I got a new phone. I think I may have bought a girlie model but that's what people told me about my old phone. It cost just over $100 so it was the cheapest phone I could buy. When my RAZR comes back from (warrantied) repair I'll probably sell one of the two of them, since they're both selling for way more than I paid.
This drink looks deadly — 2750mg taurine, 686mg D-Ribose, and 343mg Caffeine and a whack of vitamins. I can't imagine it's that healthy. I drink these things in part because I basically don't sleep unless I'm on painkillers (last night I took one of my last two codeines, which are just enough to get me about six to eight hours of catch-up sleep)… But really the reason I wanted to post this is that I think it's brilliant packaging and cross-marketing.
If I'm not letting 3' snowbanks stop me, I'm not letting pylons stop me. So yeah, they're out a few pylons now. I'm actually getting curious about it now, and might call the city and find out of funeral homes have religious exemptions from parking codes or something. If not, I'm going to demand that either they start towing their vehicles, or I get a $150 refund for when they towed me for parking in essentially the same spot. I don't care that they have more money than me, and I don't care that they have more corpses in their basement than I do.
Other than that, Nik's Celtic Colnel is doing the blog rounds…
We've got fresh snow, and many of the side streets haven't been plowed yet so it's a lot of fun to be a big truck today! I'm in full-time 4WD of course and have enough clearance that pretty much nothing will stop me — it's enormous fun being able to drive in the side lanes that normal vehicles can't handle, so in this weather I can sometimes get lucky and get places twice as fast, as if there's no traffic… And you can't beat powersliding and doing donuts in parking lots!
That said, my memories of childhood are such that if I actually had to tell this lie to someone who wasn't drunk, I could probably do it and believe it while doing it. My father really did drill into me not only warrior culture and my only experience with tattooing as a child was the understanding that you earned them through challenge, and my mother, who really is from Africa, exposed me to graphic “how-to” books on African body modification… and the whole time I was being told I could be anyone I wanted to be. So who knows what role that played, but it's certainly a foundation I could use to tell the story, especially if I transmogrified a few (also true) stories about not having English as my first language and so on.
Today is going to be a long day. I went to bed early but only got about four hours of sleep because my knee kept me up. I think that having no sensation for a while has reduced my pain threshholds. Anyway, after I post this I'm going to head off for an hour at the gym, first time since the surgery… And after that I committed myself to serving pizza to kids at Nefarious's school because one of the other parents previously scheduled bailed, and literally every single other person refused. So I'll probably be pretty dead by the end of the day.
I don't like funerals as a general statement. Outside of not liking them emotionally, in general terms I find the process of corpse disposal offensive — the idea of spending tens of thousands of dollars, as well as valuable realestate, on a corpse, seems completely idiotic (as does pouring the equivalent of 320 gallons of fuel on someone to cremate them — which incidentally makes up 0.2% of all CO2 emmissions on the planet and aerates many other toxic chemicals). But, even atheists do this nonsensical and destructive religious act, in part because the government forces it.
Here's what I want for my funeral.
I want to get stuck in a freezer so I'm completely frozen solid all the way through. Then there's to be a big party in a forest, at the height of which my frozen corpse gets chucked in the wood chipper and I'm sprayed into the forest, where I'll be directly reabsorbed into the latticework of life on this planet. The bacteria in my body that make me who I am will go on living in other animals, and to a small extent I stay immortal… Much better than being embalmed (filled with poison) and placed in a sealed box to ensure that whatever miniscule part of me is left alive will not transition from life to death to life as has happened seamlessly until very recent human history.
Too bad it's illegal to be a part of nature.
Anyway, speaking of funerals, what I dislike more than the concept of funerals is the legal protections that specific forms of funerary practices receive. What I've described above (and even milder variations on it like getting buried on your family farm) would be very illegal in most areas. However, if some rich dude dies, the police escort a huge procession that shuts down taxpayer streets, runs red lights, and so on. Yesterday I was driving down the street and a suited woman stepped out into the street with a big stop sign, in front of the funeral home that always has its hearse parked illegally in front all the time. Oh, speaking of driving:
So anyway, this woman steps in front of me with a big stop sign, literally trying to stop all traffic so their stupid hearse and support vehicles could all leave at the exact moment they felt like it. Fuck that. So I just kept going. I may have even sped up a little. She had to jump out of the street. Seriously, I have no patience for people who think they have special rights to use resources we all pay for (like the roads). That means if you're a hearse, you'd better respect cars, and if you're a car, you'd better respect bikes.
