This last week in astronomy and physics seems really wild.

Twice now, Donald Trump and his campaign staff have accused Obama of using a time machine. Once to kill Capt. Humayun Khan in Iraq in 2004, and once to found ISIS in 1999. (To be fair, it was called Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad then, morphing into Al Qaeda in Iraq in 2004, then finally becoming the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in 2013.)

I have always been skeptical that the Tea Party was ever really primarily a grassroots movement. Much like Trump, it always looked like an astroturfing corporate-funded money-making scheme meant to capitalize on populist anger (which manifests mainly as virulent anti-government sentiment, xenophobia, and misogyny).

not just loneliness weighing gravid, doleful,
becoming this furtiveness rooted, still
seeming in the light to be seen, yet unseen
amidst the hundred thousand voices seething, roiling, teeming
the faces, the gestures, all worn-down by rehearsal
words spoken by rote, by habit, stripped of meaning

Pardon my French, but it’s hotter than a motherfucker out there. This wouldn’t be a big deal at all if I actually had air-conditioning. I’m actually contemplating the idea of renting a hotel room just so I can turn the thermostat to 55 degrees and chill. Literally.

D’oh! Another thing I realized is that I just nuked my Mephisto database. The only thing still sitting on the server are some random archives and the index, and luckily, the Atom feed. I have my Wordpress install backed up, and my database for Typo is still around, so the only thing I’m probably missing are a few posts between the last time I used Typo and the oldest entry I posted from Mephisto that is still in the Atom file. Hopefully I can import all this stuff without too much headache.

So apparently it was all Dreamhost’s fault. Both Mephisto and Movable Type are working at reasonable speeds. I still stand by the notion that Dreamhost really can’t handle Ruby on Rails very well. I’m looking into switching to (or at least adding on) a different shared host. Site5 looks promising.

The real reason I grew confused and insane is that I realized that I still like someone else a lot, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. (And this is probably unwise and stupid to post here, but I really don’t care anymore. I’m like a tagger with a spraypaint can, leaving “Kilroy was here” all over the place, like a dog pissing on trees. If you can figure out who I am, and who I’m talking about, well, good for you, it doesn’t change a goddamn thing.)

I feel like I’m completely losing my mind. There are like ten trillion ideas whizzing around my brain. This can’t be good for me.

A very strange dream

The fruits of meditation. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

You've got to be shitting me… a whole week!?!? Missing?

I am sitting in an airport terminal right now. I got here absurdly early (which is highly uncharacteristic) and I am bored out of my mind.