Tens. Hundreds. I didn't lose count, I never counted in the first place. All of them dead.

I prefer neurotoxins. They're faster, less messy, and more economical. I'm not above less refined means to end lives. Smother, suffocate, burn, drown, or smash -- yes, smash. I will do, can do, and have done it all.

People ask what have they ever done to me to deserve to die. I say, what have they ever done for me? Nothing. They're ruthless, selfish. The world is better without them.

They'd kill me if they had the chance.

People say the first kill is the hardest. It sticks with you. Every kill after the first is a futile attempt to erase the memory from your life; your soul.

I don't even remember my first.

I remember today's, though. A quick burst of poisonous gas and the little bastard's nervous system is destroyed, he just didn't know it. It was funny, sickly satisfying the way he limped away. Taking those final steps before the legs gave out and the oxygen stopped flowing. The heart stopped pumping. Did he know? Did he know he was dying, his life was over? Were his final thoughts about his short, worthless life spent doing nothing but consuming and hoping to one-day reproduce? Or did he not know? Did he suddenly realize that, despite all odds, he was no longer alive?

I remember last night's. You can't tell me she didn't deserve it, the way she threw herself at me. Invading my space without welcome, touching my things. Her disgusting little hands dragging across the surface of the things I own. When I was done watching her with a disconnected sense of indignity, I grabbed a cloth and smothered the life out of her. Discarded her lifeless carcass just as quickly. Then, back to whatever I was reading before she sauntered into my life.

They think they can go on living without paying for the consequences, they're wrong. They think they can come into my home, my car; they think they can follow me. They think their tiny little lives matter more than mine. They don't understand that I will kill them simply because I can. Because nobody has come along to stop me.

It's not that I enjoy it. I don't crave it. The death. The killing. I do it because I need to. Because not all life is sacred. Not every living thing deserves the sanctity I reserve for myself. Some just deserve to die, and I have no problem being the force of death for these. I'm the wildfire clearing the brush from the forest, allowing for more life. Better life. Things more deserving of life. I am that force.

They are that brush.

They deserve to die.

They must die.

Damn spiders.

Comments: 0 Comments.

In a little under a month, I am going to be sedated and all four of my mandibular third molars are going to be yanked, nay, torn from their nesting place inside my jaws.

Wisdom teeth, as they're called, are a sort of russian-roulette entrance exam for adulthood. They're teeth that come in much later than your others, that occasionally do so without problems, but often cause havok on their way in.

I started feeling them coming in when I was about 20, so I figured I was lucky, but apparently am not. An x-ray earlier this year showed that they were coming in sideways and would either impact against my other teeth and hurt like candied death, or be just fine.

An x-ray this morning showed that from the way they're headed, it wont be long before the pain starts.

I'm always wary now when dental professionals tell me I need an expensive procedure, especially very common ones. When I was younger, my parents were duped by an orthodontist into getting me braces I really didn't need (my bite pattern is identical now to how it was before). It seems like wisdom-teeth pulling is one of those things dentists love to charge you for, like car dealerships and their underbody sealants, and when I was told the first time I should get them pulled I took a "wait and see" approach.

It's been 6 months, and I've waited and I've seed.

The path to impaction is set. Left unabated, those suckers will continue to grow sideways and will push my existing teeth into themselves. I've already got symptoms of impaction. I also have a cavity in one of the wisdom teeth, because it's impossible to get a toothbrush up there, so whenever I have anything sweet it's like a shooting gallery of pain.

Pull them out, I say.

Plus, since I'm still in my twenties I've still got young-people healing powers. If I waited until I was older and the pain really started, the extraction would put me out of commission for over a week. Now, I'm told I should be back to normal in a weekend.

There's something I like about finding something that will hurt later and removing it before it does.

It might be strange to have a doctor tell you that in 10 years your appendix will get infected and rupture, so they might as well take it out now while you're young and know you have insurance. It might sound like a sales pitch. It would be different, though, if they knew for certain.

If a doctor said there was a 70% chance that my appendix would rupture in 10 years, I probably wouldn't have the surgery now. If it was 100%, though, I'd probably just get it over with.

There is a 100% chance that my wisdom teeth are going to hurt, hurt a lot, in the next decade.

I wish there were more things that could be predicted with full certainty and removed, but wisdom teeth and appendices are really the only things you don't really need in the first place.

And tonsils.

And spleens.

Take them all out at birth, I say, them and that dreaded foreskin.

If this extraction is without immediate positive results, I should remind myself that I'll at least be getting a prescription for Vicodin out of it. Vicodin. Love it.

Comments: 1 Comments.

I tell myself it'll be easier if I pretend nobody reads this. This opens me up to write things I would otherwise worry about being judged for. It also makes me wonder why I'd be writing something nobody's going to read.

Some people write in journals or diaries, if there is a difference in definition other than the typical gender of the one using either term. They pour their lives onto ink-soaked pages and lock them away in nightstand drawers, never to be read.

"It's just for me," they might tell themselves or anybody both near and interested enough to inquire.

These people are bad writers.

I give up on trying to recall a recent event worth writing about and instead try to conjure some opinion or observation salient enough to craft into a lazy essay. I pause for a moment to reflect on the word salient and wonder if it shares a root with saline and somehow means salt.

No, it comes from salire -- which I somehow know is Latin for jump.

I wonder both how and why I know so much Latin. The sheer number of Latin phrases that have snuck into common English is pretty annoying. Per se, id est (i.e.), exempli gratia (e.g.), et cetera (etc.), and e pluribus unum, ad infinitum. These are the old standbys, sure, but there's also quid pro quo, which everybody knows because of Hannibal Lecter, and things like sine qua non and post hoc, ergo proctor hoc which I would be perfectly fine with not knowing.

After, therefore, because of.

I'm not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar, I don't need all this dead language taking up valuable real estate in my brain.

I wonder if this is enough for a post. It's not much, and it's a pretty lay-person angle. I could call it something like veni vidi vici or I, vox populi. It's all about the cute titles for me. I'd be fine with a perfectly mundane story about how dogs are better than cats (they are) so long as it could be adorned with a clever title like "Reining cats and dogs." Who cares if it doesn't entirely make sense; I substituted "raining" with "reining;" I'm like a genius.

No, that's too showy. It'll come off like I just want to flaunt all the Latin I know, dressed up like a complaint. Like, oh man, what am I going to do with all this cash I have? Don't you hate it when you have SO MUCH CASH.

I wish I had as many dollars as Latin phrases I know.

I realize that most people probably don't know that the word "agenda" is a straight Latin word. It's the plural of "agendum," a task needed to be performed. I also bet most people probably don't care in the slightest. Maybe I deserve to know all this useless Latin, taking such absurd joy in it.

I decide to drop the whole idea.

Maybe I could write some kind of little story. No, I'm too wrapped up in my final-edit of Mind + Body to let more stories swim around in my head. Besides, there's no such thing as a "little" story once I have a go at it.

I remember poor Jack Gerrardo and his pending adventures in Normandy, and hope I sometime remember to put another week into that sad tale. I'll do it once I remember what the metaphor was supposed to be in the first place. I think the "falling" was supposed to represent something. Death, or life, or war, or baggy pants.

I take a few laps between the my desk and the fridge. I'm thirsty but it's too late for something heavy like juice or one of the many of man's finder brewed beverages. I consider yet again abandoning this venture, writing something on my stale website.

I could go to sleep, probably. I'm most likely tired enough by now that all the ideas, concerns, and conversations I need to have with myself wont get much traction in my brain as I lay in bed and stare into the insides of my eyelids.

I really should write something, though. Maybe some kind of reminder that M+B will be finished and published soon. No, they're probably tired of me stringing that one out. I don't want to be like Chinese Democracy or Duke Nukem Forever.

I wonder for a moment if the ever-pending Chinese Democracy album is some kind of... statement. Like, there will never be democracy in China, so there'll never be that album. I stop, though, because I know so little about music that when I try to analyze it I only embarrass myself. Duke Nukem, however, I can speak with all kinds of authority on.

I retreat to my closet where my libations are stored, stare blankly at my collection of booze from when I'd turned 21 and decided that if I was going to drink at all I'd have to be an expert at it. The hobby was quickly abandoned on account of such little payoff, but it always bothers me that I've got this fancy liquor that I never use. I've had this bottle of Glenlivet for over a year and I bet plenty of pennyless alcoholics would rape a goat to get a hold of such a drink.

I smile at myself and the goat phrase, knowing I could never use such a thing on my site because of my imaginary audience of 11-year-olds and stubborn, middle-age prudes.

I pop the corked cap from the bottle of Glenlivet and take a small swig, for old time's sake. It's pleasant at first, I don't grimace uncontrollably like I did when I first tried whiskey. I detect the subtle, woody notes and, like always, wonder if there's just a hint of apple in the recipe. Just as quickly, though, I remember why I always regret scotch. As it goes down, there's that burning sensation down my throat that is far too reminiscent of the feeling of having very recently vomited. Perhaps this is the fault of my spectacular sense-memory, or perhaps I just have a certain distaste for vomit that I don't share with the average drinker.

Back to my chair, fingers over the keyboard once more, I am completely out of ideas.

I sigh a slow, deliberate sigh. An actor's sigh. A stage sigh, like a stage whisper. Not for my benefit, but to let anybody who might be watching know that I'm hopeless.

I resign myself another no-post day for me-dot-com. I close the tab and scour the internet, looking for some kind of distraction.

Comments: 4 Comments.

It's not a joke, sadly. Witness the penultimation in taste and tact.

Comments: 1 Comments.

This will be the first time since 2004, the first year I was old enough to get in, that I wont be attending E3. Also, neither will any of my colleagues from whatever gaming site I happen to work for at the moment (GameBump still).

The reasons for this are purely financial, as I (for once) don't have $planeticket and $hotelroomforaweek lying around in petty cash. Right now, even the thought of $gastogetoairport seems pretty steep.

If any cool people ask, though, I'm not going because E3 is totallu dead etc etc. Last year was pretty much a nightmare for me, and if this year were organized the same I wouldn't even want to go, but it's back at the LA Convention Center and not at a thousand hotels across Santa Monica. Whatever, nobody cares about my coverage anyway.

In leiu...loue....loo...lieu of actually going to E3, I made this new site called e3Feed...

The short of it is that it uses RSS feeds to automatically slurp all the content from over a dozen gaming news sites, swishes it around in its digital mouth, and spits out only the E3 stories. Users can then select the sources they want to see stuff from and search for specific words/games/etc. It's entirely automated, I just set it and forget it.

This is the first full-production site I've done entirely on my own (usually I have someon else (John) do the graphic design), and it's the first time I've made really heavy use of AJAX (if you don't know what that is, consider yourself lucky) so I'm sort of both unusually proud and secretly ashamed of it simultaneously.

Ever since RSS feeds came around I've wanted to do some kind of... thing to merge multiple sites' content automatically and this is the first time I've gotten to play around with the concept. The idea can be expanded beyond just E3 news, and I eventually want to get into some kind of smart analysis of link maps (site A links to site B report about site C's coverage of story X) and site ranks (therefore site C must be better).

At this point, I really have no idea how many websites I currently own and operate.

Comments: 1 Comments.

On Sunday there were some major storms in the area, leaving many without power. At my place there were only a few power flickers, but the phone and internet service went out until Tuesday. This is referenced in the previous post.

There weren't any storms or anything today, but about 20 minutes ago the power suddenly kicked off. There is absolutely no power in my house, yet here I am typing away.

Y'see, I have a battery backup -- an Uninterruptable Power Supply -- connected to my DSL modem and router, so even when the power is out I can still have internet access as long as my laptop's battery lasts.

That sounds somewhat (very) embarassing, so I should explain that the reason I have a the router and modem connected to a UPS is because sometimes during the summer there are power spikes lasting only a second. The power kicks out then right back on, but it can take up to 5 minutes for the DSL modem to cycle up, so a half-second power outage can leave the internet down for minutes. I didn't intend for this system to hold out my internet connection for hours while the power was out completely.

But here we are. I keep trying to turn on my desk lamp, as a reflex, and I just had to stop myself from opening my mini-fridge to grab a cold water.

As I say, an unusual situation.

I just reported the power outage to the electricity company.

Through their website.

Comments: 0 Comments.

What didn't come back was the internet. I was in the middle of something online, and had nothing else to do, so after waiting an appropriate length of time for the internet to return I set out to the good Starbucks.

There were several traffic lights out of commission. Some flashed yellow, some were out entirely. Major intersections had a police presence to avoid catastrophe, but the minor intersections managed well enough without color-based guidance. If a traffic light is out or flashing red, you treat it as a 4-way stop (like there's a stop sign for each direction). People stopped, waited, and went according to their turns. Nobody had to tell them to do anything, nobody went into a hot panic. It was like a shared consciousness. Blue car got to the intersection first, I stop, he goes, I go, the next person goes.

Perhaps there is hope for humanity. We like to pretend that without somebody to tell us what to do we will slip into a sort of dawn-of-man, anarchistic, stay-away-from-my-sheep mentality. It's nice to know that, where motor vehicles are involved at least, we can fend for ourselves.

Hopefully, when the zombies come, we will be better prepared than movies insinuate. If we can deal with inoperative traffic signals, maybe we can deal with the flesh eaters without mass havoc.

That's the hope I cling to when I check the locks on my zombie shelter weekly, restock the food and water supplies monthly, and dry-fire each of my collection of assault weapons.

I have an unconfirmed but seemingly valid suspicion that I would be quite delicious, so I have to be vigilant. Perhaps moreso than others.

When they come, the traffic lights wont work. There won't be power and our water system will be compromised instantly. Can we survivors handle ourselves as well as with just the lack of traffic signals? I hope so. I hope for the sake of our species.

Comments: 3 Comments.

This is a product of the "housing bubble" that recently burst. The value of homes was skyrocketing, properties were being bought and sold multiple times in a single day. It was ridiculous.

I don't know very much about real estate, but my dad was a Realtor with his own office for over a decade so some of that splashes onto me as a matter of course. Still, though, I'd consider myself pretty novice in the field. Also, at the time of this bubble I was around 19 years old and thereby an idiot.

Still, though, I could see that it was a bubble. Most people said it wasn't, that somehow houses were going to be a booming commodity forever. I don't know what plants you have to dry and smoke to come to that kind of conclusion but I bet they'd sell for more than a 2 bedroom house these days.

I had always thought the whole thing was the buyer/seller's fault. They're the ones who went overboard and drew the value of homes way above normal and tried to make their fortunes by buying a house for X, painting it, and selling it for 2X. If this was pet rocks or fashions or musicboxes or something, I'd be fine with it, but homes are kind of important to people, and there's a lot of people who just wanted a place to live and shouldn't have had to deal with hugely inflated prices just to put a roof over their family's heads.

However, with now over a million homes in foreclosure, I can't rightly blame this all on a few idiots who've seen Wall Street 9 too many times. A million homes in foreclosure is too large an anomaly to blame on human error. This has to be a product of a large, sweeping agenda.

You might blame the mortgage companies. They took advantage of the house-buying craze and began offering mortgages with gobs of hidden fees and interest rates that would skyrocket without warning. Buying a house with no money down is great if you're positive you can flip the house before you have to start paying the mortgage, but if you're just a guy trying to buy a house it will seem far too tempting. People buy houses beyond their means, and when the bank comes around asking for their money, game over. You would probably be right to blame them.

Me, however, I blame the show Flip That House. This is a show that airs on TLC and Discovery Home, where in each episode someone has bought a property for X dollars, will do Y dollars in renovations, and try to resell (or "flip") it for a profit. These shows were all filmed in the middle of the bubble but continue to be aired today, making people think they can still do this.

My problem with the show is that the goal of each episode is for the home to be sold for more than it was paid for, but they never show the house being sold. They don't even appraise the home. The ending of the show is just a real estate agent coming in and saying what he would list the house for. If it's a nice and big number, the owner gets all excited like he won a game show.

But that doesn't resolve anything. For one thing, real estate agents can't tell the value of a home just by walking through it, because most real estate agents are morons. To accurately calculate the value of a home it has to be professionally appraised, which includes a full inspection and a weighted calculation based on the value of nearby homes. To walk through a house, marvel at the stainless steel appliances, and say, "I'd list this for $310,000" doesn't have anything to do with what that house will sell for. The house might not even sell, or it might sell for much less.

It's like if there were a show where somebody paints a picture and somebody with an ebay account says, "I'd list that painting for $5,000" and the painter gets excited, as if he'd just made $5,000, and then the show is over. Someone has to buy the thing before anybody should get excited.

So all this show does is string viewers along thinking that house flipping is good, that they'll always sell their house, and that they'll always make a profit.

How many of those homes are probably in foreclosure right now?

That housing bubble pretty much destroyed our economy, and it's all Flip That House's fault.

Comments: 2 Comments.

The stylistic nomenclature of today's superheroes can be a bit confusing. We're used to our Batmans and Supermans (the two most popular heroes by far; see below) so we've grown used to the [whatever]man style of name. Hawkman, Aquaman, and so on.

Spider-Man changes things up. He's not Spiderman, or Spider Man, he's Spider-Man. The third most popular hero is the most misspelled. In fact, "Spiderman" is more popular than "Spider-Man" on Google Trends:

The correct spelling is the least popular one. Even mainstream media tends to format it as "Spiderman" for movie reviews and such.

But why is it Spider-Man? Just to be tricky? Because it looks better? No, there's a purpose behind it.

Batman is Batman because he's a man that's like a bat. He wears a bat symbol and styled his costume after bats for the sole purpose of looking scary. He has no bat powers. He's not half-bat half-man. He's a man that digs bats. He's a Batman.

Superman is Superman because super is a prefix. Supersonic, supersede, superfluous. A Super Man would be a man who is super -- but to what? He's Superman because he's superior to man.

Spider-Man, on the other hand, is a man with spider powers. He was bitten by a radioactive spider and his DNA was joined with that of a spider. He's part-spider, part-man; Spider-Man. Like hunter-gatherer or idiot-savant. Spiderman would be a man who's into spiders like Batman is into bats.

Consider the Batman sometimes-villain Man-Bat, who actually is part-man, part-bat. If they just wanted to be clever and reverse Batman's name they'd call him Manbat, but that wouldn't be proper.

Google isn't very interested in setting the record straight.

Consider also Hollywood's newest star superhero (notice that it's not "super hero"), Iron Man.

Clearly he hasn't always been a very popular character outside of comic book (not comicbook) fandom, and until the movie came out the more popular formatting was "Ironman." In the above graph, I had to exclude the word "contest" to get accurate results because the name of that strongman (not strong man) competition where guys from Norway pull schoolbuses (not school buses) with their teeth and throw pianos full of molten lead through second story windows is called the Ironman Contest.

He's not Ironman or Iron-Man, though. He's not half-iron, half-man and he's not just a guy who is really into iron. He is an iron man.

These rules are not rock solid, however. DC and Marvel each have a character called Sandman. DC's was a guy who could put people to sleep, like the Sandman of lore. Marvel's Sandman, who was featured in the cinematic travesty Spider-Man 3, is actually a man made of sand. By the above convention, he should probably be Sand-Man.

There's also a character called Ant-Man, who is entirely Man. He just has the ability to shrink himself to various sizes, including so small as an ant. His costume is usually styled like an ant, more or less, so he should perhaps be Antman. Ant-Man is more visually appealing, though.

If I remember correctly, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby only formatted Spidey's name as "Spider-Man" because it stood out visually. These rules are sort of retconned around that, but they fit, so I win.

As an application of these rules, lets say I wanted to create a character who attacks with a powerful head-butt and wears a costume with rounded horns on his head. Why, he'd be Goatman.

If I made a character who tried to save a goat from entering a nuclear reactor but was caught in a blast along with the goat, and then suddenly gained the ability to stand up straight on steep cliffs and eat tin cans, he would be Goat-Man.

Further, if the character instead dressed in goat hides and used a melee weapon made from a goat's skull, he would probably be Goat Man.

Comments: 3 Comments.

Google Trends is good for this. You can see the popularity of one or more terms (how often people search it) over the years to analyze and compare trends.

The most obvious use, how I see most people using it anyway, is to track the popularity of people or memes over a given period of time.

Here's Obama vs Hillary over the last 30 days. Interesting? Not really.

I prefer applications that reveal human behavior, like how certain searches spike at certain points in the year.

Here's a cute one that doesn't require much brain power to analyze. Every year around August there is a huge spike in searches for "school supplies." Yeah, it's predictable; but it's a nice proof that such trends can be so evident.

Holiday Creep

This is an even sharper (literally) example of a yearly spike. Because Easter is one specific day while school supply buying is kind of a "season," the drop-off after the peak is almost a dead drop (who cares about Easter anymore the day after?) but the build-up begins pretty early. Over a month before each Easter the searches crawl high above average. Maybe it's people wanting to find out just when the heck Easter is that year, or maybe it's people making their Easter plans.

Compare this to Thanksgiving:

While Thanksgiving seems like a bigger holiday in the US, this graph seems to counter-indicate this. Notice how sharp the incline is compared to Easter? People start searching Easter over a month before, but searches for Thanksgiving don't really pick up until the beginning of November.

Also, notice the mini-spike before each major spike? They all occur almost a month before Thanksgiving, toward the middle of October. While trying to explain this, I thought maybe first it was people wanting to find out what day Thanksgiving would be, but it seemed too early for that. Then I thought maybe it was people who, after Halloween was over, decided to move onto the next holiday, but it was too early for that.

Then I remembered that Canada has its own Thanksgiving, which takes place a month before ours. Could that mini-spike be Canadians searching for their own fruity little Thanksgiving? To test the theory, I specified inside Google Trends to only show US data, and look what we get:

There you have it. Remove Canada from the dataset and the mini-spike disappears.

Holidays By Proxy

Speaking of holidays, I wondered if there would be any holidays that trended higher with their rituals than with the actual name of the holiday. Christmas spikes much, much higher in searches than gifts, presents, santa, tree, Jesus, and nativity. Halloween spikes higher than candy and trick or treat. But what about....

"4th of July" always has less than half the popularity of "fireworks," and always just barely more than "BBQ" (barbecue). Don't even ask about "independence day," it barely registers.

I like this one. I couldn't get "St. Patrick's day" to even register, but by comparing searches for corned beef to those for cabbage you can definitely find the holiday that happens to fall on my birthday.

Behaviorism

Google Trends is good for finding when people do things. Holidays are obvious because they have set days, but what about things people can do whenever they want? How about their taxes...

This one would be pretty easy to call, but it's interesting nonetheless. The highest spike for taxes is around April when taxes are due, but there's a pretty heavy initial spike in the midst of January when responsible people start taking care of them, then there's a bit of a "hammock" all the way to April, and then a sharp drop-off after April 15th when nobody cares anymore.

The SATs, unlike taxes, have no set deadline. They're offered several times a year, but according to this chart, they seem to be taken most often right at the start of May.

I think this one speaks for itself. January first is when everybody starts worrying about their weight, aaand they slowly start forgetting until around Christmas when it suddenly bottoms out.

Inverse Functions

Graphs can usually be broken down to a function, and the inverse of that function would graph like a mirror image to the first graph. I've been trying to find two trends that would resolve like that, but I've been having trouble.

This almost fits the bill...

Swimsuits & sweaters works better. I'm trying to think of two terms that would give me a perfect double helix. Seventy cool points for anybody who can produce one.

Comments: 2 Comments.

I've gotten to the point now where instead of getting a kick out of detecting overused tropes, I am rather enraged by them. Not everything can be terribly unique, but sometimes writers need to do a little research or creative thinking instead of falling back on tired old tropes.

The thing that currently drives me the most crazy is the improvised tracheotomy, or the "hand me that straw!" plot device.

I'm sure you've seen it before. Some ancillary character far removed from a hospital setting starts choking or his throat swells up and he can't breathe. Oh no, he's going to die! No, wait, it seems that one of the main characters, who's probably been rather mysterious up to this point, has a plan.

"Hand me that straw," he says to the nearest person who might realistically have one.

From his own person or from another person standing around he'll get a sharp knife, then perform an emergency tracheotomy on the choking victim. You see him make a small incision into the throat, then feed the straw (or ballpoint pen or similar hallow tube) through the hole and the person can now breathe through this completely non-sterile apparatus.

The day is saved!

This is a multi-purpose plot device with lots of literary bang for the buck. It's a moment of drama, as the person who's choking's family or friends will surely be around to look wrought and exclaim how its his birthday or his last day of work down at the puppy factory, but the real purpose is to show that your mysterious character is even more mysterious. Besides what other mysterious things he's already done, such as keeping to himself or wearing sunglasses, he's also got some kind of medical training. Maybe he was in medical school but dropped out to care for his dying younger brother. Maybe he was an Army medic. Maybe he watches a lot of Gray's Anatomy.

Or it can be used just to show how clever or world-wise the character is. It's a bit of medical MacGuyverism, with the novelty of the improvised tracheo-tube usually ramped up to show how gosh-darn clever our guy is. We like problems that can be solved with a little creative thinking.

It's also got a pretty solid "cool factor." The emergency is immediate and apparent, the solution is quick and dirty, and the results are instantaneous. It's not something where "he should be fine in a few hours," it's something where "he'll be just fine now," breathing through a straw.

My biggest problem with this device is that it's just overused. I can think of a handful of specific examples but I know I've seen it at least 30 times, usually more often in low-budget, low-quality dreck. Beyond that, though, tracheotomies are very difficult and dangerous. There is a less-than one inch section of the throat between the Adam's apple and the cricoid cartilage where the cut has to be made; a little too far to the left or right will have the victim start bleeding into his own throat, and too far up or down and you're doing irreparable damage to the throat tissue. Plus, it's not like cutting through skin or a piece of chicken breast like it's often depicted, you have to cut through tough cartilage that would feel like bone.

Some doctors don't even like to do tracheotomies. In hospitals. With scalpels and guides and sterile equipment and years of training of experience. It's one of the things that scares the daylights out of them. You don't want to mess with the throat unless you really, really have to.

Off the top of my head, I can remember seeing it done in Anaconda, Nurse Betty, Switchback, the first episode of Jericho, an episode of ER (taking place outside a hospital), The Princess and the Warrior, and a quick Google reveals it shows up in the latest Nancy Drew movie.

I'm a bit of a medical enthusiast and I like improvised solutions to medical problems. There's a big one in M+B and I've already thought of one or more for the sequel. What's different about me, though, is that I come up with them on my own and I make sure they aren't used anywhere else. I research things and create theories and run them past experts. This makes things difficult for me, but I think it increases the quality overall.

I could have thrown a "hand me that straw" into Mind + Body pretty easily, but I didn't ("hand me that Valium"). I even threw in an oblique reference to tracheotomies just as a treat for myself and my eventual fans who know all my inside jokes.

I'm even having a problem right now where a solution to a medical problem I have to deal with is too common, but I can't get around that without just inventing brand new neurotoxins, which isn't below some people.

The movie Just Like Heaven gets points for having an improvised medical solution (in a restaurant and sort-of involving straws) that has nothing to do with throats.

I am starting to see a lot of cases where people have intracranial pressure that has to be relieved via a power drill to the skull, but I'm leaving that off the "overused" list for a while because drills to the head are pretty cool. Stand by for me to get upset about the overuse of "hand me that drill" in a few months.

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From a singular point, all of the matter in the universe explodes outward with inconceivable force.

Then what?

Setting aside, for a moment, trivial things like the creation of planets and the entirety of Earth's and humanity's history, the only effect so far of the Big Bang is an outward expansion.

Imagine setting a lit stick of dynamite in a bucket of golf balls. The dynamite explodes, the balls travel outward in all dimensions until their force is conquered by other forces like gravity and drag. If you were to pretend that explosion of golf balls was our universe's origin, where we are right now is about half a second after the initial explosion. Stuff is still expanding outward from the origin point of the bang. Currently, the universe is expanding just like spread of those golf balls after the explosion. What happens, though, in the long run?

There are two major theories. One is that the force of the Big Bang cannot be stopped. Matter will continue to travel outward from the origin point forever. As this happens, galaxies spread farther and farther apart, then solar systems spread apart, then planets pull apart, then molecules themselves are pulled apart until eventually every atom in the universe is equally spaced from every other. This is called the Big Rip.

The other theory is that the force of the Big Bang will eventually be overcome. There isn't much drag in outer space, but gravity becomes a factor. As the universe expands its own gravitational force expands. Eventually, the universe itself is so big that it starts to pull itself into itself, and the force from that initial explosion is overcome and begins to run in reverse, as if after the dynamite in the bucket of golf balls triggered a black hole, so that once the golf balls had exploded outwards they were then sucked back inwards to where they started.

The universe stops expanding and begins to contract toward its origin. Galaxies are pulled into eachother and gravitational orbit patterns are thrown into complete disarray, solar systems all cram together, planets cram together, and molecules cram together until every bit of matter in the entire universe has contracted into one sphere. Everything that ever was or will be is condensed into a singularity packed together so tightly that it would be smaller than the head of a needle.

This theory is known as the Big Crunch. It's considered less likely.

I like it, though, partly for its elegance but moreso for the possible after effect.

After the Big Crunch, every atom and particle of the universe exists in a tiny dot. The amount of potential energy in this singularity is enormous. So enormous that after what you could call "a while" but would effectively be instantaneous, it could explode outward. A big bang. Every molecule of the universe explodes outward once more. The universe is born anew for another X-trillion years until it contracts again and explodes again.

At first thought this sounds like an elegant scenario of a cosmic "second chance," but you have to understand that with forces like this there are no variables. No matter can be created or destroyed in the universe, so the quantity of matter at the end of the universe will be exactly the same as there was in the beginning. The singularity at the end of the Crunch would be identical to what existed immediately before the Bang, and so the laws that governed the outcome of the Bang would also govern the post-Crunch Bang. The universe would end up exactly as it was the first time.

The Earth and every other planet, solar system, and galaxy would form just as it did before. Humanity would spring forth just as before. History would play out just as before. For all the inhabitants of Universe 2's Earth new, they would think exactly what we think, that everything is happening for the first time. There would be a new you and a new me and because the environment and situations would be the same we'd all do the same things exactly as we did before. I'd be writing this sentence and you'd be reading it, trillions and trillions of years from now.

For that, then, it's reasonable to assume that our universe isn't the first at all. Our Big Bang could just have been the after-effect of a previous Big Crunch. This could be the 2nd or 19th or three-hundred-billionth time the universe erupted from that singularity and unfolded exactly as it had every time before.

It would be as if life, the universe, and everything were a video tape and once it reached the end it just rewound to the beginning and started over.

Imagine that this theory were proven true. Imagine it were scientific fact that the universe were looping over and over again, that everything you will ever do has been done by an identical iteration of yourself living your exact life on your exact planet in your exact universe. Would this change your day-to-day behavior or your outlook on life? Keep in mind that whether it did or not, it already did (or didn't) an infinite number of times before. There would be nothing you could do to break the cycle.

Do you think there would be a greater change within humanity as a whole? Would violence decrease and the global populous move toward enlightenment in the face of the fact that everything is much, much bigger than they thought?

I say no, or at least not for a while. Why? Because the people who are holding humanity back wouldn't believe it because it would contradict a literal interpretation of their favorite really old book.

Comments: 7 Comments.

1. It's not about vampires.

2. It's not about people breaking up.

I do this because I need to distance myself from the big bucket of suck that the whole concept of "unpublished novel" falls into. Most great books were at some point unpublished, but it is the perpetually unpublished books that I don't want mine being associated with. Basically, the bad ones. The product of somebody some day deciding they should just get it over with and write that book, perhaps in the midst of an endorphine high caused by a Tony Robbins conference or an eighth reading of The Secret.

If you forced somebody with no real skill or ambition to write a novel, it would most likely end up being about either vampires or people breaking up.

The people who write about vampires are either angry teenagers obsessed with goth culture and think that Ann Riceian vampires represent some idealistic reality, or just uncreative horror-and/or-action freaks who need easy fodder for their gunslinging hero with infinite ammo or a force of antagonism to slaughter ancillary characters without any need for establishing a back story or plot.

The people who write about breaking up are the distraught twentysomethings who've been at the receiving end of one too many aborted relationships and think they have gained some grand insight into the human condition and are thereby compelled by forces of nature to create for us the ultimate Relationship Novel. People so trapped in their own minds that they think the height of human drama is an ended dating spree.

Don't think me supercilious enough to consider myself the best writer ever or anything. I know my book isn't the bees knees and that it doesn't hold up a mirror to society or anything. I can't even talk about originality, since this story I cooked up happened to turn out to be a slight... homage to the Bourne Identity before I was even aware of the book-cum-movie (if you can believe it, after I'd seen the film I had to change a lot of the details to prevent it from seeming more like Ludlum's character).

All I'm saying is that I'm better than the people who write unpublished novels about vampires or breaking up.

The last group I gave that brief counter-description to replied with, "Ah, but it is about vampires who break up?" and I instantly knew what my next novel would be about.

Zombies falling in love.

As a brief literary aside, Rice's Interview with the Vampire essentially is about vampires breaking up.

Comments: 5 Comments.

To write about something you have to know about something, and I know a lot about a lot, but it seems what I know the most about is the life and times of imaginary hitmen.

I'm not singular in this. There are lots of novels about assassins, in fact I own several of them, and while I enjoy them I don't really consider them "literature" as much as I consider them episodes of the show Alias in book form. They're entertaining, but not very deep.

But then consider the last book I read, No Country For Old Men, a very popular, well-received novel that was turned into last year's best-picture Oscar winner. This book (and the movie) features a very very ruthless hitman as a central character but somehow manages to elevate itself to the level of literature.

I'm trying to find the distinction, of course so I can emulate it, and failing. I thought it might be level of detail, as most corny ooh-rah Tom Clancy-style novels that come off as immature seem to go overboard explaining the specific make and model of gun on every page. No Country For Old Men is pretty explicit about these things, though.

Another theory I had for the distinction between mature books about hitmen and giddy fodder for maladjusted teenagers is just the amount of reveling in violence. Writers like Ludlum seem to just gloss over the violence of some events, while a story put together by a writer with mommy issues would tend to go nuts with the gory details.

NCFOM is just as violent as you could imagine a novel being without it seeming ridiculous. It's cold and at times depressing, but it's still one of the best novels written in the last decade.

The solution, I think, is a style of writing I call "bore and metaphor." Despite the body count and intrigue in No Country For Old Men, it is at times a stunningly boring book in ways I continually fail to render into words. Also, everything drips of metaphor. Metaphors can be great, like a summer breeze, or they can be overwrought and laborious, like the last twelve Matrix movies. It's like when you're in one of those haunted houses that pop up around Halloween inside abandoned grocery stores and rec centers where you pay $15 to walk through a 1-sum maze of particleboard walls knowing that around every corner will either be a staff member dressed up as a scary clown or some elaborate prop that shoots smoke and looks scary in the dark. Instead of knowing something abrupt-posing-as-scary will be around every corner, you know that around every corner will be something that's a metaphor for something less interesting.

The key, then, for me to graduate into a better writer while still writing about the world's second-oldest profession, is for me to learn to remove elements of interest from my stories and make everything into a metaphor. Then I'll be golden.

So, in my own interest, I'd like to announce to those that have read my to-eventually-be-published novel Mind + Body, that the "milk" is a metaphor for Chris's sexual frustration and Chris buys those eyeglasses so he can look through them into his own past, instead of the other thing.

Also, the .45 Caliber H&K USP semiautomatic is a metaphor for life. Do yourself a favor, go through the story again and count the number of time he fires the gun. The number is the answer to everything.

Comments: 5 Comments.

This is the thing I'd normally write a Big Huge Thing about, but I'm getting tired of manufacturing gravitas for situations that don't really need any.

I've moved my Electroids stuff to Amazon.com. They have a thing where you send them your wares and do all the managing/ordering/shipping for you. The advantage here is that I don't have to do that anymore, as after 2 years it gets a little maddening. A consumer advantage is that their orders will be shipped around 400x faster, and if they have Amazon Prime accounts they can get free 2nd day shipping. The disadvantage here is that I have to guess how much inventory to create and send Amazon because of the few-day turnaround and potential havoc caused by Amazon not having inventory or having too much. The consumer disadvantage is that, because Amazon charges a fee for all this and because I used to make my money from the shipping & handling fee and not the actual price of the items, I'll probably have to be raising the price to make this a non-losing venture.

Right now it's at $9.99. A while ago when I had the patience for such things I determined that if this stuff was in retail stores they'd have to cost $14.99 in order for both me and the store to make profit. That price scares me because $10 is a huge psychological milestone for buyers and I like to stay below it.

Oh well. We'll see how this all works out.

Click here for the Electroids store.

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