At night, the ice weasels come.

1. The eBay auction for the dumb hippie vacation thing was oddly successful, it seems.
   
   
2. These Arcane Fractals are beautiful.
   
   
3. From Wonkette, HOWTO make money off graft.
   
   
4. From Radar: HOWTO write crappy chick lit.
   
   
5. Aetiology has a nice analysis of the 1918 flashback flu virus recreation.
   
   
6. Pardon me, but we own the music of your phone number.

I love toothpastefordinner

EEGcellent.

I had an EEG and consultation for neurofeedback today.

As I expected, it was fascinating. I sat down in front of a PC running a crappy looking Windows program, attached to a pair of weathered speakers and a little junction box thingy with wires coming out of it.

The woman doing the evaluation was a talkative, intelligent New Agey psychologist. She had the evangelistic attitude of healers whose art isn't quite accepted yet. The approach she has is to detect evidence of injury with EEG, and then to use a neurological form of biofeedback therapy to fix the problem.

I had three EEGs: one on the left side, one on the right, and one in front. They all showed up abnormal by her standards. Apparently big differences between two different voltages are indicative of problems, as are wide variations in the waves. I have a pattern consistent with injuries in the areas that would cause despair, inability to clean up my room, bad times with relationships, sudden inexplicable anxiety, frustrated rage fits, and assorted medical problems. Hey, whaddya know.

It's odd watching waves go by and seeing them fly out of control when I swallow or blink, or even when the neurofeedback lady walked around behind me.

Anyway I'm going to try neurofeedback for a while, twice a week. I can afford it now that my car is paid off.

rumors on the internets: neurofeedback

I decided to do some armchair research on this thing I'm trying. First stop was wikipedia, where a neurofeedback article had been flagged as both "neutrality disputed" and "needs to be cleaned up since May 2005". Uh oh. Sure enough, there are links to Scientology everywhere, and the tone of the article is not only dismissive but actively disparaging. Not very wikipedia. A link is provided to the talk page which is the usual ridiculous holy war involving pro- and anti-neurofeedback parties and of course Scientology.

It was depressing in that "Oh man, there goes that Internet Guy again" way. That guy in this case being njyoder, a talented and energetic troll who baits feminists and particularly rape awareness organizations.

The actual professional association seems to be pretty sane and know their limits.

New cures bring enthusiasm, messianic prose, The Solution To Everything, cranks, and naysayers. Looking around the web in a first-click way I see all of those in about ten minutes. From my point of view it's worth a try, since it doesn't seem likely to break my brain. At the worst I'll lose $200 a week for a while and then get disgusted. Since I'm already disgusted, here we go.