The opinionated fool declareth:

Nothing like watching Natural Born Killers to put you in a really, really weird mood.

Ah, how fun it is, especially during Advent and Christmas to attempt to mock and deny God! Act now and get a free DVD! Rational people will disagree that just by saying the words, "I deny the existence of the Holy Spirit" (oh no, I just said it in my head!) that it is possible to damn your soul to hell - real blasphemy against the Holy Spirit probably requires a lifetime of sin to cement. For whatever reason, I seem to recall that the Church teaches that the ultimate blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is prideful unwillingness to ask for forgiveness rather than a single utterance. Even the holiest person over the course of their life is grossly unworthy to ask for forgiveness, and we use our free will to choose what we desire, forgiveness or self-righteousness... we are unworthy of either. God doesn't prevent us from rejecting him, because how worthwhile would a slave's relationship be? We aren't slaves to God - we're either willing servants of or willing...

I'm not sure how much of each I added, but I made about 3 large glasses-worth of intensely delicious smoothy using: Limeade (from concentrate) Orange juice Strawberries Blueberries Strawberry yogurt Now to shower and go map pwg at school.

I no longer have holes in my walls from the dumbass smoke-detector-installing guy. I do have spackling in my hair though. Dry wall repair for the win!

I am SUCH A HUGE IDIOT. I forgot to feed the fish last night. Oh man, I'm going to be in trouble. Yeah. Good morning.

My hosting service is still MIA. Obviously the things I'm hosting there still are being served (for example, you can see my "The August" picture above, and still download that Iron Maiden song on the right over there), but I can't connect using my FTP client to either download or upload new files. I'm about to grab some food and head back up to the lab - the Northern blot is developing as we speak. Why couldn't I get a strong 5-minute signal? Why the 2-hour exposure shenanigans? Surprisingly, I don't really care about having to go back up to school - work has been more exciting recently, and I really want to see what this Northern is going to tell me.

One of the things the public thinks of scientists is that we do experiments to discover certain things and that these experiments always work. If it turns out one way, we know something. The experiment turns out another way, we know something else. We do this for a few hours each day, then go home. The fact of the matter is that experiments contribute to anxiety and unhappiness through three major pathways: 1.) They don't work. That's right. Most experiments just don't work. You did it all the way you were supposed to, but you forgot to do the voodoo dance, or you didn't understand that when the protocol you're holding says "incubate five minutes at 65 degrees" that actually your boss's copy, or your colleague's copy of the protocol, that line is scratched out and now reads, "incubate at 40 degrees for 6 hours." You didn't know that, and you didn't do it, and your experiment failed. Good luck digging through and finding ou...

Circumcision may decrease HIV transmission rates in males by up to 50% . In other news (but not newsworthy enough to be reported), remaining chaste still has a HIV-prevention rate of close to 100%... (Yes, I realize a good part of the 'African problem' involves women being raped, but still, a crate full of zipped-up zippers would probably help an African nation more than a crate of latex rubbers and bananas to practice on. Well, maybe if they ate the bananas...)

Gotta love it when the boss looks at you and says "Don't fuck this up, man!" before you've started what you're doing. I stifled the first thing that came to mind, which was to reply in kind with a similarly patronizing smirk and say, "OKAY DAN, BE SURE NOT TO CRASH YOUR CAR INTO A BUS ON YOUR WAY HOME! THAT WOULD BE BAD! DON'T FUCK UP YOUR RIDE HOME!" Really, what kind of asshole says something like that? It reminds me of another time probably 2 years ago when Dan gave me a tube with a DNA sample and said, "Don't contaminate this." He wasn't joking, he was absolutely serious. Like he maybe thought I thought I could, or would, or was planning to contaminate the sample... maybe I was about to... by shoving it up his ass! What a smacktard I work for! It's hard to work where your boss has absolutely no regard for you (other than thinking you're going to "fuck this up, man.") At least I'm not the tired and dep...

GetReligion delivers again. This smacktard clown (Reyes) is Chair of the House Intelligence Committee...! He doesn't even know the most basic thing about Al Qaeda! It's a fundamentalist Sunni organization. No wonder we blunder and mess things up "over there." And even worse than him not knowing such a basic question, is the fact that he actually tried to lie, and act like he knew what he was saying. Arrrrrgh!

I read a story like this and I think to myself about how and why they chose 14 days as the limit. Think about it. It's completely arbitrary. Why not 15 days? Or 16? Or 20? Or 30? Or 100? Or how about 270 days? Wait, that's nine months. That would be barbaric! Really, the only thing that changes is the look of the human after conception. Wouldn't want to allow embryos to be farmed at 15 days! Oh, no! That would be bad! Maybe even... murder! Wait, when does it become murder? After it's born? Or wait, maybe right before it's born... hmm... but nothing changes in the 10 minutes it takes to exit the womb... so it's gotta be before that. Well, 6 months it looks too baby-like, like an actual person, and it cries and squirms as it gets ripped apart during abortions... so maybe like 3 months, or 9 weeks... yeah, something like that. Let's go with 14 days, because it's really small then and doesn't have arms or a head yet. Sounds good. W...

     Only click THIS LINK if you have, say, 5 or 10 minutes to look through a bunch of kids absolutely terrified of Santa Claus.      If you don't have time to really enjoy these super hilarious pictures, fuggehdabowditt, eh! PS - How do you make it to where there's a separation between the picture on the left and the text on the right so that the text isn't right next to the picture. I added a "border=30px" but it made the picture have a solid 30pixels of white around it, and 'bordercolor="clear"' didn't work to make it transparent... any help?

You Think I Ain't Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire. How's your drive-time commute? I need a saga. What's the saga ? It's songs for the deaf - you can't even hear it!