12 : 36 A.M.
At this rate I'll wind up asleep at night

My rice cooker has a single control, labeled "on". You push it and the cooking of rice commences. It looks like a pot with a switch on the side. You know when it's done, because the single indicator lamp goes out. Helen's rice cooker has three different cooking modes, something like five membrane switches and a digital readout. it looks like a late model Saturn sedan crossed with a cryogenic storage vault. Internally, it tracks temperature and rice moisture content using variable-state "fuzzy" logic. You know when it's done either because it broadcasts the rice alert tone, or because you set it to have rice ready at a specific instant in time (and that time arrives). Can you guess which rice cooker makes superior rice? If you said that advanced technology has little to nothing to offer the rice-cooking community of the world, you're wrong! Helen's rice cooker is both better and faster at cooking rice. The rice on the bottom is not brown, unless you set it to the special brown-the-rice-on-the-bottom mode. My rice cooker sacrifices the bottom layer of rice to the ancient rice cooker gods. The rice cooker from outer space can also hold rice at serving temperature for around 172,800 seconds. Keep this in mind next time old fashioned wisdom grabs ahold of your consumer spending habits.

Oh right, spending habits. Well, I have to give mine up for now. Not much to spend on, anyway. I seem to have everything I need. Wait. I think I might also need a Supermatic(R) frankfurter electrocuter 3000 with dynamic radius morphing and weinerscan(tm) resonance imaging. Also, milk. I don't got.

SPEAKING of tired pop culture, I was thinking I'd go down to the art supply store on Pike by Bauhaus and get myself a little screen printing kit. I don't need a fancy photoresist setup or anything. I can just use a knife to scoop out the screen and make my own graphics for shirts or whatever. Yes, other things besides T-shirts have screen printing on them. A good example would be ART's line of DSP gear aimed at rock musicians. In the 80's, they produced a series of effects processors and control boards which all sported totally radical pink scribbly graphics, screened onto the steel outer surface of the units. I have three such products, and would consider it worth a good deal of trouble to re-screen the graphics onto them, though I'd re-design them to be less pink and gaudy. I'd make them spare and a different color, like... I dunno. Black, with little green lines or something.

I could also make my own T-shirts, a project I can talk about endlessly. Since I still only wear shirts designed by other people, I must not yet have gotten very far in the process. My contribution to the tired out "got milk" bandwagon would be a shirt that says "like beef?". I bet that one would go over well in Hawaii.

Oh yeah, so when people think they hate a race, are they really hating a culture? Most likely. Race itself doesn't determine much about what a personality is like. That's all cultural. Is hating a culture ethical? Personally, I think it's ethical to hate a culture of cynical commercialism. If it's okay to hate one culture, it's ok to hate any culture. Why advocate hate? Well, it's kind of an important component of having an opinion. When something is openly destructive to things you like, you get to hate it! If you don't have a good reason, though, well.. maybe that doesn't really qualify as good-quality hate. Hmm. Needs more evaluating. Maybe hatred needs depth to be valid.

Taken in vancouver at sunset

Oh, almost forgot. We were biking around Stanley park and we stopped to look at directions and Mr. Skunk waddled out of the bushes and peered at us from 15 feet away. "Which way do you think goes to the parking lot?" "Skunk! ...I think we should go away from the skunk." "Yes." [flee]