Can I buy you a soda?

Some people diligently check my blog and have become frustrated at seeing a sideways picture of my zen alarm clock every day. So, here are some new images (all right-side up too! I'm as surprised as you are.):I've peed in the ocean before, but I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with a bunch of fish in my toilet.

The Field Museum is hilarious. A plaque in the Egypt exhibit says, "The basic needs of a dead person did not change much over the centuries." Hahaha!

I encountered this fellow on my recent trip to Champaign. I was too weirded out to try kissing him.

A Green River Phosphate. When was the last time you had one?

I am enjoying my zen alarm clock. In fact, I have had a few zen mornings which I like to think were precipitated by the clock. I'm not sure how well it is helping me to transition out of sleep with improved awareness, have a greater focus on goals, and have increased self-knowledge though. For example, this morning, with the first "bong" of the clock, I smiled, stretched, and fell back asleep content that I could trust my clock to bring me into a fully conscious state in a comfortable amount of time without oversleeping - only to DREAM of the next bong, and the next and the next as my wicked inner ear sent me messages that the bongs were getting closer and closer together and were increasingly insistent that I get out of bed. This I did for three minutes and forty-eight seconds before I was woken up by the second bong. Sigh. I hope I'll get better at this.


In other news: Number crunchers were dismayed to find out that an avatar on Second Life uses as much real power as the average Brazilian; The average blogger is a 14 year old girl talking about her cat who will most likely give up her blog in less than two months; The under-resourced war in Afghanistan is now starting to turn around for the better; And one can develop a chemical dependency on light supporting the idea that tanning is addictive.