So soon?

Sigh. Yes. Question. If you "work yourself to the bone" with excessive physical work, what do you "work yourself to" with mental work? Funny thing is, by all accounts this is nothing. Just wait until I'm working seventy hours a week, working on my Master's, and trying to study for the CFP exams.

All I gotta say is heads are gonna roll if the SIG doesn't get a "yes" vote on Chelsea Property Group. Wish me luck, my first real business presentation is this Tuesday. I have to wear a suit and tie, use a microphone, use all kinds of PowerPoint slides and a couple props, and sell this idea.

An interesting fact is that fifty percent of the Diaryland diary writers who list The Loud Family as a favorite band also list David Foster Wallace as a favorite author (it doesn't go both ways--DFW is far more frequently referenced than LF). One profile says that Scott Miller is "a singer/songwriter with a 400 IQ and more hooks than a tackle box". The two really do seem almost to be different incarnations of the same substance, the same genius. Anyway, HERE is my profile.

Dajiroh Kato, the MotoGP rider injured last week, finally succumbed to death. There really wasn't much left of him anyway. He would never have moved again, or spoken, or breathed on his own. There was every chance he had severe brain damage. Yes, boys and girls, racing motorcycles at 204 mph can be dangerous. Still, remarkably, most falls result in nothing but a couple bumps and bruises. Kato was a good rider.

I was playing Yoshi's Island a little tonight. I fought a "boss battle" from the inside of the stomach of a large frog. I had to bash his stomach enough to cause enough indigestion that he'd vomit me out while dodging the increasing acid production. Truly. This game goes so far beyond any of the previous Mario games with its brilliant puzzles and never frustrating/always fun gameplay. The SNES version is superior. For the GBA version, they didn't change any graphics, which means you get to look at a smaller section of your environment (due to the lower resolution). Also, on a couple levels there's an amazing drugged-up effect you get from touching these fluffy white puffballs--the music gets twisted, the colors "trip out", Yoshi gets stars in his eyes, and you stumble around in a stupor while the ground appears to undulate underneath you. In some sort of PC move, Nintendo took that right out of the GBA version. Wouldn't want the kiddies to see that and decide to snort coke or shoot smack or drop acid.

For the young ones: Just imagine it's a great 3D game, only it's played from a third-person perspective, and in order to focus their energies with surgical precision on crafting excellent levels and puzzles, they eliminated most of that bothersome third dimension that plagues so many modern games. Oh, and they used sprites, or "an advanced cel-shading sprite emulating polygon engine" if you prefer. The result is fantastic control and a camera that NEVER screws you up and a game that's fun as Hell.

A very small number of US commercial airline pilots will begin carrying guns on flights tomorrow. The pilots, many of whom are ex-military, many of whom are private gun owners already, had to complete a rigorous training program to learn how to deal with the special problems posed by the close quarters/pressurized cabin environment of a commercial aircraft. One in the program described it as "brutal". I really don't understand the furor over this. I'm sorry, I want to see ALL pilots armed who want to be armed. When I board a plane, I'm placing all my trust in the pilot, I certainly trust him or her to responsibly carry a firearm.

What if the successful terrorist attacks of 9/11 had instead been an unsuccessful series of attempts at hijacking leading to terrorist scum having their brains blown across the interiors of four planes? Well, some folks would certainly have said that the pilots were murderers, that the folks whose heads had been removed hadn't *really* done anything wrong yet. What we need are big signs depicting a stick figure captain blowing big holes in a stick figure hijacker, with a warning that if you try to enter the cabin, even if you're a little old lady or a small child, you should expect the captain/crew to do whatever it takes to subdue you.

I was trying to find out what kind of guns they're being issued. .40 caliber semis, but what kind? A Glock? A S&W Sigma? I think one of my brother's semis is a Glock.

Anyway, Game One goes to the Mavericks, who looked sloppy in the first half. But thanks to 46 points from Dirk, they pulled away and won.