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Check it out, here’s an excellent
animated gif that wifey ran across on a
random website.
He’s impatient, he’s cranky, he looks like soot. Grouchy cat
will be turning up from time to time I have a feeling.
What is Grouchy upset about today? For one, there were some
great articles around the world about
how big of an idiot our president is, and we totally
missed out on it in the US. Not fair.
Also, as wifey points out, Grouchy Cat is not a big fan of the City of Ithaca’s ridiculous parking laws. If it’s an even day tomorrow, you have to park on the odd side the night before, and vice versa. Every night. Forever. And, my battery is dead. Cuz, it turns out that if you drive your car around the block once and that’s it, it wears down your battery. Grouchy cat disapproves. And, also, it’s a leap year, so I just jumped my car and moved it for no reason. Excuse me while I go and move my car again.
Check out Garfield Minus Garfield, an awesome website where they take out garfield from his comic strip, and you’re left with John Arbuckle acting loony. Here’s a good one:
Please vote for our poker lolcat. Wifey came up with it. The winner gets a trip to vegas.
More on the online Poker Cats Contest
Sorry there have been no posts for a while.
I swear, I have a lot of things to talk about,
but not a single spare minute unfortunately.
By this friday, for some reason,
I have a paper to write and two jobs to apply for.
There was a grant to apply for too, but it turned out
to not be a very good fit for me. So, I hope to actually
have time to go to buddhism class tonight, instead of
staying up and staring at the computer screen for 24 hr
straight.
Okay back to computer. Can you believe I just took a break form my computer, and decided to use this time to post on the blog?
Okay, for some reason I just watched this trailer for Indiana Jones and Crystal Skull Land or Something:
and I have a few questions… I’ll just ask one important one. When did Indiana Jones become an elderly Batman? He’s swingin all over the place. Egads.
Jerry Schnoor is awesome. He just published
this editorial in Environmental Science &
Technology (the top journal in environmental
science and environmental engineering) with some brilliant damnations like
This type of scientific journalism is fantastic. It seems like at some point half a century ago scientists decided that it was unprofessional to have strong feelings or a personality. I’m glad to see that starting to fade a bit. Research and data analysis, sure, should be unbiased. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be human beings when we’re talking about how academia relates to the reality outside the ivory tower. If US environmental policy is just plain stupid, let’s call it stupid. That’s more meaningful to most people than citing data, because someone else is always going to have a stupid counter-argument with smoke and mirrors to make the data seem irrelevant to the average person.
Which gets me to a second point: scientific literacy. How much would be enough for most people, to make informed political decisions? I don’t know.
Wifey and I just started getting Flight of the conchords episodes from Netflix. It is hilarious. Take a hip, dry BBC comedy and sprinkle in some wicked-awesome imitations of bad ’80s music videos. In some ways, it’s like Sifl and Olly without socks, and in other ways it’s nothing like that at all. If nothing else, then you should at least watch the episode “Bowie” to see Jemaine’s fabulous David Bowie imitation.
Bowie’s in space!
I still don’t know who to vote for in tomorrow’s primaries. Many people are all worried that our (us = liberal communist hippies) first priority is to beat the republicans, so we should pick the best contender. This seems somehow wrong, but it has to mean something because why else, then, didn’t anyone vote for Kucinich? You know you agree with everything he says. Alas, it’s down to Clinton and Obama, and I don’t know who the best contender would be. Both candidates are cool in their own way, as depicted here:
As you can see from the time I put in on the gimp, I’m really milling this one over. In debates, I think Clinton generally answers questions in a more thoroughly thoughtful manner; she has a good knack for focusing on the details that are the most meaningful to people listening. But, Obama inspires people with his starry-eyed optimism. The word on NPR seems to be that people who would otherwise vote republican are thinking of swinging over for Obama. As long as he could keep that optimism or hope or whatever it is going strong, that would be cool. He could give a new political motivation to red states that isn’t based on hating gay people or hating immigrants. But, then, Obama hasn’t been through the political mud yet, so we don’t know if there are skeletons lurking in his closet. Uhg, I dunno. Maybe I’ll write in Kucinich.
And, I’m taking a neat class on meditation from the Tibetan Buddhists at Namgyal Institute. It’s really interesting, the class is focused on what they call “meditation on karma,” which from what I understand so-far means that you explore cause-and-effect. For example, you could look at the way that your mental habits affect how you interact with the world. Like, if you pay attention to your brain, you’ll notice that when you’re being a jerk to people, your thoughts are stuck in a habit of thinking unhelpful things like feeling sorry for yourself or wanting something bad for someone else. So, it’s difficult to make yourself to be less of a jerk by just deciding “I’m going to be less of a jerk.” It’s more helpful to decide, “I’m going to change these mental habits that cause me to be a jerk.” That’s karma. It seems a lot more analytical than the pop culture notion of good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.
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