Laws of Nature: Stimps' Law of Ice Cream

This law states simply that all ice cream names could also describe bad dumps. The latest ad poster from Carvel next to D's proves this law once again. Carvel can't seem to get a product name that doesn't make me clutch my stomach. Fudgy the Whale? Fruit Fizzlers? Sundae Dashers? Hlrhgalgbag



To make you feel better about life, here's a picture of my cat being cute.

come hold my shaking hand and I'll show you around

Between two conversations at D's tonight I went out to Santiago Canyon Road for some high-performance driving. I do love a canyon road at night, coming into the curves at 80, smelling the intense chaparral, trees whooshing over the open sunroof. Not many people out there in the evening. For about a half hour I'm in the country, and then dumped back into suburbia.

I really wanted someone in the passenger's seat. I miss having friends who'd be cool with just heading out to nowhere and talking in the car. I remember maybe 15 years ago going out to the desert and back with Darryl. We had a real peak experience together after a night talking, when we came back down the Tejon Pass at sunrise and the mountains coming out of the clouds were right fucking smack in our faces like a Japanese painting. It shut us up completely for a good hour.

Lately I wrap everything in words more than ever, layers and layers of paragraphs piled on puff-pastry style. What I really want to do is curl up with someone. Prose will have to do for now.

internet murder news from all over

So, yeah, they found the body of the 17-year-old girl who got murdered in VA. And they have a person of interest whom she met on the Internets. And they both have LJs and myspaces, and he has a deviantart gallery with lots of creepy-ass pictures of young-looking girls, and her LJ name is "jailbait" backwards, and it's really fucking depressing.

Whether or not homeboy is a murderer, he's certainly a disagreeable person. Also a shitty photographer.

In any case she's dead, he's in jail, and they're both clichés. Except of course that she's entitled to be a cliché at 17 and he has no excuse at 38.

His deviantart gallery (mostly just thumbnails), her myspace, her livejournal at tiabliaj, and his livejournal at skulz67 are still up for now, for morbid curiosity purposes.

From news stories:

"Detectives seized more than 70 other items from Fawley's home, including a box of bones, a machete and part of a box spring bearing a reddish-brown stain, according to a search warrant."

"On the morning after Taylor's disappearance, Fawley, a self-described "prolific Goth web master" who "collects" auto license plates, told police he had just been beaten, robbed and kidnapped by unknown assailants. He said they put a bag over his head, stuffed him into an unknown car, and drove him to an unknown location, where he was left on an unknown dirt road. He was "saved" when an unknown good Samaritan, in his case a Hispanic male, found him along the road and drove him back to Richmond."

Thanks to hepkitten I am only four degrees from the victim, but oddly I show no connection with the LJ Sixdegrees tool to the accused murderer.

More detailed, probably too detailed blogulations about this are here and here, the latter going on way too much with psychological diagnoses. Also here.

Boy those guys all write too much.

Disinheriting the wind

From The American Scientist, here's a concise and powerful statement of the reasons "Intelligent Design" is not science and why its presence in public schools should be opposed.

Allowing students to "opt out" of learning the basic facts and theories of biology is about as wise as allowing them to "opt out" of algebra or English: It constitutes malfeasance. [...] The ID movement is more than an attack on biology because evolutionary theory unifies the life and earth sciences with physics and chemistry. If ID is accepted as a credible science, then the most basic definition of a scientific theory and the fundamental principles of the scientific method are not being taught. [...] ID is an insidious attempt by a religious caucus to impose its views on the whole country. The avowed aim of ID advocates—to undermine science and replace it with their personal religious convictions—amounts to a form of prejudice that is both poisonous and horribly frightening.

Happy, uh, Porn Sunday?

Pharyngula invites all of us to celebrate xxxchurch.com's bizarre post-everything Christian Porn Crusader event National Porn Sunday with some FISH SEX. (All links SFW unless you work for uptight fish.) I seriously cannot tell if Porn Sunday is a gigantic prank on the evangelical world or if they're for real. I mean, look at their 30 second ad starring Pete the Puppet or their customized van for spreading the word. And the T Shirt?

Tell me, folks. Has evangelical culture gotten this bizarre, or are all these pastors being taken for a gigantic ride? OR BOTH?

Gobble

The H5N1 avian flu has shown up in Turkey, in turkeys.

I hope it doesn't infect the Hamburgers, Wieners, or Neapolitans.

Mother! Father! Don't touch it! It's EMO!

The EEG lady said that my pattern of injury is often associated with the following:

• inability to form intimate relationships despite other social successes;
  
  
• self-hatred far out of proportion to the evidence;
  
  
• hypercritical judgment of self and others;
  
  
• discomfort in crowds;
  
  
• inability to clean up or organize personal space due to emotional overload when attempting to do so;
  
  
• overcompensation with intellectual success to combat social failure;
  
  
• a sleep schedule that is about four hours "late";
  
  
• complete overwhelming collapse on being confronted with multiple tasks at once;
  
  
• depression and anxiety that feel surprising or out of place even as they are occurring;

I mean, damn. I'm surprised my eye color wasn't in there. I'm skeptical and wary of diagnostic lists that seem to dovetail to my life, having had a few of them over the years that falsely promised some discovery, but this is just plain eery.

I keep having experiences lately where I'm talking to someone who wanders away in mid conversation. Or other forms of communication: I IM someone and they don't respond and then sign off, or I send email that goes into the Void.

I'm not at all sure if it's significant, or if it happens to me more or less than it happens to others. In any case I find it harder to write it off when this happens lately. I'm far less socially confident than I was a couple years ago, and it's easy now for me to slip into a near-paranoid assumption that the other person dislikes me and is hoping I'll go away.

This despite the fact that it's more likely that the other person is having a multitasking failure or distracted in some way. As with most of my brain lightning problems, it's egotistical.

In any case I cannot tell whether I'm getting a "keep the hell away" signal from some people I know or not. I'm glad that I at least know that I don't know, and that I have Occam's Razor in my medicine cabinet.

The End of Zero Tolerance: That 16th time

At least in the FBI.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5333345,00.html

My favorite favorite favorite quote:

Current rules prohibit the FBI from hiring anyone who used marijuana within the past three years or more than 15 times ever. They also ban anyone who used other illegal drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, within the past 10 years or more than five times.

"That 16th time is a killer,'' McCaffrey said.

Picture Without Caption

Courtesy do_not_lick:( Not safe for work, brain )