The Blog with No Name

I’ve mentioned several times that I’m a big fan of alternative energy, particularly in cars, and after reading about the Tesla roadster I’m even more excited:

I’ve always marveled at how long the antique internal-combustion engine has survived. By 2006 standards, my car’s power plant is a noisy, heat-blasting, poison-spewing monster with way too many moving parts. One spin in a Tesla made me realize that the gas engine might finally be on its last legs—and not because electric cars will help wean us from Saudi oil and save us from global warming. Rather, the Tesla Roadster is a rolling demo that proves electric cars now outperform their gas-guzzling counterparts in comfort, convenience, and, best of all, speed.

Hopefully by the time I’m ready and/or able to buy a high performance sports car electric motors will be commonplace, powerful, and reliable. Oh, and significantly cheaper. The Tesla is $100,000, and I’m not sure I could ever justify spending that much money on a car.

(via Instapundit)

Just about every finding in this study, conducted by a “feminist,” only confirms what we already know. The whole article is quotable, but here’s the main snippet:

In fact, women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day - 13,000 more than the average man.

Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat - and actually get a buzz out of hearing their own voices, a new book suggests.

. . .

And, if that wasn’t enough, the simple act of talking triggers a flood of brain chemicals which give women a rush similar to that felt by heroin addicts when they get a high.

Yeah, that’s right, women are addicted to talking.

Of course, men are addicted to something else:

But what the male brain may lack in converstation [sic] and emotion, they more than make up with in their ability to think about sex.

Dr Brizendine says the brain’s “sex processor” - the areas responsible for sexual thoughts - is twice as big as in men than in women, perhaps explaining why men are stereotyped as having sex on the mind.

Or, to put it another way, men have an international airport for dealing with thoughts about sex, “where women have an airfield nearby that lands small and private planes”.

Studies have shown that while a man will think about sex every 52 seconds, the subject tends to cross women’s minds just once a day, the University of California psychiatrist says.

52 seconds? That seems a little . . . off.

More snow came down just in time for the commute home from work. You can only imagine what this did to traffic. It’s predicted to snow some more tonight, so I brought my laptop home from work. Hopefully it’ll be a snow day, so I can sit under warm covers sipping hot tea while working. That sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Earliest I’ve ever seen snow in Seattle. Maybe this means we’ll have a better ski season this year. I doubt it will stick though. Traffic is going to be awful tomorrow.

The last few days I’ve been in Colorado for Thanksgiving and skiing. Look:

These pictures were taken with my Motorola RIZR, which has a pretty decent camera.

As you can see, the weather has been nice. Yesterday we were at Copper Mountain, which wasn’t completely packed out and iced over. I got a deal through the airlines I used to get here, so I got two tickets for the price of one, which was awesome. Today, we hit Arapahoe Basin, the place where “all the locals go.” It was pretty nice, but we agreed that it would be much better later in the season with more snow cover. They have a lot of xtreem(!!!) terrain that we couldn’t hit because there was barely two feet of snow coverage. Lots of rocks were peeking out of the snow. Overall, it was quite nice and much better than I expected for being so early in the season.

Last Sunday, I purchased a Nintendo Wii. The Wii is Nintendo’s next-generation console (soon to be last-generation) that is going head to head with the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Like those other consoles, anticipation for it is high, though not nearly as hyped up and overblown as the Playstation 3, so a couple of friends and I decided to camp out at the Target near my work in an effort to secure one at the earliest possible moment. Our initial plan was to get in line around 5 AM, giving us 3 hours before the store opened. However, those plans changed when we got kicked out of another friend’s house after we made too much noise playing Gears of War on a friend’s high-def TV. I guess the sleeping wife didn’t enjoy the hoots of victory and the din of battle. So, we ended up being in line at 2 AM. These November nights are pretty cold, and I barely prepared for it, meaning I was fairly miserable most of the time. For entertainment my friends and I brought our trusty Nintendo DSes, and played games until even wii-er hours of the morning. Around 7:30 AM, Target employees came out with what for everybody was waiting: the ticket guaranteeing us one of the 81 Wiis in stock. They also had hot coffee and popcorn (?) for us. I got ticket number 46. I’m glad we didn’t get in line at 5 AM like we originally planned because it was right around where the 5 AM people were standing in line that the cut off point was. At least 30 people were turned away; Target just didn’t have enough Wiis for everybody. At 8 AM we were let in the store, where we stood in single file line for about 30 minutes as we were given our assigned Wii, any accessories (limited to 1 of each) we might want, and then checked out. By the time I got back outside it was pouring rain. I’m still amazed that of all nights I stood outside for 6 hours was one of the few dry nights we’ve had here in the Seattle area — especially with a record breaking wet November. After getting home, I made two unsuccessful attempts to hook up the Wii. I was just too exhausted to stay awake.

Read on for more thoughts and some reporting on game play
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Faithful reader Fluger has pointed out there’s been a critical security flaw found in the Worldcom wireless drivers for Windows. The link details how to fix this until more official patched drivers are released. Don’t get completely owned if you have a PC laptop and use wireless, check it out.

A big part of my job is sending text messages, so I’m fairly competent at it now. However, I’m nowhere near as good as this guy. A 160 character sentence with lots of strange words in less than 50 seconds! It’d take me a few minutes to tap that sucker out.

Anybody else find it disturbing when our enemy, a crazed radical Islamist intent on going nuclear, who talks often of the destruction of Israel and is in complete defiance of the UN, makes statements such as these:

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday called U.S. President George W. Bush’s defeat in congressional elections a victory for Iran.

Bush has accused Iran of trying to make a nuclear bomb, being a state sponsor of terrorism and stoking sectarian conflict in Iraq, all charges Tehran denies.

“This issue (the elections) is not a purely domestic issue for America, but it is the defeat of Bush’s hawkish policies in the world,” Khamenei said in remarks reported by Iran’s student news agency ISNA on Friday.

“Since Washington’s hostile and hawkish policies have always been against the Iranian nation, this defeat is actually an obvious victory for the Iranian nation.”

. . .

But, he said: “With the scandalous defeat of America’s policies in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan, America’s threats are empty threats on an international scale.”

I find it quite disconcerting that our enemies rejoice when Democrats gain back some power. Maybe they hope for the return of the Clintonian foreign policy: talk a lot, lob some Tomahawks, and flee if soldiers start dying.

I was expecting my last post about the election would generate more comments, particularly comments of the tsk-tsk variety. I’m flattered more people have commented about my personality than my confession of civic apathy. However, there has been some discussion in the background via electronic correspondence with Greg and Jeremiah. Apparently, none of us voted, and we all feel pretty much the same way. I wonder if it’s just a coincidence that all of us young, hawkish white males who tend to be conservative didn’t vote. My guess is there’s not a coincidence. We three form a very loose-knit blog gang, and we all drink the same koolaide.

Jeremiah’s thoughts on the election can be found here. I’m not sure how I missed this post earlier. I think it was because I saw the word “pluto,” and I thought he was talking about boring dwarf planets again so I ignored the post. Jeremiah is turned off by politics because it is “disturbingly slimy,” which is a fair assessment. The dirtiness of politics does bother me, but that’s not what turns me off to politics these days. As I mentioned in my previous post on the election, what causes me to not care is it seems pointless. The two ruling parties are evenly pitted enough they balance each other out in our adversarial system of politics. So, policies coming out of Washington are never really going to do much to swing us far to the right or the left. Just some times the government will tilt left and sometimes it will tilt right. Perhaps this is a good thing, perhaps it is not. Nobody is happy with the current status quo, but neither half our country can agree on how to change the status quo. As long as the political tug-of-war is such, I don’t feel it’s that necessary to add my little bit of electoral strength to my preferred side. This is especially the case when choosing our representatives is less of a choice between the lesser of two evils and more of an arbitrary choice between two equal evils.

One of Jeremiah’s commenters pointed out that he (and by extension, me) could have at least voted on propositions. These aren’t a choice between two compromised and compromising individuals, but a choice that decides a policy that immediately affects me (usually). I confess I feel a bit guilty for not learning about and voting on the propositions on the ballot this year. Though, I’m still not convinced my vote would make the slightest difference in the outcome considering the blueness of where I live.

At any rate, the country still stands, hale and hoary, without my input.

Once, a long time ago, a girl described my personality as “flat as a pancake.” I was inclined to believe her at the time but not so much anymore.

For Halloween, T-Mobile allowed us to don costumes and bowl for free. I went as Elwood Blues of The Blues Brothers fame. I looked like this (minus the pink stuff):

My buddy, as Jake Blues, and I won $25 each for our costumes. I wish I could always make money that easy.

So, I have a silly side and I have a serious side. For example, I enjoy beautiful things, like this sunset the other day as I saw it from the window of my cube:

There was an election yesterday. That’s kinda cool I guess. It’s nice to know other people out there still care enough to vote. Me, I stopped caring, at least for now.

Democrats won big in the House and have gained a very slight majority in the Senate. I don’t read too much politics these days, but I thought Best of the Web’s commentary was a pretty good right-wing perspective. I’m almost relieved the Republicans, the party with which I’m most likely to align, lost. They deserved to lose. They really started sucking the last 2 years for a lot of reasons. Also, can you even imagine what a horrible horrible situation we would be in now if the Republicans even managed to maintain a slight majority in both houses? It seemed months ago the Left had slipped into the mentality that they had the right to win big in 2006, and, if they didn’t, then surely Karl “Evil” Rove pulled another fast one like he did in 2000 and 2004. I shudder to think about what state we would be in if the Democrats didn’t win. Blood probably would have been shed. . .by aged hippies. I’m not sure how much comfort the Democrats should take in this election though. They are only in power because the Republicans effed up so many things. It’s not like more people identify with the Dems; it’s just more people hope they’ll screw up less than the current batch of Republicans. Frankly, I believe they just might be able to pull that off, especially considering many of the freshman Dems are at least fairly moderate. I am glad Lieberman won.

Is it really that bad I don’t care about politics? A switch clicked off sometime after the 2004 elections, and I suddenly stopped caring. I only maintain a cursory knowledge of the goings on, which means I skim Drudge headlines, skim through Instapundit, skim through Volokh (though that’s not so political), and read Best of the Web. I’m not even sure politics affects my life in any significant way. The economy is fine. I have a job. No government can stop another terrorist attack. Wait, let me re-phase that: no government has enough balls to take the steps necessary to stop another terrorist attack, which is probably a good thing. I have my civil rights, and I am deeply skeptical of anybody who thinks we live in a country that is anywhere close to a police state. The government is still a bloated mess. The government will always want my money, though some years it demands less. The government will always suck at whatever it does. I really do not think it matters which party has power these days. It seems to me the country will have to experience a sea-change in public opinion for anything interesting to happen. In light of all of this, why should I make an effort to care? Heck, I’m ensconced in a cocoon of liberalness, it’s not like my vote is going to change anything here anyway.

Anyway, that’s my lack of opinion, and I’m stickin’ to it.

Quick update: this is entirely correct and how losing parties should accept defeat.

Three IntArW3b(!!!) videos linked after the jump. I didn’t want the nasty preview frames slowing down loading, so I decided to hide them.

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