Futuristic Words

Last week I posted an entry about a girl who texted me out of the blue, a girl who wanted some Future but whom Future did not know.

I found out.

It was Soul.

Well played, sir. I will get you back, but that was very well played.

I was minding my own business, hanging out at a karaoke bar with Soul and Big Business, when I received a text from an unknown San Francisco number:

“What u up to? U should come over! Xxo”

Moments before I had huddled over my beer with my colleagues and decried a woman who I had wanted right up until the moment when she threw herself at me. That said, this was something new and unknown, a number a.) I hadn’t bothered to copy or b.) I had deleted because the fuse was too long, and I refused to play any phone games. I generally give  about two or three phone calls, more if she’s exceptional or if we have a powerful connection, before I stop torturing myself by deleting the number.

Anyway, it’s a high quality problem. Some girl booty-called me, and I have no idea who she is. Son of a bitch.

* YOUR FOOD IS POISONED! RUN FOR THE HILLS! If you eat meat made from cows, you should watch this video. It’s not a PETA video. I love me some steak. It’s about the extremely limited testing for pathogens in your food. Oh, and you probably won’t sleep tonight.

* Katie Couric interviews Glenn Beck – Glenn Beck is an idiot. This much is plain from his talk show and his radio show. Watching him squirm before Katie Couric’s terrible and kind grin was a special kind of schaudenfreude for me.

* Lara Logan could kick my ass! – I have been in love with Lara Logan since I saw her on the Daily Show on 17 June 2008. Periodically she shows up on the air and reminds Americans that we have men and women on the ground in war zones. Here she is on The Daily Show:

She was on The Colbert Report on Tuesday where she again made me want to marry her:

Besides that where she did her thing where she made me want to marry her and brought my attention to her amazing new segment on CBS News, Afghanistan: The Road Ahead. I’m linking to the site, since there’s no specific video you should watch. Besides, if you had the same reaction to Lara Logan’s interviews that I did–excepting the boner–I don’t need to encourage you to find out what the situation on the ground is like in Afghanistan.

I’d recommend you add an RSS feed to whatever reader you use so you can keep up-to-date with her work, which is what I do with Michael Ware’s reporting, but that will only lead to despair and spam in your RSS reader. Every other video search for her is cheesecake footage because she’s so frigging hot.

* There’s a special camaraderie between people who list “etymology” among their turn-ons. Marina Orlova’s

I’ve been using Google Wave, by which I mean I’ve been starting waves with people and we’ ve talked about how dumb the application is. This is what all that sound and fury were about? What a waste of clever coders’ time.

In case I didn’t make the case in my last update, you should attend the Love Systems Super Conference this weekend in Las Vegas. All our instructors will be out there with a few additions, e.g. Brad P, and it’s going to be heaps upon layers crammed into tunnels made entirely of fun. And vagina.

Lose time:

- Tons of sampling from Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2, clever implementation of a video game styled HUD, and the only good use of first person perspective I’ve seen so far in live action. One question remains unanswered, though: what’s in the box?

- I’m reading Niall Ferguson’s Ascent of Money. It’s a dramatic departure from the fantasy series I’ve been reading since July, George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. Dr. Ferguson is smart and a very good writer, but reading Ascent of Money makes me feel like I tested well and should be in the slow class. That said, the farther in the book I read, the more prescient Dr. Ferguson appears. Perhaps he can get a fourth PhD in Cassandraism. After that will be, in this order, A Whole New Mind, Why Women Should Rule the World, Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie, The Artist’s Way, and then back to fiction with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and House of Leaves. I’m sad because except for the first one, NONE of those books are available for my Kindle.

- Get a Kindle. Girls (and guys and homeless people) will start conversations with you to talk about it. As with any situational opener, it then falls on you the Romantic Philosopher (RS)* to continue the conversation. I could go on and on about this amazing device. If you’re scrunching your face and muttering something about how much you miss the feel of books, I would point to the weight of the device and its note-taking abilities and its nearly infinite battery life. And then I would kick you in the shins and call you a Luddite.

- This is a video of a goat that screams like a person. (Thanks, Shanna)

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