Who ordered the scrambled brains?

Daylight savings. Ridiculous. Why not just have everyone move to the other hemisphere every six months?

I’m glad I took a timeout over the break to write that last post, titled “Greetings from Jasmine” which appears just below this post. Yep. I wouldn’t go 14 days without writing, causing people to worry about me or berate me for not writing when they see me. Nope. It’s simply impossible to change the timestamp on blog posts. Yep. Don’t bother looking that up on Google. Nope.

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Hi, guys! It’s spring break and bo-o-o-oy am I ever! …Huh? Nevermind. Just checking in here so that too much time doesn’t pass before I write again. I’ve been busy working on some projects that have been on the proverbial back burner. Projects. We’re talking migrating my server to better hardware. We’re talking researching random software and standards. We’re even talking moving furniture around, vacumming my room, and hanging shelves. Upgrading my desktop, shopping (ooooh LED watch), reading about software patents and copyright infringment in Free and open source software (FOSS, remember that one) and planning out the final 6 years of my UCLA career are all things that we’re talking. (Yeah, I ended up going with the 13-year “Journey of Bruin Discovery” plan; it includes the unit-limit increase free of charge, and you get to choose two younger lost slackers to be your apprentices.)

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Our President is known as both a polarizing figure and a poor speaker. But I try to be open-minded each time he speaks, and I give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his linguistic mistakes. I don’t ever recall being as impressed with him as I was yesterday when he said, “This is a complex case with serious issues. But in extraordinary circumstances like this, it is wise to always err on the side of life.” Of course, he was talking about the Schiavo case. That was a concise, relatively objective statement, that elucidated the morality of the uncertainty in the case. At that moment, I thought “Wow, I actually agree with him on this.”

Reader: “Whoa, there! Who-o-o-oa! What’s this now?! You agree with Bush?”

Let me finish. This troubled me for some time. But after thinking, I realized what chord it was that he struck in me. His advice to always err on the side of life is the same sentiment behind the movement to abolish the death penalty. The same complexity, seriousness, and “extraordinary circumstances” - by which he appears to refer to the possibility of someone dying - exist in legal cases which seek the death penalty. Why, then, did Bush repeatedly choose to err on the side of death as Governor of Texas, by permitting that state to have the most (131, I believe) judicial executions in the country? Alternatively one could ask what he meant by “extraordinary circumstances”. The potential for political profit, perhaps? Nothing new here.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my experience in agreeing with Bush with the rest of the world. If I could just help one soul, then I feel this was worth it. It can be a dark, harrowing experience. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, don’t panic. Just remember, scratch beneath the surface.

I just had a most jarring experience in Starbucks right now. I picked out a healthy-looking chicken sandwich that had a dark brown bran bread of some sort. We all know the latest health advice is to make sure to “eat lots of whole grains.” (Whole what now?!) It’s a a good source of energy that won’t promote fat gain or swing your blood sugar levels around. (Willet, Rebuilding the Food Pyramid, Scientific American, 2002) Anyway, I pay six dollars for this sandwich. Then I check the label: “Chicken with Pepper Bacon” and “Saturated fat 16 grams 63% RDI”. Sixty-three percent! (And what are these “gram” things?) They tricked me! They knew I’d go for it cause it had the healthy looking bran bread of a dark brown color. Ohhhh! And I fell for it! OOOOOHHH!!! And it didn’t even taste good! No, that’s a lie - it tasted great actually. But anyhow, now I’m all worked up, I’m all hot and bothered. I better get something to drink to cool down. But this time I’m-a goin’ be extra careful, and get something healthy - make up for the trickery of that sandwich! Hrm… Frappucino… dark brown in color… yeah, looks like it’ll be a good source of bran.

Just got back from The Ring 2. Oh, I mean The Ring Two. The scariest part of it was when we left the theater and these yellow caution cones placed on the patio would randomly announce “<static>WET FLOOR</static>”. It was so unexpected that I slipped and fell on my tail bone. But seriously, how much money was invested into that technology? Three, four million dollars? How many lives were lost in bringing that to the American public? I guess that’s a small price to pay when we consider the many lives of Century City ShoppingTown [sic?] patrons that will be saved. A talking wet floor cone… Did I mention the light on top of the cone. Yeah, the cone had a flashing red light on top of it. I guess it was there to serve as a visual indicator of the 4 foot tall yellow cone that was right underneath it. It makes you wonder? Would people actually bump into those cones?

“God damnit! Thing freakin jumped out in front of me! Should put a god damned light atop it or something. Got ketchup all over my shirt. Now I gotta wash it. And get another corndog. Damnit.”

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So I’ve added some preliminary puffery pages to the Site (yes, capital S, like God with a capital G). You can access them on the right-hand menubar. I really look forward to filling them in with actual content, and I know you look forward to that too. I’m giving myself the week of spring break to get some of that done. In addition, I hope to build some PHP-based web applications and make them available there. I haven’t thought of anything in particular yet, but I’m thinking something “cell-phone enabled”, that uses email or SMS for interaction.

In addition I added that randomized quote generator that produces the spiffy subtitles at the top of each page. (This was done using the donkieQuote plugin if you’re interested.) Along with it I changed the header graphic, as you noticed. I hope. I replaced it with a photo of a diner that I will only describe as smarmy. I got it from this post on the eggbaconchipsandbeans blog. Thanks, person!
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Ok, finally, finished my linguistics paper! Now I can sleep! …For an hour. Oh what wonderful sleep awaits me. –Hey, guys, I’ll talk to all ya’ll later. Let’s just say I gotta see a bed about a sleep.

Read it and weep.

First post! And first, many thanks to the Wordpress team, for this Free web-publishing machinery.

Welcome to my fanzine-manifesto-/dev/null on this so-called web. Hehe, my elitism rears it’s head already! You can forget the not-so-clever, over-reaching, pseudo-psensitive, uniqconformist wordplay found elsewhere; they succeed only at embarassing their authors. “Hahaha!” Such novelty is the older sibling who stands on his head in a bid to regain the attention lost to a newborn. Ironic, no?

No. Ideas trump rhetoric. So this webplace will be the nursery to my ideological incubator. But in this nursery, the shallow, the narrow, and the too-serious are… euthanized. The rest are e-immortalized, discharged into the ideasphere, to be dialectically distilled, debugged, synthesized.