My father writes:
As I was walking down the hall between primary care and Jordan Hall today, I saw one of our graduate-students carrying a thick white book with brown lettering. I asked him whether that was “Linux in a Nutshell.” It was. I said “my son wrote that.” He looked at it, I pointed out “Aaron Weber” and his jaw dropped. He said “Cool. That’s fantastic.” So you’re a celebrity. By reflection, I am now also.
Over-analyzing depression and emotion, yet one more extension of the ‘medicalization of everything.’ c.f. Freud’s statement that analysis turns neurotic unhappiness into regular unhappiness, but it won’t actually make you happy. Happiness you have to find for yourself.
Gullibility and psychics. Having read an instructional manual for phone sex operators, I’m pretty sure that the phone psychics have the same deal.
and pointers to pointers, which is to say, content about blogs.
NYT on sports doping. I see people at the gym who look like they’re juicing. But for the most part, they don’t look chemically enhanced– even the ones who are obviously working out too much, or too hard, or too often.
If it were cheap and easy, I’d probably do HGH– it seems to be so risk free! So exciting! But on the whole, my money’s still on the non-speed anti-sleep drug Provigil and of course Viagra or Cialis– I don’t (yet) need or want the subtle, long-term benefits of additional HGH in my system. I imagine I may feel differently in twenty years when my body has stopped producing much of it on its own.
Rumors don’t often make a lot of sense. Nor do the professional women dedicated to encouraging women to get out of the workplace and back into the kitchen. Or the paychecks of the rich, or the AIDS policies of most of the world’s governments– particularly China.
I get sad when I see the depths to which political discourse in this country has sunk. What the hell is this? It’s more shallow than the religious debates.
Speaking of which: the line “I like Dubya because he’s a Christian.” That’s a bullshit reason. For starters, everyone in the race but Lieberman is a Christian, and they’re all sincere religious people, I’m sure. If you really want to vote for someone who’s all about Christianity, well, Sharpton is a minister, right? Yeah, you’re just using that as a cover for what you think his Christianity stands for– a particularly smarmy, narrow-minded kind of religion that’s barely spiritual at all, that consecrates and condemns the sufferings of others while forgiving all personal mistakes as youthful indiscretions.
Grrrr. You’re more soulless than a spammer. You’re as unbalanced as a … well, as anyone else in this screwed-up work-obsessed nation.
Yet one more article about how people choose stupid names for their kids. This is the third so far. Always hot on the scene of a breaking story or the analysis of data from the last decade, that’s us. Yeah.
Meanwhile, I’ve gotten totally hooked on the show ER. Yes, the emergency-room drama that’s been going on for about eight years now. I finally noticed it and have become drawn into it. Intense emotion, real situations, and characters I actually care about. Damnit! This is television! And old-hat, jumped-the-shark-ages-ago television, at that.
Our Leaders have brought us a couple of shockingly ineffective policies over the past few decades. The drug war economics bear out the fact that supply is much more elastic than demand for drugs, and that the drug war is basically unwinnable.
And of course FreewayBlogger has been pointing out the error of our military and automotive policies with the wonderful Hummer slogan “10 miles/gallon, 2 soldiers/day.” Not to mention the the delightfully chilling “You can have my gun when you pry it from the fingers of my cold, dead child.”
Tiny tiny apartments. In Japan, of course, they’re wicked cool.
RIAA Radar, to tell you what music is made by musicians not represented by the loathsome RIAA>. It’s like a “sweatshop-free” label on your music, sort of. Although I’m sure that packaging was made in a sweatshop anyway.
Possible upcoming literary-themed Simpsons episodes. Me, I’m apeshit over the Family Guy these days.
Ol’ Mickey D is apparently angry that its legendarily crappy jobs are now officially recognized as such. Gee, you make awful, unhealthy products, you provide shit jobs for low pay and little hope of advancement (OK first job for a teenager, I guess, maybe, but even so…) and become a popular culture icon, and then complain when your popular culture iconography isn’t completely glowing? Not much sympathy for you, I’m afraid.
Not with so many people weighing 900 pounds or more. What gets me about this is the number of them who died from weight-loss complications. Sure, their weight was a serious, possibly fatal health problem, but what would make doctor prescribe a 500-calorie diet and not expect severe problems?
And since we’re supposed to discuss language and irony here, a rather odd little interview between a guy named Dong Resin and The PATRIOT Act. Not some band, mind you. The law itself. I think this is supposed to be some kind of a joke, but I’m not sure.
I also used to think of how cool it would be to go skydiving like Chema did. The various .mx skydiving groups are running an ad-hoc online memorial, and there will be masses held for him in the DF today.
Que te vaya bien, amigo, estés dónde estés.
When I was a child, I would draw designs for amphibious sportscars and think of how cool it would be. Of course, so did all the other kids. But a few people never grew up, and they have now actually gone and built one and are selling it for just $250k. Cheaper than a 1BR condo in Cambridge, I guess.
(You didn’t think I’d manage a post without bitching about real estate, did you?).
Secretly Ironic 
