The Unmistakable Cone of Ignorance

So in the spirit of all things awesome, I give you my new religion that I just now made up while sitting on the couch reading a novel and wearing my Sisters of Mercy hoodie. It is the religion of the great and mighty Great Badger. He commands me to grow my hair long and wear it in a militaristic fashion with mouse skulls braided into it. He commands that I grow my chin goatee long and braided as well. He is the source of all things feral and all things great. All hail the Great Badger!

Back to my corner… where I shall await more commandments from the Great Badger to be related at a later date.

Do you ever have a burning sensation when you pee? It could be that you have bladder badgers and they are clawing their way down your urethra. Another sign of bladder badgers is general pain in the bladder. That pain results when the bladder badgers have a bladder badger battle in your bladder. Nothing can incapacitate you as a fast as an out of control bladder badger battle between many bladder badgers in your bladder. now say it 5 times fast. BLADDER BADGER BATTLE!

Over the course of the last year or so I have been steadily decreasing the amount of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) that I consume in various foods. For the most part this has been an issue of taste. Most of the foods which contain HFCS taste syrupy and leave a cloying aftertaste in my mouth. A few items that I still make general exceptions for are either things which I am unaware contain it or which would be an utter pain to get rid of (ketchup for one I admit my weaknesses) but in general I am trying to reduce the amount of HFCS I consume. For the most part, I think I’m doing a pretty decent job. Diet pop(which has it’s own problem) if I drink pop, energy drinks from Trader Joe’s which don’t contain HFCS(and taste better than other energy drinks for half the price), Stoneyfield yogurt is HFCS free as well. Honestly food tastes better without it and after some reading it would appear that HFCS may very well be the poison making America fat and bloated. Not to slander the item here is a general summary of what I’ve read, but you can do a google search and find all this in a manner of minutes.

1) HFCS comes in a variety of combinations anything from 80% fructose/20% glucose to something around 30% Fructose/70% glucose. In general, it seems the majority of HFCS comes in a 55% fructose/45% glucose form. This form is just about the equivalent of what sucrose(sugar) becomes in the body which is very close to a 50/50 split.

2) HFCS is far more complicated to produce than sugar but due to massive government corn subsidiaries as well as high sugar tariffs it is cheaper to use in food production. HFCS is in just about everything. It’s used almost as a filler ingredient and even supposedly healthy things such as yogurt cups with fruit can contain a startling high amount of HFCS. The average American is also consuming more HFCS and normal sugar than ever before, but it’s about 2 servings of HFCS for every 1 serving of sugar or so. That may be a bit off but is close to what I remember reading a few days ago.

3) In laboratory studies, it was shown that high fructose diets combined with generally poor overall nutrition were bad on the level of causing the rats hearts to explode and their livers to scar from fatty tissue as if they were consuming massive quantities of alcohol. Also it seems a lack of copper in the diet combined with fructose caused some nasty effects as well. Now these were extreme experiments in rats which combined fructose as the only sweetener in the diet with piss poor nutrition but they still illustrate a point when set next to a study that showed the same diet with all glucose sweetener did not lead to the nasty end result of exploding hearts. It seems part of the problem is that the liver is the only place in the body where fructose can be processed. Also high fructose diets do not result in the proper hormone production to regulate hunger and over eating.

4) Sure HFCS is not toxic and won’t kill you outright as evidenced by the almost 16 billion+ some odd pounds of the stuff Americans eat every year, but when combined with the fact that most American diets are not that healthy and that we consume MASSIVE quantities of sugar(meaning large quantities of fructose in effect) is it any surprise that our society is suffering from extensive and rising obesity levels. Now I’m not a nutrition scientist, I didn’t perform any of the studies in question and I don’t claim to be any of these things, but between the possible risks and the fact that HFCS just tastes bad I’d say maybe, just maybe it’d do everyone some good to STOP EATING THE DAMN STUFF! Seek alternative products that don’t contain the stuff, look at labels and I’m sure you’d be surprised how much sugar and HFCS is in stuff you eat everyday. You’ll probably feel better and when you do eat candy and sweets you may not feel as guilty about it or just won’t feel as bad since your body won’t have so much damn sugar in it to start with.

After about 24 hours of not sleeping I start to go just a bit insane. I mean more insane than my usual level of wry humour and outright making-shit-up-ism makes me out to be. I need a way to just automatically record my thoughts when I reach this state. I start rambling about all kinds of things as my brain starts skimming from idea to idea. Though my ramblings are peppered with random pauses as I get distracted by other ideas. Sorta like a ferret on crack in a jewelry store. Unfortunately, alot of it requires being there with me or inside my head. A video of my mind would be handy. Seriously, it’s 2007 where the hell is my flying car and my simsense player. These lackings make basement baby sad. Basement baby only gets to see the light of day two times a year and you’re making him sad Mr. technology. You’re making him cry!. Combined with this ferret like skittering across my thoughts is a regrettable short term memory break down so I tend to forget my ramblings. One of my friends has challenged me to go 72 hours for years, but I always seem to get bored around hour 33 or 34 and just end up going to bed cause I’ve got nothing better to do. I need a sleep deprivation buddy. If you want to be my sleep deprivation buddy let me know. sigh 2.5 more hours to fill with mindless activity till 36 hours of no sleep. The rest you get after staying up so long is amazing. The sleep of exhaustion is renewing. The end result is I seem to do the sleep deprivation thing about 4 times a year(sometimes more) . I just get distracted and forget to sleep and eventually I’ve just got other things to do besides sleeping. Then it becomes a perverse desire not to sleep till, like I said, I get bored and drift off. 2.5 hours to go!

What do those three things have to do with each other? Not a damn thing. They do however cover the 3 topics that have occupied the majority of my waking time this weekend(besides cleaning and eating). Amanda and I saw the new TMNT movie on Saturday. She thinks it might be the best CG in a film she’s ever seen and I’ve got to say I agree. Only complaints about the movie would be that it was a kids movie so it still doesn’t capture the original badassitude of the original turtles and the writing could’ve been better. But for style and art I’m giving it solid thumbs up(or whatever scale you want to use). As for the other two topics in the post I realized I had like 5 sets of bookmarks sitting around from 4 or 5 different installs and I’d never bothered to update/organize them so I spent a few hours updating those rather than doing anything truly productive and then I took some new pictures of my apartment.

Apartment circa 2005 — Gallery was generated using Picasa and simpleviewer under linux.

Apartment circa 20 mitues ago. — This set was generated using iPhoto and the iPhoto Export tool which explains the different configurations for SimpleViewer. I like the Picasa layout better so i need to tweak the iPhoto Export tool so I can make nice consistent galleries while I’m in Germany.

I have too many shoes. 2 pairs running shoes. 2 pair dress shoes. 1 pair boots. 1 pair keens(which really should have their own category) and I want another pair of boots. Amanda made me promise that I’d point out I have more shoes than she does. Anyways here is a picture of my shoes barring the dress shoes. Keens are on the left, then my Columbia street shoes, then my Grinders and in the back are my new North Face trail running shoes. Now to go test out the new shoes on the tread mill since I live in Baltimore and the nearest thing we have to a trail would be running down the poorly repaired streets. On the plus side since I got them at REI I can return them if I don’t like them no matter what.

Zodiac Blues
We went to a 10:10 showing of ‘Zodiac’ last night in the middle of an ice storm. Both the storm and the roads looked less obnoxious than they actually were when we left but once we got near the theatre it became increasingly clear that Maryland has the snow competency level of a retarded camel. An ice storm has been going on for 6 hours and they’ve just started plowing the roads. Almost died twice getting to the theatre. Thankfully, growing up in Indiana actually means I can drive in snow even when it’s getting bad. Either way we made it to the theatre without any damage to car or body.

‘Zodiac’ is a very long movie, a very slow movie and ultimately, a very good movie. I can see how people might make complaints about it being boring cause it is so slow, but Amanda and I both really enjoyed it. It actually managed to be creepy without being overbearing and the biographical nature of it all was interesting. The Zodiac was one of those legendary serial killers surrounded in mystery like Jack the Ripper which makes him a fascinating snapshot of history. If you do a wikipedia search on Zodiac Killer you’ll see he was the inspiration for like 15 different movie villains.

Robotic Lust

I need to invest in the parts/gear/tools to start making robotic systems in my free time. Of course being a gradstudent I don’t get quite the luxury of a working stiff to have “office work” and “personal work”. When I’m working I feel like I should be working on grad school stuff and otherwise I feel like I should be relaxing. I work at home mostly or I’ ll go to the lab for a few hours any given day and work there. I tend to work in bursts which makes predicting when I’ll be working or when I’ll want to work difficult to plan around. I could arrange my life to be more of an “office” v “personal” arrangement but at the same time that just never seems to work out for me. Either way having a robotic arm to transfer cd’s from a spindle to the cd tray and then from the cd tray to a second spindle would make ripping my cd collection so much easier. I’ve ripped about 140 some CD’s so far but I still have about 250 left to go. Plus I’ll need to rerip any CD’s of Amanda’s I want since we have different directory and ripping standards. Maybe I’m just too obsessive. But soon I’ll never have to carry cd’s with me in the car or on trips again as I now have an iPod radio adapter as well as myBose noise canceling headphones.

Alright it’s breakfast time.. I’m going to IHOP cause I’m mildly addicted as I haven’t gotten to eat IHOP much in the last few years as they don’t stay open 24/7 in MD. It’s really weak.  Maybe while I’m eating I’ll even think of a theme for this blog beyond my life and things I do. Then again maybe I’ll just do more interesting things.  Either way I think I may make a page of self quotes to indulge is some serious narcissism.

Yesterday was a day of good news. Amanda got a huge raise at work so we decided to go out to dinner rather than cook or just grabbing something easy and fast out. Not that we don’t eat out all the time but we usually keep it under 40$.  We decided to hit up the veggie restaurant out on 108 who’s name I’m completely blanking on now. God I need to sleep more. Anyways, the food was as always good though the service becomes slower every time we go. I think they’re having staffing issues or something. My only complaint was they put shredded carrots on top of my carrot cake. I mean the cake is full of carrots but carrots do not make a good desert garnish… ever. Either way the cake was really good after I scraped them off.

The important part of all that was the part about Amanda getting a raise. We’ve been feeling cramped in our current apartment and since the company that owns our apartment seems to let you transfer between properties on your lease we’re considering trying to rent a townhouse from them outside the city. The downside would be that we’d be much farther from school and work, but Amanda could take the metro into work and I work such strange hours I never see rush hour. We’d be getting 2 times the space with a personal garage that’d be big enough for both our cars and a small workshop as well as 2 stories of living space. We pretty much drive everywhere we want to go already and don’t really take advantage of city living so outside of proximity to school and work our current apartment doesn’t offer many other advantages.

Other news, I will be home the last week of April and I will be heading to Germany on the 25th of May.

Breakfast time.

Continuing my trend of blogging about things I’ve done in the last week, last Friday, Amanda and I went to the restaurant Rocket to Venus in Hampden. We got there just in time to avoid up to an hour and a half wait for a table of two and ended up only having to wait 10 or 15 minutes to be seated. The atmosphere was dim with most of the lights partially blacked out and if you weren’t in a booth the tables were pretty tightly packed together. The majority of the space is actually occupied by the central bar. They had an OK selection of vegetarian choices and the food was really quite good. I had deep fried red pepper, onion and potato pierogis and vegetarian “wimpy’s” (2 oz veggie burgers) and Amanda got a swiss and tomato grilled cheese with potato salad. All in all, I’ll definitely go back there and if you’re ever in Baltimore make me take you there for dinner. Then again why you’d want to visit Baltimore is beyond me… but that concludes a nice banal restaurant review of a place people in my lab have been wondering about and I finally tried.

OK, I’m done I’m going to sleep for a few hours cause I can’t get this code working.

Last Thursday I watched ‘The Departed’ then went to a midnight showing of ‘300′. ‘The Departed’ was a good movie but it certainly not a great movie nor an Oscar worthy movie. Especially not when compared to a movie like ‘Children of Men’.
In the end, I wouldn’t buy ‘The Departed’ and I probably won’t watch it again but it was worth seeing once.

Now as for ‘300′, I got to the theatre at 11:40 and on the way in I’m stopped by some teenager with a scruffy mustache and an attempt at facial hair who asks, “Are you over 21?” This is never a good way for a conversation to begin….

He then proceeds to offer me a dollar if I’ll claim I’m his legal supervisor or some nonsense. One, I’m not about to place my self in a legally compromising position for someone I don’t know when there is not a pressing need. Two, I’m certainly not going to do it for a dollar. Either way, this was a pointless side track from my intended goal of watching ‘300′.

Getting to the theatre for a midnight showing only 20 minutes early was in retrospect maybe cutting it a bit close due to the fact that I ended up only 3 rows from the screen.  This meant a lot of the “pretty” factor of the movie was disturbed by my proximity to the screen.

As for the actual film… 300 was very loud, very pretty, very violent and very, very, very epic. No one talked to each other but rather everyone conversed in speeches. I’m not sure how you can make a movie about 300 badasses and 2600+ auxiliaries holding a mountain pass against 100,000+ angry slave soldiers fighting for a self proclaimed god-king less epic but at the same time all the epic started to wear thin. [analogy comparing movie to loud pointless yet extremely fun and slightly immature activity/item]. That being said I had a blast, I’ll watch it again and I’ll probably buy the DVD but the movie certainly isn’t a masterpiece of writing even though it may be a masterpiece of graphics and artistic direction.

Oh … and I was probably the only person in the theatre that could say to himself, “Wow that’s exactly what the neck stump of a decapitated head looks like.” from personal experience.