sunday

I’m starting to feel emotionally disconnected. I don’t really feel the need to be in a relationship anymore, the need to rely on someone else. Perhaps it’s because I’ve finally gotten used to living on my own, surrounded myself with friends, and found a routine. Life is comfortable.

I really thought I had met “the one.” You know, that one who you’re going to spend the rest of your life with. I’m not so sure any more. I used to be able to think about marriage, settling down, starting a family, etc. But now, I cringe at the thought of marriage. I’m not ready to settle down, and I don’t think I’m even ready to have a serious relationship. I’ve regressed emotionally in my relationship. Or maybe I’m growing up.

It’s a completely different crowd, although it’s only two years apart. And I really am tired of waiting. I think it’s time to move on with my life. I deserve it.

It’s like sports gel for alcoholics: a generous pour of gin, rum, vodka, whiskey, or tequila in a rip-top, palm-sized plastic pouch that’s simple to tote and conceal. What could go wrong? The $2 Pocket Shots are perfect for marathon drinkers, drinking marathoners, world travelers, outdoorsy types, frugal concert goers, or for steadying the nerves on a Tuesday morning. We keep ours in a manila envelope labelled “sources.”

A Moscow man who ill-advisedly decided to sit watching telly in the nude in the flat he shared with his ex-missus earned himself a wedding-tackle-torching for his trouble, the Evening Standard reports.

The unnamed man’s former wife evidently took exception to his vodka-swilling TV viewing, and duly set fire to his penis. A police spokeswoman admitted it was “difficult to predict” if the human candle would make a full recovery from the ordeal which he described as “monstrously painful.”

He added: “I was burning like a torch. I don’t know what I did to deserve this.”

In case you’re wondering, the couple divorced three years back, but continued to cohabit, an arrangement “common in Russia where property costs are very high.”

I just got my bill for my vehicle personal property tax in Arlington County. Arlington County taxes all vehicles located in the county. Virginia state law gives the Commissioner of Revenue the duty of assessing vehicles and administering the tax. The Arlington County Board sets the tax rate each spring. The tax rate for tax year 2006 is $5.00 per $100.00 of the assessed value.

My 2004 BMW X3 (with an estimated value of $21,900) is going to cost me another $670 for the year.

Since July 1, Virginia instated a reckless driving fine of up to $4,000, including taxes, where reckless generally means driving 20+ above the posted speed limit. Recently, a pregnant woman (who thought she was going into labor) was pulled over for speeding in a 35-zone; she was driving 57 mph.

Proponents of the new law will tell you that if you’re pregnant or going into labor, you shouldn’t be driving at all (you’re endangering the lives of you and your baby!). They’ll also tell you that driving recklessly in a 35 mph endangers the lives of others and pedestrians, which I don’t disagree with. But they’ll argue that the revenue-generating fines are justified because they will be paying to fix and improve the Northern Virginia (NOVA) roads.

First of all, if you’re pregnant and there’s absolutely no one to drive you to the hospital, what are you supposed to do? Calling an ambulance seems logical but it also incurs a hospital bill of about $500. I’m pretty sure if you were in labor with your first child, you’d probably do the same thing.

Second of all, repaving the highway isn’t going to improve NOVA’s roads. The only reason my daily commute on route 66 is as miserable as it is because of the 4-lane highway becoming 2-lanes. People in VA don’t know how to merge for the life of them (driving 50 mph in the left lane doesn’t fucking help either). The first thing they need to fix isn’t the roads, but the traffic lights that control the flow of traffic getting onto the freeway. California had these in place along Highway 85 and I’d rather be driving in the Bay Area during rush hour than in NOVA.

The concept is simple. By regulating traffic, and hence merging, onto the freeway, you reduce a back up and maintain traffic flow. At the on-ramp, two traffic lights regulate each lane. The light on the right turns green, followed by the light on the left. Each light staggers green for two cars to get on the freeway, and then pauses on red for about 5 seconds before letting another pair of cars onto the freeway. Right-left-pause. Right-left-pause. The traffic lights are only in effect during morning and evening rush hour; otherwise the lights are disabled at all other hours. That’s how it’s SUPPOSED to work.

In NOVA, you have both lights turning green at the same time with a two-second red-light before turning green again. This doesn’t do anything for traffic flow. In fact, everyone ignores it and runs through the red lights. The traffic lights aren’t even turned on at the appropriate hours. They’re on when it’s not rush-hour at 3 in the afternoon or 10 in the morning. That’s how it’s NOT SUPPOSED to work. Whoever wrote the fucking program for these traffic controls should be shot.

Worst of all, the cops in VA are complete douchbags. But that’s a story for another day.

A space-based observatory has captured images of a 13 light-year long tail stretching out behind a well known red-giant star, Mira.

The pictures have come as a complete shock to astronomers: Mira has been gazed upon from Earth for almost half a millennium, but nothing like this tail has ever been seen before.

Astronomers say the images have provided a unique insight into the way stars like our sun die. Mira was once a humble yellow dwarf like our own sun. Over the aeons it ran out of hydrogen and started burning helium, swelling up to become a much larger and cooler red giant. It pulsates, periodically becoming large enough to see with the naked eye.

It was NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Observer that saw the tail. It was conducting a routine survey of the sky, in ultraviolet, when astronomers noticed what looked like a huge comet streaking across the sky at nearly 300,000 miles per hour*.

Christopher Martin, pricipal investigator on the GEE project, based at the California Institute of Technology, professed himself completely shocked when he saw “this completely unexpected, humongous tail trailing behind a well-known star”.

“It was amazing how Mira’s tail echoed on vast, interstellar scales the familiar phenomena of a jet’s contrail or a speedboat’s turbulent wake,” he added.

The scientists say the trail of matter the star leaves behind will eventually seed the birth of other suns.

Download the full, high-res version of the picture from NASA here.

*In its press announcement, NASA describes this as supersonic. Tch tch. Space is a vacuum in which there is no sonus to be superior to. Might as well compare it to the speed of the average sheep (roughly 150,000 times as fast, we reckon).

I know I just said I was so over the iPhone, but I stumbled across this site and thought it was cool. For those of you who already have one, you can thank me in cash (although I take alternate forms of payment).

I think I’m over it. Yes, my hype and desire for an iPhone is finally waning. I pretty much got tired of watching Ori pull it out and touch it every five seconds and spending endless hours on craigslist hunting for a legitimate $400 8GB version. I’m looking more forward to my new 15″ MacBook Pro and getting my brother a Nano. (See! I’m not entirely selfish!) And maybe a new Theory coat. Definitely a new J.Crew jacket. And maybe some new pumps..like that Miu Miu bootie.

But first, I need a new job.

I was listening to 107.3 this morning on my way to work and caught a host’s story about his weekend at the Montgomery Mall. He walked by the Hollister store, and never having been in one, decided to take a look around. He quickly realized that this first-time-experience in this store was very similar to his first-time-experience in “the other store” (if you can’t figure it out, see the addendum). He soon learned, from someone who used to work at these stores, about some of the rules of the stores’ employees had to abide.

• If you have facial hair, there are disposable razors in the back for you to use.
• You must wear the company’s clothes.
• The music in the store must be at a certain level to give the idea that there’s a party or a cool atmosphere (one of the reasons why my mom wouldn’t let me work there).
• You must wear flip-flops all year round.
• You must spray the store every morning with cologne (I actually witnessed this at the Hollister in Tyson’s Corner–armed with a bottle of cologne in each hand, the employee sprayed the mannequins outside the store).
• You can’t help customers get their size. You can tell them what size you are wearing, but you must let the customers get the size themselves.
• You must go tanning.

I can understand some of these rules as they go for anywhere you work, but making employees go tanning is pushing it. The rules go on for about 54 pages. The employees are basically not employees–they’re models. They’re there to portray the brand image and yes, you can even apply to be a brand for the company (not just the store). Although I have been recruited a couple of times for the stores, I’m pretty glad I never did it. Only “pretty” glad because it was one of those high-school-work-experiences that I missed out on.

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