Simon, I mean Thomas, says “touch your nose” (with your tongue) but instead I reply:

Persimmons are good! Regular milk (nonfat: blegh, doesn’t count) is good! Soy milk (a.k.a, then, “soy bean juice”) is good, particularly the chocolate flavored (oh no, more beans!) variety. And yet they say I’m a picky eater? Hmm…

Think of regular milk (a.k.a. “cow juice”) and where THAT comes from, as opposed to our nice green soy beans, eh?

…with free POP and SMTP access in Gmail. Not only that, but it uses an encrypted version of both protocols for added security. I’ve routed all my mail (from about 5 different accounts) through my Gmail account, taking advantage of their feature that automatically archives mail once it’s been POPped. So even though I download mail to my desktop, if I’m at a different computer with Internet access I still have that pile of everything I’ve received, for reference. When I manage to fill up the whole gigabyte of online space (it’ll happen some day), I’ll delete the oldest half gig of messages because they’re just duplicates of what I’ve filed locally, anyway.

When are the other big two (Yahoo, which charges for POP access) and Hotmail (I don’t know anything about this, other than that Outlook Express can download mail from Hotmail through a proprietary protocol) going to follow suit? I don’t know, but Gmail’s still the greatest thing since butter. (To put on the sliced bread. Because you can’t just eat the sliced bread plain, you know.)

Window in Nero (CD burning program): “Are you sure you want to cancel burning the CD in the middle of the burn process? That could make the CD unusable. [CANCEL] / [STOP]“

Immediate thought: I don’t want to CANCEL the burning process, so I’m not going to press the button that says “CANCEL”. I’ll press the other button.

That turned out to be the button that STOPped the burning process and created a coaster. Burnination (has not been achieved)!

A “page-turner”; an exciting thriller built on an obviously impossible premise with one- and two-dimensional characters and a complex yet unsatisfying plot. All that said, I enjoyed reading Mr. Brown’s first “Robert Langdon” book, as they call this series after the hero-protagonist expert in historical art symbology. //The Da Vinci Code// had been recommended to me by different people on at least five occasions, so when I had the opportunity to borrow its prequel here, I eagerly accepted.

//Angels and Demons// starts out, on page one, with the following premise. Well, within Chapter One, I mean (or Chapter Two?), but I don’t hesitate to “spoil” this part of the plot because if you pick up the book and start reading, you’ll reach it pretty fast, anyway. Unless you don’t want even the first word spoiled (which is “The”, by the way), in which case retroactively stop reading before you get to this sentence. Or not, I don’t know if the first word is “The”. In fact I do have a pretty good hunch it isn’t.

The premise, then, is that a scientist has figured out a way to create unlimited quantities of antimatter and matter (in equal proportion) without using any energy. In reality (meaning, the world we live in) we can make antimatter, just as we can make matter, but it takes an incredible amount of energy. That’s “E=MC^^2^^” for you, which says that matter and energy are interchangeable and you can convert from one to the other. But since matter and antimatter tie up the same kind of energy, you can’t just pull them out of empty space. You might as well pull free energy out of empty space directly if you could do that. Create something out of nothing. Since we know you can’t do that (i.e., make free energy), in this universe at least, let’s say Angels and Demons is set in an alternate, non-parallel, (not even perpendicular) universe where one can just make free energy and get something out of nothing, suspend our disbelief like good readers, and move on from there.

So, it’s true that when matter and antimatter are combined, they annihilate each other and the energy contained is released (we, in our boring “conservation of energy” universe, have had to put that same huge amount of energy that’s liberated later into creating a tiny bit of antimatter, in the first place). So if you just so happen to have a way to make free antimatter, you can also build a sort of battery. Just combine the two whenever you need some power, and there’s your power (ignoring the steps involved in converting the heat energy to electrical or mechanical energy).

So a particular scientist (in his alternate universe) decides to pull a lot (a very visible amount) of antimatter out of thin air (vacuum), and then he decides to keep the globule of it hanging in a special storage device. The problem is that the antimatter can’t touch normal matter, so it needs to be contained by magnetic fields which suspend it in a vacuum.

Now, our scientist decides to make his antimatter containment device portable, which results in, as described in the book, something I picture as looking like a huge thermos crossed with an enormous hourglass. Why put all that effort into making this device portable? Why have it built with a battery inside, complete with a battery meter that counts down the exact number of seconds remaining in the battery’s charge, after which containment will fail? Why make it so the device can’t be plugged into a standard outlet to recharge the battery? Have you figured it out, yet? Yes, you’re smart. Plot: (1) Terrorists obtain doomsday bomb. (2) Bomb is counting down to detonation and can’t be stopped. The originality is overwhelming.

So, I kept thinking Hardy Boys, but then I realized the plot and style are more like those of a good Tom Swift, at least due to the pseudoscientific antimatter stuff. The mystery/chase aspect is Hardy Boys. Maybe a bit more complex. Maybe, let’s say: the substance of three Hardy Boys books crunched down into one, a pinch of Tom Swift, and an additional dosing of voilence/romance to facilitate an adult flavor. Shake (don’t stir) and voila! (Note: that’s not pronounced “viola”, if you’re not aware — it’s how “wah lah” is spelled.) Bear in mind, I once greatly enjoyed reading Tom Swift and Hardy Boys books back when I was little, and I bet they’d still be mighty fun to read, so I don’t say this to criticize, rather to elucidate flavor. Though Tom Swift was much more original, usually… But this is meant to be good adult literature?

Characterization is weak because, simply, the characters are not believable. Mr. Langdon (protagonist, do recall) is in a repeated state of shock, recoiling in horror or having his jaw drop to the floor with every new realization he makes or circumstance he encounters. The bad guy is not merely bad or misguided or conflicted in an interesting way, rather, just evil. The ultimate conclusion relies on those who have proven their intelligence and compassion throughout life acting in utterly stupid and un-compassionate ways, not meshing with my conception of reality as something plausible.

One instance where Mr. Langdon’s jaw drops to the floor in complete amazement (typical description; this is the flavor of the book’s words, remember) is when he sees people floating in an air silo, a tall cylindrical room with a jet engine at the bottom which blasts air upwards to allow those inside to appear to be floating. Even if I hadn’t seen a special about these on television about 15 years ago, that would hardly have been my reaction, let alone what I imagine to be that of someone who has presumably experienced much more of life than I have up to this point. So in the end, it’s hard to identify with this jittery easily-shocked protagonist as the hero of the story, let alone as a genuine person.

Although clearly the author put some research into the secret societies he details and the locations his characters visit, I didn’t feel particularly more educated by the end of the story. Further, the story made exaggerated claims about the supposed impossibility (many artists and scholars attempting this for years, etc.) of creating particular ambigrams (a coined term referring to words which can be read from different angles, in this case words that appear the same when flipped upside-down) referenced in the story, and yet the graphic artist who designed the images for the book apparently had no trouble. Further research on the Web reveals plenty of hobbyists who create and collect interesting ambigrammatic images.

In terms of an entertaining fast read, //Angels and Demons// isn’t bad. In terms of something cerebral, something that will teach you anything much about history, how the world works, how people interact; something that speculates about the future, makes an argument, or imparts knowlege: look elsewhere.

Patentable idea, perhaps? But it’s pretty simple, it just ought to be implemented. Ok, here’s the idea. Your cell phone, if it’s a modern phone, probably includes a GPS device. I know that on my phone, I can toggle my GPS setting between “all the time” and “911 only”. This doesn’t seem to accomplish anything other than setting a privacy option, though (wherein we trust that nobody can locate your phone when it’s not dialing 911); it would be a nice feature to actually use this existing GPS capability to display one’s current latitude and longitude, and perhaps some phones do this, but I haven’t run into any. Anyway, let’s assume that hooking the GPS into the phone’s operating system to actually display the information which the phone is capable of gathering anyway is a piece of programming cake. So now, my phone can do it and your phone can do it. Let’s say I’m looking for you. (I thought of this while trying to find a friend, where he was describing his surroundings while I was describing mine, and we were trying to locate each other this way. Being that we were in a large open area of a park, our surroundings consisted of particular trees and configurations of park benches, and although finding each other was relatively easy nonetheless, the idea I’m describing here is extensible because it could be pretty useful in plenty of other situations. So I started thinking, since I’m calling him on my phone, couldn’t his phone just communicate with my phone and they could tell each other their respective latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, and then I could walk and my phone could beep like a radio tracking device, with the beeps getting faster as I got closer, and vice versa? This would make finding people easy; you just home in on them. To solve any privacy issues, I could “release” my location to a certain phone number for a certain period of time. To prevent any third party from snooping, or the carrier from knowing my location, the information could be encoded using public-key encryption, the same way secure websites work so that only the end computer and the server can talk to each other but anyone else along the communications path can’t understand what’s being said.

So remember, if you see this feature on a cell phone some day, you read about it here, first.

Fun with CraigsList, in a fit of boredom/procrastination: I think I posted this a while ago, but going through some old email and running into it again, I feel like issuing a re-release. Like the new edition of the original Star Wars DVDs. (George Lucas’s table scraps, anyone?) So anyway, long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away:

—–Original Message—–
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 10:20 PM
To: anon-26012335@craigslist.org
Subject: Dear God – 30

Dear anonymous poster,

I don’t do favors. I only grant requests to those righteous individuals who have afflicted themselves by living lifetimes of self-imposed needless suffering and prayed to Me thrice daily, praising with fervor and zeal My every atom of existence because I am so supremely great.

:)

<<”Can you please do me a favor and bring someone into my life? Make him be compassionate, playful, HOT as can be, sensual, a hero in my eyes, loving, and HOT. Did I mention hot?

P.S. It’d be nice if he was a little bit tall…like me.”>>

Needless to say, this person, whomsoever she was, did not reply. Or not so needless– isn’t the emoticon a subtle hint to be intrigued by my dryly super sarcastic sense of humor? Sarcasmic.

Sarcastic people should be taken outside and shot. Or maybe I should have mentioned something about how hot (and did I mention, hot?) and by the way, tall, I am.

(After taking off jacket) ah, that’s better.

(After taking off elevator heels) ah, feels good to not be banging my head on doorways all the time. But wait, either those were stilts or I still am pretty tall!

Where socks go: I was loading my laundry into the washing machine, with the basket on the dryer. I accidentally knocked a few odd socks off behind the washer/dryer, and there’s no way to get to them without a grabber device (which I don’t have) or moving one of the machines (which isn’t worth the trouble, and anyway, they’re hooked up to the wall via pipes or tubing somehow which I don’t want to disturb). Therefore, I am leaving said socks behind there. One day someone will get them out, but in the meantime, I know exactly where they’ve gone, and it’s not to another dimension. Unless there’s a portal to another dimension behind the washer/dryer, which I concede is possible.

Embryonic stem-cell research: To not pursue it would be throwing out the baby with the bath-water.

K. asked me to proofread her personal statement wherein she expressed her reasons for wanting to join something called the Joint Center:

—–Original Message—–
From: K.
To: Mike H.

The goals of the paper:

brief statement of career aims and basis of interst in the Joint Center.

Here’s the organizations mission, which im supposed to be intersted in:

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies informs and illuminates the nation’s major public policy debates through research, analysis, and information dissemination in order to: improve the socioeconomic status of black Americans and other minorities; expand their effective participation in the political and public policy arenas; and promote communications and relationships across racial and ethnic lines to strengthen the nation’s pluralistic society.

Ok, sounds nice, but… you know I just couldn’t resist. I proofread her personal statement (solidly written, K.) and then wrote a personal statement (ha ha) of my own, as follows. Think she should submit this one?? Yeah, definitely:

I would like to work for the Joint Center because I, too, believe marijuana should be legalized, and I support the cause of a center from which to distribute joints to all who desire them, for medicinal purposes or otherwise. From a personal standpoint I am a strong joint advocate because joints (and I’m not talking about the elbow kind) play a significant role in my life. That’s because I smoke two joints in the morning and I smoke two joints at night; additionally, I smoke two joints in the afternoon: it makes me feel all right. I believe everyone should have the right to feel all right.

I believe I can contribute to the Joint Center by managing and designing the campaigns whereby its message of peace and love (of joints) can be spread. In fact, I have several such campaigns in mind, beginning with one having the aforementioned phrase as its slogan: “The Right to Feel All Right”. We will take to the streets with our message and march to the capital of Caul-ee-four-nee-uh where we will petition our Governator for the right to wend our weed to the wide world, to pipe our pot publicly, to gracefully grow our grass… to have The Right to Feel All Right.

I know the Joint Center is right for me, and I know I am right for the Joint Center. I hope that, therefore, I am high on your list of candidates. Thank you.

“Oh, funny that you asked, I’m actually writing a book. It’s called “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Photoshop for Dummies”. It’s actually a book about a book, and I forgot whether it’s being published by the “For Dummies” people or by the “Idiot’s Guide” people.”

Actually I’m thinking about starting a completely new line of self help books… it’ll be called “The Totally Brainless Stupid Moron’s Manual on (insert topic)”

The subtitle/blurb (originally it was going to be a subtitle and then it got too long for that) will be as follows. “A Guide for the Completely Hopeless: No, it won’t really help you, and you probably won’t get past the first page anyway, but you’ll feel better about yourself knowing there are enough totally brainless stupid morons out there, people just like you, to warrant our purely profit-driven publishing this book!”

“Daddy, the neighbors said you weren’t fit to live with pigs!”
“What did you tell them, son?”
“I said you certainly were fit to live with pigs!”
(From a treasured book of my childhood, Smart Alec’s Revolting Jokes for Kids)

“But anyway, I want to take over the world, too. So I think we’re going to have to work out some sort of power sharing treaty, yes?”

“You know the ghost named Blinky in Pac-Man? It ought to blink a lot, in the game. Just a thought.”

“Hey there, I hope work’s not too tough on you. Work’s tough on me because Freecell is hard sometimes.”