How I miss your ranting // Do you miss my all-time lows?

2006. Life begins again. I think I'm game. Down with falling short of those same targets. This is going to be fun. I'm going to imagine it all as a red balloon and I'm letting the string slip past my fingers. I am taking hold of this example of the principles of Singularity that might just crumble a particular wall that bears my bloody faceprint:

"If you feel that giving 5% of your income to charity isn't enough, and that the moral ideal is 10%, try giving 6%. Make the best choices you can make with the willpower you have. The choice isn't between giving 5% and 10%; you don't have that much willpower in the bank. The choice is between giving 5% and 6%. The better choice is 6%. Now you've made a better choice; feel happy. Feeling guilty about not having willpower doesn't contribute to the development of willpower. Rather, try for the proper exercise of available willpower, and the slow reshaping of the self that results."

"Remember, it also takes willpower to choose a particular purpose or to accept a particular result. Let's take the 5%/10% problem again. One reason to bump up to 6% is that it increases the eventual chance of giving 10%. But maybe even contemplating this path, and the sacrifices that lie at the end of it, takes too much willpower - thus decreasing your chance of giving 6%, or increasing the amount of willpower needed to do so. Fine. Just give 6%. No further increments planned. It's still better than giving 5%."

Solid. With all this extra work I've had to do because of sick days from the staff, there hasn't been much time for much deep thought, mostly idle fantasies and drive-by ideas like:

~ If I get married, I want one of the first dance songs (do they play more than one? I don't know these things) to be that theme from the Disney 'Beauty and the Beast'. I was in hysterics the other day thinking about the puzzled reactions that would greet us as we glided across the floor to:

'Tale as old as time,

song as old as rhyme

Beauty and the Beast'

One of my few wedding ideas, outside of the famous (or infamous, depending on where you sit) white tuxedo attire, carrying on the tradition started by my all time hero, Robert C. Bentley:

(just an awesome figure, but also notice how it appears that just as this photo is snapped, he has only now fully realized what he's gotten himself into) Hells ya.

~I discovered recently that sandwiched perfectly between 'Fox News' and 'Turner Classic Movies', lied hidden 'The Disney Channel'. So I was quite delighted at the chance to someday spy some 'Duck Tales' or 'Darkwing Duck' or some other mallard-related childhood fanfare, but the days have turned to weeks and nary a duck has been found. The channel is just pasted over with 'Lizzy McGuire' and 'That is so Raven' (spelling on both?), I raised this issue to Rajala and the Raj had this to say:

"No shit man, we had Turtles and Ducktales back then...now these kids have like sitcoms, they're way cooler than we were then apparently..."

It seems true, I mean I've always felt like I was being a bit out of it to say that I can't believe that some of these "young kids" are as hip to things as I was in my High School days. Maybe that is not a good thing. I mean already women are being herded into 'zero waist, huge breasts and $-E-X' by the media, and it does seem like even in pop music some of these people are in the business machine before they can even smoke a cigarette. Pretty soon they'll be coming out of the womb with an iPod nano...