blogwaffe

Not for me, unfortunately, but for the greater good. Google News recently aggregated two articles about scientific andvances on the frontlines of sex. The first is about the recent study linking the female libido with chocolate consumption. And we’re not just talking desire, but arousal and satisfaction as well. This has been popular knowledge for eons, and science has finally caught up. Of course, the sample size was only 163 women, so I figure this was really just a university sponsored excuse for some Italian guy to ask lots of dirty questions of strange women.

The second article relates the recent “success” of innoculating macaque monkeys agains their own sperm. Well, really a protein necessary for the sperm’s fertility, but who’s counting? The summary: nine monkey’s, seven of which became infertile after innoculations, five of which became fertile again at the end of the experiment. So a bit better than fifty percent. Also, keep in mind these are injections and were required every three weeks for the monkeys. Now, there’s no way any man is going to get injections every three weeks to keep his soldiers out of combat boots. Machismo aside, injections are more expensive than pills: you’d have to go somewhere and have someone stick you (so you could go off and stick someone else…) the first time, and get trained so you can stick yourself (…?) subsequently. I assume this can all be done subcutaneously, so it’s proabably not complicated. But still more of a pain in the ass than pills. Maybe they can take a page from the diabetes industry’s book and start making antisperm innoculant pumps.

Or maybe we should just wait around for the pills.

A little bird told me the other day Vroman’s coffee shop stocks hot apple cider. Man, I love the stuff. It’s hard to find out here, even in the fall, and I’ve been jonesin’. So rather than do my field theory in the living room as always, I decided to hit it up last night.

No dice. Last weekend was apparently ridiculously busy, and they’re out of cider. You’d think three days would be enough time to restock, but maybe they were so busy that their cider supply went into the red. Ah well, their Star of India tea was good enough to keep me there taking up half of a big table with various papers and texts.

More interesting than quantizing the Majorana fermion theory was the conversation the two girls (one claiming to be 21, the other 17) were having at the table next door. The conversation was politcal, complete with rightist (the older, fashonista, lush, wannabe socialite) and leftist (the younger, product of divorced parents (whoa there – just stating facts), teetotaler (but only after having a bad experience or two with drugs (and their abusers), outwardly extroverted to compensate for fundamental self-confidence/image issues). Neither was making any real argument, each was just spouting off moral judgements or personal theories without any support (other than, “I have seen a homeless person before”, to paraphrase). I’m sure most of what they said was deeply felt, but none of it was terribly well developed. Well, maybe that’s unfair; at best their ideas were poorly communicated.

It was frustrating to listen to these people trying to string together sentences out of but-grasped-for ideas. I think the amount of information conveyed in their hour long conversation was on the order of bits. Clearly a very noisy channel.

But, hell, at least they were talking about the current administration and what they thought could be better with the country. More power to ’em.

Best Sound bites (all by Rightie): “But we need homeless people. We need 18% unemployment [sic] for this society to function.” “Not everyone needs healthcare.” “I like living in the most powerful country in the world. Having that behind me and being able to tell people that.”

Fuck you and your damn cracker ass, America. Do you not see what has happened in this country over the last four years? Sure, 9/11, you say. I agree. Terrorists sure as hell got us. They got us good, and I think our president did a good job directly after the attacks leading this country toward safety and confidence once more. So, yeah, you can have that one. Take it – I could bitch about that, but I don’t need to. There’s enough other bullshit to air out, that conceding one point without debate won’t hurt a bit. Hell, you can have Afghanistan too. We may have been a bit over the top in some areas and a bit lax in others, but you can have it.

Iraq. The UN. Halliburton. Abu Ghraib. The Geneva Convention. Weapons of Mass Stupidity. The Kyoto Protocols. Intelligence. International Relations. The Supreme fucking Court. The Christian Right and Gay Rights (read “Gay Rights” as “Rights”). A vague and ill-defined war. Manipulation, Indoctrination, Mis/Disinformation. The Deficit. Taxation.

You gave it all justification. You have given him the right, nay, the responsibility to step it up a notch or two and screw you, his very voter base, over even more.

And, no intelligence is not a character flaw (though nepotism and corruption are), yes the rest of the world matters (and not just as a source of revenue), and, quite frankly, I don’t think you have any idea about Bush’s policies except his stance on gay marriage, his religous background, and his belief that Arab people do, in fact, exist.

Every one of you in your damn 51% majority can go sit on it and rotate. And rotate hard. Nuts to your malleability, nuts to your misconceived sense of morality, and balls to your aforementioned cracker ass.

Vote. Do it now.

Do it now before you see a contentious election come to a close and realize you didn’t contribute. Do it now because you don’t want our voter turnout to be beaten by the new kids down the street: Afghanistan and Iraq. Do it now because you’ve already endured all the ads, you might as well make it worth it. Do it now so you can complain later about the state of the government. Do it now before I come over there and smack you around a little.

Do it now becuase you can. Vote.

I got spammed.

I don’t mean that some previously clean email account got those first couple emails that cause people to cower in terror before the inevitable flood of enlargements, pharmaceuticals, and money makers. Though, as an aside, that just happened yesterday.

No, I mean my blog got hit. Not hard, but even one unwanted comment would be enough. I got six. The offending omments all got caught by wordpress‘s coment moderation filters, but I wanted more. So I futzed around a bit with the code and installed a more powerful moderation plug-in. Hopefully, since the number of hits this site gets is minimal, no one will want to take the time to figure out how to circumvent these new methods I’m using. But I’ll be watching.

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Finally got around to generalizing my little side popper app so it can deal with text input from blog entries as well as the wp-people data I designed it for. Check it [SIDE=/I appeared magically! And I didn’t screw up any funny characters! €! euro!/]out[/SIDE]. Still needs work, though: it can only handle straight text, not general HTML, and I’ll need it to if I want to use it for the picture album idea I have.

I’m wearing a sweater today. My Mr. Rogers Sweater. It is no where near cool enough to warrant such attire, but It’s been a long time since I’ve opened up my warm clothes/electronics trunk for any anything but cables and adapters, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

It’s comfortable. It’s also funny. I lived in Rochester.ny for four years where it was always a celebration when tshirts could be worn all day long outside during the school year. Different people drew the line in different places, so some people celbrated more often than others. But it was still a source of common ground for everyone: tshirts = happiness.

Now that I’m in .ca, where I wear short sleeves and shorts essentially every day, it’s sort of nice to have an excuse to put on the old Mr. Rogers Sweater. Not that it’s a good excuse: It’s currently 67°F outside. Were I still in Rochester, this would be a day of celebration.

Here in .ca, it sort of still is.

So it seems the pizza fest was a success. At the very least, no one complained or openly admitted to having a bad time. Maybe if grad school doesn’t work out I can open up a little pizza place. I’d call it “Fratello’s” after the pizza dough’s provenance. The only disappointment on my part was Dixie having to leave early before I was even able to get out of the kitchen and socialize. Oh well. Cheers, Dixie. At least I got some material goods to make up for it: (one third of) a wine rack from Jeff and Ariele, and an official burninating uniform from Heidi and Greg – both highly appreciated.

In other SLR news, I met a couple of our new downstairs neighbors today. Seem quite nice. All of them downstairs are +/- my age and working at various jobs in Pasadena. Hopefully I’ll see more of them.