JUST PLAIN ODD

I woke up this morning with a really weird feeling in my body; the closest thing I can come up with is that it felt like someone had swapped all of my internal organs with someone else's during the night. Not even bad organs, just ... different. I fully realize that this sounds ridiculous. Maybe it's just the impending rain. It seriously looks like it might rain today, people.

MY NEW DRIVING TECHNIQUE IS UNSTOPPABLE

I think the Great Highway must be some civil engineer's idea of a jokey experiment. See, between Lincoln and Sloat, the Great Highway has stoplights every two blocks that used to be timed in sequence: If you drove at about 35mph, you could hit every single one of them just as they turned from red to green, and if there was nobody ahead of you, you didn't need to use your brakes as long as you maintained the right speed. Really, even if there was somebody ahead of you, it didn't matter as long as that person understood the concept of timing; I always feel a mixture of disdain and pity for people who race ahead to each stoplight and sit there like morons until the green comes.

Okay, so now it's different, but in a weird way: For the past week, every other stoplight along the Great Highway's been timed in sequence for cars driving about 35mph. The other ones? Those stay green all the time. I don't know what's going on. Why change it? It's not like it lets you drive faster; you still have to stick to about 35 unless you want to sit in front of a red light every four blocks. Is it just for laughs? Did someone want to see if it would affect how people drive on that road? I'm just curious here.

NO!

I'm up to at least one or two completely unsolicited MySpace friend requests per day from bands I have never heard of. Those are terrible. One thing I'm glad The Definite Articles don't do is that.

I should make it a thing to not talk about MySpace more than once every two months or so. Let's try that and see what happens.

MYSTERIES OF TECHNOLOGY

There's a device somewhere in the bathroom at my office that makes a sound exactly like someone breaking the seal on a day-old 3L bottle of soda and twisting the cap twice. I don't know what it is, because by the time I think to look for the source of the sound, it's already over.

(TSS! Rack rack.)

One possibility I've already crossed off my list: Someone in another stall breaking the seal on a day-old 3L bottle of soda and twisting the cap twice. The sound can happen when nobody else is in there but me.

Any ideas? This isn't an emergency or anything, I'm just curious.

FOOT POWER

I got new shoes. I'm pretty happy with them overall, but the thing I'm noticing now is that they're so much lighter than my old ones, it seems to me like my feet are essentially weightless. I feel nimble. I just had to share that with you.

THAT HAD TO HURT

I saw The Protector last night and once again I'm forced to wonder how it is that a stuntman films a movie with Tony Jaa and lives to talk about it afterward. Or at least remains walking. I don't think this is going to spoil anything for you, but that guy is basically the baddest dude. I'm reminded that I need to watch Ong Bak again.

Unrelatedly, I ate an excellent Indian dinner right before watching that movie, but by the time I got to bed (around 12:30 or so), I was ravenously hungry again. I'm no stranger to the concept of digestion, but it was as though the food had straight-up vanished from my entire bloodstream like I'd never eaten anything. I know that dosa wasn't imaginary, folks.

PAINSPECTRE

I'm being haunted by the ghost of a headache. It's like a regular headache, except about 1/10 as strong, and it comes and goes unpredictably. It's been following me around for roughly the past 36 hours; no idea why. I'm probably going to take some Advil later and see if that gets rid of it permanently; previous doses have been commensurately small, in scale with the actual pain, but maybe if I stomp on it with ibuprofen, it'll dissipate for good. Otherwise I'm calling the Ghostbusters.

Dammit I wish the Ghostbusters were real.

WELCOME QC READERS

If uh, if any of you have made it over to the "real" blog. I stopped trying to predict what Jeph would do a long time ago, but never did I predict he would become an out-of-control rock 'n' roll cyborg.

TWO UNCONNECTED THINGS

1. Laura Veirs played an excellent show at Cafe Du Nord last night to a bewilderingly small crowd. I don't know where everyone else was, but I do know this: That is a lady who really enjoys ocean-based imagery. Maybe she used to be a mermaid.

2. There's a developer who just moved into my cube row who seems to get a lot of people stopping by his cube to discuss bugs or whatever. This is fine -- people coming together! solving problems collaboratively! -- except that one of them is the Shouty Chinese Dude. I can't work with headphones on; music distracts me. This is not a big huge deal, as the discussions typically don't last long, but I wanted someone to be aware of it. That someone is you. Feel special.

HAPPY MID-WEEK

I'm pretty busy at work these days, but I can still give you guys a Dogblog update when I'm not there, because that is just the way it is this week.

Unrelatedly, isn't that Keith Olbermann something? Between this and the other thing, I'd be tempted to write him in on my next ballot, if voting is still legal by the time 2008 comes around.

ROBOTS:HUMANS RATIO UNFAVORABLE

I'm getting one of them every day now.

Look at these:

"Katie"

"Amelia"

"Jen"

More importantly, look at those comment sections. Humanity is a raft of wreckage that needs to be towed out past the docks and shot at random a bunch of times.

VEGETABLE CHALLENGE

Getting my breakfast this morning, I realized that I have a whole salad-in-a-bag in there from a grocery run on Sunday. I wonder if I can eat the whole thing tonight. I bet I can! Salad and I are either good pals or mortal enemies, I guess, depending on how you look at it.

ONLY PARTIALLY DELIGHTFUL

Every week or two, my MySpace account gets hit with an array of friend requests from fake camwhore profiles. You know what I'm talkin' 'bout:

- "Hi my name is Anika check out my new website and pics k thx!"
- Picture clipped from a magazine ad or something

I don't know that I'd call this "fun," exactly, but I do kind of enjoy checking out the people who've actually gone ahead and added these profiles as friends, until I start to lose faith in the universe as a self-correcting system (usually this doesn't take long). Try it sometime, maybe? Or don't. You could do that, too.

POTENTIAL FOR REVISIONISM

I'm risking blog-clog here, but I'm curious. The front page of my Yahoo Mail links to five of what I guess are the "top" news stories of the day; I've noticed that sometimes the titles of these articles change as the day goes on.

Right now, the title for this article is "Pentagon gives gloomy Iraq report."

By the end of the day, I give 10:1 odds it'll be something like "Freedom forecast for Iraq: Totally awesome!!"

OF ALL THE DAMN NAMES

Okay, so NASA's got this new spacecraft in the works, right? And they call it "Orion." Did none of those guys remember the spaceship design by the same name that works by chucking nuclear bombs out the back of the ship and letting the explosions accelerate it? That was literally the first thing I thought of when I found out about this. I think there was even an Orion-style ship in the movie Deep Impact, for fucksake.

I was of two minds about this, because the pure idea behind Orion is awesome if you're going to do it in deep space, but it basically spells nuclear death for humanity if you try to launch one off the ground, from Earth. I was like, "What, they're doing this? Nice! Wait, what. HANG ON." I wonder how many people are going through this thought process right now.

It seems like they could've thought harder about that name, is all I'm sayin'. I'm just talkin' here.