A Perfectly Good Brain, Spoiled

There must be hallucinogenic pollen in the air. I keep smelling bubble gum. I always used to assume that it was just a brain tumor that was periodically causing me to imagine various and sundry scents, but it's been going on for so many years that I've given up on that idea. Had it been a brain tumor, I'd be dead by now. So now I assume that it's some plant releasing hallucinogenic pollen. True, if you search for "hallucinogenic pollen" on Google, almost all you come up with are pages about Star Trek episodes in which one or more crew members of the Enterprise end up inhaling some such substance when they visit a new, unknown planet. But the mere absence among the results of a Google search of any factual evidence of the existence of hallucinogenic pollens in the real word is not conclusive evidence that they don't exist. If they don't, then where the hell is that bubble gum I'm smelling, huh? You see?

Anyway, the search had one interesting result that was not about Star Trek. It turns out that there is this outfit called BLTC (a misleading acronym, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with tasty sandwiches beloved of omnivores.) According to their Mission Statement,

"BLTC RESEARCH was founded in 1995 to promote paradise-engineering. We are dedicated to an ambitious global technology project. BLTC seek to abolish the biological substrates of suffering. Not just in humans, but in all sentient life."

Well maybe they do have something to do with those sandwiches, if one of their goals is to eliminate the suffering of those tasty pigs. But their goals clearly go beyond making pigs happy. Poking around on their site I found goatloads of Utopian goals, many of them having to do with drugs. Apparently, they don't want to wait for genetic engineering to catch up with their vision, and are willing to use various illicit substances in the meantime. But, seriously, this is one of the weirdest web sites I've ever come across. Perusing it, I get the feeling that I might be observing the first stirrings of the Next Big Cult. Just take a look at the titles in the BLTC Library linked from their main page. Yikes! Move over, L. Ron!

So, I've wasted more time on teh Internets. What else is new?

Damn. Way past my bedtime.

(no subject)

There was an announcement in featureannounce about a recent bugfix:

"A fix so users of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh no longer experience problems using QuickReply on comment pages."

That may explain why, for the last couple of weeks, QuickReply has been broken in Opera. Well, broken may not be exactly the right word. Gone altogether is what it is. I can still get it in Firefox, but not in Opera. Fixing the bug in Explorer for Mac (and why on earth would anybody with a Mac want to use Exploder?) has apparently screwed up the feature for everybody who uses Opera. I suppose I'll bitch to Support about it.

Another freaking hot day. I'm quite sure that all the fluids in my brain have boiled away by now. It's probably pruned up in there. I'm afraid to shake my head, because I might hear it rattle. I swear that if I make it through this summer alive, I'll never complain about winter again until next winter!

To hot to think. I'll go watch undemanding television now.