My sleep schedule is entirely fucked, so I figured I'd get back to my usual escapades.

Lavish NYC jailhouse bar mitzvah not so kosher It was like any other bar mitzvah, complete with kosher food, singing and a reading from the Torah — except that it was in a Manhattan jailhouse.

Green Cone Solar Compost Digester As a Blade Runner fanatic, I'm not typically a fan of earth-friendly inventions that might stave off the bleak apocalyptic future, but this thing looks kid of cool.

Cool optical illusion Nothing revolutionary, but I'd venture some of you haven't seen this explained before.

China: Johnny Depp bad for Moral Health What do Johnny Depp, Garfield, Paris Hilton and roast pork have in common? In China, the answer is that a new government-mandated Internet filter rates some pictures of all four of them as bad for your moral health.

Blind Phone Hacker Gets 11-year Sentence Kid with silly hacker label finally gets his comeuppins.

Crosley Archive Portable USB Turntable Are you a hipster? Then you'll probably want this ridiculously expensive USB turntable so you can listen to all your first press albums as if the sound quality were better than a CD. Super duper!

Mayor calls for Freddie Mercury comeback gig The Mayor of Zagreb has called for Freddie Mercury to make a comeback gig in the Croatian capital.

'Beehive fence' deters elephants A simple fence made from wood, wire and beehives can deter elephants from raiding farmers' crops.

Fifteen things I want to see in the next Star Trek movie (besides guy/guy action and a decent villain):

1) Kirk's "dutch hammer" two-handed punch.
2) Finnigan.
3) Yeoman Rand & Nurse Chapel. How about showing the ladies some love?
4) Kirk's magical self-shredding uniform.
5) Spores.
6) A Native American planet (either).
7) Pon Farr (with or without cave).
8) Some girl "enchanting" Kirk, though in the end his heart truly belongs to the Enterprise.
9) Actual Star Trek aliens.
10) Spock sassing McCoy.
11) Half-naked Sulu running amok.
12) Chekov et al using stereotypically ethnic talents.
13) Spock playing the harp.
14) McCoy picking up some chicks, because he's the super-secret pimp of the enterprise.
15) The mirror universe.



The floozies thank you for reading.

Siberian child 'raised by dogs' Russian officials have taken a five-year-old Siberian girl into care, saying that she had apparently been "brought up" by cats and dogs.

US warship becomes Florida reef A series of controlled explosions has sunk a World War II US troop ship to create an artificial reef off Florida. The General Hoyt S Vandenberg sank in less than two minutes after experts detonated explosives off Key West.

Cancer drug erases fingerprints A commonly-used cancer drug can make patients' fingerprints disappear, potentially causing problems for foreign travel, a doctor warns.

Was watching a clip from Charlie X, and:

= + amirite?

Janice Rand must have gone through the black hole and ended up as Chloe O'Brien. I bet JJ Abrams orchestrated the whole thing. (Although if Mary Lynn Rajskub were cast as Rand in the next Star Trek movie, I definitely wouldn't mind a Kirk/Rand plotline!)

Here are some recent spam favorites I've deleted. I almost want to know what algorithm these programs use to create these titles, because every so often you come across pure gold (or the truly bizarre) and the words are so strangely mangled together, they might just be awkward poetry.

• De Niro about butts‎


• This night your bedroom will be jungles and you ? wild tiger!‎ -


• Hitler's son found!‎


• Politician's gene found!‎


• Surgeon prayed to scalpel-god‎


• Take her to the seventh sky


• Sir Sean Connery is a PhD now‎

My alarm clock took pity on me this morning and decided not to wake me for work. It was unbelievably sunny when I finally opened my eyes, but luckily it wasn't past noon.

Funny how certain dreams just glue your mind shut. I had two very vivid dreams last night; one about one of my projects, the other about Trinity. I surmise that the second had to do with Walter Kirn's interview on Colbert last night, bemoaning the under-education of the over-educated. I certainly sympathize, but I can't help but wonder sometimes what where I would be had I taken another path, academically. (I would say I had no choice in where I ended up. I did what I needed to do, so I certainly don't regret anything.)

The strangest part of the dream was how realistic it was. I find that, in my dream experience, physical locations tend to be recognizable only by my mind's eye; terrain is more often than not distorted in a way that only the dreamscape can accomplish. (But as strange as the outcome, I find these twisted interpretations appear again and again with surprising consistency.)

But this was a high-caliber dream, one of those that confuses you with its realism, and startles you when you wake. Normally, my dreams tend to be completely mundane: lunch, reading a book, checking facebook, looking at microfilm, etc. and always have been. But this was an active, sadly nostalgic alternate reality, probably generated by the anxious churning of my mind lately. Too bad I couldn't Tivo it to find out what happened at the end!

PS. I spent 3 hours yesterday reading phone books.

I hate waiting. I find myself to be a naturally impatient person, and that's too bad, because impatience brings about anxiety that ultimately results in irrational decision-making.

I have a new writing project and a new producing project I've just started, on top of everything else I've been up to. It seems like I have the time for this. That may be false, but we'll see. I seem to be crawling out of my winter-time rut, and have actually done a fair amount of writing and outlining recently. I've also been pursuing a number of artistic endeavors (design, photo) that aren't what I want to do, and while it's been slightly relaxing to have a change of pace from work, it's only added to my impatience. A year has gone by with not much shown for it. Is this adult life? Or is it just Los Angeles life?

Hopefully I'll be able to keep myself busy enough that I'll forget to be impatient.

I sang karaoke at a bar in downtown last week, and was good enough not to get booed off-stage (it was Gong Show style karaoke) so that at least was a new experience. Saw a screening of TFOS at the Hammer last night with friends. That was fun. I've been reading dense new books (Sino-Japanese war), learning strange new things (I can name the 5 most prominent Greek Revival mansions in the county), and generally trying to keep my head (brain?) above water. Swim or sink.

I spent today doing the one activity I miss most about New York: running the hell around town.

Started the day early, over to T for a BBQ with a couple friends (and a hundred other alums with children), then down to Coney for the Cyclone and sun and Nathan's, then back to the UES in time for dinner with my parents. I LOVE that I can go to the beach in New York. And it takes less time to get there here than it does in LA.

Of course I realized when I got home that I had a mountain of sand in my shirt from sleeping on the beach, but that's okay. I'm overjoyed that the one weekend I'm here its warm enough to enjoy myself; a consolation, perhaps, in case I can't make it back this summer. I'm also glad that the Yankees aren't at home to seduce me into their windy bandbox of heartbreak. And $8 hot dogs.

Reunion was interesting. Seeing wine glasses littering the gym: certainly weird. But going to the bar with everyone afterward was a blast.

I think I spoke more to certain people last night than I did during the entirety of high school. It's really too bad: that teenagers are too caught up in angst and jumbled hormones to see each other as people who are, you know, pretty fun to hang out with on a Friday night. But that's life, and my own fault for being antisocial.

I have a great regret for not investing myself more at T, both socially and academically. Sometimes, especially when I look back at everything I've learned at USC (or not learned, as the case might be), I wish that I could spontaneously become friends with my former classmates, but there's no chance of that. Now I'm stuck in a limbo between New York and LA with no comfortable place to settle. So I'll have to keep on keeping on. See you in 5 years?