Worst-Case Scenario

Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,

Well, I'm feeling inspired today. Good things are going to happen. Feelings of bliss are running through my body. What do I have to thank for it? A couple pills of ecstasy? Nope, never tried it (yet). Pure unadulterated optimistic denial? Not at all. What then? My incredible network of family & friends helping me out when/if I need them…whether with encouraging words, hot employment leads, reassuringly hilarious interview stories, deep philosophical discussions with a brother who may have been under the influence of alcohol, and basically…I just ran my worst-case scenario…and it's not that bad. What is the current worst-case scenario? Well, at this time, it's basically me going back to Utah where my old job is going to be hiring soon. It's not the exact same job…and it's a bit of a pay cut (about 20% though so a lot better than say…100%) but still full-time…and the people I'll be working with are a bunch of friends & former coworkers that I trained over the years…including my stepsister. It's also a new department, which means more learning and knowledge of computer systems, so more padding for an already extensive resume…and all my other former coworkers are just across the street.

Not only that…but even IF I didn't want to do that job and just live like a bum for a few months, the landlords of my current apartment said they'd be willing to negotiate a short-term lease for a few months (details later today) and I'd still be getting paid full-time for the next three months with a severance package almost as big as mine. So basically, I could still just chillax in my bachelor pad apartment, watching movies and writing the next great American romance novel until the 4th of July without even dipping into my savings. So please, don't you dare worry about me. I'll be fine. I may even have visitors my first weekend of unemployment…and compounded with a possible Going Away Party with my current coworkers, I'm gonna get f**ked up!!! More on that as details arises. In the meantime, I've got to meet Kevin Bacon in two days…and I have nothing to wear. Oh well, now for a news update…mostly about teenagers...

Bus Running on Natural Gas - An eighth-grader was suspended from riding the school bus for three days after being accused of passing gas. The bus driver wrote on a misbehavior form that a 15-year-old teen passing gas on the bus Monday to make the other children laugh, creating a stench so bad that it was difficult to breathe. The bus driver handed the teen the suspension form the next day. Polk County school officials said there's no rule against flatulence, but there are rules against causing a disturbance on the bus. The teen said he wasn't the one passing gas. Whether he did it or not, he might have gotten off easy. A 13-year-old student at a Stuart school was arrested in November after authorities said he broke wind in class. Whatever happened to real reasons for suspension? Like vandalism? Telling off your teacher? Drawing big breasted women on the chalkboard? Stuff like that? Not the side effects of a diet high in fats and chemicals. Eighth-graders are gassy. Their bodies are going through a lot. Oh well, help is on the way…

Solution to Natural Gas - Teenage boys, are you tired of embarrassing questions about when you last changed underwear? Also, why the hell are you reading this blog? Get your parent's permission…and send pictures of your hot older sister. Anyway, Japan's space scientists may have just the answer to the first question, a line of odor-free underwear and casual clothing. Koichi Wakata, the first Japanese astronaut to live on the International Space Station, is testing the clothes, called J-ware and created by textile experts at Japan Women's University in Tokyo (That sounds like a really hot university!). "He can wear his trunks (underwear) more than a week," said Koji Yanagawa, an official with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. Wakata's clothes, developed by researcher Yoshiko Taya, are designed to kill bacteria, absorb water, insulate the body and dry quickly. They also are flame-resistant and anti-static, not to mention comfortable and stylish. Japanese astronaut Takao Doi gave the clothes a trial run during a shuttle mission last year. Even after a vigorous workout, Doi's clothes stayed dry. "The other astronauts become very sweaty, but he doesn't have any sweat. He didn't need to hang his clothes to dry," Yanagawa said. J-ware should reduce the amount of clothing that needs to be sent to the space station, which has no laundry facilities (and I wouldn't expect a clothesline either). Toting cargo into orbit is expensive, so having clothes that stay fresh for weeks at a time should result in significant savings. The Japanese space agency plans to make the clothes available to NASA and its other space station partners once development is complete. A commercial line also is in the works. Taya also is working with clothing manufacturers Toray Industries and Goldwin. on clothes that have a microscopically thin chemical layer in the materials. Wakata, who arrived at the station last week for a three-month stay, said on Sunday that the clothes appear to be working. "Nobody has complained, so I think it's so far, so good." There you have it. The future of clothing. Big Deodorant will certainly try to block this research…but it'd be great for workout clothes…or people that are just naturally lazy and/or don't maintain good personal hygiene. Keep an eye out.

My Kind of Vandalism - A British teenager inspired by an ancient fertility symbol painted a 60-foot phallus on the roof of his parents house, a newspaper reported on Tuesday. Rory McInnes painted the giant genitalia on the newly-finished flat roof of his parents' million-pound mansion in a village 60 miles west of London…but the imposing member remained a closely-guarded secret for a whole year before it was 'discovered' by a helicopter pilot flying over the area. Contacted by the paper, his father Andy McInnes first dismissed the report as a joke. "It's an April Fool's joke, right? There's no way there's a 60-foot phallus on top of my house," he said before ringing round each of his four children. When he got hold of Rory, who is spending a year travelling between finishing school and starting university, the teen reportedly said: "Oh, you've found it then!" The 18-year-old student said he had decided to act last year after watching a documentary about the satellite images on Google Earth, saying he thought the artwork would make his parents' home stand out (and how). The oversized organ is an enlarged copy of the most well-known feature of the Cerne Abbas Giant, an 80-foot figure of a naked man which is carved into the side of a chalk hill in Dorset, southwest England. Clearly sexually aroused (or just happy to see you), the club-wielding giant is believed to be an Iron Age fertility symbol which has proven popular with copulating couples hoping to conceive…but the McInneses were clearly not keen on the idea of their rooftop art acting as a fertility charm. "We don't want any more children, so the idea of sleeping under a giant fertility symbol is rather worrying," said 49-year-old Clare McInnes, while her husband added: "When Rory gets home he will be given a scrubbing brush and white spirit and he can go and scrub it off." I assume that means that he's going have a glass of zinfandel and clean the roof…and maybe rub one out. I don't know. I'm not big on English colloquialisms. I can imagine him trying to look the house up on Google Earth at school a few days later. "Oh look Reginald, there's my house." "Really? Which one?" "The one with the cock & balls." "Oh my! That's quite magnificent actually. Very good work with the bell end. Do your parents know about this?" "Funny, am I talking to you at this moment?" "Why yes." "Then they surely don't know then, do they?" Kudos to Mr. McInnes for a grand mark of creative vandalism. Also, kudos to the elder Mr. McInnes for not hunting down his brat of a child and beating him senselessly for putting a giant tally whacker on his multi-million dollar home. Good show.

Mysteries of the Teenage Mind - Have you ever looked at your teenage children…or back on your own teenage years and thought, "What the f**k was I thinking?" Sure you have. Everybody has. Don't lie to yourself. Well, the mysterious goings-on inside teen brains have befuddled countless people over the years. Now some insights are being provided by recent neuroscience research. Between ages 11 and 17, children's brain waves reduce significantly while they sleep, a new study found. Scientists think this change reflects a trimming-down process going on inside teenagers' brains during these years, where extraneous mental connections made during childhood are lost. According to psychologist Ian Campbell of UC-Davis, "When a child is born, their brain is not fully-formed, and over the first few years there's a great proliferation of connections between cells. Over adolescence there is a pruning back of these connections. The brain decides which connections are important to keep, and which can be let go." Scientists call this process synaptic pruning, and speculate that the brain decides which neural links to keep based on how frequently they are used. Connections that are rarely called upon are deemed superfluous and eliminated. Sometimes in adolescence, that pruning process goes awry and important connections are lost, which could lead to psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, the researchers think.

Brain Pruning - Synaptic pruning is thought to help the brain transition from childhood, when it is able to learn and make new connections easily, to adulthood, when it is a bit more settled in its structure, but can focus on a single problem for longer and carry out more complex thought processes. For example, if a child receives a brain injury before age 10, another area of the brain can often take over the functions of the damaged region. If the same injury occurs at age 20, however, the person may lose a vital ability, because the brain has lost the flexibility to transfer that function to another area. "The fact that there are more connections [in a child's brain] allows things to be moved around. After adolescence, that alternate route is no longer available. You lose the ability to recover from a brain injury, or the ability to learn a language without an accent…but you gain adult cognitive powers." Campbell and UC-Davis psychiatrist Irwin Feinberg recorded the sleep brain waves (called EEG) two times a year over five years in 59 children, beginning at either age 9 or age 12. They found that brain waves in the frequency range 1-4 Hz remained unchanged between ages 9 and 11 and then fell sharply (by about 66%) between ages 11 and 16.5. In the 4-8 Hz frequency range, which corresponds to a different part of the brain, brain waves started to decline earlier and fell by about 60% between ages 11 and 16.5 years. Overall, these changes are consistent with synaptic pruning, because as neural connections are lost in those areas of the brain, brain waves in the corresponding frequencies decrease. Campbell and Feinberg report their findings in the March 23 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Synaptic pruning is just one of many changes thought to be going on inside teenagers' brains. For example, a 2005 study found that teenagers can't multi-task as well as adults because their brains are still learning how to process multiple pieces of information at once the way adults can. In addition to changes that affect how they think, teenagers' brains also undergo developments that affect how they feel. For example, during adolescence people begin to empathize more with others, and take into account how their actions will affect not just themselves, but people around them (allegedly). A 2006 study found that the teenage medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with higher-level thinking, empathy, and guilt, is underused compared to adults…but as adolescents mature, they begin to use this region more when making decisions, indicating that they increasingly consider others when making choices. So in summary, teenagers are just getting dumber. Their brains are eroding to the bare essentials so that they can learn to become adults…and have to multi-task by working, going to school, learn to drive, try to get laid, apply for college, experiment, and after a lot of this dumbing down...raise teenagers of their own. It's a vicious, horrible cycle. Thanks scientists.

Those aren't Breasts, Those are LIES!!! - Police are seeking a woman they said used a false identity to get breast implants and liposuction, then skipped town. Huntington Beach police said Monday that a 30-year-old woman opened a line of credit in someone else's name in September 2008 and had the procedures worth more than $12,000 performed at the Pacific Center For Plastic Surgery (that's six grand per can). Employees said she never returned for follow-up visits. The woman turned herself in Tuesday and was released on $20,000 bail. She faces charges of commercial burglary, identity theft and grand theft boobage (which is punishable by Nip/Tuck marathon in California). I'm still a strong supporter of the Breast Exchange Program where women in need of breast reductions can trade off with those looking for more frumpage. I'm not sure what the medical procedure for that is. I'm not that kind of doctor. That being said, it's kind of hard to believe that this 30-year-old woman couldn't find somebody to support her, much like a financial brassier, in getting these implants…but the financial crisis has hit us all in different ways. Unfortunately she had to resort to theft…instead of the usual gold digging, which is sadly still perfectly legal. I guess my point is…ladies, please don't be ashamed of your body. If you're ever feeling a little down about your physique, don’t resort to a life of crime. Just send me a picture…and I'll write you a little something something that's guaranteed to make you feel better…because it's from the heart. We all love ya, ladies…especially the breasts.

Well, that'll do it for today. Back to looking for a new employer. Have a great day everybody!!!