"Well I figured a more simple way to amuse my 1.5 year old kid. When I get back from work I just take anything off and give it to him. Once I said HEEEY SEE WHAT DADDY GOT YOU and took my socks off. He loved it crazy. I felt really sorry for him :P If only he knows what I really gave him."

Overheard in 10 Ways To Entertain Young Children for $1 or Less Without the TV.

I wrote some code. It does neat things.

Big progress. w00t.

OK. I'm noticing a trend on Youtube...

There's a little bar labeled "Recommended for You." Here's mine:



Mia? OK, I can see that. I've probably looked up a video of hers at some point.

And there's Real Genius a little further down the list. I think I looked it up to explain the Jordan character to Elia.

It's the second one that's remarkable...

Huge amazone wrestle.

And the description is clutch: "Amazon [spelled correctly] woman wrestling little black man.

And what's with the "part two?" A sequel? Really? Because there were so many unanswered questions in the first one?

OK, maybe it got keyed from my frequent MMA searches but yipes, d00d.

RIP Bettie Page.

The teen was shot as he tried to throw a fuel-filled bomb at the officers (says a police statement about the boy's death), police said. Other youths -- often referred to in Greece as "the known-unknowns" -- converged on the site almost immediately, using texting and Web sites to organize and communicate.

Huh.

OK, wtf is wrong with it?

Yeah. Gravity Bomb is back.

It occurs to me that a big problem I had, in its previous incarnation, was trying to do a few subjects per show. But I'd spend many hours on each, publish once a week, and by then the issue was somewhat beaten to death by the media. ZzZzz.

So why not just pick a story, a subject, an audio clip and a response, then publish that as a podcast. Microcasting? The podcasting equivalent of Twitter? Dunno. I'm sure someone has thought of it before me.

More soon.

She smells of the sun
and she's constantly saying
that's it's all right,
because lies sound so nice.
And like soil to seed goes
to casting my fears aside...

She says,
  "The satellite is coming". I pray,
  the wrecking ball is waining."

She says,
 "The satellite is coming.
 It's come to take us home."

     BT - satelite

These are an important four years.

So ...I might very well be reviving my political podcast, Gravity Bomb. Not entirely sure atm but if McCain wins it's just about definite.

And quick shout-out to Shira Chess who is doing her thesis on social networks in MMORPGs.

Courtesy of Ella.

Rant #1

So I was aware that what ACORN does is, by any rational standard, legit. They hire people to register voters and got swindled by some wage-earners trying to make a fast buck by making up fake names to make quota. ACORN flags the applications they believe to be falsified and they are forbidden, by law, from not turning them in.

I've yet to hear a conservative offer what they think ACORN should have done differently. That's because it's easier to be ominous and deal in innuendo when you haven't got a leg to stand on.

[Yes, Bill-O the Clown, I'm looking at you...]

Further, for these fake registrations to become actual votes, Mickey Mouse (yes, one of the names was Mickey Mouse) would need to show up with a valid ID in-hand and actually vote.

Good luck.

But maybe I'm living in a cave because I completely missed this:


I think it's important for people to know exactly what is happening. We do massive voter registration to low- and moderate-income folks. The Right Wing and Republicans, specifically, have been coming for us since the 2000 and 2004 elections. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sent U.S. attorneys after us to investigate and try to find a prosecutable action. In 2006, the reason he stepped down is that he fired eight attorneys because they kept coming back to him saying, "There's no evidence; ACORN is clean."

Bertha Lewis - Executive Director of NY ACORN.


So let me get this straight...

A conservative administration gives politically-independent state prosecutors a choice; "Bust ACORN or you're fired. It doesn't matter if there's evidence or not, we're quite sure they're guilty. If you can't, you're clearly incompetent and we'll bring someone in who can."

Huh.

If this party, these self-labeled "strict constructionists," have such little reverence for the 5th, 6th and 14th Amendments of the United States Constitution -- the foundation of the right to be presumed innocent -- then it's fitting that We, the People, should show them the door.

I'm sure McCain would appreciate the irony if he was only capable of noticing it.

Rant #2

I am, for the first time during this election, sure that Obama is going to win. Why? Because the Palin/McCain ticket is imploding. I saw some story on CNN about a McCain spokesperson referring to Palin as "a diva" and "going rogue."

Jesus H. on a greased-up pogo stick. That's rather severe language from a running mate's own camp.

And while we're on the topic, wasn't Palin's raison d'être the whole "mavericky" appeal?

So I hit news.google.com around 5PM and found this:



Three stories. Hm.

Four hours later, I get home and check again:



1,256 stories. Moahahahaha. Christmas in fucking October.

Rant #3

Yes, people lie to pollsters but nobody lies to their bookie.

Intrade is a company that trades in the political futures market. You can buy stock in a given party/candidate being elected to the White House. Here's the trading for the last thirty days:

I was pretty pumped last week when I got my first viable reply to a resume sent.

He explained, between other demands for his attention and a constantly ringing phone, the needs of his site. Some text changed here, some forms work there, etc.

No problem.

I understood this within the context of someone who actually read my resume.

I was getting pretty confused because serious web design and development takes hours of back and forth to make sure that everyone is on the same page and the goals are met. This guy was kinda like "I want the the site fixed, go do it, goodbye."

Turns out what he need is a .NET developer. I am not a .NET developer.

In his defense, the kids handling this for him just up and left for college. I don't think he even knew what technologies were involved or the scope of the job as a whole. He seems like a nice enough guy, actually.

So back to Craigslist.

Oh, and to the peanut gallery denizens who were positive Elia and I would fail, eat a dick. We're doing great.

• Seeing Rebekah and Kathy and Nick this weekend. w00t.

• Learning bass guitar. Egad. Gotta keep reminding myself; baby steps and blisters, baby steps and blisters. And I'm learning by -- get this -- playing loops on Reason and following along. Sad, I know, but I haven't been bored yet.

• GOT A NIBBLE ON A RESUME. *fingers crossed

• Going to see Stephen !@#$ing Colbert a week before the election. How cool am I?

• Got hired for a wedding photography gig.

Elia and I are still spectacular but not much to report. We're pretty boring people. Mostly we just prod each other to be more productive, canoodle and play Scrabble.

Some pics since it's been a while...

Bek is getting OLD.


Kathy and Ella before she left for Georgia.


Slinky the dawg.

On Saturday, Sarah Palin will be appearing before 8,000 rabid supporters at the Home Depot Center Tennis Stadium in Carson, California. A member of our community suggested that the best way for the Courage Campaign to "welcome" her would be to rent an airplane and fly a large banner over the event.

And that's exactly what we're going to do. With the national spotlight shining on Sarah Palin right now, we want YOU to send her a message she will never forget. [...] The big question: What should the banner message say, in 50 characters or less?

Hm. I have a suggestion.

SARAH CAN SEE US-DOES THAT MEAN SHE'S A PILOT TOO?

Fifty characters. Exactly.

Republicans today voted 2-to-1 against a 700 BILLION spending bill to bail out the American economy. Who do they hold responsible for failing to pass the measure? The Democrats who voted 2-to-1 FOR the failure measure, of course!

Their logic? Nancy Pelosi gave a speech they didn't like.

I'm not kidding.

Clearly they didn't have the votes to begin so hey, why not take another trip to the distraction well that has served them so generously for the last decade?

I've got a really simple question for the thin-skinned GOPers who claim Pelosi's speech tainted their vote; Were you going to vote yes before the speech?

If not then it's a lie and they now all stand guilty of doing precisely what they're accusing the Speaker of the House of doing.

If so, and they truly believed that this spending bill was the correct and necessary thing to do, they're really willing to let the economy go tits-up because their feelings got hurt?

Liars or wimps. Take your pick.

Dig it.



Life in Troy is good. Working some part-time retail, some web design work (for a company I worked for eleven years ago and, oddly enough, purchased by a company I worked for five years ago), some photography. Mostly keeping busy, mostly.

Every bloody bodega sells scales here. I think that's a hoot.

Perestroika can kiss my shiny, white ass.

"You know it's been five days."
"Five days?"
"Five."
[holds up fingers] "Five?"
[grabbing my fingers, clearing throat] "This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy had roast beef, er, roast tofu..."
"Roast beef!"
"Roast tofu. This little piggy had none. And this little piggy went weeee wee wee wee wee wee five fucking days."

Holy fuzzing shizzle. Starts great, ends twice as good. Ow.

That's an embryonic stem cell.

Think about it.

Obama says families of politicians are off-limits and doubly so for their children. Clearly the conservatives have different plans.

Notes CNN:

...Sarah Palin's announcement Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant -- and she supports her daughter -- shows that the Alaska governor is steadfast in her support of family values, GOP loyalists and anti-abortion groups say.

So the wingnuts are not only using the daughter's decision as a political marker but lauding Palin for a decision she didn't actually make.

Well ...OK, we all know that the conversation didn't involve the phrase "whatever you decide, we support you."

Which makes me wonder how the wingnuts would respond if Bristol opted for an abortion and Mrs. Palin stood beside her?

Is abandoning your daughter a family value too?

The last 24 hours have been the political equivalent of crack cocaine.

First, Daily Kos murmured that Palin's fifth child, Trig (who has Down's Syndrome), wasn't actually hers. This evidenced by the fact that Palin, despite having been pretty goddamn round during previous pregnancies, was imperceptibly pregnant this time around. She didn't announce the pregnancy until her seventh month and even her staff was baffled.

Meanwhile Palin's daughter, Bristol, was sporting what appeared to be a baby bump while taking five months off school for "mono." Hm.

Finally, the official narrative was that Gov. Palin's water broke before she was due to give a keynote speech to an energy summit of governors in Dallas. Not only did she give the keynote speech anyway, she subsequently hopped on an 11-hour flight back to Alaska for no other reason than to insure the child was born in the state in which she holds office.

"You can't have a fish picker from Texas," said her husband. Very nice.

Turns out Palin really is the mom. How do we know this? Because her daughter, now seventeen, is five months pregnant (and therefore could not be the mother of a baby that was born in April).

Was it reasonable to wonder aloud if Palin was actually Trig's mother? I think so. Was it responsible for Kos to declare Palin's assertion of maternity "lies" without something more substantial? No.

Having said that, what can we make of Palin's decision to put off her delivery of a baby known to have Down's Syndrome for 22 hours so she could deliver a keynote speech and, by her own admission, not have the child born in Texas?

Seems a bit reckless, don't you think? Maybe like her priorities are just a little out of whack?

And while I'll grant that Bristol's actions are not her mother's, this is where the story makes me warm and slightly giddy. The wingnuts have been the ones caterwauling "it's a private family matter!" Leaving aside their rather selective application of this standard, guess which demographic this is likely to have lasting resonance with?

Yep. The fundamentalists who wonder how an abstinence-only supporter could wind up as a shotgun wedding doyenne.

Got an email from the McCain camp. I subscribe for the lolz.

John McCain says we need offshore oil drilling and we need it now. Senator Barack Obama has consistently opposed offshore drilling - calling it a "gimmick." Senator Obama's solution to high gas prices is telling Americans to make sure their tires are inflated.

Today, I'm asking for your help in putting Senator Obama's "tire gauge" energy policy to the test. With an immediate donation of $25 or more, we will send you an "Obama E nergy Plan" tire pressure gauge. Will simply inflating your tires reduce the financial burden of high gas prices on your wallet?

Lessee...

Inflating your tires will save, approximately, 3.3% on fuel costs. A family who fills their 20-gallon tank every other week will spend $2,080. Making sure their tires are properly inflated will save that family $68.64. And, it bears mentioning, cause less greenhouse gasses to be emitted while costing that family ...nothing!

McCain's plan to drill offshore would wreck more habitats, wouldn't cause any change in pump prices until at least 2018 and even then the effect would be pennies per gallon.

Or about as much as Obama's suggestion would save that family today.

McCain is tacitly suggesting that the tire gauge suggestion is the alpha and the omega of Obama's energy plan. Kind of like when Bush, post-9/11, told everyone to go out and shop. And buy lots of duct tape.

My god, I hope McCain keeps selling those tire gauges.

Well this is going to be a long post...

The Life

First and foremost, I met an amazing woman and I'm moving to Troy, NY to be with her.





Elia...

• plays the harp, piano and violin,
  
• has a double masters in Linguistics and Physics from Rensselaer (which means I'm positively housed in Scrabble about 93% of the time),
  
• knows how to read her email in pine and
  
• is a vegetarian who owns a shotgun.
  

She's thoughtful, insightful, doesn't confuse an attack on her ideas with an attack on her and so easy with a smile. Absolutely wonderful.

But of course these facts don't even begin to take her measure. By turns of fate I will probably never understand, but appreciate nonetheless, we found and fell in love with each other.

So yes, after four years I'm leaving Rockport and the only real family I've ever known. I'm going to miss them something terrible.

The Rant (#1)

Remember way back in 2007, there was a bomb scare in Boston because a couple of guys planted Lite-Brite-esque cartoon characters all over Boston? The boys in blue went apoplectic and shut down ...well, pretty much the entire city. Some people said it was an overreaction, some said it was due vigilance and those responsible for placing the devices were foolish.

In any case, the pair responsible were arrested, dragged through the public mud and arraigned on charges of seeking "attention by causing fear and unrest that there was a bomb in that location." Eventually the charges were dropped.

Fast forward last week in Texas. Santikos Theater decided to promote The Dark Night by sending a local TV station a chocolate cake with a fake bomb planted inside.

What happens? The cops showed up. The firemen showed up. The bomb squad showed up. Then the theater apologized and, naturally, no charges were filed. Hell, the goddamn police chief went on-camera to vouch for the good intentions of those responsible.



Nevermind that the intent of the theater actually WAS to suggest an actual bomb.

The difference in these two incidents? One was caused by an undoubtedly large tax bill-paying movie chain and the other was two guys in their mid-20's.

It's nice to know people can get the justice they afford.

The Rant (#2)

Maryland State police infiltrated ...an anti-death penalty group? They uncovered no wrongdoing, no laws broken and no plans to engage in violent protest nor was the infiltration instigated by any such plans. They just thought that anti-death penalty groups might have been a good place to look for violent protesters.

Seriously.

State lawmakers are beginning an investigation into the whole mess which is great but this is the line that gets me:

"...state police indicated they believe laws limiting their power are not necessary."

Why the police would object to a law limiting activity that is illegal in the first place?

And if a state police violation of the requirement that a reasonable suspicion is a precursor to investigation isn't cause enough to limit their authority, what is??

Cue Lenny Bruce:



"Since the Constitution says that -- there has to be judicial superintendence -- that no peace officer has any place talking to anyone or making any inquiry whatsoever, a search warrant is prerequisite to the inquiry. Because if he's allowed to make any investigation, for a noise even, then he's allowed to make determinations of who looks suspicious. And the only people who look suspicious to Jews are Irish Drunks. So it's all bullshit conclusions."

The rant (#3)

A few days ago, Andrea Mitchell said something a bit odd on Hardball with Chris Matthews:

"Let me say something about [Obama's] message management. He didn’t have reporters with him. He didn’t have a press pool. He didn’t do a press conference while he was on the ground either on Afghanistan or Iraq. What you’re seeing is not reporters brought in, you’re seeing selected pictures taken by the military, questioned by the military and what some would call fake interviews because they’re not interviews with a journalist so there’s a real press issue here. Politically it’s smart as can be, but we’ve not seen a Presidential candidate do this in my recollection ever before."

Andrea has always been a GOP shill, that's not news, but AFAIK she didn't have anything to say about Sen. McCain simply refusing to answer questions from the Wall Street Journal because he wasn't happy with the press they'd been giving him.

Poor, dumb f'ing Glenn Beck. While I appreciate the fact that he's made a career out of being the king of the low-information voters by way of soft-witted gotchas, today's op-ed is a remarkable standout.

Beck's latest ire is directed at the visage of Che Guevara emblazoned on the t-shirts of the rescuers who saved the FARC hostages in Columbia.

"That's right, the same T-shirts you see Hollywood celebrities, starving pseudo-artists and confused hipster teens wearing around local coffee shops. To all those who decide that you want to be coffee house communist-chic, remember this: When you are wearing a Che T-shirt, you're wearing the same shirt that makes terrorists believe you're just one of the gang.

I hope that
latte is tasty."

ORLY?



Glenn Beck, populist fuckwad (and enthusiastic wearer of khakis), demolished without a word being fired.

Elia > Magic Wool Socks

We are meeting tomorrow for the first time.

This is my 777th post on 30thhour.

I do not believe this is coincidence.

Actually, I do, but it's still nice to think about. =)

Last week Fox News wondered if a gesture given by Barack Obama to his wife -- the so-called "fist bump" -- might be "a terrorist fist jab." Because if you've seen bin Laden give a pound once, you've seen it a million times.

Fox went on to lament "what ever happened to the old pat on the back?" Seriously! What's wrong with these kids today? Why can't they just use a good old-fashioned awkward chest bump?

Today, Fox News referred to Michelle Obama as Barack's "baby mama."

WHAT THE FUCK EVERY HAPPENED TO "WIFE?"

What a bunch of douchebags. Why don't you just get O'Reilly to do his show in blackface while you're at it?

I ran tonight for the first time in about twenty years.

Two thirds of a mile, total. Slow pace up hills, moderate pace the rest of the way. Not sure how long it took but I am pretty happy that I never had to stop.

And yesterday I lifted.

w00t. Go me.

OK, so this guy thinks that there are peeping toms checking out his daughters so he sets up a video camera. It records something that the guy believes is irrefutable evidence of alien life. He will not release the video yet but did give news outlets this video still:



What's bizarre is that he actually proved his original suspicion. The peeping tom just happens to be wearing a Punisher t-shirt...

IF YOU PEE IN MY BEDROOM I'LL FIND YOU, SKIN YOU AND TURN YOU INTO WHATEVER YOU PEED ON.

- Ella, talking to her cat.

Uh Oh

It's about a girl and what she did to my head over about three weeks in '01.

A Kuwaiti man released from U.S. custody at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in 2005 blew himself up in a suicide attack in Iraq last month, Pentagon officials said Wednesday. Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi was one of two Kuwaitis who took part in a suicide attack in Mosul on April 26, the officials said. Records show that an attack in Mosul that day targeted an Iraqi police patrol and left six people dead, including two police officers.

If al-Ajmi wasn't a terrorist before he got to Guantanamo, apparently we gave him ample reason to be one.

If al-Ajmi was a terrorist before he got to Guantanamo, why was he released?

No matter how you slice it, a failure on the part of Bush.

Say, how many does he need to get before he's impeached, anyway?

Jesus, if only the man would blow his load on a dress...

Police authorities in the US city of Philadelphia are investigating a video showing officers kicking and beating three suspects pulled from a car during a traffic stop. [...] The city's police commissioner on Tuesday said the video "certainly does not look good", but stressed the force did not want to "rush to judgement".

Police have an awful strange habit of calling for cool heads and lucid contemplation immediately after a dozen of those officers did neither.

Critics of today's major DEA drug bust at a San Diego college campus called the sting operation a "ridiculous, nonsensical waste of DEA resources." Ninety-six people, including 75 San Diego State University students, were arrested for charges stemming from possession and sales of cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy and other drugs. "It would be different if they picked one or two of the worst offenders, or if there was violence involved, but what is the point of this? Don't they have anything better to do than go after college kids?" asked Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes alternatives to the war on drugs.

I'm certainly no fan of the war on drugs but isn't justice blind? Nobody is entitled to special dispensation. What's good for minorities on the streets of Los Angeles is certainly good enough for upper class white kids with a degree hanging in the balance.

I can just imagine one of these parents sitting at a kitchen table and thinking to themselves, "You mean my child's future is destroyed because of twenty-eight grams of a plant that's less toxic than salt? My god, this War on Drugs thing is ridiculous!"

Yep. In 2006 alone it put 829,625 cannabis smokers behind bars.

So welcome to the club. Ready to call your Congressman yet?

Another day at the "let them eat cake" Whitehouse. This is Tony Fratto whoring himself wholesale at the May 1st Whitehouse press briefing:

Fratto: Victoria?
Press: Um, in the new Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only fifteen percent of people think that the country is moving in the right direction and twenty seven percent approve of the job that the president's doing. To what does he attribute this and is he concerned about this?
Fratto: Uh ...I don't think he was paying attention to it.
Press: Do you think that perhaps he should?
Fratto: No.

She continued to ask "why" but Tony moved on to someone else.

Listen for yourself.

you can wonder why you make yourself sick / you can fight it but / this feeling its starting to stick / well it must be assigned / that my heart is my own design

aqueduct

OK. You know you've been using a laptop too long when you sit at the kitchen table and slide your finger across the surface in an effort to move something on it.

Or that you need coffee. One of the two.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the old analog scale downstairs was apparently shaving 10lbs off my weight. Boy that sucked.

Given such a rude awakening -- plus spring being here -- I decided to go on a don't-eat-until-my-stomach-complains diet and even then, only stuff like skinless chicken, brown rice, salad, etc. Much to my amazement it's going really well, dropped seven pounds in fifteen days and took 1% off my bodyfat too.

I also started lifting, running (a wee bit) and jumping rope. I'm such a creature of Newton's second law which means it's a real bitch to get me moving but once I'm moving it isn't too hard to keep going.

w00t.

One thing I discovered is that I eat waaaaay more often than I need to. I want to eat All. The. Fu*k. Ing. Time. Now I ask myself "k, but are you actually hungry" and I'm amazed at how often the answer is "no." Apparently it's way more of a comfort thing for me than I realized.

So yeah, seven pounds in two weeks and without really ever going hungry. If my stomach goes "hey, feed me," I feed it. But now I'm beginning to wonder when I'm going to start leveling off. Before I'd have said around 200 but now, given my height, I'm wondering if it's going to be closer to 185.

"It would be a "cop-out" for countries to skip the opening ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics as a way of protesting China's crackdown in Tibet, President Bush's national security adviser said Sunday. The kind of "quiet diplomacy" that the U.S. is practicing is a better way to send a message to China's leaders rather than "frontal confrontation," Stephen Hadley said."

Maybe you should have tried that in Iraq, dumbass.

One might argue "it would never have worked in Iraq." Maybe, but does anyone seriously believe that "quiet diplomacy" is going to bring China to its senses over Tibet?

All this demonstrates is that Bush's rhetoric about standing with those who cherish freedom is precisely that.

Been a bit since I've blogged anything personal.

My daughter visited this weekend past.



First day went well enough. Second day was somewhere in the vicinity of unmitigated disaster.

I apparently wouldn't know Sandra Bullock if she bit me on the ass.

Spent some time tooling around Second Life. Boy, that was a mistake...

Dropped about three pounds. This would be great 'cept for the fact that I'm ten pounds heavier than the old scale said.

And thank god some reasonable weather is here.

I just found the coolest website ever; muxtape.com.

last.fm and Pandora and such are cool but neither allows for song selection and order and everyone knows that order can easily make or break a mix. I'd much rather listen to a tape someone bothered to put together than a random sampling of their playlist.

WAY more interesting.

My god, this is the shiz.

See, this is why I don't drink, see?

I listen to every single goddamn White House press briefing and it can get downright painful sometimes.

"Well, I guess Fox learned how to shitcan you."

Me, after Fox did precisely that to John Gibson.

In Germany they have this thing called Schadenfreude. Meaning to take pleasure in someone else's failings. In America it's just called "haha."

(overheard while passing the family watching Two and a Half Men...)

One biblical story that sticks in the memory is that of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22). God commands Abraham to offer up his son Isaac as a blood sacrifice because . . . well, God just needs a regular supply of blood sacrifice to keep him going. Don't you? So Abraham says, "right you are God," and takes Isaac up a distant mountain, puts him on a pyre, ties him down, sharpens the knife, raises it into the sky, ready to plunge it into the heart of his only son. By this stage, Isaac is really shitting himself. Then, at the very last moment, God was like "LOLZ!" Now both Abraham and Isaac are pissing themselves at the sheer hilarity of the situation. They're miles from home, cold and tired, Isaac is still tied down on the altar, and Abraham is laughing so hard that he can't even undo the knots.

RIP Gary Gygax.

"Where's a paladin when you need one?" - Jameson

So I mentioned a while ago that I adopted a polyphasic sleep schedule but it had to be abandoned because I had a gargantuan photo gig and unfortunately, "polyphasic" and "functional" do not belong in the same sentence. Now that that's squared away, I'm back to trying.

Normally, when you crash out, your body goes through a couple of phases of sleep over and over again. The fourth stage is the most famous and, as near as we can tell, most useful: REM. It's during this stage of sleep that the restorative effects of sleep take place. ... We think...

You go through these cycles several times a night. At first, it can take up to 90 minutes to even get to REM and the duration is fairly short. As the night wears on, it takes less and less time for the brain to arrive at REM and when it does, it stays longer.

Polyphasic sleep is based around the idea that REM is the only useful part of sleep and seeks to bypass the other phases. How the heck do you do this? I'm glad you asked.

Simply put, you'd just sleep for twenty minutes every four hours. At first it'll be hard to even get to sleep within those twenty minutes but once you do, the fun has just begun. Remember, your brain normally takes more than an hour to even begin REM so when you start sleeping, you won't be in REM and so you won't get the restorative effect. In other words, you'll be effectively getting no sleep at all for a few days.

Eventually, your brain realizes "hey, if I'm going to get any REM at all I'd better skip the useless stuff and start dreaming right away." Actually dreaming is kind of the light at the end of the tunnel when you're trying to adapt to this schedule.

The final effect is that you fall asleep within perhaps a hundred seconds, spend the next 18-ish minutes in REM and you do this 6x every 24-hour period. That's two hours of sleep per day. By day 7 one should be reasonably acclimated, capable of functioning at a nominal level, and by day ten you should be feeling pretty much normal. You'll wake from a twenty-minute nap feeling completely rested.

I'm currently on Day 7 but I'm not really on Day 7 because I've had a bunch of oversleeps. Some due to technical mishaps (such as being too tired to set the alarm right), some due to just saying "hell, I need to sleep."

At this point I'd say I'm around Day 3 or 4. Dreamful sleep now comes within seconds and as the days wear on, each nap is better able to keep me going for the next couple of hours.

You can cheat a little. For example, I switched to naps every three hours instead of four with the goal of scaling back to four once I'm doing a little better. Perhaps this will help me avoid the oversleeps. I wouldn't suggest extending the sleep periods themselves past thirty minutes, however, since that may cause the brain to actually get into REM sleep and therefore not be forced into adaptation.

Some observations...

• The induction phase SUCKS.

• Dreams are incredibly vivid and can sometimes seem to take much longer than the time I actually spent asleep.

• Don't even think about trying this unless you've got a full week to be utterly useless.

• Days stop being discrete units, they all just kinda ...blend...

• It feels kind of strange, too. If you've ever hyperventillated in a pool and then held your breath underwater, you know there's this strange "wow, I should have needed to surface a long time ago" feeling. This is kind of similar.

• If you're a person who gets stuff done, you'll have a HELL of a lot more time to get stuff done.

• If you're a person who procrastinates, you'll have a HELL of a lot more time to procrastinate.

Whee. =)

BREAKING NEWS!

HUFFINGTON POST BREAKS THE MEDIA EMBARGO THAT PRINCE HARRY IS IN AFGHANISTAN!

REPUBLICANS OUTRAGED FOR LIBERAL MEDIA PUTTING SOLDIERS IN HARMS WAY! "WHY DOES THE LEFT WING HATE AMERICA SO MUCH?!," WRITES ACE-HQ.

Oops. Sorry, it was Drudge, not HuffPo.

Kind of explains why we don't hear a f'ing thing from the wingnuts...

I actually know a girl who is so geeky that she and her new boyfriend fucking whiteboarded an outline of their future relationship.

Swear to god, not making that up.

On a different note, ever want something very, very badly but something else happens, fucks it all up, and in the process you realize your original want was a stunningly poor idea and you just dodged a world-class bullet?

Ayup.

WANT.

This is an interesting picture, given the filename and the domain that's hosting it.



Found at:

http://www.foxnews.com/images/root_images/021208_doomsday2.jpg

Thanks to Ella for the heads-up.

Because the delegate count between Obama and Clinton is virtually tied, even after Super Tuesday, the contest may very well come down to the so-called "superdelegates," a select group of people whose votes in the primaries mean a lot more than yours or mine.

There are about a million people in Rhode Island and collectively they send 32 delegates to the convention to pick the Democratic nominee. This means roughly 31,000 people will collectively cast one vote.

A superdelegate, on the other hand, is a single individual -- such as a senator -- whose single vote carries as much weight as those 31,000 people. The United States has an eligible voting population of about 200,000,000 people and they collectively send 3,253 votes to the convention.

There are approx. 796 of these superdelegates an each one of their votes is worth one vote toward the nominee. Put another way, 0.000004% of the population will cast 20% of the votes which determine who represents the Democratic party in 2008.

Kind of reminds me of a quote from Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."

CNN politicla analyst Donna Brazile said this of the superdelegates: "If 795 of my colleagues decide this election, I will quit the Democratic Party. I feel very strongly about this."

I'd like to say I couldn't agree more but actually, I can.

If superdelegates decide the Democratic nominee, I will vote for the GOP candidate in the general election. Why? Because simply staying home won't convey my disgust quite as well as I'd like.

And frankly I don't care if that nominee is Obama. It's wrong.

"Well, he found out how to quit you."

Fox News' John Gibson on Heath Ledger's death (over funeral music)

Aww. He's just bitter because nobody'll fuck 'em. Not even with a bullseye superglued to his rectum and a fist full of drink tickets, my god would you just look at those teeth...

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks. The study concluded that the statements "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

Turn your labia into a YAYbia!

So I'm thumbing through this month's issue of Wired and the cover has a blurb that reads "how to survive on two hours of sleep." If you know me at all you realize that this is a kind of life-long dream so I buy the magazine. I figure the five bucks will be worth that article alone.

Long story short, each night we pass through five distinct types of sleep and each complete cycle lasts about an hour and a half. The fifth stage is known as "REM," the stage during which we sleep and, apparently, the brain does mysterious shit that's necessary for us to keep functioning. Earlier in the evening the REM period lasts perhaps ten minutes and as the night progresses the REM period increases in duration, lasting perhaps as long as an hour during the last cycle.

Seems there's this thing called "Polyphasic sleep." The basic idea, as I understand it, is to view the first four stages as functionally useless. The goal is to train the body to get to REM as quickly as possible and this is accomplished by sleeping, for example, 20-30 minutes, 6x per day. The downside is that you feel like dogshit for a month. The upside is obtaining an extra 5-6 hours per day.

Apparently this has been the sleeping method of choice for people like DaVinci, Erdős and Bucky Fuller. So of course I've got to try it.

Whee!!!

This is funny on so many levels.

I like to subscribe to the wingnuts emails to find out what shit they're shoveling on any particular day. On Jan 5th I received a gem from RedState, a plea for cash which reads, in part:

You see, when we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop — the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us. If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Jesus. Where to begin?

RedState is actually asserting that while there are droves of liberal blogs that use Scoop and they can't find a single, solitary conservative-friendly developer to work on their code?

Scoop is written in a language called Perl which is twenty fucking years old. Throw a gyros sandwich into any crowd at the CES convention and you have better-than-even odds of hitting someone who knows Perl for fucks sake.

Hell, *I* know Perl.

But the most absurd part is the assertion by RedState that this is somehow a free speech issue. Look...

The right to free speech is a right to be heard, not a right to an audience. That's their first mistake.

Second, the fact that RedState can't find a single developer to work on their code is a testament to their assholery -- "free speech" doesn't come into play in the slightest. Nobody is preventing them from being idiots posting on their site. Nobody has denied them bandwidth.

And not to beat a dead elephant but show me one single, solitary conservative blog that stood up for "free speech" when Clear Channel refused to allow liberal messages on their billboards which is, I should point out, actually a free speech issue.

Name ONE.

I watched a weatherman this morning explain how it was raining where it was and then followed up with an erudite "you might be able to see [the rain] going from the top of your screen to the bottom."

Jesus Christ on a greased-up pogo stick.

I'm a complete sucker for New Years Eve. Couldn't care less about any others.

Oh, and the best line of the night comes from Stacey who said:

Ooo, look, it's 11:53 which is only seven minutes away from [BEEEEEEEEEEEELCH].

I thought this was interesting...

Apparently Bhutto was planning to meet with Patrick Kennedy and Arlen Specter about four hours after she was killed. During that meeting she planned to give them both "a report accusing Pakistan's intelligence services of a plot to rig parliamentary elections, sources close to the slain former Pakistani prime minister told CNN Tuesday.

From that report:

"Ninety percent of the equipment that the USA gave the government of Pakistan to fight terrorism is being used to monitor and to keep a check on their political opponents."

That's funny in a perverse kind of way.