popularity of vampires

i have been into the vampire nostalgia/culture for quite a while now. it started with reading "interview with a vampire" by anne rice. i was hooked. i read several more of her vampire books, read vampire comics...each drawing me in further. even with the advent of her movies i still felt my quirky facination was at least somewhat in the rarity.

but things have changed.

the movie "twilight" has thrust vampire interest into the stratoshpere of popularity. whats worse, it's male star has every teenage girl in love with the very concept of bad-boy vampires. vampires are now right up there with hanna montana, and britney spears. ultimately, in essence, and to wit, vampires have just become too popular for me to continue enjoying.

once a thing becomes so popular that it is status quo, rather than a novelty, i want nothing more to do with it. now if i could only wipe off these damn tattoos.

slippery slope to destiny

Be careful of your thoughts

For your thoughts become your words.

Be careful of your words

For your words become your actions.

Be careful of your actions

For your actions become your habits.

Be careful of your habits

For your habits become your character.

Be careful of your character

For your character becomes your destiny.

-Author Unknown

nefarious spuds

awwwhh!!...
see the cute lil family of spuds to the left. yeah? do ya? well hold on there a minute...

because theyre not so cute, in fact, theyre actually quite menacing.

the school i attend has a nature preserve on its campus with numerous plant life including a number of rare palms. i like walking through the area because its very peaceful.

however, recently, i started noticing a vine growing up several of the trees. every time the vine appeared more and more prominent. its this potato plant thing. a foriegn species not native to the area. it lives by growing up other trees and choking them death, blocking out their sunlight. like hitler and his armies it moves in kills native the residents and sets up camp.

ive seen huge sections of land where this plant has completely overcome all the other plantlife. choking it out. it spreads its infectious self through seed pods which are attractive to the squirrel (who probably thinks its a big-ass walnut or something). theyll pick them up, only to later decide they taste horrible wherein they drop them on the ground, and there, these lil pods, like the borg, begin to take over again (pronounced "uh-gane").

i find this plant quite disgusting and hostile in its behavior. however, from an evolutionary perspective i guess it's ability to suck off of and use others to survive is adaptive, keen, and lovely.

nonetheless (i love that word), i pick them when i see them, but im afraid its a losing battle.

if you watch too carefully you cannot understand it

Richard Feynman, a scientist in the last century, theorized about the irreversibility of time. One of his analogies/examples went as follows...

"Suppose we have blue water, and white water, that is without ink in a tank with a little seperation, then we pull the seperation very delicately. The water starts seperate blue on one side and white on the other side. Wait a while. Gradually the blue mixes up with the white and after a while the water is "luke-blue," I mean it is sort of fifty-fifty the color uniformly distributed throughout. Now if you wait and watch this for a long time it does not by itself, seperate...it does not by itself go the other way.

That gives us some clue, let us look at the molecules. Suppose that we take a moving picture of the blue and white water mixing. It will look funny if we run it backwards, because we shall start with uniform water and gradually the thing will seperate... Now if we magnify the picture, so that every physicist can watch, atom by atom, to find out what happens irreversibility - where the laws of balance of forward and backward break down. So you start and you look at the picture. You have atoms of two different kinds (blue and white) jiggling all the time in thermal motion. If we start at the beginning we should have mostly atoms of one kind on one side, and atoms of of the other kind on the other side, we see that in their perpetual irregular motions they will get all mixed up and that is why the water becomes more or less uniformly blue.

Let us watch any one collision selected from the picture, and in the moving picture the atoms come together this way and bounce off that way. Now run that section of film backwards and you find the pair of molecules moving together the other wayand bouncing off this way. And the pysicist looks with his keen eye and says, "That's all right, that's according to the laws of physics. If two molecules came this way they would bounce this way." It is reversible. The Laws of molecular collision are reversible.

So if you watch too carefully you cannot understand it at all, because every one of the collisions is absolutely reversible, and yet the whole moving picture shows something absurd, which is that in the reversed picture the molecules start in the mixed condition - blue, white, blue, white, -and as time goes on, through all the collisions, the blue seperates from the white. But they cannot do that - it is not natural that the accidents of life should be such that the blues will seperate themselves from the whites. And yet if you watch this reveresed movie very carefully every collision is O.K. "


i like this article. it seems science often gets all hung up on breaking things down to a smaller unit in order gain better or even ultimate understanding. you know, examine dopamine and serotonin receptors and inhibitors to understand more about depression; or look at single-cell life forms to understand better about our beginninings; etc.

well as Dr. Feynman illustrated...not necessarily.

spurious canine nomenclature

my dog's nicknames:

monk,
monk-monk,
monk-munkles,
spunk,
spunk-spunkles,
crunk-crunkles,
skunkles,
skunk-skunkles,
spunk-dilio-spunk-spunkles,
p. sprunk-sprunkles,
captain p. sprunk-sprunkles,
lil joe ronsisvalle,
wee lil joe,
oh wee little joe-joe

against nature's "intent"

Nature suffices for all she asks of us. Luxury has turned her back on nature, daily urging herself on and growing through all the centuries, pressing men's intelligence into the development of vices. First she began to hanker after things that were inessential, and then after things that were injurious, and finally she handed the mind over to the body and commanded it to be the out and out slave to the body's whim and pleasure. - Seneca