"Being natural, and feeling natural after I put my make-up on: that is what is important to me."

Infomercials can be chock-full of irony and humour.

The ultimate product out there, though, the one that will change your life, enrich your soul, and transform you as a person, is the Saunabelt. Using the sauna to sweat out those pounds is really uncomfortable. Exercise is time-consuming and takes too much effort. Diet plans just don't work. What you need is the Saunabelt. With this miraculous product, all you have to do is put it around your waist, and within 50 minutes, you will sweat like a pig and lose a whole inch! That's right, you can look like a skimpy Hollywood supermodel or a chiseled Roman god in a month just by putting on the Saunabelt and sweating those pounds away.

It may sound satirical, but I actually saw an infomercial for the product that made those exact claims. "Pathetic" has reached a whole new plateau.

I enjoy infomercials, though. They're incredibly entertaining to mock, as many of them seem to be mockeries of themselves as it is. The cheesiness is astronomical. Astro cheese.

Act now.
Save time.
A new you.
Works faster.
Look younger.
So convenient.
It really works.
Amazing results.
Pick up the phone.
There's still time.
Do it for yourself.
Look good on the beach.
It'll change your life.
Hurry, time is running out.
No risk money back guarantee.
Once in a lifetime opportunity.
It's the best decision you'll ever make.
Live the life you've always dreamed of.
This has been a paid presentation for desperate dupes.

To be free and inhuman?

A student brought her wailing infant into stats class today. That's a new one. She should join the noisy bubble gum chewing club and the awesome zombie brigade. Crying baby + hot, stuffy classroom + being expected to use a Student t distribution to construct 95% confidence intervals for the variance of a random sample of 25 in six minutes = grrr.

I just installed a 300 GB Serial ATA hard drive in my old Dell Dimension, finally having found the S(ATA) power converter required to hook it up to a 4-pin power plug. Of course, my mobo is old and has no SATA interface, so I had to install a SATA PCI card. Somehow, I managed to get Windows ME to install fine, but whenever I try to upgrade to XP it gives me a stop error halfway through the installation. Furthermore, in order to even get into ME, I have to set the boot order in the BIOS to CD-ROM as first priority and have the ME install disk in the master CD-ROM, which will allow the option of booting from the hard disk to be shown at start-up. Otherwise, when I start up the system, it tells me I have an invalid disk in the floppy drive.

Ideally, for it to function properly, the hard drive should be the first boot device. Of course, The only devices that the BIOS lists for boot order are:

FLOPPY
ATAPI CD-ROM
ARMD FDD
ARMD HDD
IDE HDD
Other ROM

No SCSI device is listed, of course, because the HDD is connected to the PCI card, not the mobo. What I really need to know is how to set the Serial ATA drive as the first boot device. Anyone have any knowledge on this? I'll try a few things I have in mind when I get home, but suggestions would be appreciated.

Playing Astro Lounge by Smash Mouth at a high volume while driving around earns me odd looks from people, I found, especially in the vicinity of Wal-Mart. Good music, what's that?

Eek! It's a terrorist!

MANILA, Philippines (Reuters) -- A mouse upset the best-laid plans of an airline and nearly 250 passengers in the Philippines, grounding a plane for 13 hours while engineers tried to smoke out the rodent.

The Qatar Airways plane was preparing for take-off from Manila airport earlier this week when a crew member spotted the mouse scampering across an aisle in the economy class section, the Philippine Daily Inquirer quoted airport officials as saying.

The captain ordered the passengers to disembark while maintenance staff fumigated the aircraft and laid traps, but the mouse was nowhere to be found.

The Doha-bound aircraft eventually took off 13 hours late, presumably with the mouse still on board, dead or alive.

"There was an incident before with a cockroach, but it's the first time that we had to deal with a mouse," the Inquirer quoted airport operations chief Octavio Lina as saying.

Copyright 2005 Reuters. All rights reserved.

A moment of your time to touch a life.

The smallest gestures often make the biggest difference.

Foxy Affection.

Rarely do I catch myself sounding Hallmarky, but images like these have a tendency to effortlessly penetrate through my calloused outer shell and touch my deep-seated sentimental core.

You miss the point, Mr. Know-it-All Handyman.

Only Jesus provides freedom from the bondage of sin.

...But even He can't undo the knots I tie, those beautiful, meticulously crafted works of art which reflect how seriously I take my bondage. It is deliberately Jesus-proof, for who knows on what day He may arrive and try to ruin my fun.

I got a middle C on my remote sensing exam. I am hardly disappointed, considering I was half-expecting to fail and was consequently dreading the part where the exam is handed back and I am pressured to view my score. Considering the class average was a 67% (this is a class full of relatively bright, serious seniors, mind), it certainly shows a fault on the instructor's part. Either he made the exam unreasonably difficult or his South Korean accent is easily misinterpretable. The good news is that I have the opportunity to go back and correct my wrong answers, thus elevating my score to a solid B.

Despite the fact that I am going to be eating, drinking, and breathing statistics principles until my stats test on Friday, I am a much calmer wolf today.

All over the place.

Today's fifty minutes spent in stats lecture reminded me exactly why women in general irk me so much. I'm referring to the ones that go well out of their way to look all pretty by the standards of popular culture, with their hundreds of dollars worth of make-up, expensive skimpy articles of clothing, and 'perfect' hair. It's not so much the way they look, though, that gets under my skin, as I don't have to look at them, even though everything about them screams, "look at me, guys, like omg!!" Rather, it's the way they behave. There is something about a pouty female voice that deliberately expresses a sort of socially expected helplessness that I find positively obnoxious. It's as if they expect a man to rush to their aid as quickly as possible because, well, girls are supposed to act all helpless and guys are supposed to help them! This sociological 'damsel in distress' behaviour is something I witness all too often.

Then there's the way so many of them talk. "Like, oh my gawwwwwd, that homework from research methods was like, so hard, I swear to gawd, I spent like three hours on it last night!" I overheard a girl say that just before the lecture started, and it made me want to lean over the computers and slap her. Why does the vast majority of people around school who have loud and obnoxious voices happen to be females? There's nothing like a high-pitched, totally exaggerated-sounding comment a girl makes when she passes a friend in the hallway that she hasn't seen since, like, yesterday! Meanwhile, all most guys do is shake hands and say "sup." Yeah, that's probably a major reason I am much more tolerant of males. Their behaviours are generally much less overt and seem much more natural and less exaggerated. Guys in general just seem more natural; certainly a favourable characteristic.

So many women just seem entirely artificial to me, whether it's true or not. It all starts with them covering their faces with chemical products everyday to hide their "flaws," and only goes downhill from there. They seem so self-conscious and vain. The ones that wear little hot pink baby t's that say things like "100% hottie" certainly have no trepidation about announcing how snugly they fit into that category. I find girls like these to be the absolute antithesis of attractive. They are utterly repulsive.

Back to my stats class, there is an entire clique of five or six biology "chicks" who almost perfectly match all observable aspects of my description. They all know each other sooooo well, and they always put the entire back row on reserve for each member of their clique. "Sorry, I'm saving that seat for Sarah!" I feel like I stepped into a time machine and warped back to a sixth grade pep rally. Of course, they hardly make an effort to validate their presence in the classroom at all. Whenever I glance over at their monitor displays, I see they're usually chatting with or e-mailing their hot b/f's and even more frequently, shopping for shoes or skimpy clothes. No, I am not exaggering one bit. It's that bad. I hope they all flunk.

It's all these women who operate under very real and evident stereotypes that make me that much more grateful for all the females who don't. I cannot say I abhor the female gender; far from it. It's just that so many members of it give it a bad name, and of course the same is true for males, and humanity in general.

Also, I believe it's time to confess something. Though they are far from my favourite species, I don't really hate humanity. I realise that to say such a thing is the mark of an immature mind, and I have been starting to wise up a little. I do feel a certain amount of compassion even for people who aren't my friends or whom I have some reason to respect and admire (though certainly not everyone, believe me). I actually came to this realisation about a week ago, when I was walking along the shore at the ice ponds south of town. I was minding my own business when I heard a voice say, "help?" At first, I thought I was hearing things. It soon repeated itself, though. I backtracked a few metres and looked down at an elderly man laying in a crack in the lava, clearly disoriented. He had a few bloody scrapes on him from the sharp lava rock, and I determined he must have slipped on the slick surface and gone down hard.

Now, if I truly didn't care, I would have just ignored him and kept on strollin' in the rain to let someone else deal with him. The thought didn't even cross my mind, though. I started talking to him to find out what happened and whether he was seriously injured. It turned out the scrapes were the worst injuries he had sustained, fortunately. Also fortunate was the fact that two fishermen named Jake and Lester happened to walk by a few moments after I found him, and all three of us made a team effort to pull him out of the crack and sit him up. Jake called the EMS and had a medical team sent to the parking lot before the rainforest access trail, and I went back to guide them to the exact spot. The professionals took it from there, helping him back to his condo. It was surprisingly satisfying to know that I had the right thing. It's not very often that I am given the opportunity to help someone in such fashion, and it's odd that I just happened to be down there at that point in time. It was a pretty enlightening experience.

Oh, but I am growing quite weary of hearing about "humans and the animals." Humans are animals, whether one chooses to accept it or not. They are just more evolved, capable of a much wider range of activities and behaviours, and possessive of a greater amount of strengths and weaknesses. In my opinion, this does not make them superior. They are still mere mortals fighting against all odds for survival, only many of them live much more comfortably. And you know, dreaming up a god who just happens to rank humans as the highest-ranking organism isn't exactly a quality I admire a whole lot. Other animals are beautiful for their simplicity, simply for being all that they are: gorgeous, graceful, furry, a reminder of what is genuine and true. They do not pretend, they just are. They act according to nature and instinct, and do not concern themselves with all the ridiculous games humans play. That is what makes them beautiful. They are also wonderful for the joy they bring into people's hearts, by being loyal to them as part of a family or simply posing for a camera in a national park.

This reminds me of one of my favourite George Carlin quotes:

"We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet? ..."

The same goes for "let's protect this" and "let's protect that." You know, we always have to be in control of nature, what lives and what dies. "Let's eradicate those evil coqui frogs! They're taking over and eating all the insects native birds eat! Native birds deserve to live, coqui frogs are pests!" Of course, most people like birds, so insisting that coqui frogs are cutting off the birds' primary source of food is a great sell for getting people involved in the extermination effort. Realistically, I have seen very little evidence that this actually occurs. People just can't stand these tiny, pesky creatures making so much noise. "Our neighbourhoods are being overrun by noisy frogs! WE CANNOT HAVE THIS!" **Waves imaginary pitchfork and burning torch in the air**

...Meanwhile, I can't imagine how anyone could consider the music they make anything short of euphonious. You know what's terrific, though? The coqui infestation population in Hilo and Puna is now completely out of control. They can never be anything close to entirely eradicated here. Go frogs, yeah, TOUCHDOWN WOOHOO!!!!11

To shift the topic from first to fourth, I browsed a Sonic the Hedgehog comic book whilst in Borders today, and was utterly appalled by his appearance. Before, I could not have possibly thought he could look much worse than he does in this image:



Today, however, I was proven wrong. He looked even more fruitified in the comic book. He looks as if he was drawn by one of the same artists who did the Dragonball Z series. That's not a good thing, trust me. He could not be the real Sonic, but merely a nerdy anime otaku in a homely-looking Sonic costume he spun together with blue construction paper and a glue stick in special ed art class. Dear Rayg, it's so sad. And look at Tails. What the hell -is- that thing?

I must... get that image... out of my mind...



Ah, much better. The moral: don't try to improve something that's already perfect.

Talk about disjointed musings. Sometimes, I can't bring myself to write anything at all; other times, I can barely stop.

Spring-loaded routine.

Can someone please feature my blog? I strongly desire a whirlwind of comments posted by a body builder notifying me that I qualify for a free mobile scooter (and it had better be anointed!)

Sometimes, I really feel compelled to question my study habits. When it comes to a midterm (well, actually, let me henceforth substitute that term with something a little less innately dreadful: exam), I often find myself putting off not only reviewing much of the content until the day before the test, but also learning it. There is a certain advantage to having to write a weekly essay on the assigned readings for each week: it forces the student to do the assigned readings on a weekly basis to receive credit. For the very reason that my tourism course forces me to do this, I prognosticate that studying for the single exam in the class probably won't be such a grueling task. In contrast, I spent a good eight consecutive hours last night glazing over the relevant chapters for my remote sensing exam today, learning most of it for the first time rather than going over it.

See, one of the most important factors in being successful in institutions of higher learning is having the ability to manage one's time wisely. I am taking six courses at once, and trying to use my available studying time to study for each of them to a sufficient extent is a far greater challenge than actually comprehending or absorbing any of the educational content. A couple days before a big exam, I become utterly obsessive about it, and can hardly relax until it is over with. Before that tension begins, it is certainly a good idea to have completed any assignments due on the day of or two days before the exam. Otherwise, I simply will not be able to concentrate on those assignments at all, as I will be too busy studying obsessively for the exam. If, by chance, I have two big exams on the same day, then it gets really, really messy, and I can easily envision my mind as having quickly developed the consistency of pistachio pudding.

Admittedly, writing about homework and studying bores me far greater than doing actually studying does, so I should just stop. I have a big test in two and a half hours, and I may as well obsessively cram as much as I can into my bloated brain.

Rita, though as of this moment having lost some of its strength, is forecasted to make landfall as an extremely powerful storm and devastate the lives of thousands. Time for our nation's people to perpetuate the great American spirit of compassion and generosity by bitching about rising gas prices again. Just look at what God sends our way in return for liberating the formerly oppressed Iraqi people and defending America's freedom!

Last night, I dreamt I was a participant in a professional golf tournament, and my score was something like +50923 -21. Not only that, I was dressed up in a rooster costume with large money bills sewed on like patches all over my chest. Should this represent some kind of subtle symbolic message that golfing is for rich, arrogant cocks?

I'm feeling very feral again. Another day, another opportunity to creep out a fresh set of random strangers! It barely takes any effort anymore, and is usually accomplished simply by doing the following:

1. Refraining from combing hair after getting out of bed in the morning.
2. Not shaving for a few days. There is something to be said for looking pale and grizzled.
3. Only using an umbrella when it's bright and sunny out (doesn't apply to today- it's beautiful and rainy).
4. Being perfectly silent as much as possible.
5. Playing :wumpscut: loudly while cruising down the street (hey, I love danceable industrial brutality!)
6. Leering with a mean gaze/staring blankly at someone as if trying to fathom some type of alien life form (hey, people do it to me all the time, especially 7-11 clerks).
7. Appearing to be riveted and deeply inspired by a lecture in statistics class.
8. Acting natural.

My mother probably interpreted differently when I assured her that I have a lot of fun with people.