A small selection of thoughts that I’ve been accumulating as I study for the bar exam and move house in the same month. My brains are constantly on the verge of a complete work stoppage.

• The toilet paper in our office manages to be simultaneously as abrasive as sandpaper and as diaphanous as tissue. If I were a materials scientist, there’d be a research paper in there somewhere. (It’d probably be more comfortable to wipe with, too.)
• As I get older, I am slowly drifting to the west. At the current rate (assuming an average life expectancy), I am going to die somewhere just east of Pittsburgh.
• I have an irrational dislike of URLs that contain more than two words. Syllables don’t seem to matter, but a three-word website address will make me (mentally) throw up in my mouth a little bit.
• Bananas are tasty and nutritious. However, you have to eat them in the 45 minute window between green and overripe. Although if you miss it, it’s a good excuse to make banana bread, which is also yummy.
• Incidentally, I sometimes start typing the word “banana,” and I forget to stop.
• Bananananana. (EDIT: It turns out I unconsciously ripped off this bit from Demetri Martin. Whoops.)
• My favorite legal term that sounds dirty but isn’t: “attenuation of the taint.”
• An old friend recently suggested that I should be friends with his wife on Facebook. Except she doesn’t like me. The three of us shared an apartment back in the early 2000’s; we had some personality conflicts, and she’s treated me with polite but unmistakable disdain ever since. Which is fine, really. I’m sure that living with me wears the shine off of whatever minimal charm I possess pretty fast. I try to be friendly and respectful on the rare occasion when I see them, so as not to exacerbate the situation needlessly. But I’m not laying awake nights bemoaning her distaste for me. The whole thing is passing curious. Has my friend not noticed that his wife is unimpressed by my shenanigans? Or have I misread the situation, mistaking some sort of general prickliness for individual dislike?
• I have a minor fascination with the variability in the ways that people gain weight. Some people just expand all over, while others seem to concentrate it all in one region. There was a woman on the bus yesterday morning who had a fairly normal torso perched atop a vast expanse of buttocks and thighs. She looked like an apple with an action figure sticking out of it.
• My weight gain is all happening in my midsection, while my limbs are as skinny as ever. They’re like four bendy straws jammed into a potato. Luckily, there is a comfortable sheath of fat growing around my heart, so I feel like I’m being snuggled from the inside.

spread the panic!

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Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

Me too! [Insert big, fat frowny face.] But there’s good news! We are not alone, and I hope to prove that on Saturday, July 11.

TAM 7 will be reaching its climax Saturday evening, with parties galore… So why don’t those of us who are stuck in the TriState area get together for drinks and banter? There are so many skeptics in the area that I have yet to meet, so this is as good a time as any!

I was thinking Sugar Mom’s in Old City. Drinking Skeptically with Skeptic Philly meets at Tattooed Mom’s on South Street, so I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes. To avoid confusion, we’re planning on Sugar Mom’s. Now I know some of you will be in atTAMdence, so I’d like for as many of us as possible to get out for an evening. Just think of all the fun they’ll be having in Las Vegas without us! We can have fun, too!!

You don’t have to be a drinker. I’ll be sitting there with a Shirley Temple [They're good - don't hate.]. Just come and hang out for a while with really cool people. They’ve got arcade games, a pool table and lots of really cool stuff to look at, and if you really need extra motivation, I’ll see if I can save the bumper car seat for you. I said it – bumper. car. seat.

Once I get an idea of how many of us there will be, I’ll figure out the rest of the deets (time, etc) and update. We’ll probably want to get there not-too-late, as it’s Old City and it gets crazy on the weekend.

Who’s in?!

Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

Okay kids. Studying for the Pennsylvania Bar Exam, getting ready to move into a new apartment and helping to raise my infant daughter are kicking my ass. I’m sure that the lack of regular activity around here hasn’t escaped your notice. Based on the response to the few posts I have managed to cobble together, I don’t think anyone has been too devastated.

Given all that, I think it’s time to make it official. Suburban Panic and I are going on hiatus, at least until after I take the bar. And I’m doing it right, too. I’m uninstalling my Twitter client, ignoring Facebook and Livejournal, unsubscribing from most of my podcasts and purging all but the most vital channels from my feed reader. I may pop up once in awhile (here or on Mario Kart Wii-Fi), but only sporadically, and never for an extended period of time.

In the meantime, I’m keeping a small room open in the back of my brain, where I’ll be haphazardly storing ideas about what I’d like to do with the site once I’m not staring down the barrel of the most important test I’m ever likely to take. If you have suggestions for things you’d like to see, or things you’d claw your eyes out to avoid looking at, feel free to leave them in the comments. For urgent matters, I am available by email at oskar[at]suburbanpanic[dot]com.

See you in August.

Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

In the beginning was the Cause. And the Cause was without purpose or agency. And the Cause was neither Good nor Evil. Rather, it just Was. Immediately thereafter came the Effect. There was neither intention not design, yet the Effect followed inexorably and inevitably from the Cause, because that is How Things Work.

The Effect in turn became a cause, which begat another effect, which became a cause and begat another effect, and so on and so forth. A mind-boggling number of causes (and effects) came and went. Things continued along like this for an Exceedingly Long Time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

This is a collection of random thoughts. They’re both too short for a real post and too long for Twitter. Some of them might also be too big for me to devote the time to explore them thoroughly, but that would be admitting that I can’t do everything at once.

- The National Bone Marrow Donor Program is having a donor drive. Until June 22nd, they are covering the $100 cost to add new donors to the registry. It’s free, and the life you save could be Waldorf Van Buren’s.

- Suburban Panic supports the brave citizens campaigning for democracy in Iran. There were obviously some serious shenanigans going on with the vote counting. That said, we need to at least be prepared for the possibility that a legitimate recount will end with a numerical victory for Amhedinijad. I’m not saying that the ballots couldn’t have been stuffed as well, just that the issue might not be resolved by simply counting the votes.

- Even in cool weather, the combined body heat of two adults and one dog warms up our bedroom pretty quickly, and we wind up having to turn the air conditioner on at night. Why don’t we just open the windows? Because random people - sometimes gaggles of adolescents, sometimes adults on cellphones - often wander down our street shouting obscenities at odd hours. I am so looking forward to moving.

- The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund put out a call for volunteers during Wizard World Philadelphia. I should spend the weekend studying, but I sent them an email volunteering for Saturday. I haven’t heard from them yet, sadly. Here’s hoping they get back to me. Why no, I hadn’t thought about how awesome it would be for me, a recent law school graduate, to network with a group that assists with legal defense for comic book artists and writers. Why do you ask?

- There is a woman who rides around our neighborhood selling produce from her car. She announces her presence (and her wares) with a megaphone or loudspeaker of some sort. She has various seasonal specials, but she is always selling (in her apathetic, nasal monotone) “red ripe tomatoes, red ripe strawberries, red ripe bananas.” I am sorely tempted to flag her down and buy something, just so I can see what a red, ripe banana looks like. My feeling is that a banana that is one cannot be the other, unless something is very, very wrong, either with the fruit or your color vision.

- Wiley Drake is praying for the death of President Obama. I’ve said it before; Drake sincerely believes that his actions can cause the death of another human being. There’s a strong argument that he should be imprisoned for conspiracy to commit murder.

- My daughter’s pediatrician has been talking about a clicking sound in her left hip since she was born. After her two-month appointment, he sent us for an ultrasound. After the scan, the tech told us that the radiologist said everything was normal. At her four-month appointment, our pediatrician still hadn’t received the ultrasound report from the hospital. When he finally got a copy, it said that there was a minor, but clear, dysplasia in her hip. Isn’t ”dysplasia” intended to be specifically distinct from ”normal”  I do not know in what universe these words are synonyms, but it must be a confusing place, populated by people with elaborate leg braces that they are forbidden to talk about.

- We went to an orthopedist today, who sent us back for another ultrasound. This time, when they used the word “normal,” we were able to follow up with the orthopedist, who presumably knows that dysplasia isn’t. We were assured that all is right with her hip, and given the green light to exhale. A follow-up x-ray will happen at six months, but nothing else is necessary. I suppose now is as good a time as any to admit that, if she had been required to wear a brace, I was planning to brag incessantly about my cyborg baby.

- My video lecture has loaded. Back into the study hole.

EDIT: Holy crap, the woman lecturing on essay writing looks like she’s about 17. Good advice, but MAN I feel ancient.

Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

• U.S. flexes funding power to squash WHO report showing that we’re complete morons about drug use and prevention. (The correct spelling of  ”prohibition” is S-T-U-P-I-D.)
• Simon Singh, who knows something on the subject, on how UK libel laws are stifling science. (I think by “stifling” he meant “beating with a brick.”)
• Remember the ozone hole? It’s still there, and it’s preventing the ocean from absorbing C02. (I expect that my childhood home in South Jersey will have an ocean view someday.)
• Pastor Wiley Drake prays for his god to kill the President of the United States. (And atheists are immoral scum.)

Originally published at Suburban Panic!. You can comment here or there.

This is just a note to let those of you who follow our Livejournal feed that we’re now offering a new option to get Suburban Panic content on LJ. The current syndication feed is okay, but it’s got some flaws that glare like George Hrab’s head. Posts only last a few weeks before they disappear into the ether; I often miss comments beause there’s no option to get email notice when you leave them.

In order to make your experience more friendly, I’ve retrained my old personal journal to mirror the website posts. The posts will stay there as long as Livejournal contines to exist (so we’ve got at least a week until the hamsters eat all the bubble gum and twine). And I’ll get emails when you leave a comment, so I can respond before senility sets in (again, you’ve probably got about a week).

Suburban Panic supports freedom of choice; you can stick with the syndicated feed, or add the new journal version to your friends list. (If you were already friends with lbbastard, you’re all set.) Either way, thanks for reading.