What's Been and What's Ben

Every year the time leading up to my birthday gets less and less awesome. It peaks out at about ten or eleven. Then you think about it months in advance awaiting a video game or a bicycle. Now I have enough money to buy what I need and most of what I want. Now I look forward to boxes of food. I got one from my parents today. The pomegranate jelly bellys are the best. Other than that I have little to look forward to. I can already buy lotto tickets, cigarettes, and alcohol. My birthday will probably go like every other day has. The swine flu is getting worse and Mexico could collapse economically from it. Now I have to go down for some stupid KAUST thing that could just be me reading power point slides about my 12 month (4 month per semester x 3 semesters, 2 semesters if I do it right) sentence.  There I can offend people with my amazingly horrible byproduct of six years of Spanish class. I will probably be forced to bicycle in the rain both ways if the National Weather Service is correct. Acutally a 75.69% chance of rain both ways – 87% at both 10 am and 5 pm individually. I am doing my laundry now. There is a new Better Off Ted and LOST and a rerun of South Park. LOST is the 100th episode and should be intense. I will probably wait to watch Better Off Ted. It is one of the few good shows to come out this season. Currently I am negotiating an apartment on the U campus for the summer. I would like to have one last summer, the summer of Ben, hopefully I will not be screwed up partially due to disc golf like George Costanza.

KAUST made us fill out some information for a yearbook – that is for before we actually go to school together. It will be printed and distributed this summer. First I had to fill out an electronic survey. Which I just copied over info from facebook. Which is an electronic form of a yearbook – originally used at Harvard. Rose stopped printing yearbooks the year before I went here. One question was our favorite quote. Which for me is easy.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people. – Kanye West

He said it during a Katrina relief special. It was cut from the West coast feed, coincidentally. It is on the youtube. Mike Myers is standing next to him and does the quintessential double takeafter hearing it before the camera cuts away. It summed up so much in such a simple statement. But I didn’t use it because it is a bit politically charged. Mainly it was because it is a bit vindictive after he is out of office. Also Kanye West is full of himself (see a recent South Park episode) and calls himself the voice of our generation. Which apparently is the voice of ripping off Daft Punk. Instead I went with #2, a bit of a turn around on a Woody Allen quote:

I used to think the brain was my favorite organ until I realized who was telling me that – Emo Phillips

Here is what you need to know about swine flu:

• you don’t have it
• nor the guy coughing next
• if you are not immuno-compromised you will survive
• if it does turn from epidemic to pandemic it will take care of the social security crisis

My loving mother worries about it so because in June I have to go to Mexico City for a stupid KAUST thing where I imagine they will tell us all the unpleasant things they have avoided telling us about. Which will be cool for the exception that I speak Spanish like a gringo (pronounced gry-NE-goo, I think). Mexico city being the start of this outbreak makes me question the whole Spanish Flu (1918 pandemic). Historians say this was racially charged, now I think they may be messy people. Not, of course, including, now can I say this, Puerto Ricans? For those who don’t watch “30 Rock” because they lack proper brain cells this is a reference to Tina Fey’s and Alec Baldwin’s characters’ constant questioning if “Puerto Rican” was something okay for white people to say.

My theory on the outbreak: a poor country peasant child went to visit his cousin in the big city. This child grew up in a rural village in close contact with pigs. This is now these Hx-Ny viruses seem to always start. This patient zero starts on a collision course with college students going on spring break in Mexico – of which I have come into contact with several. They pick up the virus that found easy prey in parties despite the college student’s best efforts to sterilize their mouths (booze). They bring it back to the corners of the world and now we have it.

Epidemic vs pandemic – epidemics form like battle fronts, pandemics form like insurgencies. Pandemics spread more evenly. It comes down to how they are dealt with. Epidemics have rings of vaccinations around them while pandemicsrequire quarantine of everybody. Much like wars, professional disease responders (like the CDC) like the conventional and more straightforward approach of epidemics. Pandemics are treated more with public policy like closing schools, public areas, airports, and pansexual bazaars.

Obama screwed up. Maybe not him. Some airforce general took the heat. But his administration did something stupid. In order to cover up that air force one was flying over New York to take nice pictures and prey on America’s temporary camaraderie with New York City they kept the warnings low-key. Instead everybody found out because they flew a plane low over Manhattan over sacred ground. There was a jet following it close behind (with the camera). So the New Yorkers that were not told about this all left their office towers because a jumbo-jet was flying over the city for seemingly no reason. Way to go! There is no way to spin this or even mention this incident without it sounding bad. Luckily most of the new outlets were panicking people (while telling them not to panic) about swine flu.

I would like to think that before I die I will walk on the moon. Bush 43 started the ball rolling towards a moon base. I want to tie in a political idea here about how conservatives tend to follow the trends of progressives – only run it better. Like Regan (who taxed us more than Democrats, just with a smile, from the gipper) who ran the hippie infested nation’s ideals into the cokehead-run wallstreet hot-shot based economy that caused this recession. But back to the moon. Kennedy inspired us to go to the moon, so decades later a republican (Bush 43) wanted to inspire us to go boldly back, where we had already been, and lost interest. But since there are people like me who listen to songs about the moon by Van Morrison (moondance, dancing in the moonlight) and Frank Sinatra (fly me to the moon, in the night) and have some romantic notions about walking on a monochromatic version of Arizona. If I didn’t have mad ups (good jumping ability) then I would say it is for the low gravity. Which makes me think of learning about inertial reference frames and wondering why we would have one without gravity since 99.99999% of human hours (hours spent by people being people) of humanity have been spent with just about the same amount of gravity.

Why, by the way, is the moon so white? I think our visual default white level is set to the moon. Since we spend so much time at night with the moon. I am just wondering how it got so white since most planets and moons are a little bit of off color. This begs the question about how we got a moon. Wikipedia (the truth) says most think it was a massive impact that caused the moon to form. Jerry Bruckheimer do your best!

I was disappointed to learn we cloned something extinct and I didn’t hear about it, even if it ended badly (see Jurassic Park)! It looks like a devil animal in the pictures!

A little bit ago Jim Cramer was on the Daily Show. Jon Stewart got on his high horse about how he is a snake oil salesman just like Cramer. I think he fears that there are a few million of us that rely on him for information. I try to know what is happen in the world, but some days I don’t know what happened yesterday until I hear about it from Stewart or Colbert. My real problem with his statement is the lack of understanding. The dissonance as Stewart would point out. Like a two-year-old who thinks that everybody disappears when he doesn’t see them, Stewart thinks that if he gives the occasional warning then he is clear of all responsibility. It reminds me of the SNL ad with Will Ferrell for Petchow brand rat poison. It is the rat poison (small type) with a dog on the bag and the Petchow name on it! Stewart avoids responsibility for forming a great deal of the thinking of my generation. He tempts us with his quips and outrage while stopping short of providing content. I personally hope that Stewart takes over David Letterman’s show. They are owned (personally) by the same company, Viacom.

I like Stewart. I will watch his show until he retires. I just don’t like that he has some big thing about being outraged with the lack of good reporting by CNBC on the realities of the market and at the same time talk about how he is just a snake oil salesman. He tries to have it both ways.

I barely slept last night. Same as before. I must be sick. I felt cold and had to pile on a ton of blankets. Which only made me sweat. So I took off the covers and started to freeze again. I think that is how ice ages work. I still have a lab to do!