A whole lot of babbling.

Been busy.
Last week I spent a number of days in Toronto. At first it was sort of fun and reminded me that yea, lots of people live really close to each other, but then the long hours got to me, the lack of sleep got to me and having people in my face all the time got to me. It wouldn’t have been so bad but I missed all the rocks, trees and nature that normally surrounds me where I live now. (All the nature somehow calms me down.)

The good part of the trip was that I got to see some family members face-to-face. I even attended a holiday gathering where we traded sarcastic comments, had some food and swore in front of their kids. Gotta love family! I also got a big bag of clothes, compliments of my favourite establishment “My sister-in-law’s closet.” Not only does this save me hours of useless shopping (and complaining) but a ton of money that I can now spend on cool things like dinosaurs, music and pens. Oh, and I guess presents for people I like since the holidays are coming up soon.

LAUGH.
I’ve been catching re-runs of “Whoose line is it anyway?” and laughing my ass off. What a great show that was, I demand it return and a hundred more episodes are made. Also, the Futurama movie “Benders Big Score” was AWESOME. I loved it. Unless you’re a fan of the show you won’t like it, but everyone should love the show because it’s funny and clever. (And nerdy, let’s not forget nerdy.) Laughing is good for us all so whatever makes you laugh, you should do that more. Go on. GO ON.

I don’t do holiday cards.
Now that my mailbox is getting filled, I have remembered all about holiday cards. To be honest, I just don’t understand the obsession with cards. I find most of them completely useless and a waste of time. Unless there is a life update of some sort (a newsletter perhaps), some family photos or something, then really – I would rather someone take the few bucks they spent on the card and the stamp, and just go have a cup of coffee, donate it somewhere or something. I’d rather that they derived some sort of enjoyment out of spending that money, instead of sending me something that gets a signature and then I throw out.

Yes, some people derive a great source of enjoyment out of these things, but normally they fill the card with writing instead of just signing their names. So you’re thinking of me, thank you, but send me an email or give me a call. That way I can respond to you in a useful way and we both feel good after the exchange. Your signature and a card doesn’t allow me to respond, doesn’t relay anything new to me and then adds to the waste disposal/recycling process, which makes me feel bad. If you simply MUST send me a card then send me an e-card. (After I’ve read it, I don’t feel bad clicking delete.)

I’m not being rude, I’m just trying to minimize the amount of stuff I toss out, and the amount of money people spend on stuff I toss out. If you want to send me something, send me a photo of yourself, your family, your pets, your house, where you live or whatever because that is what means something to me. If you want to thank me for something, just tell me, I don’t need a trophy card to mount on my fireplace!

To anyone I know that feels angry/sad they didn’t get a card from me, please, don’t take it personally. To anyone that sent me one and feels bad now, or angry, then I’m ordering you not to. I do appreciate the thought, and in the future you can save yourself the cash. (Hell, spend it on something you will enjoy throwing at me if that makes you feel better.)

I love you podcasts.
It’s finally happened, I’ve been sucked into the world of podcasts. I’ve spent hours downloading and listening to all sorts of podcasts via iTunes. NASA has a few great videocasts, and there are tons of other science and space podcasts which inform me what’s going on around the world, and what humans are seeing out in the universe around us. I’ve downloaded a few German lessons, classes for writers, discussions of strange phenomena and all sorts of wonderfully informative things. The best part is that they are free. All I have to do is click on them and the knowledge is mine. It could be yours too, for FREE! Load up itunes and click on podcasts, then browse around.

What time-period do you wish you lived in?
There was some silly online quiz thing asking this and people were posting some really silly things. Think about it! Only within the last couple hundred or so years (give or take 50 years) have we discovered things that make our everyday lives safer and better.

-Refrigeration – this allows us to eat a great number of foods, to buy them in bulk, to ship them around the world and make it so we don’t have to grow and eat everything right away. (This also cuts down on how many times we head to the grocery store.) That frees up a lot of our time.
-Electricity – we can stay up to all hours of the night without relying on fire. This gives us a lot more of our days to be productive. We can live in houses almost anywhere and survive with our electricity. (It keeps our sorry asses a comfy temperature.)
-Computers – we can connect with others all over the planet and can access information within seconds. Knowledge is power and now that more of us are sharing information, perhaps we’ll all start to get a bit smarter. (What we need now is to start teaching people how to determine if information they are reading is plausible/true/biased/correct/useful or not.)
-Birth control – I don’t think the world fully appreciates just how important this is. It’s made it so women can decide (to a point) when and IF they wish to have children, and help to curb the growing population crisis.
-Women are getting treated better - Don’t forget that women were bred with and tossed away if they didn’t produce the “right” offspring. We’ve been oppressed longer than anything else on this planet. From being slave labour in our own homes, being bought/sold as animals, to being kept out of schools/workplaces and generally treated horribly, women have only recently been able to vote, decide what they want to do with their lives and whom they want to spend them with. (We can even wear pants now!)
-Medicine – Now that we understand germs aren’t caused by evil thoughts or angry gods, we can do a bit more to prevent and fight off illnesses. Okay, we’re starting to cross that line into over-medication and plastering our homes with chemicals, but overall we’ve increased our lifetimes with medicines and sanitary practices.
-Society – It wasn’t SO long ago that speaking against the world being flat or saying it was older than a few thousand years was punishable by death by a bunch of mythical-being loving people. I for one am very thankful I live in a place and time where I can decide for myself what I believe and say without having some jerks in long white robes torture and kill me over it in the name of their god.

Let’s face it; over time humans are slowly getting smarter. The people in the past believed in and did all sorts of bizarre things, and I’m sure that hundreds of years from now (if humans make it) they will be amused at all the strange things we do and believe in. (How anyone can think that somehow people who wrote things in the past had it ALL CORRECT is beyond me!) We’re human and we’re supposed to evaluate and improve upon what came before, not hit repeat and shut off our brains. We’re supposed to ADAPT and EVOLVE! And we still are, even if it’s so slowly that no one seems to notice. So my answer is that I’m glad to be alive NOW, and hopefully the future is an even better time to live in when it comes around. Anyone who wants to live in the past isn’t thinking straight!

Some man kills his daughter because she didn’t dress religiously.
You’re just messed up if somehow following words written by dead people is more important than another human – especially if YOUR OWN CHILD. How does it make sense in their mind at all that their god/goddess would be for them treating others like that? People can believe whatever nonsnense they want, but it should never be okay to have this happen to anyone. I hope that man lives a long life so he’s got plenty of time to suffer in his own living hell. Maybe this incident will get people to realize that life is too precious to spend it abusing other people over things that ultimately don’t matter, when the real point is to try and be a decent human.
What we think, say and do defines if we’re a good person or not, not what religion we follow.

I think that’s enough babbling from me for today.

Insane ghost fiction from Antarctica.

INSANEtalk.com
Yep, like many others on the planet, I've got a completely pointless forum. You're invited to join, but beware, strange characters lure there - sometimes. We argue about the usual things that people online argue about (Star Wars, the refusal of some to spell things correctly, what type of cheese is best etc.). There is also the usual name-calling, but we all seem to like the abuse.
You can COMMENT on things you see HERE on THERE.

Speaking of verbal abuse...
Unlike a lot of people, I still read newsgroups. Lately a lot of them have been spammed by some guy who posts these long journal entries of sorts where he outlines how he has been verbally abused each day. He states that he's truly unwell, and has accepted that he is insane. He then goes on to detail how a TV show is laughing at HIM personally, a commercial is mocking his medical ailments, and how people whisper in the street about him using normal everyday conversation. Then he somehow links all this to some secret government agency, of course, and insists that it is THEY who are doing this to him and have been for years. At one point he even claims that "they sent someone to simulate an act in front of my window, which was captured on film."

I can't even begin to do justice to this, and though you might think I'm a cruel person for finding this amusing, I beg to differ. Anyone truly that insane wouldn't be coherent enough to write a single paragraph, much less post to newsgroups, so I'm convinced of the genius of this bizarre newsgroup-fiction. That's right, it's pure FICTION. What I'd like to suggest is that this guy not waste his time on spamming the newsgroups, but to publish a book of all of them together. I for one would love to read it, as I would find it to be great entertainment. Fiction can be fun.

Good morning, ghosts.
Starting this week, I'm working part-time in another location other than in front of my own computer in my own livingroom. (Which is where I've been working for about a year now.) It sure is nice to get the hell out of the house and work with someone cool on stuff that I don't mind working on. The place I now work at apparently has ghosts but so far they have remained silent and unnoticed in my presence.

I greet them in the morning and chat at them randomly throughout the day, so perhaps they will warm up to me and start telling me secrets such as winning lottery numbers and the meaning of life (if other than 42). Seeing as they're supposed to be human ghosts, the odds are they will not know any secret information like that, so maybe they'll just lead me to find some hidden photos from the past or an old book or something fun like that. Do I really believe in ghosts? No, not really. If they find me some photos or something then I might.

Antarctica is art.
Today I saw a piece of art that, if I had the money to do so, would LOVE to have in my office at home. It was a framed map of Antarctica with a charcoal drawing of what was probably James Cook's voyage over-layed on top. The map was a 1997 version, done by National Geographic and featured some interesting information about the frozen continent. It was great but I can't currently afford it. Maybe YOU should send me some money so I can.