Yeah, all my stories always involve coffee. I’m not sure what that means. (time for more coffee.)

ever coffee tomorrow crossover over.

That was the subject of a spam email I got this morning that crept through all my filters. I find it a very deep thought indeed.

The body of the email, next to the URL of the sex toys site, it said: rake he toast the lifelong.

(nodding sagely) Indeed.

Veisalgia: n, the medical term for a hangover. From the greek algia, pain, and the norwegian kveis, “uneasiness following debauchery.”

The Original “Cthulhu Fhtagn” Wristband Of Rubbery Doom

So a friend of mine — ok he’s not really a friend, he’s one of the imaginary people who live in my computer — is selling these custom-made cthulhu wrist bands. I was pretty enamoured of the Livewrong bracelets but these are just too cool.

He’s kind of worried he ordered too many of them, and I promised him that all my blog readers would immediately run off and buy one if I posted about it. So there you go. Run off and buy one. Both of you.

Why being into cats is essentially the same as being into psychotic tweakers.

I laughed so hard at this Eric came over to make sure I was OK.

(phone rings)
Laura: This is Laura.
telecom: Hi, this is telecom. I’m calling cause you reported that your phone was dead.

(long pause)

Laura: Its working now.
telecom: OK good!

My friend Marjorie passed along this prayer. I am neither religious nor Jewish, but still I found it moving.

A Prayer for Guidance and Understanding
Richard S. Moline and Rabbi Elyse R. Winick

Ba’al HaRahamim – God of Compassion:
Mikolot mayim rabim – Above the voice of vast waters;
Mishberei yam – The breakers of the sea;
Adir bamarom Adonai – Awesome is Adonai our God.
In the path of Katrina’s destruction, let the good in humanity rise to the top of the flood.
Give us strength to console those who have lost family, friends and neighbors.
Give us the courage to provide hope to those who despair.
Provide us with the guidance to heal those who ail, both in body and in spirit.

Hoshi’eini Elohim – Save us, O God;
Ki va’u mayim ad nafesh – for the waters have come into our souls.
Open our hearts so that we may support recovery efforts to the best of our abilities
Enable us to endure and to be steadfast in the weeks and months ahead, in the face of a tragedy whose scope is beyond our understanding.
We mourn for those whose lives have been lost. We pray for those whose lives have been shattered.

Mima’amakim k’ratikha Adonai – From the depths we call to you, O God;
Adonai shim’a b’koli – Hear our cry, heed our plea.

After spending the last few days glued to the news coverage of the hurricane I thought I couldn’t possibly have any words to express my emotions.

I find I have a bunch of words after all.

I was here in 1989 for the Loma Prieta earthquake. It was really bad. But we are an organized country, we have structures and organizations and government programs in place; an emergency happens and we fix it. We pull together. I was back to work in two days.

New York 9/11 was obviously much worse and much more horrific, but it was still the strong and proud United States I know. We are knocked down and we fix it. Unfortunately then some of us use the pretense to go off and start an illegitimate war, but in terms of our national emergencies: we have the means and the infrastructure and the will to recover. This is what patriotism means to me: its not anthems and flag-waving and chest-thumping and slogans. It’s taking care of each other when things get bad.

I am just stunned at how quickly everything has fallen apart in New Orleans, at how little organization there is and continues to be to keep the city from dissolving into an apocalyptic terror zone. I am watching the news and just shaking my head in shock. Of course the magnitude of this disaster is far larger than anything we’ve seen in years, if not ever. But where is the organization? Where are the leaders? Where is the quick and confident and assured response I’ve come to expect in the face of a crisis?

It seems after four days that finally things are beginning to move, that help is finally starting to arrive. Four days is much too long. Much, much too long. We knew this was potentially the mother of all storms on Sunday. We knew the levees were breaking on Monday. Why did the president remain on vacation? And why is it taking greater than a day to get congress back in session to vote on relief funds when they came back on a sunday in a single afternoon for Terri Schiavo? Where was FEMA? Why has it taken so long to get the national guard in in any great numbers and the active military in at all? Oh wait, I know the answer to that last one — all the guard and the military have been drawn off to that illegitimate war. Right.

In the meantime I have a friend in Canada who says thousands of Canadian reserves are LINED UP on their bases to come help and we are rejecting them. I am listening to the president saying that “no one could have anticipated the levees breaking” (well, except pretty much everyone, only YOU cut the funding to pay for that ILLEGITIMATE WAR) and the head of homeland security insisting that there has only been “isolated criminality,” even as reporter after reporter after reporter chokes back tears and talks about armed thugs roaming and looting and the people calling for help and the bodies just lying in the streets because there’s no one there to deal with them. People sick and starving and being forced to drink the flood water, even when they know the flood water is toxic.

This is not the America I know. This is not the America I am supposed to be living in. I am so ashamed for my country. So very ashamed and so very, very angry.

(from pinhole‘s flickr photos, taken at a cemetery in New Orleans)

Really long and slow but very noticeable earthquake just now. big time wiggle. Looking it up….

Update: when an earthquake happens and you can’t find anything on the local USGS maps you start nervously looking at maps outside of the local area, because that means there was a big quake somewhere else. Sure enough: a 5.9 and a 5.0 immediately following it in Parkfield, which is east of Paso Robles on the coast a few hours south of here. Looks like they’re swarming with aftershocks now. Yikes, hope everyone is OK down there.

Update 2: Holy cow, they just keep coming. Eighteen earthquake sin the last fifteen minutes, nine greater than 3.0.

Update 3: WOW. Parkfield has been the center of seismic prediction research for ages now. The USGS had heavily instrumented the area hoping to catch the next earthquake there. Looks like they got it.

Tyler Hamilton has apparently failed a couple doping tests: one just after winning gold in the Olympic time trial, and one just a few days ago after a time trial in the Vuelta D’Espana. The tests he failed are new to cycling: they test for blood doping, a strategy where an athlete gets an infusion of extra blood just before a race. More red blood cells increases endurance. Normally an athlete will stockpile his or her own blood for later transfusion, but apparently Tyler’s tests are showing that he has someone else’s blood mixed in with his own (a practice that’s kind of dangerous all on its own so its kind of curious if its true). Blood doping is illegal per UCI rules but up until this year there hasn’t been a test for it.

Tyler is, of course, denying the whole thing and the results of a followup test will come back in the next 48 hours. I’m trying to reserve judgement, but I admit I’m really shocked and disappointed by this news. I’ve been a fan of Tyler’s for some time now and I’ve talked about him on this blog before — mostly I am in awe of his seemingly inhuman ability to race well while incredibly injured (and because he seems to get injured a lot in the first place; I thought I was the only one who was that klutzy on a bike. :) If the doping tests are true, for me it casts serious doubt on all Tyler’s accomplishments, not just the olympics and the Vuelta but all the races in which he’s been doing so well over the last few years. What has he been taking? What advantages has he had over other riders? Why did he feel he had to cheat to win?

And in addition, there are bigger questions for cycling. Tyler has never failed a doping test up to this point. A few months ago David Millar was found with EPO (another red blood cell enhancing drug) in his apartment, and confessed to having taken the drug. Millar had also never failed a drug test. If these top athletes have gone this long and been testing clean, but NOW are being found out, who else is dirty? What else is out there? Just how corrupt is pro cycling?

Many questions. I’m waiting for that second test.

“The International Olympic Committee is barring competitors, as well as coaches, support personnel and other officials, from writing firsthand accounts for news and other websites.” (from Wired News)

Well, that seems Deeply Stupid. The IOC says the ban is to preserve lucrative media contracts, but IMHO first-hand reports would only enhance the traditional coverage and make the Olympics more interesting. Or at least that’s certainly the way it was with the Tour de France, where in addition to the TV coverage from OLN and the web coverage from the official web site there were also rider diaries from Velonews and on various riders’ personal web sites. It was the rider diaries that really personalized the Tour, that made it less about “Rider X won stage Y by Z seconds blah blah blah” and more about individual drama — what the athletes cared about, not just what a TV interviewer thought was important to tell us. (there’s a difference.)

I know we’re watching tons more Olympics this year now that NBC is doing blanket coverage and not the cut-down soft-focus fluff they had done in the past. TiVo is grabbing like fourteen hours a day and we can pick and choose what we watch. Of course much to our surprise we’re getting sucked into things like badminton and trampoline and saber fencing. If there were blogs and diaries and more personal details we would be on the internet WHILE we were watching the official TV coverage and we would probably be watching MORE of it. MORE coverage BETTER. This just seems obvious to me.

I haven’t been reading much recently because I’ve got this huge stack of magazines that somehow have managed to overbreed underneath the coffee table and I’ve been trying to get them under control. I was reading one of those magazines the other night, the June issue of Discover, and there was an article in there about useless body parts. These are parts of the human body that are left over from evolution (the tailbone, vestigial body hair) or due to sexual redundancy (nipples on men).

What I hadn’t realized is that in addition to these obvious extra body parts that I had already heard about, there are a whole lot of other extra parts that some of us just don’t have.

Take, for example, the palmaris longus muscle. This is a long muscle that runs from the wrist to the elbow and attaches at the base of the thumb. According to the Discover article, it may have been important at one time to our ancestors for hanging and climbing, but serves no useful purpose now. In fact, somewhere between 10 to 20% of the population doesn’t have it at all or only has it on one side. (You can see if you have it with this test; I needed to twist my hand a little to see it. I still have it on both sides).

There are a whole bunch of these things: missing muscles, extra bones. Some of us have them and some of us don’t. In short: we are still evolving. Eric, with a degree in biology, says “duh,” but this is not something that had ever occurred to me. I had assumed that evolution was so slow to affect change that you could determine differences over time after they had happened, but not be able to point to actual population changes as they were occurring. I didn’t think that I would be able to point to someone next to me and say “that person has evolved fewer muscles than me.”

My mind is blown.