Category: Life

Sometimes, I feel the need to talk about me (imagine that).

Which gives you a better buzz of energy, caffeine or sugar?

Sugar will quickly give me a burst of energy; but when it’s over, I usually end up feeling totally drained. Caffeine takes longer to give me any energy but the extra energy lasts longer and I don’t crash as hard once the caffeine has worn off. So it seems like a combination of the two would be best, but if I drink say a can of Pepsi; the sugar far outweighs the caffeine and that gives me a quicker harder burst of energy with a corresponding harder crash once the sugar’s burned off.

Once again, I stayed up too late doing nothing in particular (reading some websites, trying to figure out more WP stuff, playing UT2004, etc..) so I’m feeling extremely tired this morning. The other side affect of staying up so late is that I can remember some of my dreams from last night.

In the dream, I’m the captain of a commercial airliner (a Boeing 747, I think). We’re making a routine flight from somewhere to somewhere else when something goes extremely wrong. What exactly goes wrong, I can’t tell but I know that I’ve lost around half my passengers and an engine or two.

We make an emergency landing on an interstate or maybe on a turnpike and one of the wings (and one of the remaining engines) gets snapped off by a support column for an overpass and then we’re finally able to bring the plane to a stop.

The next thing I know my copilot and I are carrying some flat-bed like thing that I intrinsically know weighs around 1300 lbs. We carry through a couple of building hallways before meeting up with superior officers/crash investigators. They make some sort of joke, but I don’t laugh. Then we carry the flat up a slight incline, set it done, pause for a moment to remember those who died and then reach into a wall panel, pulling out some heavy duty computer cable, which then gets hooked into the flat.

That’s where I woke up, though I did have a fleeting sense that the flat thing was some how acting as a blackbox data/flight recorder device.

Note to self: No more late night tacos for dinner.

I finished reading Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. the other night. I’ve been a bit busy, hence the delay in writing up my little review of the book.

First, there’s a couple of things that you should keep in mind about my opinion on this book:

  • My general reading interests keep me firmly planted in the fiction section, so this was quite unlike anything I’ve read
  • Prior to reading this book, I have had little to no direct exposure to Franken’s work.
  • I didn’t vote for Bush.
  • I don’t like the way the Bush administration has been handling things since they came into power.
  • I am not a lawyer or an election official but I still think the 2000 presidential election had some fishy things going on in it (particularly in Flordia).

Now that I’ve got those disclaimers out of the way, I can tell you that I greatly enjoyed this book and will definately be looking at borrowing the rest of Franken’s books (from friends or my local library). Franken’s sense of humor and sharp sarcasm really struck a chord with me. That I agreed with a lot of his points throughout the book, didn’t hurt either. One of the things that I really liked about the book was how well Franken (and his team of Havard students) documented all the quotes that Franken used, via footnotes at the bottom of the pages and in the bibliography at the end of the book. It really gave the book a feeeling of professionalism that frankly, I wasn’t expecting. From what I’d heard about the book via the media; I was expecting it to be more along the lines of drinking burnt coffee made with reused grinds rather than the smooth latte that it went down as. However, that is not to say that the book is without it’s faults.

When you turn the page to a new chapter, you can expect it to have little or no connection to the previous chapter; this makes for a very rough transition between chapters and reduces the readibility of the book. Also, at points Franken lowers himself to the level of the people he’s complaining about in the book (the Right) by resorting to childish namecalling. Generally, he does it after he’s just finished quoting somebody from the the Right do it and walked you through several paragraphs to show how wrong that person from the Right was. Sometimes it’s even funny when he does it; however overall, it’s not a technique that works for me. I’d rather have seen him stay above that sort of thing and instead just continue to use things that the Right have said to show their inconsistencies and stupidities.

Well, that’s all for now (my break’s over and I need to get back to work). I’ll be reading Elizabeth Peter’s The Falcon at the Portal next.