Lately I've been watching the news for comedy, I guess since the American election doesn't directly affect me it's funny. Watching American comedians like Chris Rock on Larry King, and Stephen Colbert actually broke character for a second on his show to seriously address the public and make the case that Sarah Palin is just completely incompetant. Sarah Silverman makes the case for Obama, in video.

For more laughs check out Palin's interviews with Katie Couric [http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4476649n] and with Charlie Gibson [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubsUQKd9c7c]. Thursday night is the Vice Presidential debate Palin vs. Biden, which by all accounts will be pretty funny since Biden often says stupid infactual things as well. There is talk about Palin stepping down as McCain's running mate, hopefully this doesn't happen before the debate. Edit: And I forgot about this clip of SNL's Palin + Hillary

If James Bond was a microwave investigator I don't think he would get as many ladys and the women he could get would have names like "Ivana Bag-O-Potatoes" and "Eliza HotPocket". It also wouldn't make for a very interesting movie, but critics could say the plot rotated slowly like a dish in a microwave. Who would benefit from this I wanna know. ... He would fear any kind of metallic cutlery, and all his gadgets and spy equipment would be made of ceramic or plastic. He'd always try cover things so they don't splatter, like everything, even things that would never go in the microwave and weren't in a microwave like a fire hydrant, or a boat down at the marina. He'd fear water and salt telling people he met that they attracted microwaves and to avoid them, but no one would heed his warnings and the world would almost come to an end in every movie because of it. Bond villains would have plots that involved microwave factories and breaking into people's homes to tinker in their kitchens and Bond would become blazai and fat and would develop obsessive compulsive habbits like pressing a certain sequence of buttons on the microwave keypad after solving a case that sounds like the Bond theme. He'd still have cool cars but he can't afford it so he's in piles of debt because of it.

Did you ever think about how people with only one leg can't trip on their own untied shoe lace. Or how hopping gives you a height advantage allowing one legged people to see enemies coming from further away, and maybe just maybe that compensates and perhaps even over compensates for the slowness of hopping to safety. In that same regard how hopping children are more visible when crossing the street and therefore less likely to get run over. Or how hopping is better cardio than walking. Having one leg vastly improves your survivability in today's urban environment, and thus I suspect that these one legged people are not the result of accident but rather that of evolution. Well the ones that were in accidents are obviously the result of accident, but the other ones; you know which ones I'm talking about, are a glimpse at the future of the human race.

Music video for John Mellencamp's My Sweet Love. A pictures worth a thousand words but the video shows a thousand pictures for each word. awesome.

That's right, I'm sick, I think. I was in denial all week but now there is no escaping it. I've been told it's the flu or some similar. The point of writing this is I felt it necessesary to tell everyone that tea seems to have an exponential way of cooling, I can see the graph in my head as I plot the points along said curve as time ticks on, which is the only thing I can do to stop myself being mad at the tea itself. See I boil water and for a very long time it's way to hot to drink for a sporadically non-masochistic fellow like myself then there's a small window where it's perfect and then suddenly it's way to cold to drink. WAIT, that's not exponential at all. I just need a thermostat on my mug here.

It's always surprising when I wake up two hours after I originally intended to and find my mobile phone(battery powered, loud, vibrating alarm clock) on the ground or sometimes even across the room. I'm pretty confident that it's not alive and trying to escape. Lets face it it's a phone and it'd be easier to just call for help then seek it out. I think sometimes I just don't hear it over my dreams and the vibrate vibrates it right off and across the floor until it realizes I'm still sleeping and quiets down. My secondary alarm clock is actually a program on my mac (a brilliant lifesaving one)[http://www.robbiehanson.com/alarmclock/index.html] it wakes my macbook from sleep and gradually increases in volume and I can hit snooze on the apple remote without having to get up. What's eeri about this one is sometimes I wake up two hours after originally intended to find it deactivated. The only way that's possible is if I got out of bed, walked across the room and consciously deactivated it, yet I never remember doing this. My current strategies for dealing with this are as follows:

• hiding my mobile so I actually have to hunt for it, the longer I'm looking for it the less chance of me getting back into bed after I find and smash it.
• placing catastrophic items in the path between me and whatever alarm clock's I'm using so I trip and fall. The impact is supposed to jar me awake but sometimes I fall only to wake up a few hours later with a mild concussion and headache. Other times I slip and fall back into bed only to wake up a few hours later wondering why my system didn't work.

"TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Their site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public"

Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web

This is a photo I took a couple years ago, click for a bigger image. When I post photos it'll be in an unknown order. If you're obsessive about strict chronological succession there's nothing you can do about it.

So update on the leaky waterbed front, turns out you can just patch the leak with a chunk of vinyl and something called vinyl cement. It was really messy, by which I mean wet, emptying the mattress to patch it up and the concentration of waterbed conditioner and hours of it being all over my hands caused my hands to start disintegrating(waterbed conditioner is exteremly reactive apparently - think very very very chapped lips but it's your hands and it happened in two hours) painful to say the least but fixable with lots of vaseline. See normally you empty a waterbed with a pump and hose pipe. Not me though, I do things when I feel like and waiting a whole day to go and get a pump is incomprehendable when it's 3am and my bed is slowly leaking. What else could I do but make a fairly large incision and empty the whole bed bucket by bucket(200+ buckets total) running back and forth between my bed and the bathtub. The running was only necessary because the large hole I had to create vastly accelerated the leakage and my carpet was fast becoming a splash zone. All is under control now though, frame and base flipped so I actually ended up with a bigger better waterbed

Most people have already heard about CERN's Large Hadron Collider over the last years of construction, for those that haven't I've embedded a rap video crash course on the LHC and particle physics to bring you up to speed. If you want more info visit their site:[http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html] For anyone (there are lots on youtube at least, mostly emo kids who actually know very little about physics and are out looking for attention) who is worried about the worlds biggest particle accelerator creating a black hole somewhere along or near the French-Swiss border, there are two places to be checking regularly. [http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/] and [http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/] If you know how, you'll get a kick out of viewing the source on those pages. For those who don't the first one contains logic that runs on your computer after getting the page which determines if the world still exists, in the code comments there's an email you can complain to in the event the world has ended and the site is incorrectly showing that it has not. In my experience building web apps people using Internet Explorer are likely the only ones who will find themselves in that position, which unfortunately is most of you. The second site feels less legitimate but from an information standpoint is far more comprehensive. Providing in the code comments quotes of physicists contemplating what it would be like to live in a vacuum. They also have a subscribable feed for people that want to track whether the earth exists or not with a feed-reader. And finally poor search engine robots checking the robots.txt file to figure out what parts of the site to index are confronted with the message "robots will not save you". We all know such a convoluted sentence would cause any robot reading it to explode, which in itself brings a feeling of totality to the world being destoyed(Google would have been the only thing that could have organized the vacuum into coherency and with their robots effectually deceased the post-black-hole world will just be nonsense).