Potpourri

I tried dressing the Dawg in my clothes and sending her to work in my place. The attempt failed because she can't quite reach the pedals in the car and she sat in the driveway for ten minutes flailing her scrawny legs trying to hit the gas pedal. But she's willing, at least I can say that about her.

I thought it was extremely cool that the man-eating flower blossoms in The Ruins were capable of imitating sounds. If you're a man-eating plant, you'd find auditory mimicry pretty handy too, I bet. But I think I'd want to be able to shoot hypodermic seed pods shaped like minature golf tees, as seen on Star Trek in the episode about Va'al where a great many Redshirts cashed in their studio parking chits and went to the sandwich line in the sky.

The only thing worse than finding a huge rotten spot in a banana is not noticing it until you bite into it while reading the Reuters news website. Blech. I'm trying to eat fruit for lunch and exercise every other night at home on my Gazelle. The exercise is going well, but the fruit diet is a bit of a trial - sometimes you just feel like burying your face in a huge vat of Spaghetti-Os no matter what the Surgeon General says. The problem with fruit is that fruit never tastes like meat (and, upon thinking about it, maybe it's best that it doesn't; the confusion caused by meat-fruit might be more than I can endure). Fruit also contains imperfections - rotten spots, cysts, bits of fibrous whatnot; it lacks the smooth predictability of, say, a McDonalds cheeseburger. Every McDonalds cheeseburger looks alike, tastes alike, and eats alike; the only uncertainty is the exact location of the pickle slices.

For about the last six or eight months my back has hurt, sometimes so bad it's crippling. There was a time when bending over to pluck a tomato out of the garden was beyond me; no amount of grunting and snarling would get the job done. But I've altered how I sit (no slouching and no leaning back), I've started elevating my legs in the evening when I get home from work, I take little walks when necessary, I don't stand in one spot for any longer than necessary, I sleep with fewer pillows, and I've started exercising again. My back, I am pleased to report, seems to have returned to normal. I haven't taken a Tylenol in three or four days, and that's a major improvement. Whee!

I don't know why Bush et al spend so much time blaming Russia for the war in Georgia. The Georgians seem to have started it, or at least grossly underestimated Russian resolve, though it's also true that the Russian reaction was disproportionately violent. The Georgians should have known better than to intervene in South Ossetia, and the Russians needn't have sent in the whole damn Fifth Guards Tank Army either. It takes two to make a mess like this, though it does tend to serve notice that the epoch of Russian timidity is probably over.

Barack Obama is starting to piss me off. His lack of reaction to the stupid, annoying, juvenile and often downright malicious campaign ads coming from the McCain camp is starting to remind me of Kerry and the Swift Boat Veterans. The Democratic pundits tell me "Just wait till after the convention; it'll be a bare-knuckle fight then!" But I'm not so sure. It should be a bare-knuckle fight now and I don't understand the wait-and-bleed strategy. Maybe Democrats just don't have the guts for a hard fight... Either way, as the most visible Democrat in the land, Barack gets the blame.