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Some Random Thoughts.

Thanks for enduring the light blogging. It's almost over (and the usual awesomeness will return). In the meantime, endure some random thoughts:

Benjamin McKenzie.

Today, at breakfast, the hostess claimed that I looked "exactly like Ryan from The O.C." My wife is "lucky to be dating a celebrity," she said.

That makes at least half a dozen times I've been told that. I am not going to argue with these people, but, honestly, the resemblance is negligible at best.

Blog Nashville.

Everyone was there. Everyone's talking about it (and then some). Honestly, I am just glad it's over. But I hope all the bloggers who attended had a fun and worthwhile experience.

Wendy's.

Wendy's fast food restaurants are good value. Seriously. Two people can get very full on not-gross food for ~$10.00. Good stuff. And finger-free since 2005.

NBA Playoffs.

Yao Ming, a.k.a. "Proletarian of the Year," Tracy McGrady, Jeff Van Gundy, and the rest of the Houston Rockets lost to the Dallas Mavericks by 40 points last night. FORTY points. Good grief. What is there to even say about something like that?

By the way, Yao Ming is tall (especially compared to Lisa Ling):

Social Security Reform.

David Brooks believes that President Bush has called the Democrats' bluff on Social Security, exposing them for what they are:

This is the difference between the party with a governing mentality and the party with the opposition mentality. The governing party leads. It takes the arrows. It casts about for productive ideas and slowly absorbs the other party's good ones. Bush has now absorbed progressive indexing of retirement benefits.

The opposition party opposes. It doesn't feel any responsibility to come up with positive alternatives. Its main psychological need is to be against its nemesis at all costs. If the governing party steals one of its ideas, it will oppose that idea.

In this way the opposition party is pushed further and further to the edge. It loses control of its identity - it's simply a negative reactive force to whatever the governing party happens to be doing at the moment. It finds itself in a cycle of opposition, negativity and irrelevance.

Yeah. That it took David Brooks to point this out as some kind of new insight or revelation is really a shame (no offense to David Brooks).

Rock The Vote (is lame).

Over at the Rock the Vote blog, there has not been a new post on Social Security since April 29. I wonder if that means they've given up? Maybe they've just run out of ideas?

If you've read the comments over there, they run a solid 30-1 in the pro reform direction.

The Kentucky Derby...

...is becoming trashier by the minute. Ugh. There's nothing inherently wrong with the nude human form, but come on, let's not turn the Kentucky Derby into Girls Gone Wild.

I used to want to go someday (and order a tall mint julep and wear a white suit and a big ole tophat), but if it's just another college party spot with skeevy, shirtless dudes ogling drunk girls, count me out. Those are a dime a dozen.

By the way, congrats to jockey Mike Smith and Giacomo.

Oh, and another by the way, it's great that she's "living strong," but I've noticed those yellow Lance Armstrong bracelets (I have one, and they are for a great cause) are worn increasingly by chain-smoking, binge-drinking image-conscious kids.

And, finally, some interesting thoughts on the brain:

One recent discovery to confront is that the human brain can readily change its structure -- a phenomenon scientists call neuroplasticity. A few years ago, brain scans of London cabbies showed that the detailed mental maps they had built up in the course of navigating their city's complicated streets were apparent in their brains. Not only was the posterior hippocampus -- one area of the brain where spatial representations are stored -- larger in the drivers; the increase in size was proportional to the number of years they had been on the job.

It may not come as a great surprise that interaction with the environment can alter our mental architecture. But there is also accumulating evidence that the brain can change autonomously, in response to its own internal signals. Last year, Tibetan Buddhist monks, with the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, submitted to functional magnetic resonance imaging as they practiced ''compassion meditation,'' which is aimed at achieving a mental state of pure loving kindness toward all beings. The brain scans showed only a slight effect in novice meditators. But for monks who had spent more than 10,000 hours in meditation, the differences in brain function were striking. Activity in the left prefrontal cortex, the locus of joy, overwhelmed activity in the right prefrontal cortex, the locus of anxiety.

Very cool stuff. We still know so little about the brain.

Posted by Will Franklin · 8 May 2005 09:54 PM

Comments

Posted by: Brian H at May 8, 2005 10:42 PM

Posted by: Zsa Zsa at May 9, 2005 06:49 AM

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Posted by: Zsa Zsa at May 11, 2005 01:26 PM