What if you grew up in Iowa, became a biochemist, worked for six months on a space station, returned to Earth in “ballistics mode” which subjected your body to 8 G’s, and no one was there to meet you when you crash landed in a field in rural Kazakhstan…except a few locals who only answered, “Yeah, right,” whenever you tried to explain that you’d just come from orbit? You might give an interview like the one Peggy Whitson gave the Discovery Channel a few days ago.

It wasn’t until I got to the Davis Square T-stop that I realized that not only had I forgotten my wallet and my keys, but I’d also brought along the wrong T pass (I still refuse to call them Charlie Cards, thank you very much). I couldn’t get a subway ticket because I didn’t have my cash because I didn’t have my wallet. I couldn’t go back home and crawl under the covers because I didn’t have my keys, and the upstairs neighbors (who might’ve let me in) were already gone for the work day.

So, hurray, …

In case you missed it… Bush To Pope Benedict: “Thank You, Your Holiness. Awesome Speech.” And they called Reagan the “Great Communicator.”

From Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “It was this belief that blossomed into the most extreme of the views above mentioned, that of the professed Heracliteans, such as was held by Cratylus, who… criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once.” Pwned.

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds minus the birds, is somewhat reminiscent of Garfield Minus Garfield. I think both might owe a tip of the digitally altered hat to the ancient and venerable FilmWise Invisibles™ Quizzes.

It becomes increasingly clear that I either need to give over and make this an outright gaming blog, or else get a life.  Decisions, decisions.

Hooray for Amazon. After, what? 10 years? 15? I think they may finally have hit upon a decent web layout. Not perfect yet, but way better than any previous iteration. Geeks should also take note of their new science fiction specialty subsite section thingie, Cosmotopia.

Hurry hurry hurry, it’s still not too late to order YOUR Women in Waders 2008 Calendar! Mmmm…freshwater objectification….

Sometime, perhaps mid-lip-mash, most likely in fact, come to think of it, some few thousand of the more restless, or perhaps merely promiscuouser, bacilli resident in Jason Mulvey’s left eye had crossed the interbody gap and colonized her own right eye, or so the crusted mucus binding her lashes shut seemed to strongly suggest upon waking. She hated conjunctivitis, and she also hated Jason Mulvey, the two hatreds interweaved caeduceus-like about the core, such as it was, of her morning’s first thoughts, each viper inflaming, inciting and invigorating the other. Thusly bound to the double-helices of unshakable resentment and profligately …

I can’t help but think what an approximately perfect psychological profile might be provided by an analytic breakdown of a person’s mail set, the statistics of all your past email for the past, say, five years. If you measure frequencies of who sent what to you, who you sent what, keywords, attachments, thread length, conversation time frame, those sorts of things, I think you’d get an incomplete but still pretty revealing picture of yourself. Furthermore, if you went ahead and tagged senders/recipients (mom, dad, bff, girlfriend, spouse, boss, co-worker, etc), I think you’d have a pretty dead-on …