RETURNED IN BODY AND MOSTLY MIND

You can all relax now: I'm back.

Stories from my vacation will have to wait, however, as I'm catching up on work and the rigors (ha) of my trip have rendered my brain the consistency and usefulness of a large boiled onion inside my skull. I think it'll revert back to neural tissue by tomorrow.

SILENT RUNNING

Internet, I'm taking the Summer Train to Vacation Town for roughly the next nine days, so don't expect to hear much from me until two Mondays from now. I am leaving you this Dogblog update and instructions to vaporize the entire planet if another news article is printed about Paris Hilton. Do not fail me.

Be strong.

I AM NOT A PUNDIT

This will be the last political blogpost for Q3 2007* -- this thing came very close to giving me an attack of what for lack of a better term I'm going to have to call the bloated screaming horrors. I give its author props for not completely losing it and trying to sink the boat and send everyone on it down to the watery depths, even at the cost of his own life.

My rationalbrain wants to know the exact fraction of the American population represented by these monstrosities, but my instinctbrain just wants to know where to buy approximately seventeen billion guns and the bullets to go in them.

* I am a man who does business, and therefore speak in the terms of business at all times with total authority

A NEVERENDING CAVALCADE OF WONDER

I really and truly thought that I was incapable of anything but a kind of dull, tired anger by now whenever the subject of the Bush administration came up, but lately there's been something new: I think it's a species of dim, fatigued quasi-optimism. It's like the shadow a wan hope might cast in a half-lit room.

The rest of this post was going to be a bunch of links to news articles, but it basically boils down to me asking if it's possible to quit fucking around and just impeach Bush and Cheney simultaneously, like with some kind of Congressional two-for-one, because that's the only way I'd be satisfied. Is it? I'm guessing not.

I REQUIRE AN EXPLANATION

So I'm reading a news article, just like any other day, when I notice this ad:



What in the jimjam is going on.

You're seeing this, right? My brain didn't make up a mortgage ad of some kind of skeletal green-skinned alien right out of a doobie poster with a bikini, pigtails, and a bow on its head, right?

- Can we identify the chain of people responsible for conceptualizing this image up through its final execution
- What in the noise made anybody think to pair it with this ad in particular
- What would it be like to meet these people

TRY TO RESTRAIN YOURSELVES

At my office, we have an assortment of snacks that seems to vary slightly. Right now, two of the available items are string cheese and Funyuns. Guess what I'm eating right now.

Who wants to make out

MULTIPLE FAILURE

Some things that are probably useful to know about my personal internet/scheduling peculiarities are as follows:

- I typically only check my friends' blogs every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I don't use RSS; I keep their blogs bookmarked in folders separated by rough categories, which I open in simultaneous tabs in Firefox. I don't check them every day because most of the people I know don't update often enough to make that seem worthwhile.

- When I put an event into my Google Calendar, I set GCal to remind me about it by email two days in advance. Usually that's enough, and I don't set it to re-remind me subsequently.

What this amounts to is that I completely spaced out on the birthday of one of my favorite people who lives in this city, which happened yesterday (a Tuesday), and for which I had created an event in Gcal. The above are just excuses, though; the reason is below:

- I am not a very good/competent person.

I'm sorry, Anjie. I owe you!

SOMETIMES IT'S ALL RIGHT

Fuck yeah, National Geographic! Fuck yeah, science!

This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I were an animal behaviorist, roboticist, and billionaire with a volcanic island headquarters. Give me five years and a staff of ten thousand and we would solve all the problems.

RED BULL CONTAINS SUGAR

INT - A HOTEL ROOM IN THE CITY OF LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

It's morning, and our hero JON finds himself awake after falling asleep roughly four hours ago after a night characterized mostly by the sound of pouring vodka and the crack-hiss of Red Bull cans opening. JON throws an arm over his eyes, moving as though his bones have been replaced with splintering wood and his nerves with rusting wire, and smacks his lips as he comes to a realization.

JON: It tastes like a My Little Pony shat in my mouth.

MINOR DISORIENTATION

I woke up today with a weird, ill-defined feeling of general displacement, as though someone had replaced all the organs inside my body with those of someone else. (I may have admitted to having this feeling before; it's weird) It's more or less gone now, but it took kind of a long time to leave.

[Bonus: I was trying to come up with a good way to portmanteau or otherwise cram "organ" into "disorientation," but nothing even remotely palatable was coming up.

This has been a Backstage Look™ into My Blog™! Press "Main Menu" to go back to the main menu screen.]

RAZOR-SHARP ANALYTICAL SKILLS

I've long held the suspicion that they change the timing of the traffic lights between weekends and weekdays.

For your consideration: This weekend, for some reason, the light at Masonic on Fell was all sorts of fucked up, by which I mean way off the normal rotation that allows people driving at about 30 to catch every green between Laguna and Stanyan. But last night it was fine. My guess is that it was reset on Monday during the hypothesized weekend/weekday switch.

My only other piece of evidence for this theory is that if you're driving south on Presidio and turn left on Bush, the timing of the lights on your journey will be different depending on whether it's a weekend or a weekday. I swear this to be my personal experience, anyway.

I AM THE VERY PINNACLE OF NONSTOP EXCITEMENT