DAY ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY

I love this xkcd comic because it's about one of my favorite astrophysicists (i'm kinda in love with a lot of them):

This is a horrible autotuned version of a lot of cool things other science educators, theoretical physicists, and astrophysicists have said"

About once or twice a month, I go through the most popular youtube videos as a way to make me feel somewhat like I'm connected to popular culture. I saw a video of a bus monitor being bullied - it was so bad that I shut it off after about 20 seconds. Absolutely horrifying. Which made me happy to read good.is's most recent people are awesome post, which made me go back and click on the original again - and, though I was still unable to watch much more of it, it did make me feel slightly better to see that the video had 28,000+ dislikes.  Read also this article, which discusses the need to recognize and combat bullying, something I strongly agree with.

So while it's great that the internet rallied to send Karen on vacation, and Josh and Wesley may feel genuine regret, we need to teach students—and everyone, really—to identify situations in which group behavior is veering into dangerous territory and to speak up effectively. That means changing the cultural norms and practices in a school, so that kids and adults alike learn to help each other rather than compete. It means cultivating empathy with the same zeal that we teach science and math. And it means rethinking how we educate, so that today’s lunchroom bullies don’t grow up to be boardroom bullies.

More amazing things that reddit has helped do here. I myself am partial to the cutie with Huntingtons who died.  But my real favorite is Cain's Arcade.  Watch the documentary here and learn more about it. It's absolutely adorable. A kid created his own arcade out of cardboard, but nobody came... until someone decided to make a flashmob event.

One day, by chance, I walked into Smart Parts Auto looking for a used door handle for my ’96 Corolla. What I found was an elaborate handmade cardboard arcade manned by a young boy who asked if I would like to play. I asked Caine how it worked and he told me that for $1 I could get two turns, or for $2 I could get a Fun Pass with 500 turns. I got the Fun Pass.

It's spiraled since then and over $200,000 have been raised for his education (with matching funds going to creating a foundation to spur an 'imagination foundation' to inspire other kids). I love it!

And finally, sent by officemate:

Men and women who chew too much khat abandon their domestic responsibilities in favor of spending hour of hour getting mildly high.

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY NINE POST TWO

the season of shows has arrived, and with it, many choices. sad that i cannot do four million things at once, like get kittens, do lesson, sit outside with visitors + pets, go to concert, go to tower, go to teras, and play with kittens.

breaking news!! scotus upheld obamacare! with scalia, alito, and thomas joining kennedy dissenting. kennedy dissents but roberts upholds? crazy pants!

my craptastic phone is really on its last legs. i think it's time to upgrade to one that was built in this century.... or not. i also want a banjo. and a violin.

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY NINE

triumphant return (again) of lolita tonight, along with her brood.  exciting times we live in, no?!

How to make a viral hit. How? Steal. Steal steal steal!

A bunch of computers looked on youtube and learned for themselves what's really important: cats and tool-like objects rotated at a 30 degree angle.

As we all know, the Mexican elections are almost upon us. We all know that, right? Remember back in the day when if you took AP US Government you go to take the Comparative AP test too, and I found a comparative book that had been one of my cousins that analysed the USSR's political system? And then after using that I somehow got 3 credits of college credit for the Comparative test? Man, those were the days - days when you were rewarded for doing nothing...

I have to love this. Have to, of course. I mean, how could I not?

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY EIGHT POST TWO

I got a fig today. Every time I get one, I'm totally paranoid about eating wasps. Except from what that article says, every single fig is the product of at least one dead wasp. So figs, like many other fruits and vegetables, are insect killers, digesting their bodies!  Nobody ever believes that tomatoes are another kind of insect killer. Fun fact. Or carnivorous plant.

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY EIGHT

I know everyone's anxious to hear about the cat issue, so, it's all good! No idea if the (5 out of 6 who survived) kittens will live, but at least the mom's ok!

Care of Sara, a really cool video:

Last night we got into a debate about the tv show Girls. I saw one episode and decided it was horribly, terribly, annoying and that I never wanted to watch another one.  The reason why?  Let me take some clips from this Gawker article to tell you:

Girls is a television program about the children of wealthy famous people and shitty music and Facebook and how hard it is to know who you are and Thought Catalog and sexually transmitted diseases and the exhaustion of ceaselessly dramatizing your own life while posing as someone who understands the fundamental emptiness and narcissism of that very self-dramatization. This is a recap of it.

And another article, "Am I Rich Enough?":

Let the record reflect that the television program Girls, which is "like nothing else on TV," and which has at long last brought the previously buried perspectives of 23- to 28-year-old females to bear on mass culture, has bravely broken yet another taboo by choosing to set its season finale at a surprise wedding. Nothing has ever been like that, on TV...So what have we learned here, kids? What is the message, finally? That all television shows are stupid, and that television is not art, and to relentlessly valorize a 26-year-old show-runner with tattoos of scenes from children's books as the voice of a new generation is foolhardy and empty? That youth is callow, and navel-gazing, and small-minded? That wrapping your persona in layer after layer of defensive irony and self-deprecation does not absolve you of the responsibility to be interested in something outside of yourself? That an awareness of your flaws is not a defense?
"But," you will say. "You don't get it. The show is a satire. A gentle satire, but a satire. The flaws are the point."
"And yet you celebrate her as an auteur," I will say. "The 'artist' and the character are virtually identical, and you valorize the artist for skewering the character. Besides, she's not skewering the character. These people are meant to be loved, to be understood and explained. It's a celebration, not a satire."
"Do you apply the same standard to Woody Allen?" you will say. "Is his filmic self meant to be loved or is he a comic foil? Is he the hero or the butt of the joke, or both?"
"Laurie Simmons' daughter is no Woody Allen," I will say.
"Stop calling her that," you will say. "Why do you insist on calling her that? Do you really think a feminist artist who works with dolls can call up HBO and get her daughter a gig? The TV business is rife with nepotism. Why single her out?"
"You misunderstand me," I will say. "I don't think she got a TV show because of her mother. But I think that the concerns of the wealthy private school girls ought to be dismissed as a matter of course and not be taken seriously. There are enough people who take them seriously; for largely tribal reasons I don't want to be among them. Especially if they surround themselves with their well-bred peers. I think that we should fight to rob the Laurie Simmons' daughters and David Mamet's daughters' and Brian Williams' daughters' and Drummer from Bad Company's daughters' of this world of the opportunities they have been unjustly awarded. Or at least highlight the injustice." 

He says he doesn't hate the show. I do. Although I guess my hatred shouldn't stem from the one episode I watched. Then again, it can.


A horrifying recount of an event earlier this year.

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SEVEN

Heart's not in posting today. Spent all night with a dreadfully preggers cat (Shortbus) who finally returned to the house... to give birth. Fourteen hours later, nearly no sleep, and two emergency vet calls/visits later, she's getting the ultrasound that really turned her off the cabortion idea (my theory for why she ran away the last time; that, and idiocy) and I have no idea whether she has kittens or a mass of stillborns from what was, in all accounts, a massive hulking cat father. Which is leading me to become a neurotic cat mom, which I almost never am - if they run away, they run away, if they come back, they come back, but I hate her being at a vet's and not knowing. And what sick large cat would mate with my tiny little adorbs kitten? Can cats have midget fetishes? She's not very smart, so whatever sexual predator is out there should be stopped before he goes after another mentally disabled midget cat.

STRESSED. and had dreams of trying to assist difficult cat births. and yelling about my kedi being hamile, which i actually did have to do last night to emergency vet number one.

OBLIGATORY CAT LADY POST DONE. NEUROTICISM ENGAGED.

nothign better than some racism to distract. 'the unpronouncables', the turks. i don't really think ess key shay here spore is very hard to say, but i guess it is. now, if it were muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine spor we may have something to talk about.

still fixating on my cat.... will just sign off for the day.

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SIX POST TWO

How and why one person changed their stance on gay marriage.  While I don't agree with his views of society, it's still interesting to read, and I'm happy he's come about.  One thing I don't think that's so cool about the article: referencing the Convention on the Rights of the Child... without mentioning that of the three countries in the world not to have ratified it, the US is one. Somalia is another, but it's pledged to ratify it. The other country not to have adopted it has a slightly better excuse, given that it's not even a year old. 

My mother, my daughter. Sad, sad, sad yall.

A disappearing act of major proportions. I'm so fascinated by people who do this. I think it's all the recent Person of Interest I've been watching (excellent, excellent, excellent show. Watch.). I'm even more fascinated because this tale involves a tiny village in Turkey, a "Turkish immigrant" named Nesrin Wolf, and Steve Buschemi, who I am in love with. Here's a critique of the article, which I don't agree with in its entirety - though, as the author of the critique notes, he knows the subject personally and so my own reading of the New Yorker piece will obviously be different; it's interesting to read both together. From the New Yorker, these two are meant to be friends - this much animosity belies an amazingly deep relationship. From the Rumpus Magazine, I actually kind of get the same. The amount of time and energy these two men are going to is crazy.

Ick. I just found out the actor who plays in my favorite show has done the following:

-Opposed stem cell research

-Donated money to Santorum

I kind of feel like I shouldn't even support him by watching it, but considering I stream it for free and really only earn Turkish streaming websites money, I guess that's fine.

Now that I'm looking at it, one of the actors is a relative of the actual discoverer of the geographic North Pole.  I had no idea that the first person - and the person to plant a flag there - was a black American named Matthew Henson, not Robert Peary. Plus, she was in Hustle and Flow and was sang a song in it that then won an Academy Award - the first song by a hip hop group to do so.

Time to read about the Mexican oil and gas sector. Fun, fun fun!