Saturday, March 31, 2007

death

"I'd rather DIE than go to heaven" -- William Murderface
"Today we are going to talk about HELL" -- Father Maxi
"Death is the end of life in a biological organism, marked by the full cessation of its vital functions." -- Wikipedia

Much can be said on the subject of death. Each second brings us closer to death (by controlled internal burning). Death is all around us and it's very much necessary for life to exist. We live off death. There. I've said it. When a living body ceases to die, it becomes, well, cancer. Cancer is immortal. Yeah, I prefer embracing death. Besides, it's cool, with the black hood and scythe and all that. Real cool. I want to wear a black hood too, and wield a deadly scythe and be omnipotent! Oh. Wait. I already am.

beer

The dentist fixed my teeth, I had a nice walk in the park, dark skies, cold winds, beer with mr Wacky. Which reminds me. Some time ago, while working in the lab, I decided to inquire mr Wacky as to the possibility of having a beer with me that evening. So I opened the messenger window and just stood there questioning the wisdom of such a decision. I was after all, quite tired. And then mr. Wacky read my mind and asked me out for a beer in the same window, 1 minute later. Now that's cool. I have to research that some time.

Monday, March 26, 2007

teeth

these days i have to go to the dentist to plug a hole in my tooth. It's already cleaned up, so the doctor told me to give it some rest and come back in a month or so to have it plugged if everything's ok. Stupid auto-correct suggester, suggesting wok and oak as replacements for "ok". Yup. I'll sit beneath an oak or take a shitty walk. So I had to go to the dentist on the 28th, so I stuck a bright green post-it note writing: 3 o'clock, Wednesday 28th, teeth! Ok. Suggesting I should correct that to "k". How lame. K. So last Tuesday, it was the 20th I think. I got to sleep late as usual thinking damn it, I have to go fix my teeth tomorrow 'cause it's the 22nd and I have an appointment set up for Wednesday the 22nd. The next day, Wed the 21st, I wake up at 2pm and say hey, I gotta go fix my teeth, cause you know, it's the 22nd, and I got an appointment a t the dentist's on the 22nd. Of course :). So I arrive at the dentist's at 3:30, soaked from the heavy rain, and I am kindly informed that my appointment is actually on the 28th. Yeah. It figures. I return home and I read the post-it note: teeth on the 28th. Yup. Correct.

Monday, March 12, 2007

last-minute revelation

DUDE! that no-to-be stuff I posted 5 minutes ago reminded me of what my good friend ph0enix1810 showed me a few days ago. I think it contained quotes from some movie that gave an interesting perspective on depression. It said something like, people feel chronically sad and depressed and so on because they identify themselves with their grief and reassert that each time they say "I am sad, I am sick, I am depressed." You are not depressed, you qualify as a human being actually. Rephrasing that like "I feel depressed" seems to have a much weaker subconscious impact. Now that IS, without any doubt, without a question, absolutely certainly, a statement.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

insanity

i need sleep. i cannot sleep. can't remember anything. nothing makes sense.

oh yeah. now i remember.
take a look at what i found while browsing wikipedia.
it's a style of writing in which one refrains from using the verb 'to be'.
Now the reason why they gave it such an idiotic name, I can only take a wild guess at. Maybe it's like when you have a price P of 1.5 bucks for a bottle of beer, but then you go to the other bar and you have a price P' of just 3/4 bucks? I mean, would they be so stupid as to call such a nice idea simply 'the other E.nglish', or 'English version 2'? Oh, by the way, this blog actually uses Web 1.13. The 2.0 version is unstable and buggy. Don't buy that crap.
Apart from its absolutely ridiculous nomenclature, the be-less idea is very nice. Excuse me, I meant the idea fascinates me. It implies a whole new way of thinking about the world and it forces one to exercise care in writing. I have to think more before I write, and I need to acknowledge that my way of stating issues has a profoundly relative quality. Moreover, my way of viewing the world shows the same relativity and subjectivity, which of course I already knew, but have seldom expressed in practice. Philosophy apart, I really find it nicer to read, speak and also to write. Now to call it something worthy of referencing such a valuable concept. I suggest 'English without to be', which I find much more appropriate and self-explanatory. Also, if one were to use this scheme in another language, its name could be easily and appropriately translated.

The next thing I will talk about tonight refers to an advertisement for some cream that supposedly acts on the skin's DNA to reduce aging. I semi-like that commercial more than many others, however I must point out that, even if I lived in a society where men used face cream as often as women did, and even if I myself used face cream, I would most certainly NOT want it acting on my skin DNA to keep me looking youthful. For example, here's some stuff that acts on your skin DNA: mustard gas :)
Quoting: "The compound readily eliminates chloride ion by intramolecular nucleophilic substitution to form a cyclic sulfonium ion. This very reactive intermediate is particularly detrimental to cellular health as it has a strong tendency to bond to the guanine nucleotide in DNA strands. This leads to either immediate cellular death or, as recent research has found, cancer. Mustard gas is not very soluble in water but is very soluble in fat, contributing to its rapid absorption into the skin."
It causes painful blisters and may also cause blindness. That's cool! :D Reminds me of Dethklok episode 1. Yeah. There's some marketing for you.

Thursday, March 8, 2007

my life has been saved

I am crazy. And sometimes I'm absent-minded. Everyone knows that. In chronological order since childhood and until recently, I've been in the emergency room for: swallowing mechanical parts, jumping off furniture head-first into an iron heater, beating up a cactus that had pissed me off, chewing on my fingertips, falling onto an iron spike on an abandoned construction site, taking a wrong step in front of my residence while being too fat, eating filth, walking past a newspaper stand which was covered with a sharp piece of tin hanging at my head level, and playing with high voltage. They wanted to operate on me at least 2 times but fortunately changed their minds. This may sound like a lot, but it's actually nothing. I met people that took real damage and are came out OK. Now, let's see what other things I did that could have ended very badly, but didn't. When I was a kid I used to stare into needles and razor blades. Bring them closer and closer, until they got blurry, and then even closer. And closer. I didn't have a criterion for stopping, and you can't really judge the distance until maybe you touch your eyelashes with your finger, given that the exposed part of the needle / blade is short enough, which it wasn't. Compared to this, the chewing of said blades into tiny pieces seems insignificant, but it's still worth mentioning. Wonder if I can still do it. I mean, there are people that put spikes through their arms, mouths etcetera, so... Then there's that time I grabbed onto a pipe and let myself hang above a 20-meter deep well, after a failed attempt of scaring everyone by grabbing onto some aerial power cables. The 3 times I wrecked my bike going down the hill don't even count. Maybe getting stuck on a mountain cliff in the middle of nowhere for almost 2 hours counts, but then again, maybe not. Before that I used to have absolutely no fear of heights. I could walk on a pipe crossing a deep valley. Which is just, because a cat can also do that, as easily as if the pipe was at "ground" level. Well anyway, that's changed, luckily, some may say. But I still want to do bungee jumping. Some years ago, some guys organized bungee jumping sessions early in the morning on some abandoned crane. Yup, in Bucharest one does occasionally find abandoned cranes even near the city center. I didn't go, partly because I didn't know who the guys were and where to find them (the legality of it all was probably dubious), and partly because I was too lazy to dig up said contact info. Or maybe God subconsciously suggested me to be lazy, just as he did when I got the idea of climbing up that crane alone, even without jumping. Like that dude that threatened to kill himself and got the Police, Ambulance and Firefighters busy at 3 am. Well, yesterday that crane fell, wrecked 6 cars and narrowly missed several people. Cool. Hey, what can I say. Thanks.

a wide disaster

A few evenings ago I was leaving the university building after a long, hard day, with the clear intention of heading home, eating an extra-large pizza and a can of tuna, complete with artificial lemon juice and some stuff labeled "pizza seasoning" which I use because I can no longer find my favorite "Indian seasoning" in the stores.
As I was stepping down the stairs, the mild, cool spring air hit me in the face like a thunderstorm. I was deafened by the gentle sparrows' chirps. The brilliant, yellow-red sunset somehow looked dimmer than usual. It was dark gray transparent clouds disguised as a bright sunset. The sky was all black. And the moon was eclipsed. It had a dark red glow, the exact color of coagulated blood.
I started walking towards the subway station which is half a km away. The damn Polytechnic, besides being the coolest university in Bucharest, and having the greatest campus, is situated exactly between 3 subway stations and either way you cut it, there is no optimal way of reaching it without using either 2 subway trains and one trolleybus or 1 subway train, 1 tramway AND 1 trolley. Despite its apparent length, this last option actually seems optimal, minus the fact that it costs about 5 beers a month more. This without taking into account the new RFID chips they put into surface transport cards that track your every movement. The cameras in the subway seem more friendly.
So I started walking towards the subway, and I was struck with fear! I looked around me, there was absolute quiet, except for the thunder enveloping me. I looked up, the skies were clear, except the black clouds I was talking about. And the birds were singing. Grindcore. Then I knew something was going to be very wrong.
I cautiously descended inside the station, knowing it was the safest place to be in case of an earthquake, airstrike, whatever. But then it occurred to me, it was the least safe place in case of a terrorist attack. This did not happen until I saw a box of flowers. What was a box of flowers doing in a subway train?? Well, this is a good opportunity to review Valentine's Pay.
Here in Romania, before Valentine's Pay got imported from America, we used to have an ancient tradition called Dragobheteh or something like that, don't know exactly how to spell it for you. Only problem was, nobody knew or cared about it. So when Communism fell and its great achievement, the Bucharestian Subway remained, they imported Valentine's Pay from America to try and westernize us. But then traditionalists got pissed off and a few years ago they started shouting, like, hey dudes, you know, we got our OWN Valentine's Pay on Feb. 24th, and it's traditional, which by supreme divine logic also means it is absolutely respectable and intangible. But hey, I just touched it! It's like, when a movie comes out in America, we have to wait a few weeks for it to hit the cinemas here. So we download crappy copies of it, filmed with a hand camera in some American cinema. So here in Romania, it's like having to see Valentine's Pay -- Ultra Exciting but Crappy Preview on Feb. 14th, and then going to the cinema to see Valentine's Pay -- Full Experience Widescreen Surround Sound on Feb. 24th. (I hate the whole widescreen idea. If I ever make a movie, it will be a rational multiple of VGA resolution. Period.) But wait! There's more! :) Here we also have a so called Martzishor on March 1st, which is also highly traditional but, unlike Valentine's Pay Official Premiere, it's a popular celebration and has been so since immemorial times. So what are we supposed to do on Valentine's Pay Reloaded? Give a crappy object called a Martzishor, which is some kind of traditional piece of artistic handy crap, to each female school colleague or co-worker. And when you thought it was finally over, there comes Valentine's Pay Revolutions on March 8th. Which is Woman's Day. Now this is somehow more acceptable than the other 3 days and has a somewhat higher philosophy, it's the day you give your mom a nice gift, but apart from this this, you should probably also spend as much cash as one week ago on flowers for all your colleagues. Which I gracefully avoided this year on both dates by skipping school. So let's summarize: (ignoring the weak autoformatting that I don't care to fix right now)





Feb 14Valentine's Pay Imported
Feb 24Valentine's Pay Local Opening
Mar 01Valentine's Pay Reloaded
Mar 08Valentine's Pay Revolutions
There you have it. FOUR days demanding heavy spending in less than a month. This is not about love, respect, or other superior concepts, it's about cash and social pressure.
My last girlfriend, I bought her a spiked collar for Valentine's Pay, and she liked it. That was cool. My current girlfriend, I now buy her beer. That rules. Everything is as it should be :D

So. I was holding tight to the safety rail as the train was galloping through the tunnel, and then I notice that crate full of flowers with no apparent owner around. As the train was entering a station, I was nervously looking around trying to identify who owned that crate. I visualized myself asking everyone around me "excuse me, is this your crate?" "sorry, do you know whose crate is that?" and then shouting "WHO OWNS THIS CRATE full of flowers?!", pushing the big red alarm button and dashing towards the front of the train, seeking cover behind a panel. But the doors opened, two guys got up some 6 meters away, took the crate and left. Yeah, they were selling flowers for Valentine's Pay. Probably on the black market too.

I got home and everyone was all right. Some news about a quake somewhere far away, but not the 200kilodeaths that would have qualified it as top disaster of the decade. I was going to say "century", but then I remembered people die in mass quite frequently on this planet. So there, no premonition, just sleep deprivation and a coffee overdose. God damn it, it's 4 am again.

Monday, March 5, 2007

dude! i almost forgot! :)

VALENTINE'S DAY SUCKSssssss :D
Valentine's Pay sucks. Man, it's genius! Saw it in a local newspaper. Valentine's Pay. Yup. Nothing can sum up what it's all about like "Valentine's Pay" does. And I'm not a supporter of Steak and Blowjob Day, but Valentine's Pay sucks. The mere fact that there's a Catholic saint that has something to do with love is wrong. The simple fact that in modern times, many people equate love with sex, is wrong. And that the Church has a saint who deals with sex, is so wrong. Everything about this Pay is wrong. It's like being nice to your girlfriend (and that includes Paying) in order to get sex. It's like prostitution. Not that there's something very wrong with prostitution, except that to maintain fairness, it should be labeled as such. S & BJ would be just a gender-wise reflection, and I have to admit it's damn funny and very politically correct. Still, screw Valentine's Pay. You know what would be cool for Valentine's Pay? A death metal concert, complete with moshpit and head wounds, and sex afterwards. (Do maggots have sex in one's wounds, or do they just lay eggs? Or does it depend on the type of maggot?). Still working on the blacker-than-black paint made of powdered black holes. Shit, it's 5 am and I've got work this morning. Shit.

2001: we need more bits

there are 3 main points i want to make here. maybe 4.
1) space odyssey rules.
2) the millennium starts in 2001, you idiots
3) yeah, there was a slight year 2000 bug, which would have allowed everyone who activated their subway travel card on something like november 30th or december 1st 1999 to use it for one whole year instead of just one month. but there's going to be another bug in 2038, because on certain systems time is a 32-bit integer counting how many seconds have passed since 1970. And there are not enough bits :) Read wikipedia. wikipedia is your friend, just as google is.
4) so if one needs more bits, like 64, to keep time properly, how many bits does one need to keep stupid? i browse through wikipedia daily, because, as i said, wikipedia rules. i don't read books. most books suck. i watch tv (which also sucks) and read wikipedia. and today, it has come to my attention that stupid needs to be upgraded. to at least 128 bits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hearts.jpg
"Members of a fraternity displaying their new heart brands."
Why don't you tattoo 666 on your foreheads next time, you 0x000000F000000000000540041d1d1o45.
Using nitric acid.

discovery sucks and religion is wrong.

nothing can be more boring than american hotrod on discovery and jurassica on discovery science. and it seems to be going on like this for hours. all night. it's plain annoying. i mean, there are a lot of good shows on discovery. a lot of very good shows. american hotrod is just a miserable copy of american chopper, a show that really rules. but this hotrod stuff, it simply lacks punch. american hotrod pisses me off. dinosaurs also blow. i've grown to hate the effin' dinosaurs. dinosaurs here, dinosaurs there, elaborate computer simulations with how dinosaurs eat, sleep and sleep with each other. it's Lame. it's not even photo-realistic, but that's another rant. the ONLY thing there is to learn from studying dinosaurs is that religion is wrong, period. that, dude, hello, there was life like 200 million years ago, and whether that was made by a god, by God, or whatever, it really doesn't matter. (most of) religion is wrong for telling me otherwise and (most of) religion is wrong for telling me what is good and bad in an absolute fashion and it's plain wrong for trying to regulate my sexual functions. now of course, that's no reason to throw feces in religion's eye. but i've got good reason to rant about discovery's lousy programming and the fact that here in romania they've started airing commercials on discovery, _romanian_ commercials, which suck! not only do most romanian commercials lack any intellectual appeal, which is to be expected, but some feature intentionally bad sound production in order to catch the viewers' attention, and that pisses me off. you hear an idiot woman actor that sounds something like an idiot man with a sore throat. why would you want to emphasize the bass in that idiot's voice so much and not simply hire a male idiot to read her part? some of these days i have to write a list of products that i will absolutely never buy because their advertising sucks! this being said, there's that "documentary" that claims to be scientific only because some feel science is above everything else! i mean leave jesus alone, jesus a cool fellow. leave him alone unless you've got some scientific evidence, which you don't.