Things I have learned about myself from going to the zoo...

I have earflaps and not holes in my head, so i may be a sealion but not a seal.

Sealions eat 20 p0unds of food a day and are in the water for 20 hours. Their time management must be great, i'm not sure I'd be able to eat 20 pounds of food fast enough to go swimming for 20 hours.

I must smell juicy and delicious, because when i walk by a lion or tiger area, they come down from their resting area and pace the ground near me.

Spotted cats are cooler than striped ones.

It is way too difficult for a giraffe to do almost anything (sit down, stand up, drink from a bucket)...if i were a giraffe, my laziness would lead to my death.

The bigger a piranah is, the cooler i find it.

I want to live at the zoo, but only in a part far from the birds and upwind from the smells.

I were to live at the zoo, i'd be in a cage marked "North American Feeloader", and the staff would have to feed and entertain me four times a day.

Monkeys don't like me, but the apes seem rather indifferent.

Sometimes...

....in the game of life, you get ahold of one and really knock it out of the park. And then sometimes, you really crush one, and if it isn't vaporized on contact, it takes off, reaches escape velocity, and never comes down. Those are the days that lack words to describe them.

At the deadline....

Rockets pick up two undrafted free agents, a recovering alcoholic, and an undersized underproforming gaurd they traded away over the summer. At least they got out from under taylor's contract.

Just Smurfy...

Today i'm going to smurf me some good smurf. And if anyone tries to smurf with my smurf, i'm going to smurf that mother-smurfer real good.

My life, it is now complete.....

This article was on games.slashdot.org today.

I don't play any MMOG's but, the ability to order food (pizza no less) with such ease is incredible.

I am going to have to pirate the code and adapt that to my daily life. Next time I am in to work before the sun, when I send my boss an email to let him know what is going on, I want to be able to append /donuts and be taken care of.

Kids say the darndest things.....

Editors note: Idea from a Badnews Blonde


When I was a little kid growing up in the Mid 80's one of the groups that was gaining the most power was Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Had i been older, I would have figured that they were the front for an organized crime ring posturing to take over the world. Anyways, some how these people managed to purchase 80+% of all comercial time for a few years.

These commercials would show bloody car wrecks or tombstones and then say something like "If you drink and drive, YOU WILL DIE!" Being 6, these commercials scared the crap out of me. These commercials may have led to my psychological aversion to the Fraggles.

At the same time, Diet Pepsi was putting crack syringes in their drinks to corner a good share of the soft drink market. My mother was a corporate sell out and very prone to subliminal messages, so she immediately decided that drinking 4 gallons of that crap a day was the best idea ever. To consume this quantity in a day, my mother carried around a big ass mug that was contantly filled with the Aspertame delivery solution.

Any time my mom would take us anywhere she would be guzzling from that cup the whole time while driving. After being exposed to these MADD commercials all day every day, seeing my mom drinking something while driving convinced me that each and every car ride was destined to end my firery death. I would sit in the passenger seat clinching the door with a death grip and eyes glued shut.

One day, I couldn't contain myself any more and blurted out "mom, if you drink and drive we are all going to die!" She snorted into her soft drink, turned to me, and in the most motherly tone said "they mean alcohol you idiot".

Scientists do it on a lab bench....

Working in a biological research lab, I have found that there is a certain amount of sexism that flows as a turbulent under current through my daily life. Fortuantely, I am a guy, so I benefit from it.

case in point:

It is much more acceptable for me to go to a female co-worker and say "Hey, I need you to give me some of your DNA" than it would be for her to say the same to me.

Call for help...

I've got nothing. So much randomness in my head and nothing makes for any sort of usefull post. So, I'm putting on the responsibility on the people who read this trype. Untill I feel more inspired myself, this will become more of a request line. Just leave comments saying what you would like to see me ramble on about and I will write about the ones I find the most interesting. That way if it sucks, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Yet another Monday

It's Monday again, yet to me it feels like whatever day is 3 after friday, but before saturday. This is because I had to put in a full day of work both days this weekend. I had a great but way too short repreive saturday evening, but that was it. So here I am, sleep deprived and over worked looking toward the days ahead.

I already have the feeling that this is week that I am going to hope will just be over with. Many reasons for that, some good, some bad. I just have the horribly unsettling feeling that on the figurative road that is my career I missed one of the exits I was supposed to take and ended up off course in this sort of purgatory. I'm pretty sure that there aren't a whole lot of feelings worse than setting a five year goal and realizing after a year you are going to fail horribly and then having to sit through another four years just to confirm your dissapointment.

Yet at the exact same time there are a couple of things in my life that I am really excited about and am enjoying. I'm the kind of person who can be psychoticly motivated when I am really looking forward to something or really hate something. But when I wake up every day and want to be there for half of it and don't for the other it's hard to figure out how I am supposed to aproach the tasks at hand.

One thing is for sure, in the next six months something is going to break. It's either going to be me or this damn project and I don't fold easy. Either way it is probably going to be big nasty and violent so if you see the fuse smoldering i'd take cover till the firey wrath and pain subside.

Life lessons learned the hard way.....

Lesson #1:

Eating a piece of gum immediately after eating a bag of chips may seem like a courteous thing to do, so as not to offend others with your breath, but in reality, you just end up with crunchy gum and a nasty mix of flavors.

that brings me Lesson #2:

Hickory Mint sounds better than it actually tastes.

State Mottos

Some states have really bad mottos. For example, Texas, the greatest state in the nation, has "Friendship" as its official motto. Rather weak.

On the other hand, New Hampshire has "Live Free or Die". That kicks ass, but it's friggin' New Hampshire. They're state motto should be something like "85% of american public highschool students don't even know we exist". So i'm pushing for Texas to steal New Hampshire's state motto.

Some other state mottos that should be:

Nevada - "Just hope no one finds out"
Oklahoma - "The hat of Texas"
North Dakota - "We might as well be Canada"
South Dakota - "At least we aren't North Dakota"
Arkansas - "You sure do got a purty mouth"
Kentucky - "Can't nobody kiss as good as my sister"
Arizona - "Melanoma capital of the west"
Kansas/Nebraska - "Amber waves of boredom"
Wyoming - "We both think it's a great place to live"
Conecticut - "A Suburb of New York"
New Jersey - "The crime riddled slum of New York"
Massachusets - "We're WICKED AWESOME!"
Louisianna - "Here's what I think of your open container laws...."
Virginia - "We are officially sponsored by Winston and Nextel"

Would you do it? and why?

An undergrad came into lab today and wanted to have a discussion about this article on cnn. It isn't really that all that new or ground breaking, except for the fact that he only wanted to talk about because he thought the teacher was really hot. That then got me thinking:

If you are 28 and fairly attractive, why would you sleep with a 13 year old?

We were only able to come up with a few reasons:

1) the kid is some Freddy Adu-esque sports phenom that is (or already has) gone pro.
This seems unlikely coming out of McMinnville, TN.

2)given all the growth hormones that are in Chicken McNuggets and other processed meats, the kid is probably 6'8" and weighs 300+ lbs. and she wasn't aware of his age.

3)she didn't think he was 13 because the average age for a 7th grader in McMinnville, TN is about 19.

Am I missing anything else? She was even married at the time! I'm not the cheating kind, but if I were going to, especially to get back at or hurt someone, it would be with a Dr. or supermodel, or something, not a kid. We all saw how the case like this in Washington turned out. The lady ended up having two kids, and now they all live with the kid's parents becuase the boy dropped out of HS and no one will give her a job. It's weird how this situation can turn that boy into every other middle school boy's hero, and her into a wretched stain on society.

Thoughts on Monday....

Today is the first time I have looked forward to a Monday in a long time, I hope it plays out as well as I am hoping.

As for my thoughts:

1) weekend wasn't bad, but could have been better. Rockets won, but it shouldn't have been that close. Rice Baseball won, but basketball lost. A&M basketball kicked the crap out of Mizzou. A&M baseball started off with a no-hitter. And then the superbowl......could someone please tell the Eagles that your 2 minute offense should not take 4:30. I mean come on! they should have scored that last TD with enough time to force the Pats to run one play before the 2 minute warning.

2) The simpson's half-time Doh! or whatever it was called was way over hyped. It isn't often that the Simpson's let me down, but this was one of those times. Lack of continuity, not much humor, pretty weak all around. At the end I just ended up going to bed instead of hanging around for all american dad.

3)why can't 6:00 get here faster?

4)Since when did Houston have a monsoon season?

5) I'm hoping i'm in as good of a mood tomorrow morning.

Line of the week...

"We are here to discuss the work of Franz Schubert. He was a great composer and a great lover of women. Well, I guess that last part goes without saying, you'd have to be a lover of women to die of syphilis."

-thank you NPR for yet another cebrebal morsel of off color symphonic humor.

In case you were wondering...

If you are a graduate student at rice and need to do a summer internship, you may be asked to go speak with the lady in charge of placement at the career services center.

I recomend that, instead, you go to the zoo. Find a giraffe and yell "Hey giraffe, will you find me an internship?". You are likely to get just as much help, plus you will have gotten to go to the zoo and see a giraffe.

Note to self...

If for some reason I ever decide that purposefully injecting myself with botulinum toxin would be a good idea, at least learn from this.

1) never buy knock-off botox
2) if buying knock-off botox to give to patients, don't inject myself with it.

Some people should be drug out in the street and shot...

I saw this story in the new this morning while getting ready.

My initial reactions were "How terrible", and "I hope some big man makes him his bitch and then shanks him with a filed off tooth brush after."

And then I thought "How?!?". I mean, in every possible sense of the word, How? What is the motivation for that, how could you ever think that was ok, is that physically possible?

Doesn't say much for the guy. If you need to over compensate, buy a sports car, pay people to tell you you are the best, consider surgery....but never ever ever even think of doing something like this.

Welcome Back!

My laptop has been repaired (sorta) and returned to me.

Good-bye productivity, thanks for stopping by.

Todays thought: "I am the stuff that dreams are made of!"