Category Archives: Lite

Take a Nap

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I can’t help but sing the praises of melatonin. I picked some up at Meijers a week ago to help me overcome some sleeplessness. They are tiny 5mg pills and about an hour after taking one I feel a distinct urge to fall asleep. It’s way more pleasant than the one time I took a Advil PM because I had a headache and it was late at night and I figured what the hell. The ‘sleep aids’ that go in these pills may work for other people, and I’m not going to disparage them if they work for you, but for me the experience was incredibly unpleasant. Instead of naturally feeling drowsy and maintaining control it felt like I was going into a blackout. It wasn’t terrifying, but it was extremely unpleasant. The melatonin works with me instead of on me. I can retain consciousness if I need to, but it brings on some serious yawning and some definitely powerful feelings of drowsiness. Of course, this is not really the most natural way to fall asleep and I’m always very conscious of allowing myself to become dependent on them to help me get to sleep usually. So far I just used them once, and then yesterday at 4am after getting no sleep with this stupid coughing/congestion bit. By around 4:30 I was nice and asleep. One thing that I have noticed under the influence of melatonin is that I still have the ability to dream, which I’ve heard becomes stunted or disappears completely when you are taking stronger drugs to put yourself down to sleep, like Ambien and so on.

While browsing some news I came across a site detailing how some people with insomnia have a very hard time getting to sleep because their brains are “too hot” and that possibly getting a cooling system or maybe even an icepack might help initiate the proper descent into sleep. The article did say that one of the side effects of melatonin is that it cools the body, which makes sense. I sleep best when I’m cold and under the blankets. For me personally I can’t sleep with my feet bare, well, I can eventually sleep but it is not as quick and easy as if I had something on my feet. I’m the opposite of Scott, he needs to have bare feet, I need to have socks. The woolier and more fuzzy the better. It struck me, for all the people who I know who suffer from insomnia that you could work a kind of hat-trick to put yourself down to sleep using a strategy of chemicals, food, and conditions. I have only had one bout of insomnia when I was a little kid, but haven’t since then. I sort of wonder if something like this would work well for people with insomnia. Now before people get all bent and bothered, and yark about snopes.com and all, I’m just going by what I experience myself when it comes to these things.

  1. For Dinner prepare a turkey breast with mashed potatoes and a vegetable of your preference. I’ve heard it said that turkey meat has a lot of tryptophan in it, and that can bring on a sense of drowsiness. I’ve also heard that cooking the turkey eliminates the tryptophan and even if it was in there, tryptophan doesn’t do what we think it does. It is my experience that after eating Thanksgiving dinner everyone is dead to the world. It’s purely anecdotal, but it can’t hurt, plus turkey is good for you. It could be just a grand carb-crash, but I like to think there is more to it than that. Perhaps it’s a chance to say hooray for the placebo effect. Turkey makes us sleepy because we’ve told ourselves that it does. 😉
  2. 1 5mg pill of melatonin washed down with a glass of milk. The classic treatment for sleeplessness is a mug of warm milk, but I don’t think the temperature matters unless the warm milk helps soothe your throat somehow. Perhaps there are factors in the milk that bring on drowsiness and that if the milk is closer to body temperature that these factors move into your system faster. I don’t know. But again, does it hurt? If your lactose intolerant then water, but still.
  3. Wrap an icepack in a washrag and slip it into your pillowcase. This will cool the back of your neck, along with the blood going up both arteries up to your brain. The brain will likely note the cooler blood and figure that it’s time to sleep.
I get to wondering if someone with insomnia tries something like this, or even a part of these ideas and maybe they can get a good nights rest. The only thing I’ve noticed, at least about today is that my circadian rhythm is shot to hell, so I’m wide awake at 11:40pm when I should be starting to flag down. 

 

If anyone tries these ideas, I would love to have comments to see if any of it worked for you. I like the idea of natural treatments replacing prescription drugs.

Falling Skies

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Started watching Falling Skies on TNT tonight and I commented to Scott that these stories all have the same path. Alien invasion, human resistance. We’ve seen this before, “War of The Worlds” anyone? The story gets boiled down using convenient applications of deus ex machina to tell a simplified story. A lot of these stories all run the same and after a while they all tend to blend in together and tell a single tale. This is fine until it gets really tired and eventually the tale stops being about the poor human survivors and you start rooting for the aliens to wipe them all out. With so much lame human mugging for the camera you just wish there would be a bright light, the rest of the story would be over and we could get on to the next tired humanity vs. alien story.

Home owner beats would-be robber with frying pan, robber listed in critical condition | MLive.com

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Home owner beats would-be robber with frying pan, robber listed in critical condition | MLive.com.

This brought me great joy, reading how a homeowner defended his home with a cast-iron frying pan. Now I know the weapon of choice to have under my bed when I feel vulnerable. *PONG* YAY! *PONG* *PONG* *PONG* *PNGSMUSH*

Misplaced Loyalty

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After reading some twitter feeds recently, and for the record there are twitter people and twitter feeds. You follow a person and you can enter into a conversation with them, a feed doesn’t have conversations, they’re just semi-human-shaped billboards that yark. Anyways, following the twitter feed there was a discussion over whether or not a classical bookstore that carried comic books would upset a local comic book store, assuming that if the huge chain sold comic books that it would muscle out the smaller comic book stores the same way that Walmart kills off mom-and-pop stores in towns they occupy. This whole thing got me thinking about the loyalty many have to comic book stores. It’s a feeling I’ve wrestled with as well and for me personally it’s right smack dab in the center of the digital comic book debate. If you roll out day-and-date comic book releases digitally you are essentially removing the impetus for customers to go to a comic book store. I wonder where this sensation of misgiving is coming from, if a comic book store dies, does it threaten comic books? Is it really a bad thing? It’s almost as if comic book stores have established themselves as an habitual destination and when you upset a habit it causes a great deal of discomfort for people who are principally embedded into that particular habit.

Specifically I am writing about DC’s coming overhaul in September. They are going to day-and-date digitally deliver their comic books so technically I would never again have to visit my local comic book store. For clarities sake I don’t read Marvel comic books, so I wouldn’t be drawn in by those books, so why go? Do I feel bad about not patronizing my local comic book store? I don’t know to tell the truth. I’m quite betwixt over it. Life goes on, losing a very small customer like me certainly won’t hurt their bottom line – but what if it does and they can’t make ends meet. Do I feel responsible? Do I feel like I’d be missing out or somehow or guilty even? I feel like I should, but I don’t. When September comes I can just carry my iPad with me and enjoy Comixlunch on Wednesdays without having to carry around a stack of comic books I’ll read once and then pile up somewhere. They’ll pile up on some storage device instead.

When an EF10 hit DC

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They say that God’s pinky is an EF5 tornado. It’s got the power to wipe away a whole city from the map. Yesterday DC Comics announced that this fall they’ll be resetting everything back to #1’s and rewriting the entire “DC Universe”. This I regard as an EF10. God isn’t satisfied with just scrubbing Keystone City off the map, he’s going after every bit that is DC.

So what does this mean? Could be good, could be bad. Nobody knows. Not even the writers know. The artists are in the dark as well. I suppose WB knows, and DC management certainly must know. Here we take a little tangent, and we hope that none of this is an emergent error! It would be something completely comic if someone misheard someone else at a WB/DC meeting and what was a lighthearted dalliance is now company direction! That it could be this way is absurd, but when a comic book company makes a 180 like this one, can you really discount any possibility?

That’s another part of it. It’s gotta be a marvelous thing sitting at the head of DC and watching everyone spinning in tight little circles as fast as they can coming up with possibilities and suppositions and blurting them out on Twitter. I’ve often thought that it would make for awesome marketing cleverness to seed a rich and passionate social network with something mind-boggling and then listening to what people are hoping for, what they are afraid of, and looking at all the outliers as the news causes certain tightly wound fans to figuratively explode all over the place. I’ve also thought about a wholly emergent marketing campaign. The company has no idea what the end-game is, nobody does. The company shocks the fans, the fans then blaze feedback to the company and the company follows a path laid out by the fans. Nobody is leading at all, there is nobody at the helm, it’s two groups dancing without anyone leading. I’ve always thought that could be exceptionally cool or utter disaster. I’m sure “Marketing” and “Business Types” have already modeled that and discovered Captain Trips at the end of it, so, whatever.

Getting back to DC and this EF10 storm that just hit it. One thing I can say is dumping history can be massively liberating. Many years ago I had my car and all it’s contents stolen in Chicago. Whoosh, gone, just like that. It left me with an odd feeling afterwards, I had lost everything, but there was a certain sense of cleanliness left over. That out of a massively unpleasant experience a nugget of pure liberation could spring out of it is marvelous to me. This could be a similar liberating thing for DC Comics. By hacking 75 years of history into kindling and setting it all on fire gives them the chance to tell new stories and free the characters from their pasts.

Who needs liberation then, when it comes to characters? Well, dumping the Hawkcritters is a great start, along with the sheer goofiness of “Power Putz” and “Shockingly Buoyant Girl” in the 45th Century! Both of those can just snap-crackle-and-pop to ash. Other characters can get some much-needed historical mopping up. Who needs a good and deep mop-job? Aquaman. The butt of jokes about a rather lame silly power set really needs to be pulled apart and reconfigured. He could shine if they draw on some cojones and fix his story to match.

For those people who bemoan a lost 75 years of history, you can always go back and relive the glory days anytime you want in the back-issues aisles of a con or your own basement. Much of comic book history is self-contained anyways and you knew that everything was malleable when you grabbed your first comic! What’s the difference between Hal Jordan resetting the entirety of existence in Zero Hour compared with this? Instead of Hal Jordan, it’s just Dan DiDio, or Geoff Johns, or since Brightest Day came along and plotzed on us all, why not just peel back the layers and show Alan Moore underneath it all, as it really is? Is what DC is doing now any less upsetting to people than Kyle Rayner, as Ion, re-igniting the Power Battery on Oa and creating a bumper-crop of new tiny-blue-guardians and then pulling a whole Book-of-Genesis-Surprise on us all by creating male and female pint-sized-guardians at the same time, only years later to have someone else write about the Zamarons, who apparently are Shaq-sized? One has to wonder how Sayd feels when she looks at a Zamaron. I’m just saying. The fact that DC changes things, creates bits and eliminates others, retcons with sheer gleeful abandon and treats time like it’s silly putty – something like this isn’t really anything worth getting upset over. They’ve done this in the past, they’ll do it again, because it’s not about some sort of romanticized tradition but just about storytelling. People accept new actors playing roles they love in soap operas all the time, this isn’t anything different from that. The characters change, the history is binned over and over, but you’ll keep on paying because the stories are compelling and frankly, that’s what you’re really paying $2.99 for. You aren’t clinging on to Adam West as Batman, so just let go and enjoy the ride!

I’ll leave you all with a great little aphorism that fits here really well “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Enjoy.

Raw milk update: Michigan State University dairy newsletter cites fresh statistics, touts website | MLive.com

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Raw milk update: Michigan State University dairy newsletter cites fresh statistics, touts website | MLive.com.

Once again people! There is a reason why Louis Pasteur is the father of modern food safety! I see this in lots of states, here in Michigan and also quite notably also in South Carolina where some of my family lives. Apparently not enough people have needlessly died from e. coli, cryptosporidium, or listeria!

I can’t believe this is still being talked about seriously. Just when you thought you won the war for one class of food to be pasteurized, and you’ve moved on to another (lets hear it for pasteurized eggs!) this bullshit comes roaring back. Raw milk was fine if you lived on a farm in 1928! It’s 2011. COME ON PEOPLE.

Of course, not enough death and illness have been suffered, we need more of that, yes, please! Sometimes humanity, as a species, dazzles me with it’s collective stupidity.

Read Carefully, Read To The End…

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Our local rag pushed a tweet out about a new traffic/intersection control called a Roundabout. They went on and on, just the same as MDOT did about all the studies indicating that these new traffic control systems were safer than anything else currently in use on the roads. I remember that when MDOT was pushing roundabouts and opened up for public comment I threw in my two cents. I maintain that while roundabouts are most certainly safer, they are only that way when everyone is properly educated on how to use them. Another point I made is if people have a problem with classic intersections, how will they cope with these wholly new experiences?

From the rag:

“…Like this email from reader, Katrina, who wrote:

I was wondering if you could please tell people how to use a roundabout! I have, on more than one occasion, watched someone go in circles again and again, trying to figure out how to get out! Please explain this to people! Thank you!

Or this email from reader, Connie, who wrote:

Who has the right of way in our new turn abouts? I have been told the person to your left has the right of way. Is it possible to post a sign saying who has the right of way? Sometimes both of you sit and wait until someone gives the OK to keep moving.”

So we have a state where the driving acumen is already deeply suspect: outrageous speeds, total ignorance of directionals, and starvation-until-death at a locked 4-way stop intersection. We are asking these people, who are already pushed to their limits by simple things like the odd thing on the left of their driving column that they never touch to the aforementioned “everyone died because they were locked solid at a 4-way” to somehow just be thrown headlong into a roundabout! Now instead of a simple 4-way lock we’ll have an internal roundabout lock joined to a accessway/exit lock on top of that!

What I’m getting at is that MDOT and these studies never took into account that people are grossly untrained for using roundabouts. Yes, they may be safer, and proven such when studies are conducted in places where people were trained on how to successfully navigate a roundabout, but this is Michigan! I am terrified of roundabouts and I try to avoid them if at all possible, not because I doubt my own wits or knowledge of how to use them, but because I’m surrounded by people who haven’t a clue how roundabouts work!

In the end all of this is meaningless. MDOT pushed hard and got permission to introduce these new car-destroying traps to this state, and now we have to cope with the ramifications of their actions. MDOT has a website that has educational material on roundabouts, but after working in academia, and seeing the things I’ve seen, even looking out my office window, people aren’t going to visit that website, and even if they do, I doubt they’ll learn anything.

At least we all were safer when Michiganders were trapped in their cars and starved to death at 4-way intersections. Nobody was hurt, they just died of natural causes. In roundabouts, now we can add fiery maelstroms of destruction to the body count.

“I don’t drive, the people on the roads are lunatics.” 🙂

Inverse Cookie-Jar Hypothesis

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I’ve started to think that there is definitely something to the cookie-jar hypothesis. That notion that we want what we can’t have. Specifically to a point this morning a take off this classic idea which might be called the inverse cookie-jar hypothesis. I see this a lot in people who behave in a very outspoken fashion, beyond all rationality about a certain topic. For example, the people who are so preoccupied with homosexuality that they go to extreme lengths to stamp it out, are intolerant to the differences of other people and in general can’t stop talking about it. In my hypothesis these people are themselves struggling with their own internal battle of their gender roles and sexuality. The gender and sexuality issues could be abstracted away and a more general theory could be that any topic that people are irrationally obsessive about indicates that they are wrestling with that very same topic in their own lives. So in a way, bigotry is a masquerade of self-loathing. If you see a bigot, whatever it is they are a bigot about, is the definition of the thing that they are struggling with.

If this theory is correct, not only does it explain a lot about the behaviors of people who are really out of control, but it helps those who are victims of the bigotry understand that it really isn’t hate-directed-outward, but hate-directed-inward. That’s important, and people shouldn’t lose sight of that, if the theory, you know, is true. 🙂

Playing through on the back nine…

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I wandered into the mailroom with a piece of paper in hand, with the design to scan it to my file server. I walked in and a student was busy tending to the very same copier pumping out duplicates of something. As I approached I noticed that the front half of the machine, where the ADF is, wasn’t actually doing anything. An errant thought struck me, that perhaps the copier, while busy making duplicates, might also be capable of making scans at the same time.

Certainly impossible.

Until I walked up, the student was looking worried, I pressed the scan button, put my page in the ADF, tapped my name as a destination and pressed the Big Friendly Green Button. The copier, a Savin 8065, didn’t even blink at my request. The copies never stopped or slowed down, the ADF fed my page in, scanned it and processed it, the whole while the copier was spitting out some other job.

I never thought the machine was capable like that! I’m still a little surprised and I’m impressed! I was sure it was going to blow apart and cover everyone with thick wads of melted plastic and toner.

Well, perhaps not that last part. 🙂

Most Blasphemy Ever

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While I was helping a coworker move some really heavy boxes of paper product around the office I had a very very blasphemous thought run through my head. Imagine, if you will, our big red hand-truck, also called a dolly. Now, tape a giant brassière to it and then put it in saffron-colored robes with a pointy yellow hat.

It’s a Dolly Dalai dolly.

Yes yes yes I know, a particular hatchway to hell just popped open for me. I am a bad bad man. 🙂 Oh but the giggles from that image will hang around me for DAYS.