It's late November. The leaves are off the trees, the smell of woodsmoke would be in the crisp air if it would ever stop raining, and it's time for every true American to get ready for that big November event, the annual beginning of the War on Christmas.

Yes, while many people are irritated that the stores are no longer even waiting until after Thanksgiving to put up their Christmas decorations, the American Family Association is already on the warpath because they're not Christmassy enough. They've launched a boycott against the Gap for their store policy of allowing employees to issue whatever holiday greeting they like, instead of requiring them to say "Merry Christmas."

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "But there are many gift-giving holidays that occur in December. Doesn't the AFA know this?" It turns out that not only do they know it, they're offended by it. I recently received an email from them complaining about a commercial from the Gap. Their complaint? "Gap compares Christmas to the pagan holiday called 'Solstice.' Solstice is celebrated by Wiccans who practice witchcraft!"

First of all: there's no comparison made. The Gap commercial lists a number of winter holidays, including both Christmas and Solstice. It's a fact that people celebrate Solstice in December, and have for more years than Christianity's been a going concern.

And that's the thing that really sticks in my craw. "Gap compares Christmas to the pagan holiday." Oh, they do, do they? And how would that comparison crop up? Would it be the festive holiday trees? The lights? The mulled wine? The other blatantly pagan symbols, decorations and traditions?

Attention AFA: your Christmas traditions, excluding the one of spending way too much money at retail outlets, were stolen directly from previously existing traditions. It is thus somewhat unfair to now get offended when people notice that the holiday you stole from continues to exist at about the same time as your holiday. It was here first. It is not a threat to you. I'm sure it would be much more convenient for you if it weren't around for people to see and think, "Hm, those traditions do seem awfully similar!" -- but let's be honest. No one was ever going to think that because a guy was tortured to death for their sins, now a magical red man with flying deer lands on their roof and brings them candy. It's clear that there's been just a bit of borrowing from an external source for that.

---

And it's time for another fine end-of-November tradition: the poll to find out who wants holiday cards! I actually have some of your addresses this year, but some of you have moved, and some are new, and it's easier if I just put this poll up again.

Poll #1489874 Nothing But a Pack of Cards!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 17

What is your name and address?

Are you more or less inclined to shop at the Gap now that you know the AFA boycotted it?

Tickybox?

Mood of the Moment: annoyed
Auditory Hallucination: The Muppets -- Bohemian Rhapsody

I've long suspected that Netflix has access to some sort of time-travel device. The speed with which they receive, process and ship out movies is uncanny, bordering on alarming. I hate to complain when a company's service is too good, but I confess to being mildly concerned when they were already shipping me new discs less than 18 hours after I'd mailed back the old one. I appreciated it, but I knew it was only a matter of time before they started using their power for evil. You just can't have a device that allows you to effect travel through time and only use it for transporting movies. No one's strong enough to resist that lure forever.

Netflix is starting to crack under the strain. Someone at their company is clearly using their device to peek into the future and find out when I'm going to take a long time to return a disc. "What possible good could this information do them?" you might wonder. I'll tell you why they want to know: it's so they can scratch the disc right near the end of the movie, rendering the last fifteen minutes or so unplayable.

Now, I'm not paranoid enough to think that I'm the sole target of this; I suspect they're doing it to many people. But the fact remains that I can think of only three instances in the last few months in which I've had a movie sitting around for more than a week before getting to watch it, and in each case I've gotten nearly to the end and had it suddenly refuse to play. I'd blame my DVD player, except that the discs have also ceased working at the same spot in my Playstation and in my computer.

In that time, all the rest of the movies I've gotten from Netflix have played correctly. It's only the ones where I'm already starting to feel like I'm giving Netflix a good bargain that are broken, and always much too far into the movie for me to just give up on it, so I end up requesting another copy after already having hung onto the film for much too long.

Admittedly, this does nothing at all for Netflix's business model, but I'm sure it does wonders for employee morale. I know that any day in which I can enact a clever plan to raise someone's blood pressure level is a good one for me, at least. Perhaps I'm just projecting my own twisted sense of entertainment onto the Netflix folks -- but if so, who's putting those subtle little scratches onto my discs, and how do they have such unerring knowledge of which ones to target?

This is only the beginning; they may tell themselves that they'll only use the time-travel for efficient movie delivery and harmless pranks, but it won't last. I predict that within a year, we'll start finding DVDs sealed into Egyptian tombs and embedded in coal veins. They may already be there, in fact; it's possible that we just haven't dug them up yet.

It's all downhill from there, too. Eventually, scientists will discover that the Big Bang was caused by the sudden imposition of a DVD copy of "Deep Impact" into absolute nothingness. That's going to rattle a lot of major world religions.

Mood of the Moment: good
Auditory Hallucination: Sutton Foster -- Air Conditioner

Most Americans, I gather, don't trust the credit card industry. They feel that it is a shady business, profiting off of the misfortune of others; that it is a carrion industry, circling lazily above its patrons while waiting for them to stumble and fall. This is, perhaps, not an entirely inaccurate portrayal, but it's the image of victimization that annoys me. The companies cannot prey upon you if you don't sign up for their cards. If you don't understand what you're signing up for, then perhaps you shouldn't put your name to the paper -- especially if it's being proffered by someone you distrust.

This seems like a fairly simple concept to me. If someone is offering me what appears to be a shady deal, or if I'm afraid that I'm being suckered into something, I simply don't agree to it. Perhaps there was once an argument to be made that people didn't realize what they were getting into, but these days, signing up for a credit card is like picking up smoking. You know the risks; you know it's potentially hazardous, you've heard the horror stories of the people who had their lives ruined, and you're clear on what you're walking into.

This isn't a perfect analogy; I happily use my credit cards daily, and have never had a bit of trouble with them. Unlike cigarettes, credit cards are very helpful if used responsibly. Still, it makes the point I'm going for, which is that credit card users are not innocent little lambs lost in the woods; if they're caught in brambles, it's not because they didn't know they were there.

Despite this, once again someone is lobbying to simplify credit card agreements, as if that'll fix the problem. Admittedly, the proposed layout is much simpler, but the problem is not that the information is hard to find in the five-page, small-print booklet the companies send out right now -- it's that people just don't bother to read them.

The complaint is that it's just too difficult to find the APR buried in all of the text. I don't have one of the booklets on hand, but I distinctly remember charts being set up with all of the information clearly laid out. I went to Chase's website and clicked on their card offer, and in only two clicks, I was at a page clearly laying out the terms and conditions. I admit that the number they have in bold near the top of the page is 22.24%, and that farther down it explains that because it is variable, it may go as high as 29.99% -- but you'll have a hard time convincing me that the people, the so-called victims, were suckered in by this near-8% difference. I rather suspect that most of them saw the large "0% introductory APR" on the initial banner, and read no further. No amount of simplification of language will help this sort of refusal to read the details.

Pretty soon, credit cards are all going to have to come with warning labels. "CAUTION: Spending more than you can afford can make you sad, broke and whiny." It still won't fix anything, but at least we'll have spent a lot of time and money warning people about extremely obvious consequences. That's like success, if you kinda squint your eyes while you're looking at it.

Mood of the Moment: annoyed
Auditory Hallucination: The Fratellis -- Chelsea Dagger

I think parts of my brain may no longer be on speaking terms with each other. I've long known that they don't always communicate well; this is obvious on a daily basis in things like my typing, where I'll intend to type one word and will find myself instead writing a completely unrelated word that happens to begin with the same letter. Recently, though, there seems to be a willful refusal to transmit information going on. I'm starting to think that maybe one hemisphere is angry about what the other one said about Our Cerebellum, or something.

We had a Thanksgiving luncheon at work yesterday, and so we have a fridge full of leftovers today. I'm not one to turn down free food, and so I was back there loading up a plate for my lunch today. "I need to put some pepper on this," I thought. "It's much too bland without it."

I then put my plate in the microwave to heat it up, took it back out to add potato salad to it, carried it back to my office, took a photo of it, and began eating the food. Please note the amount of observation that this plate underwent! Despite this, I was several bites in before I thought, "Hm, seems kind of bland. Maybe I should have put on more pepper." It was not until this point that my eyes informed me that I had not, in fact, applied any pepper.

"Didn't I?" I thought. "I remember putting pepper on."

Another memory told me that no, I recalled deciding to put pepper on, which was not the same thing as actually doing it. I mentally glared at the various bits of my brain and sternly asked them why they couldn't have gotten together before I'd begun eating and pointed this out to me. There was some metaphorical foot-shuffling, and silence. My eyes, meanwhile, were looking shifty and hoping I wouldn't ask why they'd utterly failed to report back on the notable absence of pepper during their watch.

Whenever I attempt to find out why things aren't talking to each other, my brain closes ranks and insists everything's fine, despite all of the evidence. I'm not really sure what to do about it; it's not like I can appoint an impartial investigator. My lungs and heart are busy, my gall bladder doesn't know the right questions to ask, and my appendix quit in disgust years ago. There's always the spleen, I suppose, but I just don't trust that guy; he's too rough for a delicate job like this.

I hope that this will sort itself out fairly soon. In the meantime, if you see me wearing mismatched shoes, just understand that I'm doing what I can with the cooperation I've got.

Mood of the Moment: resigned
Auditory Hallucination: Rebecca Loebe -- Stronger

Today, I realized that I've been spreading superstitions. It all started harmlessly enough; I was trying to make the folks at work feel better about themselves, is all. Often, they'd call me over to fix a problem on their computers, only to have the problem totally fail to recur when I sat down and went through the steps they detailed. This would be followed by a period of embarrassed apologies on their part, and attempts to explain how perhaps they'd just missed a keystroke on mine.

After a while, I started to notice muttering around the office, about how people's computers disliked them, and would respond well to me just to make them look bad. People began calling me over with, "Look, I know there won't be a problem when you get here, but just come wave your magic wand over my machine, would you?" This was not leading to a good work environment for me or my co-workers.

So, to ease their resentment, I started fiddling with things before I'd ever even attempt to fix a problem. I'd pull up a DOS prompt and look at the host name, or check the IP configuration. I'd go look through the security and application logs. Then, if everything worked fine for me when it hadn't for the user, I could claim that I'd altered a setting and that that had likely fixed the problem. This added a couple of minutes to each repair, but people weren't left feeling that their computers hated them and were out to get them personally.

Today, though, one of my co-workers called me in to help with a problem, and prefaced the statement with, "I tried refreshing the hostname, but that didn't resolve it this time." I hadn't realized that they'd been paying enough attention to copycat me, but apparently I was mistaken. I found the "this time" a curious ending, too, as it indicates that refreshing the hostname -- a totally fictitious procedure -- has worked for them at some point previously.

It was far too late to correct this misinformation, but now I had a problem. I could either continue with my usual rigmarole, knowing that I was instilling nonsense in my unfortunate co-worker, or I could go back to having things work on the first try much of the time, thus irritating them.

Neither choice seemed palatable, but fortunately, I stumbled upon a third option: that old magician's standby, patter. By chatting about unrelated topics while I ran through my ersatz diagnostics, I was able to keep my co-worker from paying attention to exactly what I was doing, thus guaranteeing he picked up no more superstitions about ways to placate the computer from today's repair -- which, I might add, worked just fine the first time I tried it.

Mood of the Moment: cheerful
Auditory Hallucination: The Bloodhound Gang -- Bad Touch

My impression of how things looked inside the human body, and specifically within blood vessels, has always been of a pipe filled with gritty water. Red water, I suppose, but basically just a big current sweeping along, with various shapes being carried along in the flow and bumping into each other a lot. Sometimes, these things are viruses or bacteria, which have various bits that allow them to hang on to other things, or pierce them, or just generally make a nuisance of themselves. Even those, though, I imagined were essentially just drifting along on the tide.

Apparently, this is not always the case! I was catching up on my science this morning, and found an article about how multiple sclerosis crosses the blood-brain barrier. This is not an easy task; there are cells intended to make it an impossible one, in fact. MS's T-cells skirt these cells through a technique born out of what I can only assume is sheer malice.

For most of their trip through the body, the T-cells drift around precisely as I'd always imagined. Once they are carried into the vessels running through the nervous system, though, they begin clinging to the walls and inching their way backwards against the bloodstream. They continue doing this until they come to a joint in the wall, whereupon they squeeze themselves through and go out to wreak havoc in the brain.

This is, in my opinion, very creepy. I liked the model where things got swept about willy-nilly. Sometimes bad things ended up in the wrong places, and made you sick, but there was no intent there, no desire. These things, on the other hand, are clearly goal-oriented. They wait until they're in a specific location, then suddenly alter their behavior and turn into microscopic rock climbers.

On the other hand, this greatly increases the possibility that I can eventually have unicellular diplomats in my bloodstream to reason with things like this, though -- or at least unicellular mercenaries to pick them off. I'd rather have the diplomats, but the mercenaries aren't a bad second choice. I don't really know what I'd pay them in, but I imagine we can work something out.

Mood of the Moment: lethargic
Auditory Hallucination: Molly Lewis -- Poker Face

Once again, comics have taught me something amazing. I'm not certain when specifically they last taught me anything amazing, but I know a lot of amazing things, and I read a lot of comics, so it seems likely that there's some overlap there. Even if there weren't, though -- even if I had never learned anything even remotely worthwhile from comics before today -- this would make up for all of it.

Ryan North, through the medium of Dinosaur Comics, has informed me that all that it takes to be entered into the running for a Pulitzer Prize is fifty dollars, a form, a pen, an envelope, a stamp and approximately five minutes. I have all of these things available to me right now; I can actually reach all of them without even getting up from my chair. Technically, once I printed the form out I'd have to walk over to the printer to go get it, but this means that I am about twenty-three steps away from the potential for being in the running for a Pulitzer.

I had no idea it was this easy. I don't think the mailman's picked the mail up from the office yet today; if I hurry, by tomorrow I could be saying, with total sincerity, "Yeah, some of my work's being considered for the Pulitzer Prize this year." That, I feel, is fifty dollars well spent.

I always figured that it would be much more difficult than that to enter. I mean, clearly I won't win, especially as I'd probably enter this article for my submission just to make things as meta as possible. I suspect the committee would not appreciate this as much as I would, but whatever. It's not their fifty bucks. If they can't handle my distinguished, original writing, who needs them?

If I set aside fifty bucks a year for this sort of thing -- which is less than fifteen cents a day -- then I can inflate my bragging with the claim of "my work is regularly submitted for a Pulitzer." Some people might question why I haven't yet won one, but I'll explain to them how tough the competition is. Not just everyone has envelopes lying around, you know.

Mood of the Moment: hopeful
Auditory Hallucination: Songs to Wear Pants To -- I am the First Fifty Digits of Pi

I don't know most of my neighbors. I made a token effort to meet them when I first moved in, but most of them didn't seem to care who I was, and when I stopped to think about it the feeling was mutual. I had some minor issues with my next-door neighbor for a bit, on account of him being an enormous twit, but that all worked out fairly well -- by which I mean that he hasn't actually done anything annoying in years, but I still feel fully justified complaining about any minor problem to anyone who'll listen, because he used to be a jerk. Also, I get to feel superior to him every time my grass is mowed and his isn't, which is much better than the satisfaction of a job well done.

On the whole, though, if I were to leave town, I would feel secure in the knowledge that my neighbors would not, say, allow someone to move into my house, then intentionally burn it down, knock down the remains, and pave the whole thing to make a parking lot. Indeed, this is something that I think most of us could say. Unfortunately, Neville Presho is not most of us, and 16 years ago, that's precisely what happened to him.

The article does not detail exactly what Presho did to tick off every single one of the 170 people on the island where he lived, but it must have been something impressive. The High Court Justice investigating the case was unable to determine who had set the fire, despite evidence that it was indeed arson, or who had torn down the burnt house, despite the fact that only one man owned the equipment needed to do such a thing. That last, especially, seems like a fairly open and shut case, but I suppose that with no one willing to speak up, "he had the equipment necessary" isn't enough of a case.

I'm also a bit confused as to why it apparently took 16 years to get a judgment against the people who, at the very least, clearly stole Presho's property. Even if the house grew chicken legs and wandered off on its own, that last bit should be easily provable. Perhaps Presho irritated the judge overseeing the case, too. Clearly, the man responsible feels he still has a chance, as he reportedly intends to appeal rather than pay the quite miserly $69,000 in damages.

This weekend might be a nice time to bake your neighbors some cookies, or maybe help them rake their leaves. Remember, a little goodwill goes a long way toward not having your property used, burned, stolen and repurposed!

Mood of the Moment: surprised
Auditory Hallucination: Voltaire -- When You're Evil

Like many people, I've long believed that America needs a viable third political party. My reasons are not that I feel that my views are unrepresented, or that this will magically fix everything. I personally find that my political desires are quite adequately catered to by the Democratic Party -- but the thing is, I'm a centrist. We've got two political parties, and so people assume that they represent the left and the right side of the spectrum, but that's really not the case. Our parties cater to slightly left of center, and somewhat right of center.

This has been basically fine for a long time, because even though not everyone agrees with the center, it tends to make a good compromise position. People can agree on it; most of them are unhappy about it, but they're at least content in knowing that their counterparts at the other end are equally unhappy.

Lately, though, there's been indication that a third party is starting to form, but they're not splitting off from the Democrats. It's made up of the people who feel that their religious morality should be mandatory for everyone, that personal liberties are a fine idea but that we've gotten a little carried away with the whole idea. It's made of the Tea Partiers, the Dittoheads, the Birthers, the people who listen to volume over reason. They're the ones who believe that the government should stay out of their lives, personally, but have no problem with demanding that it interfere in everyone else's.

So if this bulging mass succeeds in breaking off and spawning a new party, what we'll have is a center-ish party, a right wing party, and an extremely right wing party. This is not, to my mind, an improvement; what it means is that the political right is going to become the new compromise location. When the center and the extreme right can't agree, it's the middle-right where they'll settle -- otherwise known as the old far end of the spectrum.

The Republicans are pretty big winners in this scenario. Not only do they get to be the new voice of reason and compromise, but also the shouters and haranguers who think that they haven't been right-wing enough will stop crashing their political rallies and hijacking their agendas. As a fan of the Democratic agenda, and as someone with a bunch of friends who could be politely described as "left wing" -- and perhaps more accurately as "flaming liberals" -- I don't really see this as a good thing.

I'm not really sure what there is to do about it. It's always easier to get people to march in lockstep than it is to get them to think for themselves, and the political power of this new movement comes largely from the unhesitating agreement of most of its members. That said, if people aren't prompted to stir themselves in response to this sort of thing, perhaps my beliefs really don't align so much with the center anymore.

Mood of the Moment: busy
Auditory Hallucination: DDR -- Dam Dariam

A while back, ariadnelives mentioned that her brother had lost quite a lot of weight simply by beginning to pay attention to what he ate. He managed this by taking photos of everything he consumed over the course of the day; this way, at the end of the day, he knew exactly how many times he'd had "just one cookie."

This isn't a new concept, of course. Some time ago, I stumbled across photos of average families from around the world posed with the quantity of food they ate in a month. I loved the images, and thought about doing it myself, but on any given morning, I rarely know what I'm eating for dinner that night. When I go shopping, I buy whatever seems like a good idea at the time, and only worry about assembling it into meals later. Buying food for an entire month, or even figuring out what that would be, is well beyond my level of organization or commitment.

Taking pictures of things I'm about to eat, though, is something I can just about manage. I saw "just about" because I'd intended to start taking photos this morning, and then totally forgot about it and ate all of my stew. So there's a good chance that some photos will look like this:
Still, it'll at least give me a visual representation so I can collate it all at the end of the day. That said, I don't want to kick off the project this way, so I'll probably make a fresh attempt at starting it tomorrow.

I love looking at things in aggregate. I manage this through charts and graphs a lot, but they're not as fun as actual images. Knowing that the average person drinks 16,000 gallons of water over their lifetime is interesting. Looking at a pool holding 16,000 gallons of water makes that a much more viscerally engaging statistic.

So, assuming my memory functions better tomorrow morning, by the eleventh of December I should have a photo collage of exactly how much food I personally consume in a month. Thanksgiving might throw the average off a bit, but that just means that when I look at it and go, "Man, I can't believe I ate all that," I can pretend that this month was an anomaly due to the holiday. Same thing for next month, with latkes and fruitcakes and New Year's junk food. And the next month, and the next, and the next, all for excellent reasons. I lead a very anomalous life.

Mood of the Moment: full
Auditory Hallucination: Cartman sings Poker Face

I'm starting to be concerned that I may have died over the weekend. I admit that this seems somewhat unlikely, given my current state of activity and general refusal to lie still and quit breathing, but there are certain indicators which are beginning to worry me.

Years ago, I learned that bodies sometimes -- or maybe always, I don't recall -- bruise after death, due to the blood pooling in the lower parts. It's called lividity, I think, and I appear to have something very much like it going on in my leg right now. In a clever demonstration of levers, fulcrums and the redirection of force, I managed with the help of a half-sawn branch to essentially kick myself in the side of the knee as hard as I could on Halloween. It raised a huge purple knot, with the surrounding area fading through some lovely shades of yellowish-green.

This bruising was perfectly reasonable. Yesterday, though, I began to notice new mystery bruises spawning on my knee and lower on my calf, at the far end of the discoloration from the primary bruise. All three are a faded purplish-red; none of them hurt, but they do seem to have grown larger over the course of the last couple of days.

Also, my pulse is a bit slower than normal, and my lower back sort of hurts; I'd been ignoring that, but it could be rigor mortis. If so, I hope it doesn't spread. It's annoying enough as it is. If this started happening over my entire body, I'd probably just give up moving around, too. Maybe I'm just more obstinate than other dead people, or more clueless. I never have been good at taking subtle hints, like in that whole appendicitis debacle. If you're not familiar with the story, the short version is that I failed to notice I was sick until several days after my appendix ruptured, and then didn't make it to the hospital for another couple of days after I finally noticed something was wrong. In my defense, my body was well aware of the Rule of Obtuseness, and should have known better than to try subtly suggesting things to me.

I'm also considering the possibility that I'm undead -- heartbeat notwithstanding -- and have been crossing off the types I could be. My vocabulary seems intact and I've got no craving for brains or flesh, so that rules out a zombie or a ghoul. I'm too corporeal to be a ghast or a poltergeist. I was out in the sun today, and neither died nor sparkled, so vampires are out. I'm not a Nazgul, or a barrow wight of any sort, since I don't have an object I feel a compulsion to guard. It's possible that I accidentally made myself a lich; I have been falling asleep reading and watching horror movies lately, so who knows what I might have invoked in my subconscious. I think you generally have to say those incantations aloud, however, so I doubt that's it. Still, it's leading the pack so far.

I need to find a copy of my life insurance terms and conditions. If I'm undead, can I collect on it? If so, even if I'm not undead right now, I need to change it so that I'm my own beneficiary, just in case things work out for me later. At the very least, I might be able to make them add a ridiculous new clause to the agreement, which would be a success all by itself.

Mood of the Moment: alive
Auditory Hallucination: Spamalot -- Not Dead Yet

I've been thinking about apocalypses a lot lately. Distressingly, I think I'm fairly ill-equipped to survive one of pretty much any sort. I don't have large stockpiles of canned food, I'm far away from a reliable source of fresh water that isn't my tap, I don't have a bomb shelter or even a basement, and I have no idea where I'd get lamb's blood on short notice. Really, the only thing that I have going for me is that pretty much everyone I know is less equipped for an apocalypse than I am. This means that once they die off, I can go take their stuff.

I think I'd do pretty well as a scavenger. It's not an ideal way to live, but it's a good way to get myself set up while I figure out how to farm. I know the basic principles, obviously, but I have no idea how much I'd have to plant to support myself, or if I need different soils to grow different plants, or anything like that. I figure I can learn all of this stuff from books, but I'll need to go raid a library first, and as long as I'm out scavenging I ought to lay in some other supplies for when I screw up the crops.

It's tempting to forgo the subsistence farming altogether and stick with the scavenging. There's always the risk that other people will have looted the stores first, I suppose, but then I can just go loot those other people. They probably won't appreciate this, but it's a post-apocalyptic world; there's going to be some unpleasantness.

I'm a big fan of my modern conveniences, but when I picture my dream future, I see a deep red sunset over a ruined city skyline. It's a chill autumn day; the leaves are red, matching the sun and the rust that's spreading over all of the collapsing buildings. I have a shelter, but it's rudimentary -- no fancy multi-story house, just something I cobbled together from things lying around.

I don't know why this appeals to me so much. I like society, and have no particular reason to want to see it fall. There's something fascinating about the idea of living in the twilight of your entire race, though, of knowing that for better or worse, you were the culmination of your species. It'll happen to someone eventually; why not me?

Mood of the Moment: cataclysmic
Auditory Hallucination: Rebecca Loebe -- Stronger

When I graduated from college and started looking for a job, I had a number of ideals in mind. I wanted a job that paid well, of course, but I was looking for more than that. I wanted a job that would entertain me; I wanted it to challenge me, but not overwhelm me. I was lucky in that I found a job that gave me all of these things, and I rarely have cause to complain about it. Every once in a while, though, I come across a sign that there are better jobs for me out there, and I wonder if I should go in search of them.

Most recently, I've encountered a study by a group of folks at the University of Montreal demonstrating that caffeine keeps you awake. They co-opted 24 volunteers, made them stay awake for a day, and then fed half of them caffeine pills three hours before allowing them to go to sleep. Shockingly, those who took the stimulant were less able to sleep than those who did not.

"Caffeine is the most widely used stimulant to counteract the effects of sleepiness, but it also produces important detrimental effects on subsequent sleep," says the abstract. To me -- and admittedly, I am not a scientist -- that shouldn't really be a "but" there; it should be an "and" or possibly a "so naturally." To my layman's eye, that sentence essentially reads, "Caffeine keeps you awake, but can also keep you awake."

I'm wondering if there are any openings in the tautological research field. This is the sort of work I could really sink my teeth into. I've got some ideas lined up already. For my first study, I'd investigate whether pushing on the gas pedal in a car makes you go faster, not just now, but also after you've stopped pressing down on the pedal. I'll have one group sit in the car while it's in drive and press the gas for ten seconds, and the other group not press the gas. Then, I'll measure the speed of the car in each case after thirty seconds. I don't want to tell you my hypothesis just yet; you'll have to wait for me to publish, so you can see my results for yourself!

I found particular hope in a sentence in an article discussing this study: "Her study builds on recent findings that reducing coffee consumption is the best way to improve sleep for the middle-aged." The implication here, if not the outright assertion, is that this is but one of many studies demonstrating that when you take coffee to wake you up, it keeps you awake. This means that once I get my doctorate in tautology, I won't even need to keep coming up with groundbreaking studies like "accelerating adds to your speed." I can get paid to cross-check and confirm the results of other tautologists!

I don't want to rush right into this career change; I think I'll take a day to think it over, maybe sleep on it tonight. And I know now I'll be better off doing that without the aid of coffee. Thanks, science!

Mood of the Moment: jubilant
Auditory Hallucination: Beck -- E-Pro

Good news, everyone! We're now safe from bombs. Advanced Tactical Security & Communications, in partnership with ComInfo Systems, apparently a subsidiary of Cumberland Industries, has a hand-held, battery-free, no waste, no mess, no hassle and no fuss explosives detector! It will detect as little as a picogram of various dangerous substances from up to 5,000 meters away in less than 5 seconds. It also finds drugs ranging from ecstasy to to cocaine, and will even find ivory, for good measure. And the entire thing weighs less than two pounds!

"This can't be real!", I hear you cry. "How does it work?" That is, of course, proprietary, but it utilizes a process known as Meticulous Aggregation, Gathering, Indexing and Correlating. And this amazing device -- which results in a false positive less than 2% of the time, and even then is usually due to it detecting a microscopically small amount of whatever it's been set to -- can be yours for the low, low price of $18,500.

Act now! Most governments would pay up to $60,000 for this astonishing tool! Only through this online offer can you secure this outstanding bargain. And if you order now, your ADE-651 will come with a card for detecting humans, too. No more will you have to wonder about whether the so-called person you're talking to is actually a space alien, devil or intelligent fungus in disguise. Simply point the ADE-651 at them, shuffle your feet briefly to generate a charge and in less than five seconds, you'll have your answer!

Don't let terrorists, saboteurs and general ne'er-do-wells threaten the safety of your country, island base or secret moon lair. With the ADE-651, you'll spot them miles away! Don't be the last on your continent to own this amazing new technology!

Mood of the Moment: happy
Auditory Hallucination: Rebecca Loebe -- Mystery Prize

Let us suppose for a moment that you are an off-duty, noticeably inebriated police officer. Let us further suppose that it is near Halloween, and you have taken your young daughter to visit a house of horrors, presumably for the express purpose of seeing people in rubber masks jump out at you. And finally, let us suppose that as you are leaving the haunted house and heading back into the parking lot, a masked man with a chainsaw, who you have already observed as part of the act inside the house, chases you out brandishing his weapon.
Poll #1480373 Parking Lot of Peril
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15

Do you...

If you chose option four, congratulations! You may be Sergeant Eric Janik of Maryland, who apparently felt this was fully appropriate behavior. Happily, the state of Maryland disagrees, as Sgt. Janik has been suspended and is facing criminal charges.

I'm constantly amazed by people's inability to figure out that things like this are stupid. There's a very simple test that you can perform before you do something like point a gun at someone. Think to yourself, "Would I think this was awesome if it happened to me?" If the answer's no, then you probably shouldn't go through with the joke.

Maybe I'm wrong! Maybe Sgt. Janik loves having guns pointed at him. Maybe that's why he became a police officer in the first place. I'm betting, though, that this is not the case, and that had he performed my simple test -- easily done even while drunk -- this could have been averted.

What is hateful to you, do not do to others. It's not a new concept; you'd think it might have sunk in a bit better by now.

Mood of the Moment: good
Auditory Hallucination: Alexander Hamilton Rap

Winter is making a spirited attempt this year to cut fall out of the picture entirely. It stopped raining long enough for me to rake up all of my leaves before the Halloween party on Friday, but then came back with a vengeance. Chilly rain drilled all of the leaves off of the trees; my deck and yard are completely covered in a soggy leaf blanket, and the trees are entirely denuded. On the bright side, this means I'll only have to rake once. However, I was always sort of a fan of fall; I'm sorry to see it be given a miss this year.

It's not really cold yet, just damp. I think that the lowest it's gotten is the mid-40s. This is heartening news! There may yet be time for crisp evenings and bonfires and all of the traditional activities. Fall's not going down without a fight.

The roads, however, are. Every year, during winter, the roads become pitted and racked with potholes. I was pretty sure that I understood how this happened; water seeped into small cracks in the asphalt, then froze and expanded. The expanding ice shoved the cracks wider, then melted and allowed more water to get into the now-larger crack. Through this process, eventually the Grand Canyon was created, or something that felt very much like it when I dropped one of my tires into it while driving.

As I said before, though, it hasn't gotten down to freezing temperatures yet this year -- not even to within ten degrees of it. Despite this, the roads have new and excitingly damaging potholes every day. It seems that they've noted that the leaves are off of the trees, and have decided to save the water a lot of hassle and simply fracture themselves.

This theory requires that the asphalt have a degree of free will, which is perhaps not a good assumption. Unfortunately, the only other theory that comes to mind is that the local Department of Transportation is purchasing water-soluble asphalt. I'd much rather think that the roads are intelligent, rather than accept that the people in charge of creating them are not.

Mood of the Moment: good
Auditory Hallucination: Handsome Devil -- Makin' Money

For most of the year, you're not meant to be morbid.
Folks think you odd for laughing at death.
But in late October, that all gets contorted,
And everyone's anxious to draw their last breath.

People dress up and pretend to be dead.
They're mummies and zombies in makeup galore
With blood, gore and grave rot and knives in their head.
All cheap imitations they bought at the store.

It makes sense for me; I find this amusing.
I've got no problem indulging my weirdness.
But I've got to confess, I find it quite confusing
To see everyone else's spooky-spiritedness.

Please don't misunderstand me! I am not complaining.
I'm glad to see crowds at the big Zombie Walk.
But why is it suddenly thought entertaining
To have a body outlined on your driveway in chalk?

I think it's the same thing as Casual Fridays
"Today, we think you can do your job in jeans."
But wear them on Thursday, and you will hear this phrase:
"We need to explain what 'professional' means."

So I'll go and have fun with the ghosts, ghouls and goblins
While everyone else thinks the same way I do.
And next week I'll take on the regular problems
Of trying to pretend that I'm normal, too.

Mood of the Moment: good
Auditory Hallucination: Aqua -- Halloween

In third grade, my teacher taught the entire class a song with the names of all fifty states listed alphabetically. She would hold contests to see who could sing the song the fastest, while still pointing to each state on the wall map as its name was said. I haven't retained the latter skill; I've got a decent idea of where each state is, but if you asked me to find Kansas, it would take me a minute of hunting among those rectangular ones in the middle. I still know the names of every state, though. I've never been able to forget that song.

Apparently some people were more adept at this than I was, though. Not the geography -- the forgetting. According to a poll conducted in mid-August, 10% of Americans don't know that Hawaii is a state. Now, the poll has a 3.3% margin of error, so let's round that off. The survey was conducted by touchtone, so perhaps a few people fat-fingered their answer, and hit 2 when they meant 1; let's whack off another percent for that. That's still more than 5% of America who's not certain that Hawaii -- celebrating its fiftieth anniversary as the fiftieth state just days after this poll was conducted -- is a state.

Five percent, just to drive this point home, is one in twenty people. Surely it's not the people you know, of course -- but are you certain? Your coworkers say some dumb things on occasion, but surely they must know that Hawaii is a state -- right? Odds are that some of them don't.

On the one hand, this knowledge isn't actually good for anything. Under no conceivable circumstance am I going to need to know that Hawaii is part of the United States, except maybe for saving myself some passport-related embarrassment while traveling. But on the other hand, it's a pretty basic piece of information about the country in which we live. It's something I learned in third grade. You'd think that better than 1 in 20 adults -- some of whom probably vote, and nearly all of whom have the right to -- could manage it.

There are some other fun questions in that poll -- 39% of the respondents feel that the government should stay out of Medicare, for example -- but it's the Hawaii one that bugs me the most. It's been part of the country for fifty years. Our current president was born there, and even the 25% who think he was not, and the 14% who aren't sure, should still be aware of where it is they're saying he wasn't born.

This is going to suck all the joy out of insulting people in traffic. The next time someone cuts me off, and I call him a moron, I'm going to start wondering if he knows that Hawaii is a state. Statistically speaking, five percent of the time, he's not going to.

Mood of the Moment: irate
Auditory Hallucination: Captain Dan and the Scurvy Crew -- This is How We Row

The weather and me, we're about to have some problems. I like rain as much as the next guy -- more than the next guy, actually; usually the next guy looks miserable, and I have a good laugh at his expense. I'm always a little miffed when it rains during Frisbee, because some people don't want to run around in the mud, and so it's harder to get a game together. On the other hand, I then get to run around in the rain and the mud, so that one sort of balances out.

The problem I'm having with the rain is that it's been raining essentially every day since fall hit, which means that I've been unable to go out and rake up any of the leaves. Generally, I'm okay with this sort of problem, but since I'm having folks over for Halloween on Friday, I feel that I really ought to clean the back patio up. I am not interested in raking wet leaves, especially not if I have to do it in the rain -- but it looks like I may not have a choice.

Rain on Halloween itself is always annoying, too. Instead of getting to see all of the kids' costumes when they come to my door, I'm presented with only two variants. Either they're covered up in rain gear, in which case they all appear to be dressed as tourists at Niagara Falls -- or they've braved the elements and their makeup has run, so that they seem to have dressed up as Tammy Faye Baker on a crying jag. Neither of these costumes is bad the first time, but an evening of nothing else gets old.

I've been talking with my intercessor, Ish, to see what he can do for me. He's been somewhat noncommittal, but that's only to be expected from him; it comes with the name. Still, I think he'll fix this for me. In the past, he's always come through-ish.

I get that things aren't all about me, and I'm willing to meet the weather halfway here. I'll rake wet leaves if I must, or I'll put up with the dampened Halloween spirit -- but I won't willingly do both. If we can't compromise on this, then I'm afraid that the weather and I are going to have to have it out. I've always maintained a friendly relationship with it, but I won't have that friendship abused. I'm warning you, weather -- severely. No more shenanigans.

Mood of the Moment: annoyed
Auditory Hallucination: Within Temptation -- Deceiver of Fools

In France today, the Church of Scientology was convicted of fraud, along with six of its members. The Scientologists were fined heavily, but the court stopped short of ordering the dissolution of its French chapter, which the plaintiffs had requested.

The verdict -- which the Church says it intends to appeal -- also includes the requirement that the Church "publish the results of the verdict in several national and international magazines to warn people...about what Scientology offers and what was discovered at trial." I looked around briefly, but was unable to find the text of the verdict online yet. I'd like to see it, because although I do find Scientology very weird, I'm not sure what makes it any more fraudulent than any other religion. Religions all promise intangibles in return for goods and services rendered now; they will all gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

I may be overgeneralizing here. There may be religions which don't speak of the afterlife, of ineffable God or gods, of things taken on faith and belief and trust instead of evidence. The ones which spring to mind all have these aspects to some degree, however. According to the news article, the Church of Scientology was convicted of fraud due to its practice of locating spiritual imbalance in its practitioners, then telling them to purchase healing items to fix themselves.

I'm not really sure how this differs from some of the preachers on television who tell their watchers that if they donate money, they will receive God's blessings. Perhaps it's just in the equivocation; since they only say that God may smile upon you, even if it's said with a smile and a meaningful nod, it's not technically fraud because they haven't promised anything. There are people who are tricked into believing that there is actual fruit in their Froot Loops, after all, so clearly not that much effort needs to be put into the duplicity. If so, it seems that all the Scientologists will have to do is change their pitch from "this will heal you" to "this may heal you," and they'll be back on solid footing.

Other than that, the only difference I can see is that the Church of Scientology is providing something concrete in return for the donations it receives. If you give money to one of the late-night preachers, all you get is a vague promise of hope; with the Scientologists, at least you get a book with your vague promise. It seems to me like that's actually a better deal.

Mood of the Moment: good
Auditory Hallucination: Ceann -- Blame the Viking