More thoughts on Iraq. I am highly amused to find that the U.S. inspectors haven't managed to fabricate some evidence yet for their claims of 'weapons of mass destruction', whatever those are.. :) It's not like they arn't already experienced with lying on these matters.. Of course, they're resisting Democratic efforts to open an investigation into how things were handled, and Pat Roberts, pretzels be unto him, calls it "simply politics". Call it a running theme in my thinking, but there's no escaping politics, and there's no reason that politics should be considered 'icky', as it's part of almost everything we do. BushJr deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison, and the Republicans have shown sufficient lack of internal restraints to keep people like him out of the process that they deserve to fall back a few notches. That's politics. Whee!

I think I might want to get a sound card for reincarnated holly -- the motherboard sound chipset can only be opened at a certain frequency, meaning that software needs to do the rate conversion, and so big conversions make things sound crappy. Oh well -- at least most of my mp3s sound decent.

An irritant -- people who litter on trails. On the way to work today, about halfway there, I saw a styrofoam cup. I start to walk by it, and realize that it irritates me, so I go pick it up, to throw it away when I reach a trash can at CMU. A few minutes later, I see a plastic fork, so I put it into the cup. One thing leads to another, and when I arrive at CMU, I have a cup full of garbage left along the trail. I arrive a little bit angry. I think it would be quite enjoyable if people 'adopted' trails, to keep them clean, and when they see people littering on their trail, they are legally permitted, with no retribution allowed, to beat that person with a stick for 15 seconds. Either that, or a dump truck comes to your house and spreads half a dump into your home. Partly, it's just that it's so senseless. If you have a backpack, put your junk in it, and throw it away later. If you have pockets, use them. If you're a runner type, wearing lame shorts with no pockets, you're probably not littering anyhow because you like your trails and the outdoors. There's no excuse I can think of for littering the trails.

Odd -- sometimes the news can't seem to get stories straight.

Also, it looks like Apple's suing to invalidate the Unix trademark, as it's become generic. Go Apple!

The night before last, I had a dream for something modern artists might do to severely irritate Muslims, just as the feces art of Mary irritates a lot of Christians, worldwide. A complete writing of the Qu'ran in pig dung. I must've been chuckling in my dream.

And now, on the lighter side, a list of attractive female celebrities:

• Parminder Nagra - (starred in Bend it like Beckham)
• Christina Aguilera - Musician
• Jennifer Aniston - Actor
• Halle Berry - Actor
• Dana Owens - Actor/Musician - attractive, but not in a sexy way
• Whoopi Goldberg - Actor - attractive, but not in a sexy way
• Kim Greist - Actor - only with short hair
• Cyndi Lauper - Musician - In a kitschy way

And, as a certain female someone nags me about my love life (or, rather, the lack thereof), and my lack of, as they put it, 'prospects', and as I really hate discussing those things by answering questions over the phone, I will say this. There are some people who are away from Pittsburgh for the summer who I've been exchanging emails with who sound interesting, but I haven't seen them, so I don't know if I'm attracted to them. There are also two people who I come into contact with on a more or less regular basis, who I'm quite attracted to, but neither of them are available. To that person, who I don't even know if they read this journal anyhow, I'm picky, and I'm terrible at 'breaking the ice'.

Finally, here's a list of things that irritate me:

• People who think the 'military look' looks anything but thuggish. There's a difference between a good haircut and looking uncivilized and violence-prone
• Strong notions of feminity and masculinity. I don't think people should look androgynous, and light versions of these concepts are fun to play with, but that's it. In day-to-day life, they should play no role, and guys who get a stupid thing going about their honour, never being wrong, bottling their emotions, and all that crap is just stupid. Gender-specific courtesy is also stupid. Be good to people, but chivalry is outmoded.
• Prudishness. Americans are good at this (meaning that they tend to be irritatingly prudish), and are quick to mark people who arn't prudes as disgusting, promiscuous, or gay.
• People who are unable to know or admit when they're not sure or wrong about something.
• People who arn't curious about science, society, and other stuff
• As mentioned above, litterers
• People who think we can 'escape politics', and all sorts of other fluffy notions. It's fine to build your philosophical tower high, but it's important to realize that always at the bottom, regardless of how you layer things above them, lies 'power politics'. Rights are things we make, not things we discover.
• People who have a fear of hubris. To live is to be a will, and to shape the lives of people around us.
• People who bend over backwards to avoid pissing people off. All they do is guarantee that they'll lose to someone who does that less without being an asshole.
• People without imagination
• People who loathe pets and nature.
• People with no ambition to do anything with their lives
• Websites that require flash for basic navigation
• Ugly web fonts
• Giant cars that rarely are used for anything that makes the size worthwhile