Triop #6 (1/2/2006 - 3/10/2006) RIP (Monday, March 13, 2006 - 7:32:58 PM) [Post a Comment]

Sometime during the day on Friday, my last triop died. Below are pictures I took of him a couple of weeks ago. I waited until Sunday to bury him in the same spot as his brothers and sisters because I didn't want to say goodbye. So sad. That afternoon, I cleaned out the tank and got it set up to dry out in preparation for... get ready for it... TRIOPS: THE NEXT GENERATION

	Triop #6 (1/2/2006 - 3/10/2006) RIP

It seems that last week, NPR started featuring a song-of-the-day. The one on Friday really caught my attention. It's a band called the Headlights with the wonderful song 'It Isn't Easy to Live That Well'. You can listen to the full song on NPR's site.

I did some digging and finally found the band's website. You can listen to two other songs from their first "mini-album" plus an extra song there. Finally, the first song can be downloaded from the record label's webpage for the album, "The Enemies EP".

I will likely buy the CD from the Public Radio MusicSource to help support public radio. That page has clips of the songs you can listen to as well.

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random stuff (Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - 12:12:54 PM) [Post a Comment]

If you didn't know, my brother Keith is in the Air National Guard's 389th Airlift Squadron. He's been deployed once again to somewhere in the world. (Even if I remembered where, I'm not supposed to really say.) This morning, I got my first ever email from him. After typing up my reply, I realized that parts of it would be appropriate to post here for other friends and family to read--things I've been meaning to post here anyway. So, here you go:

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I've been sick with an annoying stomach virus the past couple of days, so I missed work on Monday. Other than that, work has been going fine. A friend of mine, David Harvey, starting working here at Aristotle a couple of weeks ago. Carolaina and I met him at Midnight Oil a few months ago during our weekly card games with friends. Me and him carpool down here to Little Rock to work everyday--so that's been nice.

When I weighed myself on Sunday morning, I was at 161 pounds. It seems lately that all I'm doing is maintaining my current weight--it stays roughly around 163. A few weeks ago, Carolaina and I realized that I'm eating a lot less than she does, but since I'm rather sedentary, I don't seem to need as much. This week, I've started eating sandwiches again! I missed those. Everyone asks me all the time if I feel any better, but I don't really. You hear in all those weight-loss pill commercials on the radio with testimonials: "I have so much ENERGY now!", but that just hasn't been the case with me. I notice the weight loss mostly in small ways everyday: my rings keep falling off, abrasions from a lack of "padding", and I can see that I have bones!

Carolaina continues to recover slowly. She'll get better at things for a while, regress some, then continue to improve. In the meantime, though, she's really frustrated about what she can and can't do. Next weekend, she wants to see if she can drive her car again. I think it's a really bad idea, but we can try.

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I have one last triop left. This one has now lived more than 2 months--extremely advanced age for a triop. He keeps going and going and seems happy enough, even though he's eating a lot less.

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talking raven (Monday, February 27, 2006 - 12:30:45 PM) [Post a Comment]

You haven't lived until you've heard a rather large raven speaking in a British accent:

Bird Flu Forces London's Beloved Ravens Indoors - All Things Considered, February 24, 2006

I had no idea that ravens could "talk", much less sound so human.

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horrible leader (Thursday, February 23, 2006 - 5:09:12 PM) [Post a Comment]

I heard an NPR interview today that succintly sums up a good many of the reasons I think Bush is one of the worst Presidents in US History.

Looking at President Bush, Seeing an 'Impostor' - Fresh Air from WHYY, February 22, 2006

Be sure to read the sample first chapter of the guy's book at the bottom of the page. I'll sum up the relevant points and my own reasons here:

1. He won't listen to any opinion contrary to his own.
2. No dissent of any kind is allowed against the President by any White House staffer.
3. Extremely vindictive against anyone with any kind of criticism against him. For example, the Valerie Plame case, and many others
4. Extreme unquestioning belief in his own rightness
5. Has never yet once vetoed any bill sent to him by Congress, no matter how much pork barrel spending it's been loaded with.
6. Ridiculously obsessesed with secrecy, even about things that don't matter. What has he got to hide? Recently, he's begun a process of re-classifying old historical documents which could be seen as embarrassing--this dumbfounds me.
7. Recent illegal wiretaps and spying of Americans in the name of "security"
8. His policies are more in line with liberal Democrat party issues: big government (Dept. of Homeland Security, anyone?), massive government spending, etc.
9. Unfunded mandates: No Child Left Behind, Manned missions to the Moon and Mars.
10. Iraq. 'nuff said.
11. Attacks on science (evolution, mostly) and blatent support of creationism
12. Little or no support for stem-cell research (mostly restrictions), which could give us some truly awesome health benefits someday
13. Ridiculous economic policy: the trade deficit WILL bite us hard one of these days, stupid protection tariffs (steel, timber), and a massive government debt getting bigger every day
14. Incompetent response to Katrina disaster (I know, not all his fault, but he's part of the problem.)
15. Condoning and setting the stage for torture of prisoners (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and others)

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Carrot Cake Soup (Friday, February 17, 2006 - 5:05:29 PM) [View 6 Comments or Post a Comment]

I just now remembered this. I'd love to try it, if I could allow myself the carbs. Penny Arcade's infamous Carrot Cake Soup:

Long story short, I'm getting my chicken soup on, it's Sunday afternoon, and Gabe's reading some Preacher in the Den, which is also the living room, the bathroom, and the foyer. I am interacting with pasta dough in what I think is a stern way, when I hear him say that he might like the soup better if it were, in fact, carrot cake. It hits us, hits us both, simultaneously, like a semi made out of lightning which is also a professional boxer. Carrot Cake Soup. You cube the carrot cake, some pieces have frosting and some don't, and you put a handful of these chunks into a bowl full of milk. So let's go do it. We'll do it later this week, he says. But I know that's the same as not doing it. Why not now, I say? I know a store where we can get all the stuff. You can just buy it, the way you can buy stuff in the household cleaners section and make a bomb big enough to kill God. The stuff is just lying around there and nobody's doing anything with it. It's not a crime to buy them separately, and what we do at home isn't any of their fucking business.

I think someone might have been following us as we pulled into the parking lot, we walked toward the grocery store and tried to keep the conversation natural. We certainly didn't discuss carrot cake or the soup one might make but cutting it into cubes and swimming islands of it in cold milk, pleasure islands, like you'd see in a magazine. At the bakery counter, a woman asks if she can help me, and I'm so nervous that as I'm pointing to the carrot cake behind the glass, my finger starts to tap in Morse Code that reads:

I AM ABOUT TO COMMIT A CRIME AGAINST GOD AND MAN STOP

And where is Gabe with that Goddamn milk? There he is, in the self-checkout. Idiot. There's cameras all over that thing, it's like a Goddamn surveillance tree. It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together. A red light flashes on, and off in my mind. At another checkstand, I pay with untraceable cash, assuring the woman that I will eat the cake by myself, without assistance from cows. I smirk. This woman has no idea that she's just sold me the trigger to a flavor gun.

Carrot Cake Soup is like the taste of watching girls make out. It has an extraordinary power that oscillates between gentle and overwhelming, between light and dark, between pleasure and more pleasure. When it was over, I realized that I was panting. I was in possession of carnal knowledge. And I knew that, somehow, every taste beyond this point was in the service of the one that still lingered, waited, to remind me that nature has laws, and those that break them are criminals, and though they roam free enough the knowing will hold them, and keep them, until the last.

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