I was just reading bump hunting at Cosmic Variance. It’s not as dirty as it sounds… it refers to a 2.5 sigma excess in a CERN scattering experiment that could be the Higgs boson. While it’s not statistically significant enough to start to get excited… yet… it got me thinking: could this be the first major scientific discovery blogged in real time?

I’ve been laying down some planks in the attic so I can crawl my way across the ceiling to the point I’ll be installing a bathroom fan.

This morning I dreamed that as I proceeded, I ran into more and more planks already in place. Until, on the far side, I arrived at a completely floored area, well lit, with a white-upholstered recliner and loveseat. And two shelves full of stolen library books, mostly about chess and go and history. And Paul Giamatti was living there.

Man, that’d be great.

The Misanthropic Principle: The physical constants of the universe take the values necessary to make our lives miserable.

I was just looking in the mirror, and thinking, maybe after niko gets out of dental school, she can fix that bottom tooth that sticks out kind of funny. And it won’t cost hardly anything.

But then I realized: that’s when the bus will get me.

I know its out there, hiding around the corner, just waiting for me to have the most perfect day ever. Like when you get your braces off, and get a great job offer, and discover a strain of grass that grows exactly 4″ tall then stops. So you’re checking out the reflection of your straight teeth in the window of the parked car, wondering how much you can sell your lawnmower for, and WHAM. Bus.

So, I have to make sure I have something to languish about, for my own protection. If I spy a large tailpipe slipping into an ally, or get a whiff of diesel exhaust, or hear the stifled aspiration of an air brake, I know. It’s time to manufacture some more problems. I really came to the right place.

Giant zombie Jesus.

I just saw Children of Men, which I’ve been eagerly awaiting for some time. It makes Bladerunner look like Teletubbies: The Movie.

Though if I were a kid, I think teletubbies would have freaked me out. Much like the howdy-doody doll.

I was going to link to a photo of the doll, but a quick google of “howdy doody” turns up something much more interesting. Under “Image Results,” it displays three photos. Two of the famous doll (a dummy, really), flanking a photograph of George W. Bush.

I have a vague recollection of a recurring dream I had as a wee tyke. I kept peering into the dark depths of a garbage can in the garage. At this point, I could barely see over the lid of the can. And I imagined, in the shadows, I could just make out the grotesque shape of the aforementioned simulacrum.

Years later, and I mean decades, my father told me (in the telling of some unrelated story) that my older sister had one of those dummies, but they had to throw it away because I screamed my head off whenever I saw it.

This fascinates me because it crosses the boundary of memory; I remember (in some sense) seeing it in the garbage, and having an obsessive impulse to keep looking in there. My ‘recurring dream” may have been, in actuality, many episodes of looking at it. Or it could be many recollections of having done it once. But I have absolutely no recollection of having seen it before then.

I have one other such memory. I recall asking a little girl (the one that lived up the hill behind our house) how old she was, and she said two. I was three at the time. But when she said it, I realized I had no memory of being two. If I was three, I obviously must have been two. Why didn’t I remember it?

In any case, go see Children of Men. The “bleak future” genre is probably my favorite. This one will be a classic.