What's A Former Soviet Republic To Do?

Relatively short random thought today, but I saw a commercial from the Kazakh government. It's message? "Kazakhstan. Ever wonder?"

Sasha Baron Cohen, you're a genius in so many ways.

The Science of Meep


Science has eaten my life. Working out at the gym, I think about what type of muscles I’m using and can actually picture the sarcomeres aligning together for the contraction, the triads releasing calcium so that the actin and myosin filaments can come together. I bit into a piece of chicken and thought what would this have looked like fixated underneath a microscope instead of frozen and deep fried. I look at a party and realize all my friends have inherited the mutant gene which improperly encodes aldehyde dehydrogenase, causing a malfunction in their metabolism of alcohol. I realize that this is the path to becoming a Mad Scientist, but I'd be in good company...

Besides, I have promised a couple of friends to turn them into cyborgs in 50 years when their original body parts fail some of them.

Conservatives dislike the poor. Liberals dislike the ignorant. Me, I'm not prejudice. I usually dislike everyone.

I've been meaning to avoid turning this into a political blog, but today, as more people in the Med Campus lounge paid attention to T.O. overdosing than say... the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan having a momentous meeting at the White House and driving the course of the War on Terrorism, or say a mad gunman taking a Colorado high school hostage, I'm finding it hard not to political, or to stop reading the editorials before the sports or funny pages. The more I'm concerned about the state of our country, the more I guess I want to be informed. Aristotle was right... not about the sun revolving around the earth thing, but that man is a political animal.

Yet our media is supesaturated with sensationalist "personal" stories concerning those poor celebrities who just can't be understood. (Drudge Report, I lost faith in you during the Terri Schiavo shit-tacular news coverage. FoxNews, we were never that close.) While a piece of my heart does go to every child who falls into a well or every multi-million dollar wide-receiver who gets depressed, can I go one day with Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan acting... demur? Can't they do that one day so the rest of us can focus on the fact the world's going to shit?

And I end on a sad note: there are some days it just doesn't pay to be male.

I actually asked an intelligent question about the Michaelis-Menten equation in class today. If you’ve never heard of it consider yourself blessed from the madness.

While on the Central time zone,

It’s O-Week at the University of Chicago. Right now thousands of matriculating first-year college students there are being lulled into a false sense of fun and merriment. How do I know?

The website on my friend's AIM away message:

NO-week

Actually, my years in Chicago were the best time of my life. No, not emotionally, psychologically or sexually, but where else can I have conversations about Star Wars and existentialism without going to a Comic-con?

Godspeed, Unit Kiersz. Godspeed!

Why I write (aka what didn't fit in my damn 500 character limit profile)...

Because a honeybee flaps its wings in five milliseconds and the average American’s attention span is becoming shorter than that. Because we want to read insightful passages of literature only if they’re based on the movie. Because great speeches like the Gettysburg Address would today be reduced to five second soundbite on TV, followed by a techno remix on YouTube. Because as Bart Simpson eloquently phrased it – “T.V. ruined my imagination and my ability to ummmm, well uh....you know,” and I’ve watched a lot of TV in my life. So before I become banal like the rest of society and get run over because I saw a shiny object on the freeway, I’m dedicated to writing down my thoughts and events of the day (be them random or slightly random) simply because to better ourselves is to think… before I forget.

Today is my sister’s birthday. I sent her a text message. She hasn’t responded yet, so I don’t know if she got it, she appreciated it, or if she’s still alive.

I don't think she'd appreciate her future birthdays being the anniversary of the Thai Coup d'etat of 2006 (I hand it to Wikiphiles for naming this event faster than the media). The government of Thailand was overthrown in a bloodless military coup today, and actually most of the Thais and the King of Thailand supported it. Crazy that people prefer a military dictatorship over an unpopular, albeit-democratically elected government?

I remember my class on “State, Society and Democratization in Southeast Asia,” which summated that there are a variety of socio-and structural reasons dependent on each country-case that came down to one basic axiom - democracy doesn’t work in Southeast Asia. I don’t know what to think about Thailand, but hey, its instability has so far contributed to the Philippine economy growing. My 6-digit inheritance in Philippine pesos is now worth 4-digits in U.S. dollars.

I have a weird way of flirting. It's more noticeable if I demonstrate it in person. At least its not a handicap for me.