Sunday Hate Read

Drs. Oz and Roizen.  Five or six paragraphs of the glibbest horseshit imaginable, chock-full of self-serving buzzwords and useless advice.  The fact that they might actually be right just makes it that much worse.  I hate doctors for lots of reasons, but their healthier-than-thou attitude and patronizing over-familiarity are pretty high on the list.  Fuck the both of them.  It's their fault my blood pressure is so high.

One of these days I'm going to get organized...

I'll have everything I need packed neatly in one box.  And then they'll bury me.

A little pretentious,




a little gratuitous...

Equals art?

Wild Rose on Nowness.com

But is it really gratuitous if the nudity is the entire point?




Personal Soundtrack

I don't know how much it really applies to me, but my life seemed to make more sense after I heard this:

I often say...

...that I do the best I can--that I've done the best I could. But I don't know how often it's actually true. How many times have I completely exhausted myself physically and emotionally? Done everything that was physically and metaphysically possible in a given circumstance?

And of all the times that I've done less--when I've been too tired, too depressed, too hopeless to do any more than I have--how many of those have been due to circumstances beyond my control? Given the same set of mental and physical circumstances how many people could have done better?

I mean, I know I'm lazy. I'm just not sure how lazy...

There's not usually anything worthwhile in internet comments...

...but I'm charmed by Diamond Godde$$!!!'s description of Hayden Panettiere as a "tiny linebacker."

Though I don't necessarily agree with her assessment...

"latent ravening ferocity"

"...as if they got from his latent ravening ferocity not so much a sense of dependability as a feeling that his ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest lay with his..."

"the one weapon for the preservation of integrity, else breath were not worth the breathing, and hence to be regarded with respect and used with discretion"

Somewhere on my journey from angry young man to bitter old man confused and middle aged.  I found a lesson in this story: the idea that a bottomless rage might be controlled, carried around and used judiciously as a weapon.  I'm not sure it's actually something I've been able to apply to my life with any success, but it's at least seemed like a possibility at times when I didn't see a lot of possibilities.

The fairest way to look at it...

...is probably that it's not necessarily all my fault.  But that it's not entirely within my control, either.

It's like I always say...

...I'm not trying to be an asshole.

But I'm willing to be.

All I want...

...is for everything to be perfect and nothing to ever change.

Is that so much to ask?

I find this woman somewhat unsettling.

Whenever I surf past "Korea Today" at 2 in the morning, I am captivated, but slightly creeped-out, by the co-anchor. She's beautiful, but odd-looking.

She's probably the strongest evidence I've seen of human-alien interbreeding.

Picture via. Gif made from screencaps of "Korea Today" by [lrf]. Both presumed fair use.

Everybody's got something to hide...

...except for me and my monkey.

Image via.

The lobby of the...

...Chesterfield County Courts Building is unbelievably (maybe appropriately) bleak and gloomy. It's like a chunk was cut out of a February afternoon in 1890 and incarcerated in this piece of indifferent modern architecture.

It's not quite "abandon all hope ye who enter here," though. Maybe more like "Why bother? You're screwed."

I love the fact that the Code of Virginia...

...specifically exempts the President and Vice President of the United States from jury duty. I guess it's the whole "Mother of Presidents" thing.

Three things the internet has taught me about human nature.

(Mostly from the comments section.)

1. No matter how high-quality or well-regarded or popular something is, there's always somebody that thinks it's garbage.  A corollary to this is that for any TV or movie or book series there will always be someone that admits that it used to be good but it sucks now.  
2. There are people just waiting for a reason to hate someone or something.  Some celebrity says or does something that falls below a critical threshold of popular opinion and they are fair game.  And once someone is in the allowed-to-be-hated category then it will always be open season on them and anyone who speaks well of them.
3. So many people are completely incapable of understanding why other people might have made different choices or faced different circumstances than they have themselves.  That others might have had different options or fewer opportunities or just saw things differently.  If I had to sum up the internet in a sentence it would be a 28-year-old white male software developer who cannot understand why a 60-year-old black woman hasn't made the same choices he has.

Perspective

Courtesy of Macy's.

Seems like...

...I'm paying more attention to politics even as politics is becoming more and more dysfunctional. I'm realizing how much of a difference it makes even as it becomes less and less possible to change anything.

It's Only Art if She's Naked

But, seriously, simply an amazing painting.

The artist

Song of the Month

And if you spend your whole life
Rolling horses into Troy
You will not go to heaven
You'll go to Champaign, Illinois

I'm a pretty rational person...

...for the most part. Skeptical, cynical, etc. But I still believe in luck. Assuming that there is such a thing as randomness in the Universe--that it's not all predetermined by God or some mechanistic chain of causation--then it must be possible that sometimes good things will happen to you and sometimes bad things will happen. And whether these things are truly random or the causes are simply concealed from view, you have no conscious way of influencing them. But you never know. Maybe it does matter what color shirt you wear or what side of the bed you get out on. You might as well try to influence the indifferent chaos of the Universe.

Of course, sometimes it's hard to distinguish superstition from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and I've got that, too.