Tuesday, June 24, 2008

I feel so much better now.

Turns out that the Earth is not in danger of being swallowed up by a precision engineered, man-made black hole that stinks of exotic cheese and Gauloise cigarettes.

That's right, the BBC says that the Large Hadron Collider opening soon on the Swiss-French border won't kill us all.

"Critics have previously raised concerns that the production of weird hypothetical particles called strangelets in the LHC could trigger the mass conversion of nuclei in ordinary atoms into more strange matter - transforming the Earth into a hot, dead lump."

At least it'll probably be a dry heat, right? But it's okay, because the reality is that there's no conceivable danger that it'll happen. In the words of the report:

"Over the past billions of years, nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments - and the planet still exists."

So there.

I love this stuff.

If you want to, read the full article.

Monday, June 23, 2008

What doesn't kill the planet...probably still kills the planet.

Bio-diesel burners beware. Ethanol producers, stop what you're doing. Step away from the corn...

You are killing the Gulf of Mexico.

You bastards.

Okay, in all fairness, it's really just the flooding speeding things up, but hey, why not sensationailze?

Friday, June 20, 2008

Vignettes...

This post is really just an excuse to log into Blogger and write something, since I haven't in a while. I'm not going to explain it.
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If you're on the Atkins diet, can you use Carbo-Pro as race fuel?
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A week or two ago, someone told me that I don't listen to music that she'd listen to in public. I spent a while wondering what exactly this meant. I mean sure, my "Variations on Mmmbop" CD might be a bit embarrassing, but trust me, you've got to hear the Wu Tang version.
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Tonight we were swimming at the cove and I went without a wetsuit for the second time this year, if you count Lavaman. I haven't done the Cove without the benefit of neoprene in a while and I have to say, I had completely forgotten about the scratchy, gloopy awesomeness that is stroking barechested through a stand of kelp. Don't believe me? Try this: grab some 80 grit sandpaper, slide it through a can of Crisco and rub it across your nipples. Trust me, it'll be fun.
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Went to the doctor today to follow up on the foot, which has been backsliding lately into the painful side of things, but the other side of the foot hurts now, so that's something. Anyway, it's been hurting and I thought that I had maybe reinjured it. So I went to see the doc and he grabbed my foot and squeezed it. It went something like this:

"Does this hurt?"

"No."

"Then it's probably not fractured."

"So what do I do about running?"

"You'll have to just work through it."

Yes, that's right, my doctor's advice was to man up.
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Back to the Cove tonight, I swam right over a school (pod, squadron, buttload of?) bat rays. There had to have been 15 or 20 of them. I thought they were awesome, four or six feet below me. The one that was a foot away...it scared the crap out of me. I think I screamed in the water.
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If someone asks you to play Sharks and Minnows, it's a fun pool game. If they ask you to play Sharks and Seals, you'll need a spoon...or a running start.
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