Sunday, December 31, 2006

PIMPING


This YouTube link to a weird animated German music video's kinda interesting...
(Hat Tip: Lore)

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Five THOUSAND Visits

If you check out the "visitor counter" at the bottom of this blog, you may notice that I've just passed the 5,000 visit mark.
Five thousand hits in about two years. Really, it's a testament to you, my throngs of readers.

For those of you who have a difficult time wrapping your mind around a number as large as 5,000, let me make it a little easier.

First, divide by two, because half those hits are probably from me visiting to marvel at my own cleverness.

Then remove another 500 for people who clicked through from Google image search looking for the picture of a goat and another picture of Parker Posey.

Now it's down to a slightly less mind-boggling 2,000 visits (thank you, Google spreadsheets!)

In Biblical times, when people lived to be several hundred years old, many of the most compulsive and brilliant thinkers would spend their entire adult lives counting to see if numbers like 2,000 existed or were merely theoretical. Historical sources tell us many of them went mad, but whether it was due to the endless counting or the consciousness-altering secrets contained in such numbers was never recorded.
Then people died off at around 35 for a few thousand years, and until the invention of computers "one thousand" was still just a story told to scare naughty children.

Now we know that even larger numbers exist-- numbers like a million, and that great worm of naughts and commas, the billion. The consensus among scientists is that there are about a billion things in the universe, give or take 1,000.

And 5,000, give or take 1,000, is how many visits there have been to my blog.
Excelsior!

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Hang In There!

So the FDA is having a hearing about whether antidepressant labels should mention the risk of increased suicidal thinking.
 
Well, that's an interesting thought-- you're seriously depressed and your pill bottle says:
"Hey, man.  You ever think about just ending it all?  Eat me, and that could happen.  Happen more, that is.  Life is hard.  So hard."
 
I think a better label would say something like:
"Hey, man!  No pill is perfect, but this pill can help some!  Hang in there, things will turn around.  Come on-- would it kill you to at least finish the prescription?"

I Regret That He Has But One Life to Give for His Country

So, Ahmadinejad?
I hear you're hosting a conference in Tehran to debate whether the Holocaust really happened. 
You pretend millions of Jews weren't murdered and you state that the purpose of your nuclear weapons program is to kill another few million, which is okay because that hasn't really happened before.
All kinds of crackpot anti-Semites are scurrying to bathe in your glow-- David Duke, Robert Faurisson and various other "Holocaust deniers, discredited scholars and white supremacists from around the world." 
I hear even Red Skull is giving a talk.
Dammit, Mahmoud, you're making it awfully tempting to drop bombs on Tehran.  I wish we were too smart to fall for it ... but less every day.