Chugging Along / Bright Ideas

So.  The 24-hours surrounding Wednesday was a near-perfect one (only off by 20 minutes); the last 24 hours (Thursdayish) was not (off by 1 hr.).

So we had Monday - screwed up; Tuesday - perfect; Wednesday - almost perfect; Thursday - not too bad.   That’s a week that could swing either way, overall, depending on how I do today and over the weekend.  (Which I haven’t planned out yet.  Darnit.)  I did make smoothies every day except Monday, so that’s something.

Actually, I’m pretty impressed with this week, if only seen against the backdrop of how much time I’ve spent curled up somewhere, wishing I could remove my brain with a fork.  The little victories are definitely sweeter when the enemy is a cracked-out radioactive Oliphaunt with lead shoes on.  Or feels like one, anyway.  ;)

So here, in lieu of anything terribly interesting, are some Neat Ideas I’ve run across lately:

*  Nanotechnology could be the end of Bad Hair.  Nanites could live on hair shafts, removing dirt, regulating oil and moisture, and even (depending on how many and how sophisticated), changing hair color and moving / holding hair in place.  Maybe eventually you could "download" hairstyles and have your nanites move your hair into the right shape.

*  We should put courts online through videoconferencing as soon as possible.  The amount of money that would be saved just from your lawyer not having to sit around in court for hours waiting for their case to be called (and not allowed to have laptops or cell phones thanks to "security", removing any chance that they could charge someone else for that time) would be staggering.  Plus, the benefits in terms of public access and accurate records would be huge, too.

*  Insanity is usually caused, all or mostly, by broken ("bad") thought-patterns that get out of control.  It’s almost impossible for someone to control thoughts while they’re happening; but it is possible (though difficult) for someone to stop thinking altogether.  Meditation is one way, but it’s very hard to learn to do correctly.  However, another thing that causes a cessation of thought is the creative impulse.  Maybe this is bigger than just "why art therapy tends to help".  Maybe Art is a cure for The Crazy.  (I thought of this when thinking up a poem suddenly pulled me out of a two-hour-long catatonic freakout the other day.  It was pretty amazing, that simply attempting to think up a good poem did what nothing else that I or anybody else tried, could do.  So now it’s A Theory.  ;)

*  If World War Three (the first salvo of which is set to go with the U.S.’s idiotic plans to invade Iran) takes out the media part of American life, all those comic-book geeks who’ve memorized entire "alternate universes" have a good shot at becoming some of the most hailed bards of the new world.  Can’t you see sitting around a big fire, listening to some weirdo recount the Third Ressurection of Superman?

*  If you were a demon who successfully possessed someone, wouldn’t you do your best to convince your host that you, not it, were the "real" one?  The only clue it would have, if things went well, would be the tiny semantic fact that there were two of you involved in the thought process.  This would create some paradoxical statements like "I love/hate myself" and "I can’t believe I did that" and so forth; statements that, underneath the surface, give away the fact that there’s two "I"s in the equation.  But wait!  The "dual I" is a true condition for most people.  So maybe we’re all possessed and have just been convinced that the demon is "us"!  (This is a much more fun take on possession than the ol’ Rituale Romanum view, if you ask me.)

*  What if we (the People, as it were) adjusted the requirements for adopting children so that it matched the number of unwanted children?  So, if there were 100,000 kids without families in an area, then the best-qualified 100,000 parents would be allowed to adopt them.  The goal being to minimize the number of kids without parents, as long as those parents weren’t actually doing anything illegal.  The current system of trying to "protect kids" by leaving them in orphanages while prospective parents who don’t meet rigid guidelines hawk the system for years does nobody any good.  The current standards for adopting a child are WAY stricter than the standards to keep a child one already has; what sense does that make?  Especially in light of the fact that we all know that fair or mediocre parents beat the hell out of being raised by the State in pretty much every way?

Hmm.  I’d better stop so I have some ideas left for tomorrow!