Previous Post's Finish

[Please see, of course, the previous post.]
So what should have been a single lackluster post now is two. Maybe I
needed a song to tell you reading my blog is just like reading my
blog.
>

--
Essays About Anything: http://essaysaboutanything.blogspot.com

The Fibromyalgian: http://fibromyalgian.blogspot.com

So Little Thought Goes Into Important (To Some) Things

I love PBS. So much so that I take the time to feel guilty that I
can't donate whenever a pledge drive is going on (which is way too
damn often). I'm living on disability income for gods' sake! Also, I
can't support something, regardless of how little, that is responsible
for Barney.

OK. There's a show called "History Detectives." A bried song
introduces the program, the lyrics of which are as follows (as best I
can tell): "Watching the detectives. Watching the detectives. It's
just like watching the detectives."

The song, then, informs the viewer that what they're about to do --
watch the (hisory) detectives -- is just (that is, exactly, like
watching the (hisory) detectives.

How the holy hell could someone about to watch a TV show need to be
told that the act of watching said TV show is just like watching said
TV show? That watching a specific TV show is exactly like watching
that TV show, I bravely assert, has never been questioned ever by
anyone.

[POST MUST BE CONTINUED ON A NEW POST.]

--
Essays About Anything: http://essaysaboutanything.blogspot.com

The Fibromyalgian: http://fibromyalgian.blogspot.com

I'M BACK (but I've got some problems)!!!

Aaaahh yes. I finally feel up to blogging again, even though I don't
have the benefit of something like Ritalin or Provigil. Still, I once
again feel like posting my genius-level observations.

But, as mentioned above, there are problems. I need a laptop (PLEASE
DONATE THROUGH MY FIBROMYALGIAN SITE!) because my nearly-ten-year-old
computer isn't cutting anything anymore, barring me from the Internet
and anything else I need to blog.

SO: I have to post with my phone, which keeps my posts short (for some
reason the phone keeps my e-mails to a certain, rather short length).
So I can't post short stories or even flash fiction.

BUT: I can and will post what I can and do all I can to make my
hamstrung posts as wicked-sweet as possible.

Which boils down to this plea: Beloved readers, please come back to
me! I swear I'll never hurt you again!

--
Essays About Anything: http://essaysaboutanything.blogspot.com

The Fibromyalgian: http://fibromyalgian.blogspot.com

An Addition To My Previous Prediction That the Next War Will Be With Pakistan

I'M BACK TO MY BLOG BABY!!!

Months ago I blogged that our next war will be with Pakistan.

If I remember correctly (can't check past post because I now have to
post using my phone), I didn't go farther than my prediction.

So it's important to note that a war with Pakistan will not be simply
with Pakistan. Pakistan has allies, India (Pakistan's eternal enemy)
has allies. Arabic and majority-Muslim countries (ie, the "Muslim
World," an inapt and offensive term) will side with Pakistan. Russia
will side with Pakistan.

And so we'll have World War III in our time.

And Christian and Muslim fundamentalists will be it's biggest cheerleaders.

(You can, with my love and eternal gratitude, help me get a laptop
with donations through my FIBROMYALGIAN site so my thumbs don't fall
off. And if people are kick-ass enough to help me out, I'll be
transparent about the process and let everyone know how much I take
in, and when donations no longer are needed for Project Get Bandini A
Laptop. Heart all of you!)

--
Essays About Anything: http://essaysaboutanything.blogspot.com

The Fibromyalgian: http://fibromyalgian.blogspot.com

Dear Willie Mays (OxyClean Guy):

For the love of god stop yelling at me already!

--
Essays About Anything: http://essaysaboutanything.blogspot.com

The Fibromyalgian: http://fibromyalgian.blogspot.com

UPDATE!

>

I've been off Ritalin for... eh, maybe a month-and-a-half, and haven't been able to write a single sentence that would be of any interest to readers.

Tomorrow I see my doctor. I'm going to get down on my knees, praise her as the goddess of all creation (or at least my personal goddess of pain control), and beg like hell for Provigil.

I can walk and move and a lot of things I couldn't before. But I can't write.

Anything of interest. (See this post.)

Hope to be back soon... And with a wicked vengeance.

PS: Posted in an Apple store. Buy a MacBook.

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Why I Haven't Been Posting:

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Since moving to Portland I've been weaned off the medication I was using to assuage my chronic fatigue (a disorder comorbid with fibro), and now can't get anything done. I have a ton of half-posts I can't finish, which is just as well because they would seem half-assed because I can't focus, think, ad infinitum.

I'm working on getting a shrink who can get me on Provigil and should then be able to write. In the meantime, please stop by from time to time. When I can give my un-posted crappy drafts the care they deserve, you'll be deluged with the best writing since Shakespeare.

I hope to get a shrink and some Provigil ASAP. I figure I should be back on attack in mid-April.

As ever: Stay Tuned!

Kisses!

--C. Bandini
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Prelude To A Father-Son Conversation

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"Jesus goddam that bus was fifteen minutes late today! Fifteen this time!"

"We gotta go or somethin'?"

"We gotta hurry."

"H'come?"

"H'come?

Well son, you know how Mommy squeezed the life from Daddy's hopes and dreams--"

"'Course Dad."

"--and how the only thing that makes her happy is Daddy's misery and on forever like that?"

"Yes, Father."

"Well, I'll tell you when we get in the car."
>

It's not funny.

>
The homeopath
went on about
the evils of
antimalarial drugs
while slurping a
Gin and tonic --
the drink invented
(as tradition has it)
so India-colonizing Brits
could take their
antimalarial, bitter Quinine tastefully.

Samuel Hahnemann
took Quinine
some time after
he quit practicing medicine
and used its effects
to formulate
his invention:
homeopathy,
and its principal tenet
"like cures like."

Which makes arsenic
the cure for arsenic poisoning,
once it is diluted (or "succussed") in
water
until the
water
no longer contains a
single
atom
of arsenic.

Which makes pure, uncontaminated
(by the time the ill person takes it)
water
the homeopath's cure for everything
and the gin and tonic-swilling homeopath
an idiotic scammer
or, more likely,
dumb enough to
have been scammed herself
into scamming other idiots
since she
holds that Quinine is evil
though it led to the invention of the
bullshit quackery
that pays her bar bills.

Quinine info: Wiki.
Hahnemann info: Wiki.
Homeopathy info: Wiki.
>

"Maybe he did touch some children, but come on, it's Michael Jackson!"*

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*"South Park"

I've had conversations with people. Quite a few, in fact.

Sometimes Michael Jackson is brought up in the course of certain discussions. I'll inevitably say something like:

"The mammoth piece of shit fucking monster is a goddam serial child molester."

And sometimes the person I'm talking to will say something like:

"Yeah, but you can't deny that Thriller is one of the best records ever."

"BUT"?

There is no but!

The argument seems to be ("South Park" again): "Sure he's touched some children, but he's entertained us for so many years..."

That is, Jackson being evil and disgusting and really, truly, ultra-mega evil is mitigated by the fact he's a gifted performer (which I would dispute).

The shitball could cure every type of cancer, end poverty, end huger, end war, and he'd still be a shitball that needs to be locked up in a cage unfit for that pet monkey he kept around and probably had sex with.

BUT all he's done is sing and dance.

Thriller sucks and Michael Jackson can't die soon enough.
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Faith-based healing.

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The Chinese have compounded thousands of years worth of knowledge and experience into what Westerners call Traditional Chinese Medicine. And there's no doubt the West can benefit greatly from its many methods and practices -- many of which are based on the concept of Chi.

After all, China was able to boast a national average life expectancy of about 32 in 1950, while Western, more developed, countries had average life expectancies of 35 to 40 in the mid-1700s. And Chi remains a vaguely defined concept that lacks -- in any of its permutations -- any science to support its existence.

Nevertheless, I think it's important to heal people using both Western and Chinese medical traditions -- to use methods that have been proven to work in concert with those that have have been proven not to. We need to take a holistic approach to treating people... And to take that approach way too goddam far.
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The gods must be crazy.

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Portland has more microbreweries than any other city in the entire world. (Wiki)

Portland is singlehandedly responsible for PBR making a comeback across the entire country. (read this and this)
>

England for the English.

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A primary advantage of Britain's Constitutional Monarchy, and the primary reason the queen leads the State Opening every year in full regalia, is that the nation's populace is made ironically though still painfully aware it could, as it has more often than not, be led by a single person's whim.

She makes the members of the Houses of Lords and Commons seem like saviors.
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Foot baths for fibromyalgia!

>

A friend told me her Mom has been much better lately, since she began using Fentanyl patches. (I had to tell her how to correctly pronounce "Fentanyl," and what it is.)

She told me she's proud that her Mom is less dependent on pills, an extremely subtle way of calling me a pseudo-addict pussy because I have to gobble massive quantities of orally administered medicine each day.

"My Mom looks at things differently."

Her Mom uses foot baths to help relieve her pain.

My friend equates her Mom feeling better with her Mom's decreased intake of narcotic pills.

She's right to do so. Her Mom can take fewer pills because her Mom is now on a drug hundreds of times more powerful than morphine. And than what I take.

My friend hates pharmaceuticals. Hates pills. Hates her Mom.

My friend ascribes her Mom's recent pain-decrease to her Mom's sunnier disposition. And to foot baths.

Not to the most powerful narcotic known to humanity.

This narcotic -- Fentanyl: so strong it's dosages are in micrograms, not milligrams -- has allowed Mom to have a sunnier disposition by decreasing her pain. Fentanyl has allowed Mom to take foot baths because now she can sit up for long periods without squirming in pain.

...I remain closed-minded and refuse to swap my pills for smiles, foot baths and Fentanyl. I'm doing all right with much weaker stuff (and a smile is a gateway expression) except for a drooling, teeth-grinding, fist-clenching hatred for fuckwad naturopaths who haven't heard of fibro but know I can be cured. And tell me how after I make it clear I'd rather not hear how.

Suggested cures have always involved something a fibromyalgian should never be subjected to, like chiropractic (for this example): someone applying crushing force directly to one's trigger/tender points.

If chiro cures fibro, then I expect to be able to cure broken bones by attacking fractures with sledgehammers.

...Jesus. I need a smile and a foot bath.

>

Questions (and no Googling for the answers):

>
No Googling -- but the answers are below.

1) How many US soldiers have died in Operation Attack Iraq Because Bush II Has A Vendetta?

2) How many Iraqi civilians?

3) How many US soldiers have died in the war in Afghanistan?

4) How may Afghan civilians?

5) How many Osama bin Ladens?

6) How many angels can dance on the point of a needle?

ANSWER KEY:

1) About 4,000. (There have been 4,242 confirmed deaths among the Coalition of Nations Dumb Or Asshole Enough To Send Their People To War Based On the Bush II Administration's Word. And I naturally estimate that the vast majority of those killed were US soldiers.)

2) Between about 91,000 and 99,000.

3) 651 US soldiers killed . Forty-nine were killed in 2002. 155 were killed in 2008, more than any other year. More than in 2002, 2003 and 2004 combined.

The total losses among all invading countries: 1,077.

4) Short answer: No one knows. Which seems fine because the vast majority of the Western World doesn't want to know.

"Estimates of civilian deaths based on media reports since the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 range from 4,800 to 7,000 killed by US and NATO forces, with another 3,000 deaths caused by insurgent actions. As in Iraq, figures derived from media estimates must be considered an under-estimation due to the lack of reportage of many incidents and the unknown numbers of wounded who died later of their injuries.

"The figure does not include the tens of thousands of alleged 'Taliban' deaths. In the past three years, media accounts based on US and NATO body counts add up to well over 10,000 fatalities among the insurgents. On a number of occasions, it has been subsequently established that the victims were innocent Afghan civilians." (World Socialist Web Site )

5) Zero. However, the US secretly launched Operation Natural Death years ago. Therefore, the number is expected to go up at any time.

6) Only one, and only if it's a gifted dancer. Thomas Aquinas holds that angels cannot occupy the same space -- or, as he has it, "contain" the same space. ("God and Reason In the Middle Ages," Edward Grant -- see the subsection Angels and Natural Philosophy, page 255.)
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Honey Bucket!

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After seeing the below, I cared much less about being allergic to honey and, therefore, not being able to consume it.

Mm-mm!
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The Eternal Order Of Reasonably Civilized Monkeys.

>
The drawing I made and posted previously has something to do with something known as The Eternal Order Of Reasonably Civilized Monkeys.

How so? That is: How do I know the two are related?

I saw the writing and the drawing together, scribbled in marker on a bar's bathroom stall. Scribbled in the same hand.

So we have a group of bathroom vandalizers. Or -- which would be more fun -- organized crime with a funky name. Or anything in between.

No matter. I probably don't want to know. Finding out could result in physical pain (if we're dealing with organized crime) or disappointment or anything in between. Disappointment would be caused simply by knowing exactly what the Civilized Monkeys truly are. Then they would cease to be whatever I imagine they could be. And whatever they really are can't be as interesting as the hundreds of things I imagine they may be.

Reality is no fun.

Still. I need to know what's up. And will likely take some trouble to find out, since everything is my business.

Therefore, the recommendation (which has been kid tested, mother-approved*) is that you Stay Tuned, Blogfriends, for further installments of Calvin Bandini In: The Case of the Mysterious Monkeys!

*I ripped off the Kix slogan. Kix is a cereal best eaten with heaping teaspoons of refined sugar.
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Panic: We are hanging here.

>
My attempts to load incompatible software onto my aged Mac have ultimately resulted in this:

I start up the computer and get a very strange screen with very strange words and numbers that end with

"panic: we are hanging here"

...Ohhhh-kay.

Looks like a complete reinstall is in my future.

A reinstall I will have to perform in a state of panic. Because they're hanging here.
>

The devil had an aisle seat.

>
Since moving to Portland, the following has happened:

The mayor (Sam Adams) has become involved in what is being considered a scandal, in which the mayor lied about fucking around with an 18-year-old. Fucking around with an 18-year-old is legal. Portland's mayor is openly gay. Politicians lie.

A guy shot nine people in downtown PDX. Killed two teenage girls and himself, wounded the others. Gets far less news coverage than does the above item re the mayor.

The ability to tax cigarettes and alcohol is being sought by the state legislature.

...And so it seems derangement and evil took the same plane here that I did.
>

Caring Is Creepy.

>
I knew finally
that she wasn't
attracted to me
after I asked her
if she was and
she said she wasn't.

Still, one night
I insisted we meet
and I kissed her.
Before she got mad
I said
"Thanks. I can't
taste
my dead grandfather's forehead anymore."




>

I live in a city I didn't live in two weeks ago.

>

I moved to Portland.

I'm seeing a sign/symbol/Chinese character drawn/painted/wiped on any surface that will take it. It freaks me out and I can't find out what it is -- means. ...Well, Google offers nothing and Wikipedia doesn't know a thing, which means I don't because one is my library the other my brain, respectively.

I drew the sign/whatever from memory:

And drew in red because I see it almost exclusively in red.

Odd as hell.

So is the fact that everyone in this city seems genuinely kind. (Just had a chill down the spine.)

...Get Cheney back in the White House and give him as many person-sized safes he needs to feel comfortable. We need an asshole to check this freakish shit out. And dig up Hoover in his dress and exhume McCarthy...
>

Burn this computer.

>

I just read Fahrenheit 451, a book by Ray Bradbury. My understanding is that most high schoolers are forced to read it. Somehow, I wasn't. And so I didn't side with the firemen, stop reading and quit school to work on a farm to raise, have sex with, and butcher livestock.

Bradbury's not good. And not the one to make the case against burning books.

(Of course, I'm much worse than he is. But I'm not making the case for saving word-strings.)

Get a load of Faber. The character and his relationship with Montag was so goddam contrived how could he have been anything other than a police-plant?

But no.

And the ending -- saving books inside people, people negating themselves, considering themselves only the books they carried in their heads.

Fine fucking life.

Of course, preferable to the shitstorm of the city, to having Denham's Dentifrice drilled up your nose into your frontal lobe and wagged about.

Still, the book ends with the book-band marching away from the city.

What?

The city is utterly ruined, and you guys are off to be walking shelves.

Why not take what was the city and make it a big goddam library, grab all weapons available to fight off the government -- if it remains at the closing of the book... It could have been bombed to nothing as well -- make what you want and protect it?

That the walking books choose to roam around the not-cities seems to champion pastoralism. Blech.

...Thus ends Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which you could burn Fahrenheit 451: A bunch of ass-hats are roaming the countryside, many books within them, to wait until the phoenix of man rose from the ashes of its war-lust.

...They do so instead of making whatever their ideal society would be from the ashes of the bombed-out metropolis so conveniently behind them.

They make a simile (phoenix) and then can't use it.

Goodbye, Blue Monday!

ETC.

(I also re-read Breakfast of Champions. The Vonnegut writing machine was set to Massively Self-indulgent prior to aforementioned book's creation. ...But the man draws a fine asshole.)
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America: the Christian nation that rejects christ.

>
OK... Haitus begins after this post because there isn't a "well enough" and there's nothing I care to leave alone.

Research for my last post brought me to an article by Bill McKibben in Harper's Magazine. Read the whole thing.

Some highlights from said article (written in 2005) to encourage you to do so:

McKibben notes that "somewhere around 85 percent of [Americans] call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish."

Still, he wonders:

"But is [America] Christian?" ... "What if we chose some simple criterion—say, giving aid to the poorest people—as a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they'd fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?"

We find that, "by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose -- childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool -- we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin."

Also:

* "Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers."

* "We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations."

* "Having been told to turn the other cheek, we're the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest."

* "Despite Jesus' strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate -- just over half -- that compares poorly with the European Union's average of about four in ten." ... "[C]ompare our success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent."

* "A rich man came to Jesus one day and asked what he should do to get into heaven. Jesus did not say he should invest, spend, and let the benefits trickle down; he said sell what you have, give the money to the poor, and follow me. Few plainer words have been spoken. And yet, for some reason, the Christian Coalition of America -- founded in 1989 in order to 'preserve, protect and defend the Judeo-Christian values that made this the greatest country in history' -- proclaimed last year that its top legislative priority would be “making permanent President Bush's 2001 federal tax cuts.”

*A "furor erupted last spring when it emerged that a Colorado jury had consulted the Bible before sentencing a killer to death. Experts debated whether the (Christian) jurors should have used an outside authority in their deliberations, and of course the Christian right saw it as one more sign of a secular society devaluing religion. But a more interesting question would have been why the jurors fixated on Leviticus 24, with its call for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They had somehow missed Jesus' explicit refutation in the New Testament: 'You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”

McKibben comes to his own conclusions.

My conclusion: Were there a heaven, nearly all American Christians could get in only by killing Saint Peter and rushing the Golden Gates.

Which it seems very likely they would do, given the above.
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Christ abhors Christianity.

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Today my hiatus begins -- I won't be posting until I get my computer to my new address (I'm moving).

I'll leave you (for a week or two) with this:

Matthew 18:6-7: "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

7 "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!"

(italics mine)

That is: It is better for a corrupting influence to kill him-/herself than to allow him-/herself to be a corrupting influence. Jesus, here, is speaking of children, who need to be taught scripture and how to follow god.

Taught properly -- without "corruption" of the holy texts and Jesus' words.

Now: Not a single passage in the Bible has anything to do with lesbianism. Therefore, it is not prohibited. Not a sin.

However, Christianity teaches that it is. It teaches people that which the Bible and Christ himself did not.

Christianity corrupts those who are as children in their understanding of Jesus and the Bible:

"Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife." (Bill McKibben, Harper's Magazine)

Jesus apparently recommends a millstone and a plank-walk to every Christian preacher.

Christ calls for Christianity's end.
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Excuse me while I blow your mind.

>
I have a mug full of writing utensils next to my computer. One is a marker: MARKS-A-LOT.

Every time I see it, sitting at my desk almost daily, I become more convinced that Sir Mix-a-Lot took his stage name from a permanent, broad-tipped marker.

Hopefully, anyway, because I'd consider that absolutely hilarious. Even if it wasn't -- or, more likely, because it wasn't -- at all imaginative. It would be made all the more funny if Sir MARKS-A-LOT came by his moniker exactly as I've come to ponder how he did so. I imagine him staring at writing devices, but noticing this one in particular because the marker is bigger than the pen and pencils, and screams its brand in all-caps. He's mixing tracks in the studio, marking things up, the light bulb flickers above his head, and the ass-crazy bastard is reborn.

Which isn't a value judgment on The Rapping Marker. At least his name came from a more esoteric source than Eminem's did.

Now I'm left to ponder whether I should re-christen myself King Dual-balls (I adore Uni-ball blue, fine-point pens) or CalPod...

PS: I know the title of this post is a bit seamy, coming on the heels of a post about sex.

PPS: I know using "coming on the heels" in the above sentence also was a bit seamy.
>

Sex is medicine.

>
And our odd society and odd world with odd religions considers celibacy, chastity and especially virginity to be virtues. Deadly Virtues (ominous bum-BUM).

For the gods' sakes', Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders lost her post because of the following:

"In 1994, [Elders] was invited to speak at a United Nations conference on AIDS. She was asked whether it would be appropriate to promote masturbation as a means of preventing young people from engaging in riskier forms of sexual activity, and she replied, 'I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught.' (Wiki, of course)

In fact, masturbating like a fiend is being linked to myriad benefits.

Bu sex is better.

(The citations below are from this Wikipedia page.)

"In 1997, Forbes Magazine reported on 'one of the most credible studies correlating overall health with sexual frequency'. [sic] Queens University in Belfast tracked the mortality of about 1,000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade. The study, published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal found that 'men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards'; that is to say, those that engaged in sex more frequently enjoyed longer lives. The report also cited other studies to show that having sex even a few times a week may be associated with: improved sense of smell; reduced risk of heart disease; weight loss and overall fitness; reduced depression (in women); the relief or lessening of pain; less frequent colds and flu; better bladder control; better teeth; and improved prostate function. The report cited a study published by the British Journal of Urology International which indicated that men in their 20s can reduce by a third their chance of getting prostate cancer by ejaculating more than five times a week."

And you just have to love Bush II, who will leave office having done irreparable harm to the US and not a single good thing to/for it.

At least the below action wasn't evil:

"In 2006, the George W. Bush administration expanded abstinence programs from teens to adults, by introducing programs to encourage unmarried adults to remain abstinent until marriage." (italics mine)

At what age did Bush II swim up from decades of alcohol and drug abuse? And what goes with alcohol and drugs like alcohol with drugs? Sex.

Why does a piece of advice always have to come from someone who did fine without it him-/herself? What worth is such advice to be given?

Ugh. I'm tired, but wanted to post for the sake of getting something new up here. I'm getting lazy because I'm about to move.

Expect more laziness for maybe two weeks longer. The kind of laziness that (example above) causes me to start something and not finish it.

Excelsior!
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Evolution is just a theory.

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"In casual speech scientists don't use the term theory in a particularly precise fashion." For instance: "Einstein's relativity is usually called 'the theory of relativity' while Newton's theory of gravity often is called 'the law of gravity.'"

But the "theory" best explains why the universe acts as it does. Newton's "law" imagined gravity to be, simply, a force that pulled on everything.

Still, despite the fact that Newton's force doesn't exist, it's easier to accept and comprehend than a four-dimensional universe in which orbits are straight lines.

Onward: I think it's best to think of a theory in this manner: "a testable model that is best capable of predicting future occurrences or observations and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise verified through empirical observation." (Love you Wikipedia, and I promise not to forget Valentine's this year)

Einstein's 4-D universe allowed humans to, for the first time, explain why Mercury's orbit is what it is. And so on.

His models, theories, and theory of models currently best explain the universe. The universe could, in fact, be exactly as he explained it. Nothing has proven him wrong.

Still, the 4-D universe will always be just a theory simply because humans don't have access to every happening everywhere at any-/every time.

Then there's Cell Theory, which "refers to the idea that cells are the basic unit of structure in every living thing." ... "The theory says that new cells are formed from other existing cells and the cell is a fundamental unit of structure, function and organization in all living organisms." (Wiki)

Obvious, it seems. But still just a theory.

Now to (biological) evolution.

It's 100 percent true, factual, proven, unable-to-be-disproved that organisms change over time. You can watch organisms with short life spans evolve (develop; change over time). Organisms like bacteria and viruses that cause illnesses in humans; like the flu virus, which portions of the population are immunized against each and every year because each and every year the virus has changed enough to make the bugger immune to your previous year's immunization.

So, if you don't believe in evolution, you have the unfortunate habit of proving that evolution happens/has happened every single time you get sick. And you get sick an average of three times a year.

Evolution happens. You state its reality with sneezes and to your boss whenever you call in to work when you actually need to.

Here's the sticky thing:

The theory of how evolution works continues to be refined.

Meaning that evolution is just a fact that has a continually more precise theory behind its whats and wherefores.

PS: Creationism/Intelligent Design disproved: the duck-billed platypus.

The. End.
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NRA4VR.

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"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

K.

2009: A well-regulated militia isn't necessary to secure the US, only to ensure every kid who goes to school wonders the tiniest bit which classmate snapped today and might shoot them.

The Second God-Damned Amendment had nothing to do with the fact that the not-yet US needed an assload of people with guns. I guess.

And The Revolution having come and gone, the Second applies?

Fucking still?

To come: Statistics and probabilities.

Meantime: Enjoy your rights. Be secure in knowing that law-abiding citizens don't shoot people. Non-law-abiding citizens do.

With guns that came from your house. Stolen. Sold. Et cetera.
>

It seems relevant.

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An awful and disgusting thing happens when one learns of a murder committed with a claw hammer.

One immediately wonders, and actually hopes to learn: Which end did the killer use?
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With the holidays over, it's back to blogging.

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And so a weary world sighs in relief, one small worry -- why nothing from Bandini for so long? -- assuaged.

So "once more into the breach, dear friends," with the weird, the petulant, and the weirdly petulant.
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