Tuesdays with Muerte

13 Things You Really Ought to Know About Botulism . Unhappy people watch TV. Happy people read books. -- A University of Maryland Study. I was just wondering if Rick has ever heard of the word at the bottom of this list of LONGEST WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ? Insect Camouflage! Usually, I'm pretty good at "Where's Waldo?" and the like, but some of these leaf-mimicking bugs are truly impossible to detect! How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you...Mom, you'd better call BG and make sure Precious isn't demonstrating any of these characteristics. Learn a new language shower curtain - only $26

The following was inspired by a discussion I enjoyed with my Raintree Roommate, Chris Hightower, at his mom's house for Thanksgiving dinner. MY THOUGHT: In dreams, dragons can represent the unconscious. Most people think they need to SLAY their dragon in order to dominate their subconscious mind. What most people don't know is that success can also come from taking consistent steps further and further away from the danger or threat until the it is merely a distant memory. The Secret, as they say, is to throw out your desires to the universe & hopefully watch as results come back to you. (This sounds a lot like the power of prayer to me.) ANALYSIS: I should not be as content with my life as I seem to be. There is nothing to justify my numbing complacency, because of which I feel blissfully paralyzed. It is true that am not engaged in any righteous work to satisfy my expenditure of time. The only explanation I have to rationalized this is that the Adversary ...

I was checking out, my friend, Eve Eddington's blog the other day and eventually came across this delightsome, time-wasting website: www.befunky.com . It allows visitors to upload pictures and mess with them; just like www.yearbookyourself.com . Befunky.com will soon have a feature that will allow users to cartoonize videos! I made these after only 15 minutes of playing around with the website! You all should check it out!

I needed pills to survive in space. Somehow, no one needed spacesuits. By the year 2333, the world's population moved to space. After searching for another 500 years or so, mankind discovered and inhabited a distant planet with all the resources we required, save oxygen. We were, however, able to manufacture O2 on our new planet but not enough to sustain the entire population. Recently, scientists developed a set of pills as a makeshift solution to our predicament. The first pill enables space travelers to make maximum use of the oxygen carried by the blood to the body's cells. In other words, someone who used to be able to hold their breath for 30 seconds could now essentially hold it for 30 hours. The second pill slowed the heart while stimulating receptors on the nerves and muscles so that the body could perform normal tasks with minimal blood flow. I fell in with a pair of illegal card gamblers and convinced them to continue to supply me with pills--as lo...

A 9% [680 point] drop in the American Stock Market broke the proverbial bears back, yesterday, when the National Bureau of Economic Research officially declared that the US is experiencing a "recession". The New York Times has the full story . What is a recession? By popular definition a recession is two consecutive quarters of GDP loss. Unfortunately, we don't have the resources to immediately evaluate the state of our domestic economy. Therefore, it takes us months to determine whether or not we have actually been experiencing a recession or not. It turns out that we have, in fact, been in a recession since the last quarter of 2007. How long will we be in this recession? "Some people in the US say it could last for 3-4 quarters...This recession is compared to that of 2000-01 and 1969-70." Citation With any luck we'll be out of it before too long. However, this recession may be incomparable to any other we've experienced in the memo...

I've spent quite a few hours alone watching movies during this last Thanksgiving week. The Dark Knight was INCREDIBLE having seen it once already. I admit, I was weirded out when I watched it for the first time in theaters with Bryson. I was disturbed to the core by how dark and eerily plausible the whole thing was. This time, I went in already having prepared myself for the darkness by compartmentalizing my brain. I said to myself, I will not concentrate on the disturbing images and themes, but instead, discover and appreciate what else this film has to offer. I was blown away! THERE WAS NOT A MINUTE OF THE 2 1/2 HOUR LONG MOVIE THAT DIDN'T MOVE THE PLOT AND MESSAGES ALONG! ( See my tribute to Batman in a previous blog entry. ) Anyway, aside from The Dark Knight, I watched a lot of comedies. I was much less impressed. Not impressed at all really. In order for a comedy to be funny to me, it has to reflect and satire real life people and situations. It seems like ...

1. Bad Hair Day - Some days there just isn't a thing you can do with your hair. I'm sure we've all experienced this to some degree in the last 10 days; and we all have our own way of dealing with it. As for myself, I chose to do nothing about it. When I feel like this sheep, I embrace the chaos, then move past it. 2. Not Real. But seriously, how awesome would it be to have EVERYTHING taste a little bit like strawberries. Imagine: Hot Coco, Cold Cereal, Chicken Salad, the list goes on... 3. Real. and Sick. 4. Cool costume. A little bit morbid, but cool. The only materials you need to make this mousey creation is a couple of brown grocery bags, some fur from the fabric store, wrapping paper tubes, tin foil, some construction paper, scissors and glue! 5. Kids love to dance - It doesn't matter who their partner is. Now that I've been away from ballroom dance for almost 2 years, I feel like I can say, without prejudice, that my favorite form ...