But … I’ve got a new job… which will keep me super busy and I’ll be a Very Important Person and all that now, but also requires moving to a whole new area where I figure I’m going to have nothing to do in the evenings except comment about the world. And how hot it is there.

Apologies for the absences, but I figure I just want to beat billmon to the punch on the whole Lazarus thing.

See you soon.

Also: I know I’ve asked this before, but seriously – Dems in the House and Senate… what the fuck is it going to take for you to bring articles of impeachment to the floor? You’ve got admitted felonious behavior for fuck’s sake. You hidebound pussies! Get on it, already!

Looks like the Canon EOS Rebel XT is the hands-down winner. The others are the Nikon D50, Canon EOS 20D, Nikon D70, and the Canon Digital Rebel (non XT version).

Guess where I’m looking first when I get my digital SLR camera? Man, I want one of those bad boys.

During the election coverage on Tuesday, the number one news item – in fact, the only news item – running on the ticker was the divorce. It made me wish for an asteroid to hit the earth the broadcast booths of the media networks.

BritBrit told KFed via text message on his cell phone. That’s OK, that’s the same way he proposed to her.

KFed of the amazingly motile sperm seeks custody. Of course he is, that’s the only way he’s going to get any money. BritBrit should call his bluff if, you know, there weren’t little human beings involved.

Though I find it hard to believe, apparently actual human beings were involved in the writing, production, promotion, and listening to of the following:

I’m sharing it with you both to fuel your genocidal rage and because there are some things you just can’t unremember. This being one of them. And if I have to suffer, so should you.

One has to wonder if the brood mare would have dumped him if his record hadn’t been a bomb and he didn’t have to give away tickets to his shows just to pack the house to 1/3rd capacity. The people’s dislike of the uberweasel was just too big to ignore. Also, BritBrit’s uterus was screaming for a break since, apparently, prophylactics are simply out of the question (His Holiness of the Incredibly Motile Sperm has powers sufficient to destroy any containment device) and taking a pill every day is just too confusing what with having to remember what a day is and all.

Now, back to actual important news.

Call me, Reese. I know you’ve been holding yourself back from flinging yourself at me for years now. I admire your principle and your dedication to that previous relationship. But now that you’re free, you can throw off those shackles society has set upon us and we can be together at last my love.

Best part is if you sign up through me, *I* get a little lurve from them, which makes it easier for me to keep on blogging. Woo.

Why the federal penitentiary system is also reading here, I have no idea. Someone needing some tips on getting their voting rights restored, maybe?

Missing: whip, cream bottle

Update: actual email subject line did not have the comma… but imagine if it did!

also, I was watching Stargate SG-1 and in season 4, Vanessa Angel makes some appearances as a tok’ra scientist (probably best known as the woman in Kingpin). Except instead of typing “scientist”, I typed “scientits” … a phrase which I am going to endeavor to work into conversation as often as I can from henceforth.

Freud would be so proud.

If I were to open a trendy restaurant in Turkey frequented by models (and possibly wrestlers), I would totally name it Istanbulimia. Either that or it’s my new name for Nicole Richie.

Now, who on earth should I link to? The big sites don’t need me, and unrequited rolling is kind of… well, too close to my relationship experience to be comfortable. Not that I’m not a totally smoking hot ladies man with throngs of admirers, of course. Because I am. Totally hot. And popular.

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We’re better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?
…
While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it’s hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen’s average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It’s almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.

A 1987 article by Jared Diamond before he became Jared mofo’n Diamond!!!! (Guns, Germs, & Steel; Collapse).

I have nothing substantive to add, just that it was an enjoyable read and an interesting take on ideas that he’s expanded on in his later works.

China has fired high-power lasers at U.S. spy satellites flying over its territory in what experts see as a test of Chinese ability to blind the spacecraft, according to sources.

It remains unclear how many times the ground-based laser was tested against U.S. spacecraft or whether it was successful.

But the combination of China’s efforts and advances in Russian satellite jamming capabilities illustrate vulnerabilities to the U.S. space network are at the core of U.S. Air Force plans to develop new space architectures and highly classified systems, according to sources.

(you’ll have to excuse the formatting, I’m working on a way to get screenplay formatting to merge well with WP. And for those that don’t know, or those that are about to shell out hundreds of bucks on screenwriting software, Celtx is both Open Source (free as in speech) and free (as in costs-no-money); using much of the Mozilla code (including the new calendar/Sunbird stuff). It does export some ugly HTML, though, so you’ll want to be careful before copy-pasting that shizzle into your blog. PRE tags with the text output is the quickest way, but not the prettiest.)

For example:

In my head I had a picture of this little icon in the top left corner of my vision. And the icon was lit up with a white (slight bluish tint), rectangular with rounded edges. The background of the icon was the solid white, the icon for “brights” was a single thick line pointing from NW to SE (icon box-relative), kind of like a compass needle. It was lit up, which meant her brights were on… which was important to know, because she needed that information in order to get into the shower.

See, awesome, huh! I hope when I do go insane it’s just as whimsical and interesting. Perhaps less functional and maybe with some more colors, please.

A man accused of fondling home health care nurses while posing as a mentally retarded person who needed diapers changed has been sentenced to a year on home confinement.

That’s totally sick and wrong (when it’s nonconsenual). Unless you’re in Japan, in which case I think it’s considered standard courting procedure. You just have to make sure that the nurse isn’t some homicidal maniac who likes to put you in a bag and hack your extremities off. That would be bad. And yet, just desserts for the assaulter. Who totally looks like this guy: