Lather, rinse, repeat

Attempts to change one's personality, one's approach to life, even to physically alter the function of the brain, are incredibly rewarding when they succeed. A small chance of success is worth a thousand dispiriting failures. I won't minimize the problems, though. The impact of each setback or failure is devastating. (video, .wmv)

this song don't have no video

1. This is some impressive video of the recent Iowa tornado. You have to ask about the brainpower of someone who was running around in the middle of that with a camcorder, much less with an unleashed dog.
   
   
2. Via springheel_jack: Why does this bird hate dominos?
   
   
3. wearescott directs me to the nightmare world of Paula Dean's cooking show. She puts WHAT on her hot dogs?
   
   
4. Oldest living Australian celebrates her 175th birthday with a hibiscus flower cake. So, Harriet, what was Darwin like?
   
   
5. Also from Aetiology, a detailed analysis of the science of cow tipping.
   
   
6. NASCARlequin wasn't enough. We present: 50 Cent Novels.
   
   
7. The new lame-o journalism term is apparently "ubersexual", referring I guess to... plain old-fashioned masculinity. Or something. This is tiresome because 1) who needed a name for that? 2) neologism! argh and especially 3) "uber" as a prefix suggests faux-Nietzsche Nazi horse pucky and needs to go away. Thanks in advance!

late nights and freeway flying always makes me sing

I got an In-N-Out double-double last night and ate it in my car. I had the seat kicked back and the sunroof open, and I was looking straight at the full moon. Mars is still very close, so I could see the Red Planet with an unaided eye right there too.

It doesn't take much to send me into an astronomical trance. I think about the fact that I'm looking at another planet, and how far away and huge it has to be, just looking up at the moon. When it's full and looks oversized on a clear night, the moon is just hypnotizing. Mars even more so, since I can look directly at and see an impossibly remote place that maybe, just maybe people might visit someday. I was pleasantly dragged back into sophomoric "oh wow the universe" mode that way and spent a while there.

Years ago I noticed that living in suburban Southern California has a particular depressive effect. When you're surrounded entirely by man-made things — signs, stores, roads, parks, airplanes, houses, gas stations — the world starts to feel like an extension of the people around you and their attitudes. And here, the man-made world around us is new and cheap and tawdry and already falling apart. It's a mess of convenience stores sprinkled over beige bedroom communities, strip malls, sterile little parks, drive throughs. The scenery does not inspire. Eventually I get bad theology in my head: the world was built by money-grubbing assholes who didn't care about their work, and it's falling apart.

The cure for this is nature. I am a city boy at heart. I don't much enjoy camping, small-town rural life terrifies me, and I feel naked without a used bookstore and some good coffee down the street. But I like to visit nature. Even an hour staring out into the Pacific Ocean is a decent recharge. But really I need a day in the desert here every few months. When you're out past 29 Palms with nothing between you and some craggy mountains 30 miles away, and it's perfectly silent except for creatures you can't see, there's no 7-11 to get you down. For me it's a reminder that the world has its own vastness, its own power, its own logic and function, and that my little world of stoplights and shoe discounters and empty greasy parking lots is small and not representative.

Slumped back in my car seat staring at the moon and Mars last night, I thought "Yeah. It's time to go there." Not Mars or the moon (which would be cool also), but the desert. It would be good to shed a layer of suburban grime and doom again.

Then I sat up to get going and fries fell down my pants.

Unbearable

The always useful and entertaining Maciej Ceglowski explains better than I ever could exactly how hard The Unbearable Lightness of Being sucks. "The Dave Matthews of Slavic Letters" is just about perfect. It's a dumb, trashy book.

But he fortunately doesn't stop there. The rest of the article provides a guide to the best in Slavic dating literature! Including one of my personal favorites, The Good Soldier Svejk.

But if you really still just need to get laid, the Kundera is there for you. The cock has its reasons than the mind knows not of.