*yaaaawn* What year is it?

Ok... what the actual fuck?

 

Jesus... It's been a long time. I missed you. No, really! What have you been up to? That's cool. Same old same old, eh? Me? Well allow me to bore you with an incredibly detailed blog update that I'm writing in order to take up time at work...

 

 

I said no, no, no...

 

I'm addicted to Rehab. That sounds a lot funnier than it really is, but I'm comfortable with that. It all started this summer when I was reffing roller derby a lot (I'm up to over 60 bouts reffed, by the way!). Imagine this scenario. You had a great time on a Friday night with friends, eating lousy bar food and drinking a bit more than your fair share (and your fair share, and yours, and yours). But you have to be at the derby bout at 1 in the afternoon the next day to ref a double header, and you KNOW that's not enough time to get normal again. After all, you're not twenty anymore. You can't just go and treat your own body like its yours and it'll do whatever you want. So you wake up bleary eyed, hung over, headachey, and your stomach seems to want to reject any possibility of solidity. You get dressed, shower, realize your mistake, take off your now wet clothes, shower again, and get ready for the bout. By 12:30 you're still feeling a tad south of miserable. You go to a gas station... You buy a Rehab... and boom. Like a shot of pure, cold, tea flavored youth you instantly feel light years better. You're focused, ready for the day, and to complete the cycle, after the bouts you do it ALL OVER AGAIN. This stuff is magic. And holy christwagons on a taco plane IT COMES IN FOUR FLAVORS! Honestly, I can't remember an elixir that fixed a broken human better than this. Except for that stuff in Reanimator. That shit was probably Rehab too...

 

Green tea flavored rehab should bring this head back from the dead... I am very well adjusted...

 



Also, I live with my friend as a roommate now. He is a computer programming night owl, so I am forced... FORCED I tell you... to watch star trek DS9 well into the wee hours. Rehab works for that, too. Very well indeed. I still drink coffee like a motherbitch though.

 

So what else is new... Oh yeah...

 

These guys... THESE FUCKING GUYS...

 

Fuck bed bugs. Fuck them in their little fucking fuckfaces. I don't want any species to be eliminated from the planet (even Tea Partiers) but THESE fuckers can fucking die in a fire. If I have to shoot each one of them with a god damn bazooka I will with a great big grin on my face and I'll pay for all the ammunition. I don't know exactly how they got in to my apartment, but I have my suspicions...

 

I had been letting a cat stay in my apartment for a couple of months. She will go in and out at her leisure. I think she picked up some eggs (you know its bad when they breed like fucking lizard chicken demons) from a couch or chair someone threw out and she napped on. I didn't know I had them til my girlfriend spent the night and got bit almost fifty times...

 

I'll let that sink in. I didn't know I had them. I don't react to their bites. My girlfriend got bit fifty times in a night. How long had they been feeding on my delicious blood? I'm guessing that there's a family of a couple of hundred people that would have been saved if I had donated that blood rather than let it be harvested by evil fucking Satan's dingleberries.

 

Naturally I reacted calmly and rationally... Ok. I freaked out. I've moved, bombed all my stuff, got rid of most of my furniture, poisoned every inch of my bed, vacuumed my mattress and washed all my clothes (ALL of them) in hot water and dried them on high for at least an hour. All told, I have no clue how much money I've spent trying to eliminate these little antipodean specks of ass chunks from my life. Now I'm going to tell you some of their little awful habits... the best way to kill something is to know how it lives (you hear me, potential serial killers?).

 

First they shit little black smears. That's how you know you have them if you don't see them in person. Of course, the fecal smears look like mold, so you never know for certain, so the appropriate reaction is to set whatever it is you suspect on fire and listen to them scream.

 

Next, they live in solitary colonies. They don't like living near each other, but have to preserve their space. So they live in tiny little clusters of individuals that hate. I saw a couple of those colonies on my box springs. So my reaction was to set them on fire and listen to them scream.

 

Finally, they are very flat, so they can live in very thin areas... like the hems of clothes... or the folds in a mattress... or behind your eyes. The solution? Fire. Screams.

 

To this very day I can't get a good nights sleep (it's been almost two months) without waking up every time a hair on my arm moves. I slap at nothing even though I've moved to a new place and taken great steps to eliminate any animals from my person except for my cats, and they're getting me suspicious. I do also live with one of my best friends now, who put up with my massacre with great aplomb...

 

And not a bit of absurdity...

 

Also... The coolest thing! I've changed my emphasis in my biology degree...

 

Finally my hobby of playing with dead people will actually PAY!

 

I'm going in to forensic science! What? Oh, for the sake of fuck, I KNOW that CSI isn't an accurate representation of the job. But Here's the deal. I have some criteria for a job that I would enjoy doing for the rest of my life...

 

1. I want a job that not a lot of other people can do for whatever reason.

 

2. I don't mind gore.

 

3. I want a career before I'm fucking 40 years old.

 

4. I want to deal with the sciences.

 

5. I like solving puzzles.

 

Find another job that fits those criteria. I dare ya. I've talked a lot to some specialists in this field and they've said that the worst part of the job is the smell of rotting corpses. They say that they keep a change of clothes in their offices at all times because you never know when you'll bring that smell home with you. That's the only thing I'm worried about. But it's exciting! The mere fact of being able to do a job like this makes me smile through the blood and gore.

 

Anyway... That's me since we last met. How are you?

 

Song of teh post: Rehab, by Amy Winehouse

Forensic research interest of teh week of teh post: Sharp force trauma wound patterns (stab wounds)



Killing the cat, metaphorically speaking...

You know what bugs me... Hang on, that's not the way to start this...



Let's try this...



Go to a mirror. Look at your reflection. Something you've seen all your life. Sure its changed a bit since, well, every other day, but it's you. Big deal. But try this.

Feel the area of your skull just above your eye sockets. If you're a male, you probably have a ridge there. Females usually don't have this, even though its pervasive through all the races of humanity. This brow ridge is there mostly as an anchor spot for muscles in the face, and for some reason males have bigger muscle scars on their bones than females do (just ask any forensic anthropologist!). There are other muscle scars on other areas of the skull, like behind the ear and the jaw insertions that males seem to have more of than females do. Why is that? We still don't know, but are ya curious?

Now close your eyes. Express happiness. Did you smile? Of course you did. Did you know that people who are blind from birth smile when they're happy? They do. Why? If you go to the animal kingdom, the bearing of teeth is usually used as an expression of aggression. Feral children don't smile. Why do we smile? We think we know, but are you curious yet?

Now just stare at your reflection. See your face? It's composed of atoms, basically. These atoms were cooked up in the furnace of a star, billions of years ago. The carbon in the proteins, the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, all that stuff was thrown from a star as it exploded in its final stages of life. Did you hear that? A star died so you could be here. How does this happen? You curious about that?

All those atoms have been kicking around space for eons, millions of millenia. They coalesced into one form in one sliver of time to make you. And you can contemplate that. Imagine how precious that is! All those billions of years and nothing. Now, in this brief period of time, you are here where nothing once was. You, imperfect, spotty, farty, goofy, perverted, bad habit-having you. You can think about this fact. Isn't that amazing? For almost fifteen billion years there was nothing as far as you're concerned, and now you're experiencing it.

The universe is almost fifteen billion years old. That's fifteen BILLION. That's a large number. It's kind of hard to contemplate. Dinosaurs died out sixty five million years ago. One million years ago our ancestors were just going bald and figuring out that the sharp pointy bits of a stick can bring down a big ole beast to eat. We think that a person who is a hundred years old is really old. Balls. Old is the earth. Over four billion years old. Huge swaths of time passed between the beginning of the universe and the formation of the earth, and more huge swaths of time passed between the beginning of the earth and the formation of life. Huge swaths of time passed between the beginning of life and us. Hundreds of millions of years. There were only five hundred thousand people at Woodstock, and if you pretend each person was one year, that is almost 1/800th of the number of years just multicellular life has been on the planet.

The earth! What a wonderful place. It seems huge, doesn't it! It's massive. It's where everything we know... is! All that has happened , all history, all discovery, all murder, love, war, peace, tyrants and saints, from spears and arrows to rockets and nuclear bombs. All of it is here. At best, we've got a plaque, some footprints, and a flag up on the moon, some bits of metal floating around deep space, but who we are, all of us, is here on this huge planet. Now go to the orbit of Mars and look back. We're nothing but a pixel. All we are and know is on this tiny speck of rock floating in the middle of nothing.

All this grandeur, all the improbable circumstances, all the wonderful things, painful and pleasing, that happened for you to get here are amazing in their scope. To be alive and realize you're alive is awe-inspiring, and now that we know what we know about the universe, it's even more mind boggling! Evolution molding us into what we are today, with no reason or purpose, just natural laws and biology. You are the culmination of an evolutionary journey. You did it. You hit the genetic jackpot, and you didn't even try!

All this amazing possibility and room for growth, the terrifying vastness of the universe, the arrangements of atoms that make up the molecules that make up the DNA that make up you- all a natural process. All explainable. And all you have to do to know about it is learn! To pick up a book about genetics, or astrophysics, or evolution, or geology, or whatever you don't know about, and find out that we figured all this out- talking monkeys figured out all this amazing stuff- is truly a wonderful thing. We are a smart and wonderful species, and our curiosity is something that has propelled us to what we are now. For good or ill, it has been there, helping us.

And then, there are the willfully ignorant, the liars, the people who want to scare you into the small, ever shrinking universe that they find comfortable...


Evolution has no explanation as to why and how around 1.4 million species of animals evolved as male and female . - Ray Comfort

To say that the banana happened by accident is even more unintelligent than to say that no one designed the Coca Cola can. - Kirk Cameron

The real purpose is to say the Bibles true, and its history. Genesis is true. - Ken Ham

Oh, absolutely, ... because, you know, the Bible teaches that God made land animals on day six, alongside of Adam and Eve. - Ken Ham

Only Christianity and its teachings can explain the purpose and meaning of this world--and also gives the basis for right and wrong, good and evil, etc. - Ken Ham

"The Earth is billions of years old. The geologic column is the way to interpret it, and Charles Darwin's evolution is right." That is what they teach in order to be a good communist. Did you know that Russian teachers come to America to study education because the American educational system is considered the best in the world for teaching students these three principals. This prepares them to be good communists and to doubt the word of God. - Kent Hovind

“Who are you gonna believe, the scientists or God?"
(Mewling crowd OF CHILDREN) “God!”
"That's right, and don't you forget it!” - Ken Ham

Cain promoted the evolutionary doctrine that man can progress by his own efforts… When God rejected his [sacrifice], he became angry at God. Since he could not hurt God, he took out his anger on God’s servant, his brother… Cain’s efforts to “evolve” closer to God met with disaster... The story of evolution continues in Gen. 9:22, “And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.” ... When the people left the Tower of Babel, they took their false religion of evolution with them. - Kent Hovind

These people are evil. They want to take your awe, curiosity, and wonder and throw it away, replacing it with shame, flagellation, and the "honor" of begging for forgiveness for being human. They lie, cheat, and in some cases, steal, to have their way with your sense of adventure to make it fit in with their tiny little worldview.

Don't let them do this.

Keep your awe. When you look in the sky at night, don't think that it's a pretty decoration created for you, think of it as a frontier to be explored. When you smell a flower, or pet a puppy, or hold a baby, don't think that it was just a whim of a bored skybeast that brought it into your path, think of how the flower came from other plants, whose evolution is directly linked to the evolution of the insects that pollinate it, or that the puppy came from wolves that inhabited human settlements ten thousand years ago, or that the baby came out of the womb in a time where its chances for surviving were greater than its chances of dying by a huge margin, thanks to medicine, science, innovation, and curiosity.

We are cheated by the people who demand reverence for a bronze age deity. Cheated out of our wonder. Cheated out of our awe. Cheated out of our lives.

Give them nothing but skepticism, and don't take them seriously. They don't love you. They want to destroy the only thing you have that is insubstantial but powerful enough to destroy them...

They want to destroy your curiosity.

Song of teh post: Rise Above, by Black Flag
World view of teh post: Skepticism for the win, baby!