lol, limewire

SNL has never been funny, ever. Argue all you want, it's 90% shite. ok, here's 5% funny.

Did you donate to Child's Play yet? If not, DO IT. Those guys do great things and have kept me entertained for more years than I've ever been entertained by anything. --

Probable song cover: Unicorn

Bob Ross, the video game

I feel like sometimes we should ask more scientists what they think of things. Little fucking cuties.

I'm encouraged to listen to my iPod at my new job, which is pretty sweet. Definitely one of a few pretty great perks of working for a Web 2.0 company / company whose well-being rides on portable audio. I have a hard time listening to most music at work lately because it's sort of distracting.. but the new Califone album has been a huge exception. It's the perfect soundtrack for background listening. There are quite a few parts that are so awesome that they do distract me... but that's a good thing, I think. ***

Here's my top whatever of 2006, in no order:

* Beezewax - Who to Salute
* Beezewax - Music to the Life of the Late Olivia Mordecai
* Jon Auer - In The Year of Our Demise
* Maritime - We, the Vehicles
* Appleseed Cast - Peregrine
* Mogwai - Mr. Beast
* Lemonheads - s/t
* Califone - Roots & Crowns
* Tattle Tales - Hearts in Tune
* Islands - Return to the Sea
* Thermals - the Body, the Blood, the Machine
* Steinways - Missed the Boat
* Portastatic - Be Still Please
* AV Club - s/t --

I think there's a few I missed, if I remember 'em I'll update the list.

here are some sky pictures of note, all have been hit liberally with gimp's unsharp mask feature.

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ayeeeee

find ourselves a new place to haunt.

so three planets were recently visible in the dawn sky. jupiter, mercury and mars. i found that out by stumbling across this site. after reading through most of the archives and clicking around pretty much everywhere i have discovered that i am fully devoted to plasma physics research.

what started it all was a curiosity piqued by this nasty bastard. weatherman turned paranoid by observing unusual variations in what he thought he understood. bitter by the reluctance of anyone else in his field to make a comment. currently sitting on a wealth of information dangerously technical for approachable awareness. and of course his influence has spread.

so through known manipulation of the ionosphere a gaggle of different outlets here on earth are toying with forces until now only ignored. we are indeed entering a new era.

so plasma physics concerns our atmosphere and most of the material sustaining our universe. nothing big. for me, it's largely the effect of the sun on these physices that hold my interest. solar wind caused by coronal ejections send particles careening towards earth at high speeds (millions of miles an hour) only to be deflected by our magnetosphere. this activity is responsible for causing simultaneous and matching auroras at the north and south poles. recently, during a period of solar minimum, we have had a significant amount of activity. specifically sunspot 930. attentive to this hole, spaceweather.com notes

"One week ago today, sunspot 930 unleashed an X9-class solar flare--one of the strongest flares in years...The sunspot's tangled magnetic field still harbors energy for X-flares"

if you click on that link for strongest flares, it will take you to a list of the 20 strongest x-class flares since there has been equipment to measure such a thing ('80?). the one we experienced on the 5th of december is #15. not too shabby. what does this mean? i do not know. it means lucky bastards near the poles get some enjoyment.

edit: i cant give you enough links. an article on this recent flare and a video of japan's hinode.

jumpin at shadows.

how we doing today? i pass VLA's near every day. this one happens to be off of astropix. for the unfamiliar, it is a daily astronomy related picture website. i tend to go as often as i can. oh, a VLA is a very large array. array of satellites. the ones i happen across are in vernon, nj. and their purpose is for all manner of things, i assume. i saw some big fuckers in alaska, when i went. still paying for that. but yeah, this astropix brought something to my attention the other day. yesterday. yesterdays astropix really got my attention. it was a vid of the surface of the sun taken by the japanese hinode satellite. im pretty much in love with soho, its in my bookmarks under blogs. but soho is aging, and nasa runs all sorts of blurs over the photos, because there is something they either dont want you to see, or they are being selfish with the higher resolution photos. either way, what you see on that site, and what the equipment is capable of, is a very large rift (capable and current). i wish i knew why. but you see this hinode business. when they posted this i wish they had a channel on tv i could just tune into. oh, you can find that video here, by the way.

im getting really into the sun. i get up early to see it come up on the horizon. i study what the changing light conditions do to the appearance of the clouds. i buy these powerful magnets and run hypotheticals and conditions on them. to me it does not get much better. magnets people, magnets. magnetosphere? i really dont know. but i have this video i borrowed from derek called solar max. what a ride this sucker is.

speaking of rides, or lack there of, i got to retry the fountain experience. to me, this is an enjoyable film, if only slightly. i just cant help but feeling there could be more. the story could have moved in a direction it did not. i left feeling just a little cheated, or something. maybe this is how i feel, maybe i feel that im on the level with the content here; to me, it is approachable. therefore there are things id like to think i know which are rich in lore and legend to take and pull this sucker up and over the top. there was too much cheese. these days a movie has to have some sort of romantic plot line. basically it has to have a plot line. maybe i felt a documentary would have suited this topic a little better?

its hard to grasp what im feeling. which is the reason i traded away two of the superstar names i was so in love with on my fantasy hockey team. todd bertuzzi and peter forsberg now belong to de best. i set up a condition i thought was fair and probably ended up ripping myself off. gotta look forward tho. and yall really dont care. do you care that every time a dry leaf blows in front of my car i think its a critter which results in me swerving all over the road and an elevated heart rate? it has happened so many times youd think id be over it. its happened repeated seasons. yet no matter what i take the bait and bite. speaking of sympathy for critters, i lost isaac yesterday. its kinda sad. i liked that bird. maybe ill catch up with you later, isaac.

so yeah, if youre looking for something new to listen to try out the gotan project, i got lunatico and i really like it.

This post-Q And Not U project seems intriguing. A little bit like the old Q, but with more palatable (male/female) vocals and a bit of 50s pop charm. Now that I'm on this post-Q kick I'm realizing that I never really gave Ris Paul Ric a chance. The two songs he has up on his myspace are pretty good...

Marissa and I almost went to see The Fountain on Friday. Well, it was slightly less than almost. Faced with a Friday night with nothing to do for the first time in what feels like (and probably was) months, we decided to use it to do just about nothing. Well, except for dinner and a movie... but, compared to the other stuff we've been doing lately it certainly seemed relaxing and nothing-like. Unfortunately our plan was ill-fated. I left my office (Wayne) at 7 o'clock to pick Marissa up (Jersey City) so that we could go to dinner (Montclair, about 3 miles from my starting point) and finally to the movies (Wayne, about 10 paces from my starting point). Although it was a sort of circular plan, the timing seemed reasonable. However, I've never once driven to Montclair coming from the east, and botched up what I remembered being a decent way to go. We didn't get our dinner on until 9:30, so we had to skip the movie. Fortunately it was a nice enough experience to make up for the fact that I'd blown our non-plans for the evening.

The few times we've had Italian food since visiting Italy, I've tried my best to recreate an order that similar to what we had over there.. but it's been tough. I think Friday night's was the best attempt yet, though. I'd forgotten the name over the weekend, but the internet helped me remember that it was called Palazzo. Pretty sure it was the best wine I'd ever tasted. ***

I remain mentally obsessed with Final Fantasy 12 but also without enough time to play it. Having Final Fantasy 3 DS in my pocket is nice... but doesn't quite satisfy the hunger that I have. I'm 15 hours in and feel like I just barely started. These games certainly have a way of skewing what I envision as normal gaming... or well, normal living in general. ***

There's a new band. Pretty sure it's way better than the old band. But of the 5 people that read this, two of them besides me are in it... so not much to talk about there. ***

I'd like to have some of that wine about now. --

Football is a 'Gentlemans'' game, played by 'thugs', Rugby is a 'thugs'' game, played by 'Gentlemen'

mornin' everybody.

not really organized today. just eager to bump chris's posts further down the page. woo, mystery job.

seriously though chris, i wish you the best of luck and i hope you're very happy, sincerely. how bout that word, sincere. cant be too careful with that one.

ah but time lurches forward. amazing, cause i feel like i am the force pressing back against it. well, life is, not me specifically. culture and counterculture.

salman rushdie, shalimar the clown. this is a book im reading. its choc full of indian lore (dot not feather). im starting to notice that rushdie enjoys creating very explicit sexual scenes in his novels. i dont know how i feel about that but it does something weird to my body. my hormonal makeup. he also is very adept at playing with indian and english words. hidden meanings and striations. i dont know what else to say. all his books have a sense of the fantastic and a courtesy to the spirit. it takes my mind off matters which wrestle to bring me down.

i went and saw the fountain the other day. before i went i got loaded on mad elf and alprazolam. senses blunted, i stumbled into the theater. not hard to imagine i dont recall a single thing. kristen, whom i saw it with, was eager to discuss it prior. how embarrassing when i had to fake like i was cogent. isnt it about time we dropped that second R from embarrassing. id like to see it again. its a movie finally worth my time. no?

what else have i been up to? im trying to make it a habit to consume grapefruit on the regular. something hunter thompson did every morning. well, his morning was around noon sometime. i remember reading somewhere his philosophy on eating. breakfast is a huge meal with a pot of dark coffee and at least two grapefruits. also drugs. he conceded that the huge breakfast, coffee and grapefruit thing came from mahamud ali. i tend to think about hunter often. specifically being trapped in ones body, it rebelling against life. i get flashes of that feeling. sends me into a meditation on purpose and intent. then ideas of sacrifice and all these "holy" sayings and church thoughts step up and demand attention. if i had to i would.

the other day the phrase, time heals all wounds, up and lumbered into my sphere. im wont to sharing company with such forces, so we played. now its easy to see how this applies, very subtly, to things right in your face. but this word time. that there is expanse. and some wounds are very large. expanse. vast.

there is a larger picture here.