i guess i think about weird shit at night.
but tonight more than usual cuz i tried to go to bed at a time that i dont normally do (way early, plus i took a nap today after only a few hrs of sleep last night.

anyway. the only person (that i know) who might enjoy this is lea. but anyway. heres what i got:
all your life you by chance (especially in a cheesey sci fi movie) hear people referring to life as we know it as carbon - based. i guess i can kinda see how they justify this. the so called "R" variable on the top of the DNA substructure will dictate what kind of molecule you're dealing with, but it is forgotten that the other element thrown into the mix (other than Hydrogen, which is pretty much just filler and what keeps the DNA base from interacting with others [sorry bout that long parenthesis]) is nitrogen. its one-third of the DNA substructure. btw. i made up my own term for that, so it might not be what it's called, but to me the DNA substructure is two carbons along with a nitrogen, hence the 1/3.

but i guess when comparing the nitrogen kinda falls out of the equation. i could be making this up, but you have your acid and your base with this DNA. on one end, one of the carbons. on the other end, a nitrogen. in the middle, always a carbon. so i guess it makes perfect sense for DNA to act in this fashion with a carbonic acid on one end and an alkyline on the other end for a balanced molecule with a possibility for a little shakin' things up with the additional attatchment of whatever "R" radical to pick out one of 30-some amino acids to create protein in yo' silly ass.

i guess balance is the key. but it takes more fucking energy to maintain balance.
its funny how everything comes down to whether its economically (energetically) worth it to maintain a given system of whatever kind. acquisition to resources in whatever form is the key to survival.

that went a bit away from chemistry there at the end. maybe lea wouldn't like it so much after all.

if you're wondering how i got on this topic, its random, as usual. worked with muratic acid at work today to make the hotub water more acidic. hence chemistry. i guess its not so odd if you had hung around with me all day.

another topic spawned from work:
the new yorker, ever read it?
reminds me of playboy but without its "draw".
i read through some of it anyway, since the pool is goddamn boring.
i dont know if its just these bithces in the new yorker and the likes, but the authors kinda try to hard. i guess its trying to keep reading exciting by throwing in a bunch of vocab that's oddly placed yet descriptive, and also allusions to people that maybe only new yorkers or those that are "cultured" would know. like henry fielding or some shit. who the hell's that?

there was an article about a graffitti artist that has made it big in new york.... already mentioned it to some... neckface is the guys name. he draws fucked up faces and i guess has exhibitions in his hometown of san fransisco. but apparently canvas won't satiate his need to deface public property, and the man still goes out and does his business around the city. bitches buy clothes with his name on it, and beck's singer bought 4 or 5 of his pieces. maybe i wouldnt be so bitter if i saw some of his work, but from the impression i got, it's crap. there are much better graffitti artists out there than this guy with his squiggly-ass neckfaces.

final thing about the new yorker.
i found a redeeming article in it... talked about height variation over time. not just in one's lifetime, but over generations and in different parts of the world.
seems that americans kicked some ass in height around the 1800's and til nearly about WWII where we've kinda peaked off and now some danish are passing our shit up. japanese are catching up, and black slaves grew up to eventually be as tall as white americans (their owners) and taller than their african counterparts at the same time as whitey.
all about the resources and nutrition. america had it all. even back before whitey had a firm grip on america, i guess the cheyenne plains tribes of the 17 and 1800s who fed on buffalo and berries were the tallest in the world.
although they say it is a wide sample size (the number of people tallied for their height) seems to me they may have left out some of the black men. not sure how old the study is, but aren't there a lot of larger black men. and i'm not solely talking NBA stars, but people like the Masai who are fucking lanky and tall as fuck.

what i got from the article (my own thoughts) is that people are becoming smaller in the US. well. they eventually will. and its not such the bad thing. although i wonder if its a worldwide fact that the taller man usually gets more respect. ... then some of the more liberal countries of europe may become more of an intimidating force (until they eventually follow our progression as well).

people think china will be the next power-player of the world. i think they got some issues they still need to work out. same with japan.
my money's on europe to rise up again. ... and not just based on this height crap.

started out the work day noticing a few new people.
one of them made me think back to what i had heard in class just a few hours before.
"you can walk into the new york subway and see somebody that could easily resemble a neandertal".
well. my prof doesn't believe it, simply due to the fact that he sees Homo sapiens and neandertals and two separate species, but while at work, i found truth in that statement.
it was in the form of this old man. somewhat hunched, with arms hanging (hunching isnt necessarily a neandertal characteristic, but, however, adds to the effect). this guy had a huge brow ridge full of wrinkles and a fat nose. something of a troll, if you ask me.

but heres the problem with first impressions. i gave the guy a slight smile as he walked by. its what i do for about anybody i dont know well enough to give a cheerful hello to. the guy just walks by.
but the second time he walked by, he gave a heavy hello.
then we actually had a conversation about me and school, which is usually the start of any conversation over there because the job is usually slow enough to be buried in a book. but anyway.

the guy goes off about mayan ruins in mexico (cool shit) and how his duaghter went into the peace corps.
and heres the actual point of the story.
the daughter went to swaziland for her peace corps adventure. the guy was about to explain where swaziland lies on a map, but i kinda shrugged it off letting him know i knew where it was.
well, hell. now it seems that my point is pointless. all i was trying to get across was the fact that i enjoy being aware of the location of whatever country somebody may have visited or had some sort of story about.

what a profound statement. my bad.
always sounds better in the head.

the human head is odd.
apparently its gone through a crapload of changes since its deviation from apes. paleoanthropology or whatever you want to call the early study of man thrives on pointing out differences in what seems to be the most common fossils remains found of past hominids: the skull.

funny thing is, the major view in the scientific world today is that even though homo erectus, which is seemingly the first hominid to get out of africa, or at least the middle east, has similarities that are prevelant today. accordingly, these guys were in asia, we're talking china. but i guess they all just died out for some odd reason, natural disaster, ice age, you pick your favorite extinction scapegoat. but erectus has these similarities that are passed on to what is considered two new species. one that will go to be neandertal, the other to our very own sapien. so if similarities persist in sapiens that were present in erectus and erectus died out, why couldn't sapiens just have been a continuation of erectus.

what i dont get... and it may be spawned from this thought of seperate species idea, is that its really faux pax, or however the fuck you spell it, to compare different races. sure you got the skin color, hair, facial features, but hold up, wait a second, anything beyond these blaringly obvious characteristics is unscientifically putting people of the same species into different categories. some argue that there is no such thing as race. only clines or some bullshit. i've come to notice that scientists will tell you that you are wrong in thinking in a certain mindset and go on to explain their view of how it should be, when in all actuality, its the same concept that you've presented, only they word it slightly different. such bullshit. anyway. back to the topic.

ok. so you have erectus in africa, europe, and even all the way the hell in east asia (china). eventually the sample that you have starts to look differently in europe and africa than in asia. yeah. go fig. a million years of separation (maybe not completely) and they start to have their own skull niche.

what i'm questioning now, is if anybody recently has compared skulls of recent humans across the human gambit of "races".
because seriously. call me racist or whatever, but certain characteristics are pronounced in certain cultures than in others. nothing racial about it. i mean, wardrobe aside. if you take a fuckload of europeans, and a fuckload of people from the US, and another fuckload sample from australia, i'm sure you'll have a better than 50% or 33% (however you're sampling them) correct choosing of who goes in what category.

i mean its not like comparing neandertals to sapiens, but those that they name in the "divergence" of erectus from neandertal to sapien are rather comparative with a few differences.

i guess what i'm arguing for here is that i'm guessing (guessing = no evidence) these weren't different species and in fact they could interbreed. because natural hybridization is, and always will be, the secret to successfully conquering a niche beyond one either of the two original parenting species could survive in.

but i guess this is all how science moves along.
mentors present what they know, and the arrogant students find the details that dont quite match up. and when there's a whole mess of them the idea flip-flops from the previous thought to the rival theory. this is seen throughout science, at least from what i've seen in my field. but i guess that is how science evolves. one idea created. its opposite proposed. a swing back to the original idea, and possibly another reversion until the two are almost melded together and people realize that explanations are rather complicated and can't be explained through one single causal event.

i apologize for the abstractness. i'm sure that abstractness will never allow me to be a good writer because i'm always hoping people will figure out what i mean on their own. but i'm afraid it might not be possible.
anyway. to make it less grandiose and less vague, i'm just talking about out of africa versus multiregionalism in human evolution. i think the original trend (due probably primarilly to racists veiwpoints) was that sapiens evolved out of the west, and we couldnt have come from the "primitive" east. but then people decided that maybe we've been a single species for a lot longer than previously though (multiregionalism). so anything contemporary could breed with anything (granted male/female parts matched up). but now on further inspection, the tide is back to separate species. this time out of cranial differences namely a flat back of the head versus not, and a prominent mid-face versus a flat one. but. now. here i am. thinking that maybe a dozen specimen over a million-year period (as everyone knows) may only be showing temporal differences rather than a wanted spatial difference in skull features. and as i see people today, i'm more away of these features, and they're different in many that pass me by on the street as i walk to the bus stop. and ya know what? theyre all fuckable. if its a chic, barring trisomy 21 or some other reproductive inability, i can make a baby with any chic walking by me, and her head can be as "distorted", "primitive" or "perfect" as they come.

its a moot point, but i think interbreeding was a definate possibility during the pleistocene.

so i'm not really into wearing shit with a blaring brand name on it, i.e. tommy hillfigger, abercrombie, etc.
but what i really think is retarded is people wearing this new fad of hollister clothing.

now. whoever puts out this shit i guess has a reputation of being a surfing town in california (?)
and it may very well manufacture and sell surfboards, but all i've ever heard of hollister is that it is the bike capitol of california, cuz as redmond is washington's. so for one, think of wearing a fucking shirt or hat with redmond written on it.
secondly, i've been to hollister. hollister is about 45 minutes from the coast (see my problem with it being labeled a surf town?). it lies in the valley, you know, that hugeass one where a shitload of food comes from, the sacramento valley. so being in this valley, it is an agricultural town. from its downtown, you can reach vast fields of corn and other varieties of vegetables in probably 5 to 10 mintues of driving.
its a fairly dry place, with high amounts of irrigation.

so. instead of having shit like redmond put on a shirt, i guess in this respect it would be more comparable to having something like tri-cities or yakima on a shirt.

so. if you really want to visit hollister, and buy a shirt for reminiscent purposes, by all means, go right ahead.
but if you buy this shirt in washington, i dont really see the point, other than feeding a fad that will make no sense in a few years, you dumb motherfuckers.
does anybody who wears the merchandise really know hollister? fuck no.

bitches, get a clue.

what else.
oh yeah.
theres a cat that was literally on its last legs yesterday. collapsed in the cat man's yard. twitching now and then, neck contracted in pain every ten seconds or so. in that twinge of pain, i think he was also struggling to catch one of its last breaths. i couldnt tear myself away from watching it from the side window at the top of the steps. it was laying on its side in an odd looking position. flys swarming its emaciated body.

went over and actually talked to the cat man. fortunately his door was open already because of the heat, so he saw me and came over instead of me having to get any nearer to his stank-ass house (the inside of his house looks about as good as the outside, btw). anyway. i got the closest look at this man than any other time ive seen him chilling on his porch or going to and from his car. gray hair covered in a straight-billed hat (you know the kind). a giant bulbous nose, not really red like an alcoholic's, but just very round and large. he had a plain white shirt on that kinda pulled to the right. he has a rather prominent belly, but the collar of his shirt was exposing his collar bone. it didnt match with the belly. the area around the bone was sunken a couple inches. didnt match up... his eyes also seemed to somewhat protrude from their sockets. all and all, kind of disturbing.

so i told the man about his cat dying. ya know, in case he had some compassion and didnt want to see it die in the disrespectable, fly-ridden way he was dying. yet, all he told me was. "the cats pass on. its what they do."

brilliant.

so i persued a little.. maybe he didnt realize the gravity of the cats situation.
his response, "they're wild, theres nothing i can do about it."
you feed them. i'm sure you can come up with something. also, any disease that they might be carrying, i'm sure you've been exposed to 100-fold. but no.

so he continues by telling me that these cats have all been spayed and neutered. at this point, i realize that i'm not going to get through to this man. he's gone into his mode of defending his cats. i couldnt give a shit (well, maybe a small shit) if the cats are sterile, i'm just alerting you to the well-being of one of them.

so i let it be, and prior to my leave for work, the cat was still gasping for breaths every 10 seconds or so. a larger cat came around and sniffed it. after doing this, it seemed he alerted the other cats, as two more came around and surveyed the scene. aside from the initial discoverer, they kept their distance. eventually, they went back to whatever it is they do in that jungle of a backyard. shitting or sleeping is all i can think of.

oddly, the cat seemed to be out of breaths, motionless about 5 feet from our fence. this morning, he was a bit more northeast of the fence. dragged? nothing seemed to leave gnaw marks or anything. from examining it yesterday, poking it with a stick ellicited no response. i dont know how it would have moved those 3 or so more feet to finally die in the same position as before but on its other side.
maybe the old man went out to check out if it was really dead. diagnosis: yes.

poor scrawny-ass cat. its not like the rest arent treated well though. some disease must have worn that guy to death. .. a painful-looking death.
i guess i didnt mention the spasms and yelping.
poor fucker.

jesus. bloggers all sorts of crazy now.

anyway.
theres this bus that i've been noticing to roll by our place around 2:48 am. theres no stops on 20th, but apparently its a legit route.
check it out: the 83. rolls by around 2:48 and just before 4 am.