I've been meaning for ages, just ages dahling, to post on ideal intellectual communities, grad school, consulting, &c. &c. Because while my job is quite tolerable and even engaging on a day to day level, week to week and month to month I'm getting bored. Time to grab the angst by the bull horns and have at all those things early twentysomethings are supposed to have bullshit angst at, what?

Excerpts from the Tao Te Ching may be freely substituted for the remainder of this post, if you'd rather. In a charming synchronicity, this particular translation was written by a woman who had just been booted out of academia. Her talk of "getting right with the Tao" is irksome in the way it's been scraped off the barrel of evangelical Christianity, but hey, there's swear words!
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I agree with Dick Cheney! Or at least, the Dick Cheney of 2020:

"Let us rid ourselves of the fiction that low oil prices are somehow good for the United States," Mr. Cheney, who is now vice president, said shortly after introducing the legislation.

Yes, let's.

Just added a bunch of horse-teenage-booger sex sites to the comment blacklist, and realized something: I've never gotten comment spam for goatse. No, I don't block on anything resembling "goat" or "tub".

What in God's name is wrong with the Internet?

Well then, I'm not dead! I didn't crash even a little bit, not even almost, so thank you all for staying off the freeway. The odometer rolled over and the car still runs. In celebration, how about some whelks? I'm particularly fond of nos. 2 and 5 myself.

Three little whelks from Poole are we,
Filled to the gills with whelk-like glee,
Univalve all, as you'll agree,
Three little whelks from Poole!

In other news, my tomato seedlings have all grown their first set of real leaves, and two of the nine have potato leaves! Potato leaf is recessive, so this is a perfect Mendelian ratio for a heterozygous parent - or a heterozygous cross, oooh! I didn't quiz the guy who gave me the seeds on his garden prophylactics, but tomatoes usually self-pollinate. In any case, if it wasn't just some other variety mixed into the seed envelope, it's much more genetic instability than the hardcore heirloom tomato wonks prefer. I'll have to watch for other traits and work out the little bastards' ancestry, if I don't give away half of 'em first.

1. Graham Leuschke - your grandmother's mathematician, or not? I suspect not, unless there's something about your grandmother's mathematician collection that you haven't been telling me, O Dear Reader. In any case, I quite enjoyed meeting him for coffee on Saturday. I'm all, like, intensely secondhand connected to the l33t Internet snow monkey zeitgeist society now, and stuff, so there!
2. They're hatin' on the evolutionary psychology down at Crooked Timber - here and here. Go join! The comment threads are in grave danger of being bogged in their own meaningless seriousnesses.*
3. I tried leaving a message with a particular local hotel re: Item 1, but they refused to write it down (in Cyrillic or otherwise) and leave it under the door. It's way hard to leave an answering machine message in a foreign character set. One more reason to deplore the ubiquity of voicemail.
4. My birthday is also Space Invaders Day; how cool is that?
5. My odometer rolls over in ten miles, i.e., tomorrow morning. You are all advised to steer clear of the 210 eastbound, as I will be driving around dangerously fixated on my dashboard.

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There was a slug on my rhubarb - a baby slug. Awwww! I let it crawl around on my thumb for a while; it left an ickle trail of slime.

Allowing something to leave a trail of slime on your thumb creates an inviolable bond of hospitality, so I couldn't just pour on the salt. I ditched the baby slug on a tree trunk far away from my garden. It exuded a slimy rope and rappelled down, twisting in the wind as it searched for suitable habitat. It stretched out its eye spots with all the exuberance of youth!

I hope it gets eaten by a bird.