The Desert Mermaid

• The presidential power transfer takes place automatically at noon, unless you’re on the Fox Network.
• There is a fourth-cone mutation in humans that makes some people (the articles claim only women for reasons of chromosome, but I have a dude friend who says he came up positive on the test) see more colors than ordinary people. They’re called tetrachromats. Dude, that’s awesome.
• On a related note, that’s why some male birds do not appear to be the fancy men you would expect male birds to be: they are, but in the ultraviolet range, since birds are default tetrachromats.
• No matter how low you go on clearance pricing, people will always ask if it’ll go lower.
• Some people are honestly convinced that it is difficult to break even $500,000 per year. This is because they count nannies, private schools, chauffeur/bodyguards, and thousand-dollar dresses as necessary expenditures.
• Baby skunks are born naked, but with black and white markings on their skin
• There is a difference between a bulldozer, a digger, and a front-loader.
• Lining a bodice is much easier than hemming the neckline.
• The Motion Picture Association of America is weird—it’s run like it’s some kind of Sooper Sekrit Undercover Organization, when it’s really just a bunch of pissy, uneducated people with no real guidelines of psychology or sociology sitting around censoring movies.
• Snow days aren’t always good. Man, I hate being a grownup.
• James Earl Jones was briefly given the role of Gordon from Sesame Street. This gives one the opportunity for so many entertaining speculations …
• Skilled noodle chefs can very quickly flip hundreds of noodles out of a blob of wheat dough.
• The problem of girls bullying each other and the way they do it stems, once again, from society’s refusal to see girls as people with conflicts and feelings, so their anger is forced to be passive-aggressive. This also explains a lot of Mormon culture, incidentally. (ETA: 10cents pointed out I was oversimplifying here. We're just starting to study this sociological phenomenon, so I expect other factors will be found as well.  This is a big one.)
• Semi-finalists in the Captain Crazypants L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest cannot re-tweak their stories and send them back in. Not surprising, really.
• Colossal squids are distinct from giant squids in many ways, but one of the badass ones is that they have rotating claws instead of suckers.
• A mele ma’i a song devoted to a particular person’s genitals in Hawaiian. If the person’s really influential, their genitals might even get their own name. Nether bits: powerful and entertaining.
• Squeaking brakes are not always a sign of worn out brake pads, but they are always annoying.
• Terry Pratchett’s young adult fiction kicks ass.
• That feeling of numbness that people report on some antidepressants is highly unpleasant.
• One of the reasons my mom gets bugged with my sleeping schedule is that she actually tries to be quiet while I’m sleeping. I told her emphatically not to bother.
• Chaos theory is a description about how small margins of error in predicting equations build up as steps are repeated, which can even be affected in simple systems.
• You can get sent to therapy just for being a cloud cuckoolander—but that’s if you’re so much of one that your entire interaction with others consists of it.
• Curling a doll’s hair with curlers and a dunk in some hot water works spectacularly well.
• The wrybill, a New Zealand Plover, is the only bird known that has a beak that bends to one side. (Always, it turns out, to the right.)

Note to self: If you are going to discover that LJ is in financial crisis and has laid off a bunch of staff,* please make sure you eat first, because that takes panic factor down to zero.**  Nothing like a good baseless WE GOT MOVIE SIGN to remind you to eat dinner. Seriously, if I haven't had food, I panic about where I left my Sharpies.

Well, that was a bummer cherry on top of a bummer sundae of a Tuesday. Today was one of those rare occasions where Teh Flying Snowz has meant I missed something I really wanted to be doing—namely Gothmas, my friend’s notorious Twelfth Night celebration. Instead I get to stay at home, drink tea, back up my whole damn journal, and cry about the fact that my brother went back to school and about the endless void that is our existence and about how I actually found something kinda Goth to wear to Gothmas. Woe, woe.

Yes sir, just more fodder for the Feast of St. Emo.

In other news, I am sick and tired of these motherfucking snakes my hair. I’d had ambitions of growing it out because long hair is fun to play with, but now that I’m looking like I’m wearing Pippin’s wig I’m remembering that long, thick, curly, layered hair is a pain in the ass. It takes forever to wash, rinse, and dry, busts out into genius hair at all the wrong moments, and gets in my eyes and ears. I forced myself to continue with grim determination until it dawned on me this week that every time I see someone with short hair I get all wistful, and Former Commodore Norrington meanders by and remarks, “Not too long ago I would have given anything to have you look like that while thinking of me,” or something to that effect.*** So screw this “long” business. I am going back to my crew cut, as soon as I can find a new hairdresser to add to my succession of Total Nuts With Scissors.

It will give me something to look forward to in the midst of all this emo.

*And JUST AFTER you bought a goddamn permanent account.

**No, don’t panic. This may turn out good if the clueless bastards running it now turn it over to some clueful people. But for those of you who like to play it safe, you can back up entries and comments with LJArchive, LJBook (currently this one is a bit swamped), or this program that they tell me works on Macs.

***Or he would, if I were Keira Knightly in PotC.