A few weeks of headaches and listlessness, of palpitations and sleeplessness, of such unshakeable weariness
the painkillers and the antibiotics, the receptor blockers and the immune modulators
make you a little less achy, and little less sore, and the nights aren't as fraught
with tossing and turning, and the fluttery, nervous twirling in the pit of your gut
and that basic fear of worrying whether you even know what you're doing anymore
if the next morning will bring some horrific disaster that everyone is counting on you to fix
and you'll just end up standing there uselessly, hands trembling and nerveless
and the roar of triumphant chaos finally sweeps you away from the sandy shores
drowning you in the dark depths of that trackless sea of despair

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Sir Arthur C. Clarke

The evolution of Tolkien’s synthesized mythology of Middle Earth is well documented by his son Christopher Tolkien, who eventually published J.R.R. Tolkien’s notes and various drafts, some of which eventually became incorporated into The Silmarillion

Man, this totally sucks. It’s 1:30 a.m. and I can’t get to sleep. Of course, this means that now I am screwing around with the new blogging engine. As you can tell from the header, things aren’t exactly fixed quite yet, and probably won’t be tonight this morning unless I decide not to sleep at all.

One would be hard pressed to convince me that anti-immigrant sentiments are not synonymous with outright racism. The arguments that immigration foes posit are specious at best. The whole, “they’re taking our jobs” idea just doesn’t fly. I really don’t see too many white people lining up for a back-breaking season of crop harvesting or signing up to clean out rich people’s toilets. These aren’t jobs that white people want, although in a lot of cases, they are jobs that need to be done. A more informed argument is the idea that we have to discourage them from taking these jobs because it only encourages rich bastards to pay workers poorly. There is a lot of truth in this. The problem is that (1) it doesn’t directly address how we can get the rich bastards to pay decent wages and (2) it doesn’t address the economic pressures that drives people from developing countries to find jobs in the U.S. And, realistically, I just don’t see people voluntarily paying top dollar for their lettuce and tomatoes just so my black and brown brothers and sisters can have a living wage, undocumented or no.

So as I noted, I stayed up for 32 hours the past couple of days. I figured that I'd take a four hour nap, pack, and then head up to L.A. to visit my parents. Heh.

Now I should probably know better, but for those of you who know me well, this is probably not surprising at all.

This site compares the extent of the subway networks of various cities. I wonder how L.A.'s MTA light-rail system and the San Francisco BART would compare? Time to do some mailing, I guess.

Heh, those damned comets. Apparently there is a theory that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was caused by a comet (link from Slashdot), and not Mrs. O'Leary's kick-happy cow. Which incidentally jives very well with the explanation Matt Groening gives in "Simpsons Tall Tales", where Paul Bunyan saves the earth from a meteor, but finds it too hot to hold onto, and ends up throwing the meteor onto Chicago.

Viggo Mortensen seems like a pretty cool guy. (link from deconstruct life.) I had only previously known him from films such as "A Perfect Murder" (which was apparently a remake of an Alfred Hitchcock movie—"Dial M for Murder" which is something that I apparently need to watch) and "The Prophecy" (where he plays, of all people, Lucifer and where Christopher Walken plays the angel Gabriel turned evil—the movie was pretty cheesy but watching Christopher Walken was pretty entertaining.)