Beautiful quote

"At some point, self-confidence turns into a learning disorder."
--Lamentations on Chemistry

One reason Tron Legacy was not a good movie was because the world didn't have consistent rules. You couldn't tell what the limits of the characters were and so it felt like the characters could pull arbitrary super powers out of their asses when they needed to move the story along (e.g. the old guy suddenly causing a tornado at the end).

I always felt cheated at the end of DragonLance and Stephen King books for the same reason.

It would be cool if our planet was at the outermost edge of the galaxy, and that galaxy was at the edge of the universe, so all we'd see is blackness on one side of the sky but stars on the other.

Fox News and Comedy Central should make a deal to give Jon Stewart a half hour slot right after Glenn Beck's show and give Glenn the half hour slot after The Daily Show.  Jon could use the time to rebut what Glenn just said and vice versa.  It sucks that an entire channel can be a homogenous block of one ideology.

Hypothesis

Mountaineers that pose like badasses in their pictures are more likely to die. 

I sometimes think about this homeless man I've seen watching cars on the freeway in the evening.  When he was young and in school was he excited about the future?  Did he have a crush on anyone?  Did some girl have a crush on him?  Where did he lose the friends he had and wasn't able to pick up new ones anymore? 

At the end of a long day of hiking some months back, when I walked by I somehow startled a cow grazing by the side of the road and it took a bad step and then crashed down on its side.  The last thing I wanted to do was touch its filthy body, but I manned up and put my hands under it and pushed.  It started to move its legs wildly but the thing that stuck with me was the look in its eye, you could see the panic.  Its fear felt way too human to me and it disturbed me.

I wasn't even close to being able to lift it and it snowed that night.  I left a note on a rancher's trailer with the cow's serial number on it, but I don't know what happened.