Star Date 2010.0723 -  The walls slanted, as you might expect, at strange, Seussian angles, Escher-print angles, and though made of crude and weathered wood, also managed to convey a kind of carney-like falsehood - connected shacks made to appear more ramshackle, and haunted, than they actually were...

Star Date 2010.0722 -  A tale of two ships, perhaps. The first ship is the Manitou,  tall ship, reconstructed on the plans of a 1800's trade schooner, but outfitted for tourist passengers as cargo, instead of, say, wood or coal. Beautiful sails, some square, some triangular, all polished wood and re...

Star Date 2010.0720 -  Great Wolf Lodge. Indoor water park. Vast. 1000 gallon super bucket. Sliding down tubes, splashing into pools, walking through solid curtains of water, all without sunburn, all comfy and nice. The bathhouse of the gods.  Awesome. We dined - I use this word with precision - at ...

Star Date 2010.0720 -  I walked across a lake. Houghton lake is very shallow through much of it, such that one can walk in the lake, water at waist, then chest, for up to a half a mile or more. Sandi and I decided to see how far we could go. I was on tippy- toes, Sandi treading water or clinging to ...

Star Date 2010.0718 -  Tonight we stay at the East Bay Lodge, a place of polished wood, cabin logs, several rooms, and much cheer. We are right beside Houghton lake. It is appropriately wet. The lake not the lodge. Thankfully. http://www.9and10news.com/Category/Story/?id=240831&cID=1   See that ...

Star Date 2010.0718 -  Michigan: the land of brick. Everything here is made of red Super Mario Brick. Schools, houses, shopping malls, the sky, the food, the people and even the brickyards. No, wait, the brickyards are made of wood. Go figure. It's because they don't have earthquakes here. Until the...

Star Date 2010.0718 -  The lack of sleep is taking it's toll. Morale is low, especially inside my colon, where constipation has been declared as the new government. It is a harsh and iron-fisted regime.  A vast voyage across lake Michigan by coal-powered steamship has shown me that the flatness of t...

Star Date 2010.0716 -  I am a bacterium driving across the vast surface of a fuzzy green tennis ball. This is the endless, featureless horror that is North Dakota and Minnesota. The occasional tree or farm house is the only sign that my vision is false. The hundred degree heat bakes the tennis ball;...

Star Date 2010.0715 -  We have landed at a Best Western Warbonnet Inn somewhere in Miles, Montana. No sign of intelligent life, though there is a great deal of flatness. There is also dryness and the sort of heat felt only by escaped felons and the damned.  The road is long and weary. Our destinatio...

What now? I am going on a trip! Sandi has always wanted to show me her birthplace, Lancing Michigan. It's been a thirty year dream of ours - but either we've been too poor, or I've been too fucked up to actually do it. This year, in 15 days or so, we finally do it. Two and a half weeks farther east ...

All medicine and treatment has unwanted side effects. The bottom line with all treatment, with all of medicine, is to decide whether or not the side effects are offset by some gain. If so, if the gain is of greater value, then the treatment, the medicine, is worthwhile. If not, then medicine becomes...

I think this may need to be updated.

i was walking to lunch, and wasn't paying enough attention, stepped wrong. ended up slamming face down on a concrete walkway. had a touch of shock while dealing with the paramedics. hospital trip later, i busted my radial head, the part of the elbow where the radius meets the joint. no cast, just a ...

Nuking a clathrate bed. That sounds like just what the planet needs. Let's see... the only thing keeping the deadly methane clathrates from killing the globe is the fact that they are a mile underwater and frozen solid. A nuke creates a vast, expanding cavity of rapidly expanding superheated plasma....

After some consideration, I am thinking that the BP Deepwater Horizons oil spill will have a high probability of becoming the greatest man-made eco-disaster in history. Here is why: 1. It cannot be capped. The problem is clathrates, methane ice. The attempt to cap the well failed because clathrate i...

There are problems with the forum software, or it's interaction with the server, that we have never been able to solve. I am sorry for the troubles. The only answer so far seems to be rebooting the darn server regularly, which of course shuts it down for a few minutes. Many people contribute to this...

I've been thinking about UFO stuff lately, and researching it because it fascinates me. There is a lot of crap out there, and as wild as most of it is, there is, deep in the most conspiracy-oriented stuff, an astonishing degree of agreement and consensus - but I am not here to argue these matters. R...

If someone had a far longer life, would they not become more complacent about their self-preservation - and thus become more likely to be fatally hurt? Could you elaborate on your hypothesis? I'd like to weigh in on this one myself. The greater the investment, the less one wants to lose it. The mor...

Sooner or later there -will- be enforced, compulsory controls on population. It is inevitable; the only questions are what will precipitate it, and how it will be implemented. It could be like China, and the one-child only policy, it could be through tax incentives, it could be through forced revers...

Alright, alright; even if -and it's a BIG if in my mind- it were somehow possible to have hundreds of billions of humans alive at the same time on 'Our World' - which may, or may not include orbital space colonies, floating airship continents, floating oceanic artificial islands, underground cave-wo...