The Event Horizon of Anxiety

There aren't any personal-level events that strike me with an existential terror.  As an adult male human of the large, imposing, American, hairy sub-types, I don't worry about physical violence, accidental death, accidental maiming, or much else.  I don't worry about these because should they happen, I will not be the initiator and thus these events will be out of my control.  There's nothing to worry about in events I can't control for what I think are obvious reasons, and need no explaining. 

There are a few impersonal-level events that do strike with an existential terror, on a fairly regular basis and while I recognize the irrationality of this fear since the events will be far outside of my ability to help or control, I still think about them.  Surviving a nuclear exchange is one such event, and I agree with my father's words to 8 year old me, "if there is going to be a nuclear war, I would prefer that you and your brothers not live to see the world after."  That was an interesting trip to the guidance counselor after a duck and cover drill.

One of my favorite movies details the after effects of another sort of event that wakes me up at night.  The simple premise is this: sometimes humans are too smart for their own good, and sometimes we experiment with shit that could result in a bad event, the sort of bad event that instantly causes us, our planet, or possibly even the universe to just go away.  I'm smart enough to have gone further with my education but as a young genius I was unmotivated and that might be for the best because I'd probably treat the LHC as the biggest Nerf gun and mini black holes as foam darts.  In other words, I'm smart enough to know exactly how crazy I am for worrying about this, but I'm still just a genius who worries about one or two things. 

I was reading about some ideas some other smart people have for detecting the presence of other dimensions through the detection of mini black holes using the LHC and science to do sciencey things when the anxious voice in my head said, "this is how the universe ends, if you can bend or break a fundamental rule of the universe and then everything goes blip."  I thought about this for a minute, my mouth full of coffee and my brain full of stupid.  Then I remembered that the universe is really big.  Like, really really really big.  We know that the universe is big because look up at night, that just goes on for effectively forever.  If that alone isn't enough to remind you that no matter how smart you are, you're still just a bag of meat on a rock, then you're probably a priest who is utterly confident of your place in some imaginary plan.  The fucking arrogance of thought that the idea of a greater plan to life just irritates the ever-loving shit right of me.  Seriously, if I'm constipated I'll just think about "God's plan for you" and then I'm destroying porcelain.  That's the worst type of consolation, there's a plan for all suffering so that makes it ok because you're meant to experience life this way, starving orphan or crack-addicted newborn or mildly inconvenienced middle-aged person.  I'll be right back.

Anyway, I was describing how I logiced my way out of anxiety.  The point is that the universe is big, there millions or billions of galaxies, and those galaxies have lots of stars, and some of those stars must have planets, and some of those planets will have life, and some of that life will be multi-cellular, and some of that multi-cellular life will be investigating the universe just as we are.  Since the universe is around 18 billion years old as far as we can tell, and our planet is only about 4 billion years old (suck it, creationists), and since there may be very old black holes which may or may not have started as stars, there exists the possibility that there is a much older civilization of intelligent enough creatures to build a Large Hadron Collider-equivalent.  The universe is so vast, ooo you are so big, that this possibility is really more of a certainty.  So my fears of some genius like me who wants to play Nerf tag with a particle accelerator and some micro black holes accidentally destroying this existence are stupid because if that were possible someone would have done it by now. 

Now all I have to worry about is some sort of localized disruption of the time-space continuum rendering this section of time-space so wibbly-wobbly that we can not exist within it.  That is much more comforting.

Of course the unlikeliest event of all would be the arrival of an alien super-intelligence and the co-opting of all life on this planet, but that's probably not going to happen and would be essentially the same as the events of the previous paragraph.  I am so relieved.

CDC: Jennifer Garner, LeChuck, Blonde Hollywood Teen Star #7

Just had a dream in which I was living in a lovely duplex house above a seaside cliff.  The duplex had a huge yard with some lovely hedges, a nice garden, and a bench by the cliff for assignations.  There were several acres of gardens, and no real reason for the house to be a duplex which might explain why the other half was empty.  There was a large pile of newspapers in front of the door to the other house, and it bothered me daily but the real estate agent said I couldn’t clean it up.  I had moved there to research some super-rum invented by the Pirate LeChuck from Monkey Island.  I had possibly nefarious reasons for this research, and was trying to hide it from my neighbors in the duplex.  Even though there was no one living next door, I was still secretive about my super-rum recipes and research.  I closed all the curtains and watched old 16mm films of LeChuck in action in the basement.  These weren’t fiction, they were like family films from the 50s and 60s, but filmed by a member of the Pirate LeChuck’s crew.

It was Halloween, and I had forgotten to purchase any candy.  The man from down the lane brought his children to my door for Trick or Treat, along with an enormous Grizzly Bear-sized dog.  The dog liked me.  I answered the door and was confused about the kid’s constumes, and said, “All Saint’s Day! Of course!  Hold here a moment while I locate some sweeties.”  I put my Model 1865 revolver on the floor behind the door, and dropped the crossword over it so the kids wouldn’t see it.  The father did, and was only slightly bothered. 

It was then that I realized I was Dracula teaching Biology or some -ology at a college, and my students and I were preparing for a whitewater rafting trip, upon which I was only planning on feeding on some of them.  I also realized that I had just used an entire bag of Starbursts in my latest batch of super-rum, and only had a one of each basic color left, but they were soaking in a coconut-husk mug of extremely potent, but ultimately not the super-rum, rum.  I sheepishly turned to the family, and nearly walked into the enormous dog who was perfectly silent  in my creaky duplex, and held out the Starbursts.  “These have been soaking in some rather potent rum, so I doubt you want your delightful children eating them.  I’m sorry, children! I let my research overwhelm me sometimes, you know how it is.”

They shook their heads and stared at me, and I realized I probably just showed the whole family my fangs, good thing it was Halloween.  The father started waving the kids on, saying that they would try the next house, and that maybe those people were considerate enough of the long walk down the drive to actually have some candy.  I said that wasn’t likely as the other half of the duplex was empty.  I promised to deliver some candy tomorrow night, as that was All Soul’s Day.  The father gave me an odd look and hustled his children out the door.  The gigantic bear dog stayed with me, and it must have decided to move in because it had red eyes now.

Jennifer Garner was one of my students, but not one of those I was planning on devouring.  She had left her laptop and mountain bike at my house after one of the planning meetings for the whitewater rafting trip.  She was annoyingly nosy, and trying to discover my secret.  We had to make a trip back to my house to allow her to collect her bike and computer, and she tried to slip into my basement.  I told her that I kept it locked because of the rum brewing equipment.  I didn't tell her about the coffins.

The evening before the trip, we were all staying overnight in the biology department's hallways.  One of the students had said that he had noticed that I could hold my breath for a really long time, during an incident on a practice trip wherein I had saved a couple of my students from drowning.  During this incident, I had learned that these students were also supernatural, the boy some sort of tree-fairy person, and the girl some sort of rock-fairy person.  I resolved that I would feed on and kill this annoying blonde student who looked a little bit like any fungible blonde Hollywood actor.  No one would notice his disappearance, but until I murdered him I was going to mess with his head by forgetting to breathe around him.  I think I actually held my breath because the next section of the dream was dominated by an increasingly loud heartbeat and pressure building in my chest in a way that shouldn’t happen to Dracula or any other vampire because they don’t need to breathe unless they are talking.

Someone suggested a game, and broke out a copy of Geeks Bidding on Closing Game Store Merchandise, with art by John Kovalich and a rules combination of Munchkin and Fluxx and Uno.  We played this for a while, and then my brother suggested we watch his Lord of the Rings fan movie.  I had not noticed that he was on the trip before this.

The movie covered various aspects of the Silmarillion, primarily dealing with Faenor fighting Morgoth, Gandalf smoking his pipe and talking, and the Fall of Gondolin.  It didn’t make a whole lot of sense even from my perspective as a dreamer.  I think Gandalf may have been meant to be a narrator.  He was played a rabbit in grey robes and not a man with a beard.  This movie featured stop motion animation, looked like a modern Terry Gilliam Monty Python animation, and had music by the choir from the Lemmiwinks episodes of South Park.

A large mouse in a white wizard hat, maybe Saruman, picked up Morgoth’s hammer after Morgoth’s defeat and used it to smash several characters back to life.  They were lying in circles on the ground, and the mouse smashed them with the gigantic hammer and the sprung to life and started singing, then the God from Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail showed up from behind some clouds and the smash resurrected people walked off into the clouds.  All I could think was that all of this was completely non-canon. 

I’m not exactly sure how I was going to survive on a whitewater rafting trip as a vampire, but this was a dream, so I’m not responsible for making it logical.

The Daily Caller Will Never Become "the Conservative Huffington Post"

"In his new book, “The KinderGarden of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Things And Why He’s Convinced That Ignorance Is Bliss,” Sayet strays from the humorous to explore why what he calls “Modern Liberals” support the policies they do."

"Explain the title, 'The KiderGarden of Eden.'"

So I was flipping some news on Yahoo, I think, and I saw a link to this Daily Caller piece.  The Daily Caller is usually good for a laugh because of frequent copy editing errors.  Every time I see one, I laugh at The Great Orange One's attempt to start a conservative version of the Huffington Post.  Maybe if you could frame your worldview in some way that wasn't a conservative version of someone else's work, you might succeed someday, Tuckbag.  Maybe if right wing cobags had some imagination, they might criticize Obama about something real instead of "He's so well respected and I don't like that! Waaaaaah!"

The article claims that Evan Thomas of Newsweek said that Obama is a god, but there is no link to back this up.  In fact, the only links in the article are from those Ad Choices auto-links.  This is just lazy, lazy reporting.  There is no attempt to fabricate even the smallest shred of journalistic integrity. 

The whole article fails to mention that Saturday Night Live has been making fun of Obama nearly every week, but I suppose they are too cool for SNL.  I think SNL has gotten much better lately. A search for Obama parody returns a wealth of hits, but I will admit that I have not investigated the political opinions of the people involved with those hits.  They could all be conservative, but I think can safely that this isn't the case because Key and Peele are on the first page of hits.

I took a screenshot to preserve these failures for posteriority.  That is not a typo, that is term that means we will all be wiping our butts with rags like the Daily Caller after the Whateveralypse.

Jumping the Fence Between Universes

I went for a walk in my neighborhood today, I thought it might be nice to meet more of the neighbors.  First, I checked on my garden, down the hill, past the barn.  I pulled a few weeds, decided to wait on picking the orange tomatoes.  The pepper plants seem to be doing well, the jalapenos are growing back after their savaging by some unknown critter.  The cucumber still looks sickly with yellow leaves, but maybe that is normal.  The sole cucumber on the vine grows a little each day.  The eggplant may even make a full recovery for the third time, and possibly even produce some fruit.  My vine beans are attempting to reach the bottom rung for the third time, but I doubt they will produce anything before being eaten by whatever has been gnawing them to nubs.  My bush beans are steadily growing, and continue to resist the devastation visited upon their vine brethren.  Not much for me to do.

I thought about jogging up to the road and back a few times, but the weather was so nice, temperature in the low 80s, humidity below 40%.  I decided to find that pond I have seen on Google Earth, so I hopped the fence and strode out into the pasture.  I kept an eye out for cows, and their leavings.  I was mostly worried about wandering into a bull’s vicinity.  The cows move away, but a bull might attempt to get real friendly.

I walked up the small hill on the other side of the fence, and took in the view.  Ahead, there was another, slightly taller hill on the other side of divot that couldn’t exactly be called a valley, more of a slump.  There was some promising looking scrub on top of the hill that might conceal the pond, which is probably man made due to its shape.  To my far left down the hill, there stood a line of pines and cedars that I was pretty sure marked the path of a stream that joins the stream from which I water my garden.  I walked onward, staying within seventy yards of the fence on my right.  I guessed that I might be able to reach the fence before any bull reached me, as long as I saw the bull first.

As I walked on, I found a cluster of lilies growing among the tall grass of the pasture.  Pale pink and white that looks like faint blue to my eyes, the flowers were almost done with their time in the sun.  The petals were falling off, but among all the greens and browns of the grass, even a well worn flower looks pretty.  There were some small blue flowers on plants that had rough or spikey stalks, and I appreciated those flowers less than I enjoyed the lilies.  The lilies were pretty without being defensive about it.  I only tolerate thistles because goldfinches are cool.

Reaching the top of the other hill, I realized that this was not the border of the pond, because there was no pond to be seen.  Picturing it in my head, I realized that the pond had to be on the far side of the stream bed with the cedars and pines because the pond is surrounded by trees.  The direct path to my next suspected location was to go left, but there was a cool old tree standing alone about thirty yards from the top of my new hill.  The tree had lots of old, dead branches, and maybe even a hole through the trunk.  Worth checking out.  There was also a circular, concrete thingy that I could check out after the tree, while swinging west toward the stream and possible pond.

I heard a strange droning sound above me, and looked southwest at the source.  Upon seeing the source of this sound, I immediately though that I might have leapt a fence into another quantum reality.  The source of the sound was a zeppelin.  I walked toward the tree while keeping an eye on the airship.  The angle was such that I was head-on to the zeppelin.  I thought to myself, if that thing is carrying passengers or doesn’t have a logo, I am in a tough spot.  I am dressed in a jogging outfit, and this may be why I haven’t seen any cows yet.  To my dismay and also joy, the airship turned slightly and I could see a Metlife logo.  The brief moment of combined existential dread and joy was worth all the scratches I had received.

I walked up to the tree, and saw that something had dug out a little lair at the base of the knotted, old tree.  The tree, which I called Old Farmer because he looked like a weather-beaten farmer standing in a corner of his fields, was oak or maple and six to eight feet in diameter.  I took one step onto a thick root, and peered into the hole.  The rotted roots of tree had been dug out and scattered in a fan around this wedge of the tree, and I looked around for other animal signs.  Six inches in front of my foot, I saw animal sign.

There was a section of black snake on the root in front of my foot.  Having recently cleaned up a deceased black rat snake, I did the only natural thing for a person in my position.  I took a step back, and found a nice bit of grass with which to poke the unmoving snake section.  The snake section moved immediately upon the gentle poking.  This was only the last ten inches or so of the snake, so I looked in the grass along the direction of travel and spied a snarl of snake about two feet from the previous location of my foot.  I moved a few feet back and a few feet to my left to get a better view of the snake’s head.  I couldn’t quite see it between the clumps of dried grass, but I wasn’t about to reach my hand in there, I’ve learned that lesson enough times previously.

I gently nudged the snake with my foot-long piece of grass, and immediately regretted the length of my chosen implement of harassment.  The snake coiled up and struck, reaching the length of the piece grass and the space that my hand had occupied before I reacted.  This was an unusual snake.  I was not penning it in at all, but it really did not want to run away like the other snakes I have encountered out in the boonies.  I grabbed a longer piece of grass, and we replicated the results of the first prodding.  I took another step back and another look at the snake.  My internal monologue’s accent defaulted to Australian as I surveyed the scene.  It was definitely not a moccasin, but it was oddly aggressive, or maybe I was being an inordinately rude person.  Probably both.  The flash of insight that it may have laid some eggs in the rotting base of the tree slowly flickered into my skull, and I walked backward a few more feet before turning to leave the snake in relative peace.

I crept over to the concrete circle, attempting to sneak up on whatever may live inside the ring.  This would have been funny to anyone watching, as I probably made the same amount of noise as before, while moving considerably slower.  It is hard to be quiet in dry, dead grass that is piled up to your knees.

The circle turned out to be devoid of visible animal life, but the plants inside it were quite green and happy.  The concrete ring was about four feet high, and four inches thick, and seemed like a section of pipe laid on its back to create a pool or something.  Except that it was dry, had no bottom to contain any water, and seemed to tall for any calfs to drink out of, had it been full of water.  Weird.  I noticed some mouse runs around the outside base of the concrete circle, so I looked around the base for any potential mouse houses.  I found a large flat-ish rock on the far side of the ring, and gently pried it up away from me like I have seen on countless nature programs.  I hit jackpot.  A mouse and a blue tailed skink raced out from under the rock to the shelter of the taller plants around the concrete ring.  The mouse left behind a little, grass-lined burrow with three to five baby mice, and the skink just left.  After looking at the mice for a few seconds, I gently replaced the rock exactly as it had been before I left it.

Then I had a little fit of paranoia, and lifted the rock to check on the babies.  They were fine, so I gently replaced the rock, again.  I went on my merry way down the hill toward the stream bed and the cedars and the pines.  When I reached the line of trees, I saw lots of cow tracks.  The streambed was dry, but only just.  The muddy soil didn’t look like it would steal the shoes off my feet, but I decided to leap across it anyway.  On the other side of the streambed, there were all sorts of flowers: blue thistles, little blue clusters, some yellows, and the white flat ones that have the profile of an upsidedown mushroom cap.  There were happy bees everywhere, and some mud wasps, too, but none of them seemed to mind me crashing my way through the taller grasses and flowers.

There was another row of small cedars between me and what looked like a man-made embankment, and this row of trees was well meshed by thorny bushes, with a dash of poison ivy to make it challenging.  I found a small space to carefully squeeze through, even though I realized that this was unnecessary.  I could have just walked about forty feet to my left to walk through a gap between trees, but that wasn’t the point.  I carefully stepped over the poison ivy, under the thorny bushes, and between the tree branches.  Walking up the embankment, I found my goal.

The pond was a muddy, rain-filled watering hole.  It was nothing special, most likely built for the cows to drink and cool off.  The pond was probably only a couple feet deep, not including the mud, and also probably a foot shallower than it would be in a normal year.  This didn’t matter to the turtles and frogs that scattered into the safe, brown water as I crested the embankment.  The turtles and frogs seemed happy enough, either leaping out of my way or shuffling off the various rocks and floating tree branches.  I walked the circumference of the pond, and was startled by a fox.

The fox leapt out of a clump of grasses with a brown furry creature in its jaws.  I saw only a brief glimpse of the head of the fox because it was running away from me, but it had caught either a rabbit or a mouse of unusual size.  I started whistling as I walked the rest of the way around the pond, hoping that any other foxes, or snapping turtles, or bears, or snakes, or bulls would stay away.  I am not afraid of these animals, but I think we would all be happier if I didn’t startle any of them by somehow sneaking up on them.

I made my path away from the pond, and walked in the general direction of home.  On the north side of the pond, down the embankment, I found the remains of a dead cow.  The beast had been dead for longer than a week, and possibly less than a year.  The spine was in a few pieces, as was basically all the rest of it.  The bones were all white, and some of them had been scattered a good distance, as I realized that I was standing on one, while looking at the rest of the carcass from a distance of ten feet or so.  There was some brown mud around the nearest section of ribcage, and while it may have been leftover skin, it may also have been mud smushed up between the ribs.  I looked at it for a bit, there’s the skull, the other half of the rib cage, some leg bones.  I walked back down to the streambed, through the little field of flowers, and jumped across to the main pasture.  I walked back home, crossing the other stream, up the last hill, and back over the fence into the universe of job searches, blogs, and cobag politicians.

Memories of Saturday Mornings Past

When I was but a young rock child living in Romania, we had no cartoons to watch.  A great uncle, Basalt, took pity on me and my fellow pebbles, and sent us many a VHS tape* containing hours and hours of nature programs.  Marty Stouffer's WIld America, PBS' Nature, and various Richard Attenborough narrated series entertained me when Romanian propaganda held no interest.  Now, in the fullness of time, one third of the way around the circle of life, Richard Attenborough entertains me yet again:



* Kind of like a DVD that only goes one way, youngsters.

Evening in the Park

I'm lying on a picnic table in Battery Kemble Park, listening to the wind rustle the leaves. The air is unusually cool for September, and the clouds drip now and then. To the east, the city's glow casts a depressing orange on the vaporous ceiling in an ugly false dawn. The crickets chirp, calling a desperate, last hope for sex before death. The breeze tosses my damp frizzled hair about my face, and I ignore it. Dead trees claw at the sky, silent accusers. The sky is a mottled grey, slowly morphing and mutating as my eyes adjust and the wind exerts its will.

Depending on your definition of parallel universes, on a planet n meters away from my spot, there is someone extremely similar to me, lying on an extremely similar picnic table, thinking extremely similar thoughts, asking extremely similar questions, and just as hopefully depressed about the future. I think the Germans probably have a word for this feeling, but it is 93 characters long and I can't do umlauts on my phone.

My New Career in Advertising Beckons

A coworker and I were riffing on the wonders of Gold Bond in our steamy, seedy place of business. In addition to debating the merits of various application styles, we wrote a few ads that would probably only ever air on a short-lived, summer-replacement sketch comedy show. On HBO. In between Taxicab Confessions 47: The Long Ride Home, and Real Sex with Dolls 11: Real Girl on Real Girl. Here are some slogans I came up with on the bus this afternoon:

Gold Bond: Keeps your balls cold without freezing your nuts off.

Gold Bond: Keeps you dry until you want to get wet.

Gold Bond: For those men who know what "not so fresh" feels like.

Gold Bond: Feels good on your butthole. Real good.*

Gold Bond: Strong enough for a bear's balls, made for a man's. Bear-Men may also apply.

**Gold Bond: The average crotch is a stanky, sweaty 170 degrees fahrenheit, but a Gold Bond crotch feels like a breezy 70 degrees.

Take the Hundred Degree Challenge! If your balls don't feel one hundred degrees cooler after a single dusting of Gold Bond Crotch Powder, we'll send you a bottle of Gold Bond Medicated Crotch Aftershave!

I also invented some new Gold Bond products:

Sandalwood-Scented Gold Bond for the adventuring man. "For those Hemingway days...and nights."

Whiskey-Scented Gold Bond for the gentleman. "Who doesn't want to smell like Sean Connery?"

*This one comes courtesy of the barback.
**This is more of a marketing campaign than a slogan. Sorry.
***Please don't sue me for this, I write this from love. Plus I'm broke.

Thanks, But No Thanks

I really appreciate all the help that people are giving me as I continue to look for a fruitful job. As usual, some of the help is good and some of the help...means well. The number of articles I've read about tech sector jobs, and other careers that are so far removed from my life and skills, would bore you. They bore me. I am not, and never will be, a programmer or coder. I learned in college that computers are fun and useful, but that my mindset is not quite right for programming. Maybe I should enroll in expensive software classes, but three to five years of classes later, most of these jobs are going to be filled. I have no drive to be a programmer, and I know what happens to me when I am not motivated in a job.

When you're looking for work, there's the job you take while you seek the job you want. Knowing the difference is important for your happiness and sanity. I am kept motivated in my current job by that irritating carrot called tips, and simultaneously motivated by the same rotten carrot to find a different job, a job in the career I enjoy. You've got to know your bliss to follow it.

Cooking with Helob: Tie-Fighter Peanut Sauce and Pasta

The cool thing about this recipe is that it requires only two things beyond the cooking implements: peanut butter and pasta. The even cooler thing about this recipe is that I am inventing it as I cook and blog at the SAME TIME. I have never been to Thailand but I have eaten lots of satay and had a friend from Bangkok in grade school. Nonetheless, I feel fully qualified to make a scrumptious meal. Please note that although I do own a cookbook, for the purposes of this trick, I will not be consulting it.

Ingredient list (constantly updated as I work my magic):
chunky peanut butter (64 oz jug)
San Giorgio spaghetti 8 degree (on sale!)
filtered DC tap water (trust me, the unfiltered shit will kill you and rob your corpse)
extra virgin olive oil (because I had it in the cupboard, a recurring theme in all my culinary experiments)
1 tablespoon Patak's Hot Curry Paste (concentrate for sauces, tomato & cumin)(half of all I had left, figured I might need more in the next week or so until I get paid again)
2 tablespoons Bombay Brand Ginger Paste (made form fresh ginger)(both this and the curry paste have been in my fridge for over a year, doled out into curries and spaghettis)
a couple shakes of seasoned salt (for good luck)
a couple of vigorous shakes of Pride of Szeged Hungarian Paprika (for good health)
a dash of ground sage (because it smelled appropriate to my most recent sense memory of peanut sauce)
a dash of ground mace (see above)
the unending scorn of one large tarantula with performance anxiety

Cook spaghetti as usual. Throw some olive oil into a sauce pan. Throw a few globs of peanut butter in, basically until you think you have enough for your sauce needs. Heat on low because peanut butter will hold heat for a while. When the peanut butter and oil mix easily with a spoon, toss in a heaping tablespoon of the curry paste. Then open your jar of ginger paste and clean off the brown bits around the edge from the last time you used it. Then give it a quick lick to check whether it has gone bad. Seems ok? Toss in a heaping tablespoon. Spoon out another, decide to check it again, realize that it has a bit of bite. Taste it again, thanking that practical anthropology course you slept through in college, realize that the bite is usual and that ginger paste is some potent shit and put the tablespoon back in the jar. Seal the jar, back away slowly. Stir this mixture. Then go ahead and season the mix to whatever color you like in a peanut sauce. Let sit on "Low" heat to keep it from congealing. Periodically glance over at your tarantula and wonder why she/he/it/spider won't eat any of the yummy crickets you bought for it/she/he/spider the other day. I think he/it/she/spider is codependent and spends all night moaning away and sobbing, "why aren't my crickets good enough for him?"

Take periodic taste tests to astound your senses with its interesting and surprisingly edible flavor and consistency. Under no circumstances should you add raspberry jelly but if you never have that urge, then you have seasoned the sauce properly. If you think it is getting a little thick, toss in some more olive oil. There may be a better ingredient to use, but it wasn't in my fridge or cupboard, so fuck it.

When the pasta is finally done, throw some of your concoction over the pasta and eat heartily, while reminding yourself that even though this might be some odd shit and in no real way related to authentic peanut sauce, at least it isn't FUCKING RAMEN.

Cookie Contest 2007 Ingredient List

As promised, my ingredient list for my entry in the 2007 Cookie Contest:

5 pound bag of sugar
5 pound bag of flour
5 pound bag on unbleached flour
5 pound bag of whole wheat flour
2 pound bag of confectioner's sugar
2 pound bag of corn meal
2 cups sea salt
1 cup coconut shavings
1 cup human shavings
5 cups freshly rolled oats
2 dollops of essence of babpupten
2 boxes of raisins
1 box of cranberry raisins
1 ounce raison d'entre
1 ounce ethereal ectoplasm
1 1/2 pounds of 86% organic chocolate chunks
1 cup tears of the unrequited
3 teaspoons of the Dreamer's spittle
6 tons cooled magma
3 tons of volcanic ash from Pompeii
1 ton people ash from Pompeii
3 dashes of Spice Melange
3 drops of the anti-agathic Essence of Ageria
3 dried and ground mind worm larvae from Ceti Alpha Five
1 drop purified water of life
1 bulb of garlic
2 blue eyes of newt
1 bag of M&Ms
2 wheels brie cheese
2 wheels camembert cheese
2 wheelbarrels of headcheese
4 cans condensed milk
2 cans sweetened condensed milk
3 cans condensed goats milk
5 cans condensed weasel milk
1 smelt
cinnamon
paprika
vanilla
old bay seasoning
celery salt

Mix ingredients in non-Euclidean bowl, gently folding in the chocolate chunks. Let this sit on the counter until the reality of your kitchen is redefined in a darker light than shines at night. Ignite oven with the burning soul essence of orphaned male child of a pious widow. Place magma in titanium/unobtanium alloy pan, use center rack in oven. Heat magma to 1250 degrees (centigrade), add ash. Dollop out the cookie mixture onto baking sheet. Should any dollops randomly fall onto the sheet in the form of runes, pictograms or the Elder Sign, DO NOT READ THEM ALOUD. If you choose to read them in your head, you risk only your mind. Should you dare to read them aloud without the proper preparations and precautions, I will not be held liable. Please sign the attached waiver of liablity and fax it to 1-888-NOM-RYLE.

In case you are wondering how a person could write a post like this after the previous two posts and their intense content, I can only say that were I to dwell solely upon those topics that affect me in a most serious and painful fashion, I would not remain sane for long. The struggle is a daily one and I hope that I do not trivialize the suffering mentioned last week.

So that's 4,562,941?

The conservatives are wrong again. Abstinence programs are ineffective.

The full report is located here as .pdf, it takes a little while to load.

You Know What's Awesome?

In the middle of kicking all kinds of ass this weekend on the World of Warcraft, my graphics card started acting funny. It locked up twice and my computer decided to reboot it and then tell me about the problem. This is an event easily classifiable as Not Good. My entire system even shut down entirely once, necessitating me to use the power button on the back of the box.

Given the nature of my previous troubles (detailed here, here and here), I am just going to take it to the store where I bought all the parts and have it worked over. I would do this stuff myself but the only way I know how to do anything with a computer involves plugs, whistles, electricity and inciting tiny invisible people to fly into the machine to harass the ghost into action. You would be surprised how much influence pixies, fairies, angels and other imaginary creatures can have on tangible objects like computers and politicians.

I also figure that I can get the techs to properly install my SATA hard drive and possibly even keep my old ones in fine working order. Then I can have a proper back up of my illegally downloaded music pornography.