Is it hot in here, or is it just me?

The Today Show, which for some reason I can’t stop watching even though I hate it, has given me two frights this week; The first, yesterday, when it showed a clip of a man being fished out of a Los Angeles river. Apparently, he had been wearing sweatpants when his car became trapped by rising water, and at some point in the course of being rescued and hauled to shore, he lost said sweatpants…and apparently wasn’t wearing underwear. The point being, the Today Show producers just ran the tape without digitizing the poor man’s wiener. Not that I object to the sight of a penis, obviously, but not at 7 o’clock in the morning, and not on the Today Show! Subsequent airings of the tape did utilize digital obfuscation, and Lester Holt was even kind enough to mention to the poor fool during a live interview that they were, in fact, protecting his modesty – except for that one time, I guess.

The second scare was on today’s installment, with Katie Couric unashamedly flirting with Newt Gingrich, who looks like a grown-up Cabbage Patch Kid and reeks of pure evil. How he can still be going on about moral values, after serving divorce papers to his second of three wives while she lay in the cancer recovery ward, is beyond me. Who still listens to this fool?

Thankfully, more and more real Christians are reclaiming their faith from the kooks.

And speaking of religious kooks, Mel Gibson has driven the Fundamentalists crazy by recently coming out as staunchly anti-Iraq War, as well as pronouncing a kinship with fellow kook filmmaker Michael Moore. Makes me more inclined to watch my copy of The Passion which Mother Rubble gave us for Christmas, which I’ve been avoiding because of the gore, seeing as how I didn’t sleep for three weeks after watching the trailer for Dawn of the Dead. But that’s another story.

So it’s almost 70 degrees, and my allergies are causing me to have burning pain in my lungs, and I, like the rest of the world, am wondering what happened to winter. And just when I think THAT’S bad enough, I go and find that it may not be just the Earth that’s in trouble.

Now, who can help me figure out how to blame this on the Bush administration?

In addition to finding scary interstellar climate theories while surfing the internet, not doing my work, I ran across this interesting theory which caused me a good hour-and-a-half of sleeplessness: seems a mathematician has come up with a theory that the Dark Ages may never have happened – like, those years, roughly 614-911 AD, simply didn’t exist, they were just kind of, inserted into history as if they did exist, but there’s really no independent archaeological or literary proof of it. Which means it’s really only about 1700 or so. Wonder what this does to millenialists who think the end of the world is overdue?

Consuela, my workplace cubicle-mate, not only makes and receives cell phone calls, in Spanish, all day long, but also plays some kooky radio station that she streams from the internet. Here’s a sampling of today’s playlist:

Never On a Sunday (on vibraphone)
Once I Had a Secret Love
Mona Lisa
Born Free
Somewhere My Love
Witchita Lineman
Mack the Knife

Not that I have a particular aversion to these songs individually, but en masse they’re a bit much to take, especially without a cocktail in one’s hand. The last straw was Over the Rainbow – not the Wizard of Oz soundtrack version, but the old, boozed-up Judy Garland. That’s enough to make me want to end it all on the best of days.

More internet fun, about