Opening Day

While I am psyched for opening day, the crack of the bat, the green of the ivy, and all of that...I question the wisdom of starting on March 31st. Really? That just seems so early. As if to prove my point today's game went through hours of rain delays, culminating in a loss for my Cubbies. Boohoo.

But on the bright side Fukudome hit a 3 run home run, so he's off to a good start making me glad we scooped him out of Japan. Soriano and Theriot went 0 for 10 to lead it off...Soriano just still doesn't look comfortable out of his leadoff spot. On paper he should be second or third, but history just doesn't back that up. Something in his head doesn't adjust well to the movement. I hope Pinella either breaks through and convinces him to hit regardless of his position in the lineup. As for Theriot...he's a sparkplug, but his OBP is just too low for leadoff. He's better fit for the 7 or 8 spot.

Well, it's just one game, 161 to go...and we're in last place.

mea culpa

I forgot the skunk ape a couple days ago in my discussion of possible undiscovered large primates. The skunk ape is the "bigfoot" spotted across the south east of the United States, particularly in Florida. Unlike the bigfoot and yeti this ape apparently has a pungent odor.

For the record I don't think there's any possibility of this animal existing. At least as an undiscovered ape. An escaped chimp or orangutan hanging out in the swamp? Perhaps that would account for the one pretty decent photo of the "skunk ape" it does look a lot like an orangutan.

Also for the record, bigfoot has been spotted, supposedly, in at least 49 of the 50 states. Stupid Hawaii...throwing off my numbers.

Man, I must seem like some crazy cryptozoologist or conspiracy theorist with all this talk of UFO's and Bigfoots (Bigfeet?).

Had one of those amazing archaeologist discussions today...you know the kind. Loud. Indoors. Terribly inappropriate. Lots of locals staring in horror. It revolved around the lovely sex terms found on Urban Dictionary. (By the way...should I use "on" or "in" for that...is it in the UD, as though it were a real book? Or is it "on" as in "online" or "on that page?") After explaining to the unenlightened about the Pirate, the Superman, and other lovely maneuvers...I came up with my own. First we talked about "the Munich" wherein you sweat buckets while having sex and thinking about the terror attack and slaughter of the Israeli Olympic team (straight from Eric Bana in the movie "Munich"...that was a really messed up scene. I can't even begin to describe how odd it was to you who haven't seen the movie). Ashley and I were having trouble putting it into perspective for Adam and Kim (our table mates...much to the horror of the other patrons we were going into more and more detail). I came upon the analogy...it's kind of like fantasizing about September 11th during sex. So our new move is called the Nine-Eleven. As in "man, I'd go nine-eleven on that ass" or perhaps "dude, I'd totally knock down her towers." I'm not sure exactly what that would entail...I'm going to try to insert it into the vernacular by using it in conversation.

Natalie Portman? I'd totally crash a plane into that ass...

Mr. Sandman

Sleep is so weird...

I mean, I love it. It just might be my favorite time of day, and one of my favorite activities. But why on earth do we have to do it? And how come just an hour or so difference one way or the other can have such an immense impact on the day as a whole? An hour too little...and you're cranky, unable to concentrate, and a wreck. Too much and your entire body clock can be thrown off, or you can feel just as miserable as if you hadn't slept enough.

I'm going to go gather data of this phenomenon at the moment. That's what being a scientist is all about, finding problems and gathering data, observing, and figuring out what's going on.

That and staying up too late,working 10 hours, and then being a wreck the rest of the evening.

That one looks like a teddy bear

Stupid rain...now we have to work late to make up the lost time from earlier this week. I'm too tired for any profundity.

I'm just gonna chase those transparent lines and shapes you can see at the periphery of your vision. They're so weird...

Crack pots, crack, pot...or just cracked

The human mind is a bizarre thing. Now, this alone isn't an insight of any shock or depth...one need only look at the news to see strange people, or normal people doing strange things. As an anthropologist I don't study the bizarre...we like the mundane, the normal. Everything that we find we have to assume is normal...simply because it's easier. I suppose it's rooted in statistics at some point, the odds of finding the abnormal is much less than finding the normal. In 5000 years it's far more likely that an archaeologist will find a Honda than one of the concept cars unveiled every year (and promptly forgotten). Psychologists and sociologists are the ones who really deal with the bizarre...at most an anthropologist will study how society, the normies, deal with the bizarre (like burning them in the case of Medieval Europe). Still, it's fascinating to us all (or at least to me...and I'll speak for you all. So there). We also all love parenthetical statements. (right?)

The conspiracy freak is a particularly unique breed of the bizarre. In this case I'm not referring to truthers, people who think the CIA puts transmitters in our fillings, the water fluoride mind control, or the real nutjobs. Instead the people who 1) perpetuate hoaxes regarding UFOs, and 2) those who are taken in. A quick caveat: I want to believe. I was raised on the X-files, of course I want to believe. But what's running through the minds of those who say that they are former employees of area 51, working with extraterrestrials to reverse engineer spacecraft? The Russians had difficulty reverse engineering the B-29, a single step above their engineering levels, and somehow we can bridge thousands of steps? Or this other nutjob, who claimed to work with the man who invented the famous totally impractical flaying saucer in the 50's (could hover ~ 8 feet off the ground)...a man who claimed to be Nikolai Tesla's secret apprentice. He claimed to have secret information regarding resonance (something Tesla was interested in, to the point of quackery) to essentially warp between points. So, naturally, he was contacted by a secret corporation to help work on said machine, not just work on...but use. *insert highly captivating vivid imagery here*

On one hand...who the hell believes this kind of story? No one to corroborate, totally ridiculous scientific "facts" that fly in the face of physics, and a fantastical string of events and gnostic-esque circles of enlightenment. No matter how much I want to believe, you're going to have to do better than that.

On the other, these people have an, apparent, fanatical devotion to their story. They really believe that they were able to circumvent the rules of physics, able to send avatars across the country under the eyes of a super secret super powerful corporation. Well that or they are amazing liars. And certainly some of this breed are liars, desperate for attention...amused and their ability to fool others, whatever their motive. But others clearly believe this...this man really thinks that Tesla passed on the means of using electronic resonance to teleport, and he teleported. In all other aspects of life, the man seemed normal...able to form normal relationships with other humans, hold a job, all the things a crazy person can't do. Where is the source of this disconnect with reality?

I believe in Bigfoot, Sasquatch or the Yeti (kinda, I want to, and think it possible...after all Jane Goodall does, so who am I to argue with the most preeminent primatologist in the world?). But I admit there's not much to it, more the possibility (due to largely unexplored terrain in the Yukon or the Himalayas...intelligence and secretive nature of the other great apes (after all the gorilla was undiscovered until the early part of the 20th century), oral histories of the indigenous peoples, and so on). That said, the story of the man who was captured by Bigfoot...taken back to his den "used" sexually...yeah, not so much.

Am I insane or deluded? Scientifically speaking there is no hard evidence, and I am supposed to be a scientist, right? How do I balance my gut and my brain? Am I the same freak as this guy on TV talking about warping in a brilliant flash of aquamarine? Feel free to answer...that isn't rhetorical.

This is just brain vomit, not well organized or thought through...but oh well, it happens.

Mainly on the plain...

There's something pretty powerful about looking at the radar and seeing a swatch of red and yellow stretching all the way back towards Texas, looking up at the clouds and rain spitting down at you, and connecting the images with reality. Yeah, it was that kind of profundity running through my head today, after all...we only spent 3 hours digging so I had plenty of time to philosophize.

Thinking about the power of a single storm stretching a thousand miles, or standing in a field that would soon be sowed with seed and growing the crops we all depend upon; these crops depending upon this same water. It was kind of profound...thinking about that cycle of interdependency that leads to everything in this valley around me, thousands of pelicans, snow geese, even eagles flying over head. That rain soaking me, making me miserable, was what created all of this, even the hills rising on either side were actually bluffs carved through water erosion, the field fertile through alluvial action.

I was reminded of a story Douglas Adams would recount when he was waxing philosophical...I'm too lazy to use the googles, but I'll retell it, besides I like telling stories.

A puddle wakes up one morning, yawns and blinks, looking around at his surroundings. He ponders his world, the hole he finds himself in, thinking "wow, what a wonderful hole there is here, it's so amazing that it has been made just so that it fits perfectly to my form."

While I believe the original story then goes off to an apocalyptic theme, I'd like to stop it right there...that is exactly the mindset I was in while oggling the sky thinking how everything just fit together. I consider myself an intelligent sort, but even I didn't really notice myself limited in my perspective, limited to a very shallow beauty. Instead I was just thinking how everything just seemed to fit (or was nearly made to fit), I then moved on thinking of how life is liquid...stretching and conforming to the shapes and pressures of its container. I find that even more beautiful and powerful. That complexity reliant on totally different resources, deep sea vents providing life - drawing chemicals out of the rupturing mantle, the "lungs of the earth" in the Rain forest, pumping carbon dioxide from the air providing oxygen for biodiversity across the globe, microbes surviving the vacuum of space surviving on the Apollo spacecrafts...as Dr. Ian Malcolm would say, life...finds a way. *stutter and stammering endearingly*

Instead of everything "fitting," as is so tempting to think when taken away by pure power and beauty, what we see is clawed...kicked and scratched...out of whatever is available. You can't help but think that if tomorrow sulfuric acid were to rain from the clouds, replacing all the water on earth...in 4 billion years there would be something. And I would bet, complex...microbes breaking the acid down into another compound, fungi breaking that down, and so on and so on...creatures and plants filling every crevice, bursting their vessel at the seams. Not because the vessel was made for them...but because life made itself fit. Life...finds a way.

ding ding

Fucking Law and Order. Seriously...it's like crack for middle class America (which of course I'll group myself with for convenience of thought process). We were rained out today, so I got to chill in my lovely room after arriving in Missouri...so what do I do?

Sit down, unpack and flip on the television. Promptly fall asleep during some dry, but interesting, History special on the frigate. That's pretty middle class, right? Falling asleep while watching a television show about war? When I wake up, ready to eat dinner or whatever I flip around and lo and behold L&O is on. That was around 5.

It's still on, still in the background as we "speak" on at least two channels. Have I turned it off? No. I've left to go to the store...stuff like that, but 1) there really isn't much good on (I have no desire to watch anyone dissecting the NCAA seeding) and 2) it's "good enough" to keep me from seriously looking.

The second is the crux...it's good enough. Pretty decent formula cop show (especially those ripped from the headlines episodes, they're a hoot). There's nothing especially amazing about the writing, there's a lot of stereotyping (and clever ... and by clever I mean blatent ... reversals of "ooooh look what you get for believing stereotypes"), plenty of deus ex machina, and the like. But hey, the good guys get the bad guys, a mystery is solved by the gang, and you feel good about yourself (and of course humanity, America (fuck yeah!), and the judicial system). I think that's what we normies want, good to be good...bad to be punished...and apple pie for dessert with some ice cream on the top. Wait scratch the ice cream, that's un-American...a la mode my ass you frog bastards! I'm currently watching the classic L&O, but this really encompasses them all, SVU and CI too. They have different rankings based on personal preferences, and quirks but I'll include them all in this generalization, good enough TV. It can be the new line-up blockbuster. Next on TNT; Good Enough T.V.

Man, I need to find more productive hobbies than injecting televised crack into my eyeballs.

Whoa...

Alrighty then, let's see what we have here.

Splines reticulated? check.

Gene pool chlorinated? check.

Llama population? check.

I think we're a go for launch, let's take this baby out for a spin.

I've always failed at the "online journal" sort of deal, mainly because I'm a lazy son of a bitch who loves to think about doing things rather than doing them in the day to day. I'm the sort that gets to the end of a day at work and starts thinking "Hmm, what will I do today?" This immediately leads to a long list of things I plan on doing, thinking about how fun they'll all be, and essentially fantasizing about the rest of my evening...creating a mental utopia of the mundane (playing a computer game, getting some writing or reading done, calling a friend, whatever).

Then I get home...and do none of it. Just sit around trying to decide where to start...and usually just ending up sitting around looking at Fark.com trying to decide whether I'll have more fun playing Oblivion, or Team Fortress 2. Then it's 11pm and I've got to get to sleep, work starts in eight hours.

So after all that I never really have much I think I want to say in a journal.

But what the hell, this isn't a journal, right? This is a blog. It's hip, it's cool...it's on a whole different plane of existence from the lowly olj. I'm sure that just by reading this my cool is emanating through the tubes and into your eyeballs, penetrating your synapses and making you, through this experience, a little cooler.

Get used to it my friends, there should be a whole lot more cool radiating through the tubes in the future...I'll let you in on the ins and outs of my mind, life, and erm, uh, something else, in the near future (read: tomorrow).

Until then, hasta la pasta.