As of today, my freshly minted body mass index (24.8) and the US Governemnt have now upgraded me from "fatty" to "near fatty." (If you're really curious as to what that all means, you know my height, you do the math.)

Seriously, though, forty pounds down and ten left to my initial goal. However, given my height, my inital goal is still eleven pounds away from the exact middle of "normal," which I'm now considering going for.

If my strain has healed up as well as I hope it has in the month I've had to take off from cycling, I should be able to knock that twenty pounds out in seven weeks.

Or maybe a few more than that.

Anyway, I just wanted to keep you people updated.

Americans anime nerds who visit Japan as baffling to the Japanese as both the nerds and Japanese are to us.

I am now in the process of reading T.E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom." It is about the Arab campaign against Turkey in World War I and its effect on Arab self-determination, if you didn't know. It is the basis for the film "Lawrence of Arabia."

I am not reading this book now in order to make a political point of some kind--I read too little for it to be a political excercise when I do--in fact, I've had and been meaning to read the book since the June, 2000, long before we were embroiled in the Middle East again.

However, it is impossible to read this book as a person who is generally knowledgable about current affairs and world events and not draw some parallels--or, rather, perhaps, causal relationships--between what happened there at the beginning of the 20th century and what is happening there now at the dawn of the 21st.

So, I will be posting here things that catch my eye. Again, I am not 'Making A Point,' though this is the way the sanctimonious would make a point about this kind of thing. And while I most certainly do not agree with everything that I will post that Lawrence said, I am not going to argue everything I post here. Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments, though, the point here is to spark some thought about this, I think.

That said, here's the first excerpt in which Laurens seems down right prescient:

"And we were casting them [young British soldiers] by thousands into the fire to die the worst of deaths, not to win the war but that the corn, rice and oil of Mesopotamia might be ours."

(From the introductory chapter)

Now, this current war is not about oil, on the face of it, and even, perhaps, underneath the surface, but neither was that one--it was about 'liberating' the Arabs from the Turks. And putting them under (temporary? transitional?) French and British rule. I'm just saying, there's more to the comparison there than first evident.

Watch Siskel and Ebert shred each other in these out-takes. Absolutely priceless.

Last night's SNL was the funniest in a long, long time.

The cold opener with Al Gore? Funnier than all the other sketches this season combined.

CNN on Baby Names: "The most popular combination for female twins was Hope and Faith."

Surely this trainwreck is not why, right?

RIGHT?

So I was thinking about pornstar Madison Monroe the other day, not like that, but rather, about how she and other pornstars have odd names. Pornstar names, I think, often sound pornstarish because their either two first names, or two last names. And their often alliterative, but this is not a requirement. Anyway, I was also thinking about how many girls names come from men's names or from last names. And Madison and Monroe are both last names.

OF PRESIDENTS!

And, furthermore, of

SEQUENTIAL PRESIDENTS!

Let that sink in for a moment. A pornstar with a name made of SEQUENTIAL PRESEDENTIAL last names. What other good pornnames might be hiding within the list of our commanders in chief? I took it upon myself to whip up a few. Some are more suited to women, most are suited to men. Take a look for yourself at what I came up with--sequential names are marked with an asterisk, reverse sequential names are marked with a +.

* Jackson Van Buren

Clinton Coolidge

+ Reagan Carter

+ Taylor Polk

* Taylor Fillmore

Filmore Polk

+ Grant Johnson

* Wilson Harding

Johnson Harding

Truman Johnson

Hoover Fillmore

Ford Johnson

The best sequential name I came up with for a female pornstar:
Reagan Bush

Most Obvious Names:
Bush Johnson, Polk Johnson

Best gay porn names:
Johnson Hoover, Hoover Johnson

Least Sexy:
Garfield Taft

Most pompous sounding:
Harrison Arthur

And the one that sounds most like an illegal sex act:
The Cleaveland Van Buren

I invite you to come up with your own and leave them in the comments. Here's wikipedia's list of presidents to help you out.

For Noah: the original 13 minute short that became your beloved "Bottle Rocket."

I now think Danica Patrick is awesome. Having seen her be neat on Letterman (like, a dozen times, if I recall correctly) before and knowing that she's one of a very few female drivers to ever even compete at the Indy 500, well, lets say I didn't have anything against her before. But now, I gotta say, she's awesome.

I say this, not to sway you from your already (or not so already) formed Danica Patrick opinions, but mostly because I want to relay what, exactly, got me excited about her. The answer? Her new Secret commercial (click, toward the bottom, where it says "See Danica's TV Ad" off to the right). It's fun, it's funny, and, more than anything, its her that makes it funny.

I'm surely not the target audience for this ad: I will buy exactly as much Secret after I saw this ad as I saw before it (that is, exactly none), so lets hear from the ladies: a female Indy driver kicking ass at video games, this makes you want to buy deoderant, yes?

I find myself excited about TV ads more than I think most people are, which has got to be weird, because I'm bound to watch fewer, that's right, fewer TV ads than almost anyone else, even though I surely watch more TV. For example, both the new Volkswagen ads that I linked to before and the new Toyota Yaris ads have me thinking about buying a car, when it'll be, at least, a year before I can afford one.

So lets hear from you: what ads have flipped your awesome switch lately? Was it the writing, the direction, the acting, the product? Have they made you want to buy the product more? Do they make you forget that they're a sales tool? If you can find it on youtube or somewhere else, give us a link. You'll be glad you did.

Though this is about software that's Mac only, there are programs like this for every platform. I can't speak to if they're as good as Yojimbo, but I can tell you that if they're half as good at doing what I'm excited about, you should look into them. Read on for more than just a software review, ok?

Yojimbo is an application for Mac OS X Tiger, made by the nice people over at Bare Bones Software, that takes care of your data for you. Wait, that's not exactly true, it handles your information for you. Any of it. All of it.

Let me see if I can make this sound as cool as it is: we live in an information society, so much so that people are getting to be afraid of information overload--more on this in a minute--so we use our web-browsers as the swiss army knife of information discovery, and our RSS readers as our information filtration devices--by the way, if you're not using an RSS reader, it will change your life and make you smarter. I'm not even kidding.

They did a study where they showed that a lot of intelligence in people comes from ignoring what's unimportant. An RSS reader, which allows you to skip over a story you find uninteresting with a single click, while still providing you access to all the information a certain source provides every day, allowing you to more efficiently filter what goes into your head, well, that's just a really, really good idea. Get one. If you're on a Mac, I highly recommend NetNewsWire; the Lite version is free and fast and is all I need, certainly and I don't know how I would live without it. Pick your 10 favorite sources for information on the web and subcribe to their feeds and enjoy. You don't get what you don't want, can easily skip what you don't like, and it updates itself every time you tell it to, across all your subscriptions. If there's anything to new know, you'll then know it.

Anyway, web-browser = swiss army knife: you can get to, explore, ignore, surf, search any information that exists on the web. RSS reader = funnel and filter. Where does Yojimbo fit into all of this?

Now that you've got all this information, what do you do with it? Injest, filter and cross-reference. That's what your brain does, automagically, all on its own. But, as I get old, my memory gets spottier and spottier, so instead of being able to tell you what website(s?) featured that article I mentioned before on how information overload is just as bad for your brain as pot and what exactly it said and what day it said it and what I had for breakfast that day, I can tell you that I once read an article about it, somewhere, sometime that said something.

See, I would've liked to link to that article, but I couldn't find it. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that I made it up, as my father often insisted when I couldn't remember enough to be convincing as a kid, but rather that I just can't remember enough of the right words to get it into the first thirty search results on Google [link here to study that shows that people only go through three pages of search results before reformulating their query on google].

Now, so instead of relying solely on my memory to retain everything that I've ever read, exactly what it said, and whether or not I watched a sitcom this one time with a similar plot (safe bet: I didn't), instead, I can Yojimbo it and create an index of, well, my brain. Now, the thing with information storage and indexing like Yojimbo provides is that if you use it thoroughly, then you'll have a searchable database like google, but unique to you, and you alone. For example, I made a note almost immediately to remind me of the difference between Phil Collins, Paul Simon, Peter Frampton and Peter Gabriel. Now I will never again spend time trying to remember which one came alive and which was responsible for "Sledgehammer" and if it was the same one (it's not) because this is information my actual brain cannot seem to hang on to for the life of me. Also useful for me? An index of birthdays (Sorry Kathleen, Christina and Susan and almost sorry to Justin, Michelle and Lars).

I almost used 'religiously' up there, in place of 'thoroughly,' as to how intently you've got to put information in to make it useful, so you get the idea of what I'm driving at: total information storage and recall. And the thing is, it makes you more productive. No more spending five minutes trying to remember who did what at the end of that story you read or that turn of a phrase you really liked that had to do with sunsets was. Just search the index you've got of your entire brain, and right there, there it is, or, at least, enough of a hint to where it might be. And, it'll also tell you other things you read/looked at/indexed with those same words in it, allowing you to make connections you might never have made on your own.

I am a little excited about this, as you might be able to tell. But I've already indexed everything I've ever written on a computer and it's already coming in handy. And even more so if it held links to that damn information/marjiuana story, or that story about how people only go through 30 results on google.

Yojimbo costs 39$, so it's not free, like some of the best Mac-only software (quicksilver, cyberduck, adium, NetNewsWire Lite, snap'n'drag, onyx, ibackup, menu meters, Flip4Mac, et cetera, et cetera) but it does even more than I've given it credit for like catagories, passwords, bookmarks, archives, notes. My free trial isn't up for a month, though, so I suggest you give it a month to try and win you over, too.

Your seachable brain. The future is now.

Slate agrees with me: the new Volkswaken "Safe Happens" ads get it just right.
Seriously--well executed and of just the right tone.

//

Starry Night... ON A CAKE!