonight, he'll look like an idiot.

In a world... where Sarah Palin is Vice President

Sarah Palin as McCain's VP choice? What a cynical, hypocritical choice. After slamming Obama as inexperienced, he picks this person with even less experience. It's obvious to anyone with a brain that he is going after the Hillary voters by naming a woman... any woman. And we're not supposed to talk about her family, but here she is, a glaring example of why abstinence-only sex ed (which she strongly advocates) just doesn't work. And yet all these socially conservative women seem to choose to ignore this and are all excited about Palin. I heard them this morning on NPR just dismissing that issue by saying "Teenagers will do what they do no matter what." How convenient.

All this is Very bad for Obama. But maybe she'll get up on that stage and completely freeze up, or say something that will completely alienate those conservative women. I can always hope.

All that said, Obama will have no one to blame but himself for his arrogance in not asking Hillary Clinton to be his running mate, then this Palin disaster woudn't have happened.

In unrelated news, sadly, Don LaFontaine, the movie-trailer voice-over guy who immortalized the phrase "In a world..." with his distinctive sound, has died. Note in the Wiki article that a few years ago he appeared on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me to play Not My Job. He didn't win Carl Kassel's voice for the contestant, but offered to do the voice himself! Nothing against Carl, but I think I would rather have had Don's voice! "In a world... where TK can't come to the phone..."

I am so sick of Sidewalk 'cause' peddlers!

I don't know if it as bad in other big cities, but the situation keeps getting worse here in DC: young people with clipboards or folders who assault you on the sidewalk with lines like "Do you have a minute for the Environment?" or "Can you help homeless children in Africa?" Today I was ambushed by 2 people in the space of 2 blocks. I just say "No, sorry." and walk on, but some try more aggressive tactics, like one guy saw my UVA cap and tried to get me to talk about that, while I kept walking.

I assume these people really are from Greenpeace or the Democratic National Party, or whatever. But there is no way I am going to give any personal information to some person who approaches me on the street, no matter how many ID badges they have. I'm surprised how often they actually get people to stop and talk to them. I guess it must work, or they would stop doing it.

Still, it annoys the hell out of me.

DC in the Summer

I just hate these steamy summer days. And WTF? The Metro was full of annoying tourists at 7:45 AM! TOurists should not be allowed on the Metro during rush our. They are slow, easily confused, and they block the escalators. Though some of the blame goes to Metro for not having very clear instructions, and often unfriendly staff.

I also was rifling through my place for 15 mins this morning looking for my watch. Yes I still wear a watch--it is a nice, elegant black SWATCH that my friend Andreas from Switzerland gave me like 8 years ago. It's not your typical SWATCH; it winds itself with hand movements, so no battery needed. I'll be sad on the day when it finally dies.

So here I am at work, the sweat slowly drying out of my shirt. Bleah!

Box of Rocks

Wow the checkout people at Safeway can be pretty dense. I don't blame the bagger tho first did this because I think he might have been 'differently abled,' but the checker woman yesterday was just dumb.

I have two recycled, reusable green Whole Foods grocery bags that I have now brought with me to Safeway twice to at least save a few plastic bags. The first time, when I gave them to the bagger, he looked confused. IT's not like Safeway doesn't have their own reusable bags you can buy, and I have seen others there with Whole Foods bags, so I wondered what his deal was. Then when he filled them he asked what he should do now. I said use plastic for the rest, duh.

Then yesterday, I handed by bags to the checker woman and she set them aside down at the end of the stand. Then she started to fill plastic bags with my stuff. I was like, 'Could we use those bags I brought first?" She looked confused and was like, "Oh, okay." She was just going to leave them sitting there. Then when the bags were full she asked me the same thing: "What should I do with the rest?" Like I was going to pull more bags out of my ass or something. Grrr.

Gnashing of Teeth

Sometimes I think I should just live in blissful ignorance, rather than listening to Morning Edition on NPR every morning, and just getting more and more angry at how the politicians are screwing us over every day, and how the world is going to hell.

This whole housing mess was triggered by the greedy banks making these risky loans... loans that in many cases they must have known that the borrowers could not keep up with. But did they care? No. And now the Bush administration wants congress to hand them a blank check to bail out Fannie and Freddie. I don't pretend to fully understand the whole situation, but I agree with 'many economists' they mentioned, who think that bailing out these institutions (who are apparently very powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill) would just make the banks think that they can continue with their risky behavior (sounds like sex, doesn't it?) because the government (aka taxpayers) will always bail them out. They think that Fannie and Freddie need to 'suffer' more before being saved. I agree. I think the executives and board should pay, and pay dearly, even if it continues to have a negative effect on the economy. Someone should take responsibility for this.

And I am so sick of Bush demanding that the oil companies be allowed to drill in the Alaska reserve and offshore. This is a stopgap cure, and won't solve anything in the short term. Major changes need to be made, and the oil companies need to spend less on marketing their 'green-ness' and a whole lot more on alternative energy. A few million just doesn't cut it.

Finally, this story on Navi Mumbai made me thing of the world of Neuromancer

Digital TV

So you all know about this digital TV thing coming in Feb, right? My ancient 1st gen TiVo will stop working soon after (the story is that Comcast will keep sending the analog signal 'for awhile' after the switch). I don't want to get another DVR/tuner for the bedroom. A friend has Verizon Fios, and since I already have Verizon DSL and landline, I may just switch to a package of all 3 (switching my DSL up to Fios also) and dump crappy Comcast (I am paying them almost $100 a month for service--no premium movie channels--and a DVR). Unfortunately, as regular readers know, I hate Verizon almost as much as them (remember when they cut my phone/DSL cable last year and denied, denied, denied?). But you can get a DVR that will play shows on any TV in the house, and people say the Fios picture is better than Comcast, no pixellation. Comcast will only get worse as more and more people share bandwidth. The trick will be to get everything done in one day, because I certainly don't want to take two days off just to sit around and wait for technicians...

Andromeda Strain 2008: a Review

So wrong in so many ways.

I suppose they felt they had to change it and update it (everything has to be secret government conspiracies now, instead of the novel and first movie, where a lot of things just went wrong because of inevitable human failings and mechanical failures).

Part of the problem as Entertainment Weekly pointed out, was that it was boring: "You know something's wrong when Bratt, after years of smooth cop talk on Law & Order, looks bored mid-paragraph."

The one sexy part, somewhat played up in the book, was when one woman, Ben Bratt and Rick Schroeder all had to go through decon. Even this was disappointing! We get to see a flash of her breast but do we get to see any hot Ben/Rick butt? No. (On a completely unrelated note, the walk along the bike path today was particularly nice: an endless parade of cute guy butts in bike shorts whizzing by).

But I digress.

The one doctor's (played by a woman in the first movie, then by hottie Daniel Dae Kim here) epilepsy was rendered pointless. In the book and first movie, the lab computer discovered something important and flashed a red light. The doctor, working late and alone, went into a petit mal seizure and blanked out, missing the warning. Also in the first movie, when she went into a major seizure at the end, people thought it was Andromeda and it caused a panic.

One interesting, but again pointless twist was that the Odd-man Hypothesis 'single man,' Rick Schroeder's character, was gay. It had no real meaning in the plot. It would have been a bit interesting if it was revealed that he was not in fact single but had a partner, thus cancelling out the purpose of him as the odd-man.

I'm not even going to go into the whole intelligent virus sent back through time through a wormhole crap. Or the drug-addicted reporter plot (also not in the book or first movie), or the crappy special effects of the red stain going over everything them miraculously eaten in seconds by the bacteria.

Finally though there was the silly ending in the shaft with the open radioactive pit at the bottom. The book and first movie were much more reasonable: the central core was filled with computer-controlled lasers, designed to shoot down any animals that might enter the shaft and try to climb up. Since the largest lab animals were small monkeys, the lasers were only powerful enough to stop them; a human could take several hits before being incapacitated. Instead we had them climbing around in this shaft with glowing water at the bottom, while bit of junk fell on them from above (I assume this was supposed to be materials disintegrating from above as Andromeda ate through the facility, but I just kept imagining stagehands up above dropping crap on the actors).

Overall a waste of time. I'm gonna go finish watching the first movie, which I have on VCR!

Waste

Especially with fuel prices where they are, I was annoyed to walk by an office building yesterday and see a maintenance worker with his noisy, gas-powered leaf-blower clearing off the few bits of leaf and trash on the sidewalk. Of course this stuff is blown into the gutter, where it goes into the storm drain system and eventually into the Chesapeake Bay, which has enough trouble already. Would it be so much more effort to use a broom and one of those little scoop things? I realize this is probably some poor guy making minimum wage, but still.

Just as aggravating are the guys who hose down the sidewalk in front of the building every day. What a huge waste of water. There are starving children in Burma and China who don't have clean water! I realize some of these places have sidewalk restaurants, but most of them are just office buildings, and a nice rain once in awhile should be plenty of a wash-off.

TGIF

It's been a bumpy week, and it's not over yet. Oh and George W., where the hell is my rebate check? I got direct deposit!

I almost hate to say it (just out of some misguided loyalty), but Hillary needs to pack it in. The gas-tax suspension is a stupid idea, and only Barack is brave enough to not go along, and to point out that it is just a gimmick, and probably wouldn't do any good anyway. The Dems just need to unite behind him and move on.

Oh, and why didn't the geniuses realize what a disaster corn ethanol would turn out to be? Now everyone is chanting "We're sacrificing food for fuel! That's bad!" Duh. One more thing to be grateful for: I have easy access to mass transit, and if I need to, I can walk to work in 45 minutes. I fill up the tank of my car about once every 60 days, if that. I use it to get groceries and drive to 2 of my spin classes.

Happy Earth Day

Happy Earth Day. Though, frankly, with people like George "I don't like Kyoto" Herbert "Carbon Dioxide is not a Greenhouse Gas" Walker "Looky! I have a plan to fight Global Warming!" Bush in charge, I think civilization as we know it is screwed. Oh, the earth will get by, but there will be a lot of extinctions, and in the next hundred years I fear that there will be famines and massive death from starvation, flooding, storms, and war. People are going to start fighting over the limited resources (oh, wait. We already are). A lot of the equatorial areas will become uninhabitable for humans. It'll be a mess. I'm glad I won't be around.

One small thing you can do: Stop buying bottled water. You know where those plastic bottles come from, don't you? Petroleum products. And you know that most of that water is just tap water anyway. At the gym I use a cycling water bottle (not a regular 1-use plastic water bottle) I fill from the drinking fountain, which has a filter. At home I use a Brita. In the WP today I believe it said something like 23 million plastic water bottles are thrown away an hour. And don't get too smug just cause you recycle some of them. Plastic has limited recycling usefulness. Here's some info from This page:

Problem #1: it takes 3-5 times more water to create the plastic water bottle than will actually fit in the bottle. Considering each bottle should only be used once (to prevent the leeching of phthalates)- that is a lot of water that is wasted for each bottle we drink.

Problem #2: Plastic is made from petroleum, so we are depleting our non-renewable resources for a bottle that will be used once. The Pacific Institute calculates that the process of making the plastic bottles consumed in the U.S. uses approximately 17 million barrels of oil per year.

Problem #3: Plastic bottles aren’t recycled: only about 12% of plastic bottles were recycled in 2003. Recycling these bottles would ensure less petroleum was used in the production of more plastic bottles. Instead, these bottles pile up in the landfill, taking as long as 1000 years to decompose.

Problem #4: It may be just tap water. Bottled water seems to be more pure and safer because it comes out of a bottle that you had to buy. However, 25% of bottled water is just reprocessed tap water, meaning you’re not getting anything special. In fact, you could save yourself a lot of money (and the planet a lot of pollution) by buying a water filter.

In other News:

• I just love that Jimmy Carter is thumbing his nose at the Bush administration. I've always had a sneaking admiration for Carter, going back to the memory of him announcing a "Windfall Profits Tax" on the oil industry back in the 70s. The tax money would be used to research alternative energies. That was freakin' thirty years ago. Of course that went nowhere. And, here we are. There's enough solar energy coming down to earth to supply us with all the energy we would need hundreds of times over, with zero greenhouse gases or even heat waste. Duh. I want a house with solar panels.

• My legs are killing me, especially my glutes and hamstrings; it's a combination of stiffness and soreness. I was afraid I was going to die teaching class last night, but once I was warmed up I was fine. Today though, crouching or even sitting is painful. I haven't done weights since Thursday; what's up with this?

Five Friday Things

It's Friday, so time for Five Random things:

1. I meant to blog this way back when it first appeared on NPR, but I forgot. Today's religious holiday brought it back. It's a story about how Huckabee used all these bible fable references in his speeches, and how few supposedly religious people had any idea what he was talking about. THey asked all these people on the street who identified as pretty serious christians, and most of them could not identify his bible references. Ironically, atheist me knew them all (though I was shaky on the widow's mite one). What does that tell us about these evangelicals?

2. On Colbert Report the other night, he exposed some McCain hypocricy. He played the infamous clip of Falwell after 9/11 blaming it on the abortionists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU, etc., and Falwell agreed. McCain, back in 2000:

Speaking with reporters aboard his bus, the "Straight Talk Express," after his loss in three state primary elections, McCain referred to Baptist evangelists Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell as "evil." At an earlier speech in Virginia Beach he dubbed the same men "agents of intolerance."

Then in 2006,

McCain gave the commencement address at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. During his 2000 presidential bid, McCain called the Fundamentalist Baptist pastor, Falwell, an “agent of intolerance.” With significant coverage during the campaign, McCain said that he would never back down from his earlier statement. His later appearance at Liberty University prompted questions about the McCain-Falwell relationship and a possible presidential run in 2008. McCain stated that Falwell is no longer that divisive figure and the two have discussed their shared values.

Right.

3. I'm feeling much better, though still kind of tired. I'm actually excited that Sunday is Easter. Not because of the whole undead thing, but because my spin class is cancelled. I'll probably go in a work out anyway though.

4. With gas prices spiking, have I mentioned lately how I so do not miss the Mac consulting job with all the driving (not the least of which the really stressful 40 min each way commute through stop-n-go traffic that I did not get reimbursed for)?

5. I've started doing the layout for my latest book! I love doing layout, and I'm learning new InDesign stuff as I go.

Bailouts

I dunno, I am kind of with Senator Harry Reid on the whole Bear Stearns bailout:

"Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said the Fed's latest actions 'appear to shift large risks to taxpayers, who may find themselves on the hook for billions in worthless securities.'"

And who exactly gets bailed out anyway? Apparently retirement and such for the employees was based on the company's stock value, which went from $90 a share to the $2 a share JP Morgan paid for it. So they are still screwed. I guess at least they have jobs... for the moment. Meanwhile on NPR last night they said that the CEO of Bear Stearns was at a bridge tournament as his company was falling apart. The arrogance of these people.

And what is the cause of all this? Greedy banks and mortgage lenders making loans to deluded or deceived people who should not have been given mortgages. Then they package this debt and sell it to the investment banks who think they can make a quick profit on it.

This morning on NPR they said that often these banks are leveraged to 30 times their actual value at any given time. That sounds like asking for trouble.

It would be interesting to see a simulation of what would happen if the government did not bail out these rich greedy jerks, and some people had to take responsibility for taking extreme risks with other peoples' money. These companies that got themselves into trouble would suffer the consequences. Of course, Citigroup might be one of them and that's my bank. I'd say the investment bank portion would be forced to split off and face bankruptcy (I think that was Spitzer's idea before his untimely fall... speaking of taking responsibility).

This is fun!

Meanwhile the monkey in the White House just keeps saying that 'our economy is strong.' What an idiot.

Allergies Suck

I was pretty much laid out all yesterday with my pollen allergy. The Zyrtec and the Singulair didn't seem to make a dent in it. I don't get so much the sneezing or congestion, as I get this drainage that goes down my throat and tries to go in my trachea, and of course it doesn't like that, so I cough... and cough and cough. My throat is raw. A couple of my coughing fits were so violent that I... well you get the picture.

A bit better this morning, but I have to go teach spin class with my voice already halfway gone.

Anything but Neutral (It's time for a rant)

So apparently the whole Net Neutrality thing is rearing its ugly head. What with Comcast trying out charging people based on their usage and all. What upsets me even more is the idea that your ISP (e.g., Verizon) could slow down or even block your access to places they don't like such as competitors. They could (for instance) make an alliace with Yahoo! and slow down my Google searches. They could block me from going to certain sites... That is just wrong. And of course these telecoms make up these dot-org sites trying to make it look like there is grass-roots support for 'innovation.' They just want profits. Here's a new 3-part article in Macworld that talks about it. I went to Save the internet and sent messages to my representatives

In a somewhat-related front, Bush is stooping to childish threats about vetoes and delaying trips (What's next? He's going to hold his breath? We can only hope!) to try to bully the House into going along with the wiretapping law that grants immunity to these same telecoms who handed over information in violation of their privacy agreements. Without immunity, they would be open to lawsuits. Not automatically liable, just open to suits for breaking agreements. Seems fair to me. I wrote my representative about that too.

I really wish the Congress would stand up to Bush's veto threats, even if it means things will grind to a halt. Force the stupid bastard to negotiate!

How much longer will we have to suffer with this ass? 339 days (I have a widget that tells me).

Salvation Army: reality vs image

Though I would never give money to the Salvation Army (they are a religious organization, and anti-gay), I must admit I find their new ad strangely compelling. I've only seen it with the sound off at the gym so far (while watching my hot anchorman on CNN). It shows this middle aged woman in the uniform, slowly ringing the bell. She stands very straight, her feet in sensible shoes angled out just so. First she is next to a homeless mother and child, then she is silhouetted against a light in a subway passage near a drunk passed out, then she is on a house roof in a flood as a family is rescued by a man in a small boat. It's all very eerie and dramatic, because she just stands there right near them, but it is if she is invisible to them, and she also does not recognize their presence.

Then today at the grocery there was the bucket outside. I heard ringing but did not see the ringer... then inside the vestibule (where it was much warmer) there slouched a young african-american man in a lounge chair, ringing the bell. I guess he should be credited with doing the volunteering (or maybe it was required?) but it sure was a dramatic contrast from the commercial. And I wonder how much they spent on that commercial anyway?

Ah, DC

I was in a crosswalk on the way home today in Rosslyn, and a young woman deliberately failed to obey the giant YIELD sign and almost ran me down. I literally had to jump out of the way to avoid being hit. Then she gave me the finger before I could even get the words "Yield, bitch!" out of my mouth. I spent the next several minutes fantasizing about a) kicking the rear view mirror off her car; b) throwing a handy rock through the window and possibly hitting her.

Then I took a few deep breaths and told myself that she must be a very angry, stressed, unhappy person, and maybe she'll drop dead sometime soon without my help.

Metro Weirdness

At the Rosslyn Metro station this morning, I noticed one of the strange machines I hadn't seen in awhile, which I think are some kind of air sensor to detect poison gases or something... like saren. There were also quite a few Metro Cops in evidence.

At Farragut West going home tonight there also seemed to be far more than the usual number of cops. And (most likely unrelated) as I got out at Rosslyn they anounced severe delays on the Green line because a 'customer was struck by a train.' (I guess that 'customer' term didn't do a whole lot of good).

But I wonder what else is going on? Has Bush raised the terror/panic alert?