Good Eats

Ahhh, is there anything that I'm going to miss more than all the tantalizing foods out there?  There are a gazillion restaurants I have not even tried, and even at the ones I have tried there are a plentiful menu entries that remain undiscovered.  (And some might argue that tonight's dinner, Applebee's Provolone-stuffed Meatballs, should have remained undiscovered.)

This whole blog could be about food, but I'll settle for making a finite Bucket Mission instead.  Keep in mind that there will be plenty of mentions of other "off-list" restaurants and foods over the course of TLY, but only these will be tallied up...

Bucket Mission: Food

Synopsis

You already know that trying out food is something I look forward to, but there is much that I haven't tasted!  Complete a list of 20 restaurants that I have not tried before.  Write a brief account of each experience.

Now, some of these places will require a bit of travel, and some have branches in the area.  Most folks should be familiar with most of the names on the list, as they are all franchises.

• Chicken: Bojangles, Church's
• Burger: White Castle, Red Robin
• Mexican: Baja Fresh, Taco John's
• Sandwich: Jimmy John's, Jason's Deli
• Pizza: Cici's, Godfather's
• Buffet: Golden Corral, Old Country Buffet
• Seafood: Bonefish Grill, Joe's Crab Shack
• Italian: Maggiano's Little Italy, Fazoli's
• Asian: Pei Wei's, Benihana
• Ice Cream+: Culver's, Braum's

Metric

Simple:  cross each restaurant off the list when I try it.  I need to walk into the establishment and sit down to eat.

In fact, I kicked this list off on Saturday January 7, when Marcie and my parents joined me to visit Golden Corral in Springfield.  My general advice is not to go there at 4PM on a Saturday, because that's when everyone seems to go.  However, from a food perspective, give this place a try.  They do have some standouts on the buffet line.  And Marcie trying out the "Chocolate Wonderfall" was worth the trip.  :-)

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 29, 327 days remaining

The City on the Edge of Forever  (Edith Keeler must die...)
Operation - Annihilate!  (If I could have guessed "bright light," Spock should have been able to get it :) )
Amok Time  (Season 2 begins with Spock's mating ceremony)
Who Mourns for Adonais?  (Lonely Greek god)
The Changeling  (Nomad = V'ger Lite)

Video Mission Update: 33 / 728 hours = 4.5%




Food Mission Update: 1 / 20 restaurants = 5%

Season 1 Retrospective

I've made it through The Original Series season 1, and it's time to look back for a minute.

"City on the Edge of Forever" does live up to the hype, even if there was some controversy about changes to Harlan Ellison's original script.  I would tend to agree with the review titled, "Ellison" on this page.  Based on the original script, the new script was much closer to the spirit of Star Trek.

"The Naked Time" is the episode where we get to see the main characters go out of character.  A shirtless Sulu threatening the others with his rapier is very memorable indeed.  (I also realized that Sulu's swordsmanship in the 2009 Star Trek reboot was canonical after all.)

"Balance of Terror" reminded me of Run Silent, Run Deep, a film I watched numerous times as a kid.  The parallels of the hostility of the deep sea and deep space, and man's complete dependence on their vessels for protection from those environments, are pretty obvious.  Also, is there any better Vulcan/Romulan than Mark Lenard?

This season, we also get a good dose of literary references, such as Shakespeare, in "Conscience of the King," and the various characters in Sturgeon's playful "Shore Leave."  Western literature, history, and culture figure into quite a few episodes, and this is part of what makes the season memorable.

However, I cannot wrap up this post without commenting on one facet that would make a great study:  gender roles.  There are a few books on Amazon that tackle the subject, and I'd like to read them if I ever get the time.  Star Trek featured some guest appearances by some very lovely ladies to be sure, and I have to wonder how much the "eye candy" aspect of the series contributed to its popularity.  Short skirts were period for the 1960s, to be sure, but by 2012, that image of Star Fleet officers in skirts definitely feels outdated.  (Indeed, by The Next Generation, the right to wear skirts was pretty exclusively Counselor Troi's, as I recall.)

Well, I am running behind in my Video Mission Bucket List, and I do not know when I will have the time to catch up...

Deadline

I need to deliver on my first development deadline at my new(ish) company by Jan. 31 and I have a fair amount of work to complete.  The software I am working on is really slow when I connect to our database from home over VPN, so I instead I made the 15 minute drive into the office, Marcie in tow, for a Saturday work session in my cube.  We lasted about 3 hours there, and I got a bit done, but it turns out I didn't really need to run my software against the database anyway :D

I just hope that I don't spend many weekends in TLY trying to meet work deadlines.  Come on, we all have a final deadline.  If you know what I mean.

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 28, 328 days remaining

The Alternative Factor  ("What of Lazarus?"  What of anti-Lazarus?)

Video Mission Update: 28 / 728 hours = 3.8%

On Death Row

(January 27)

Yes, everyone, we've been given a death sentence to be carried out on December 21, and sorry to say that the governor will not be able to pardon us this time!

Years ago I mused on what I would want for my final meal on death row, and I selected the steak tip salad from Omega Pizza, probably because I ate it once a week and it was my favorite at the time.  It is certainly better than the steak tip salad offering from Lake Williams Pizza that I tried today, which featured thin jerky-like pieces of steak.  I guess it was steak.

In all seriousness, the topic of capital punishment is one that requires a lot of discussion.  What's your stance?  Did the Cheshire Connecticut home invasion killers deserve the death sentence?  Here's a juror who doesn't feel he made the right decision in hindsight.

In my worldview the jurors did the right thing -- nay, they did the only thing possible -- by sentencing these wanton family destroyers, these who would treat the very core fabric of what we have built society upon as nothing more than so much tissue to shred apart at their whim, to a certain demise.  Of course, they shall languish on death row for a very long time (and that is a different topic), but in the end, they shall be dispatched from this world that they must have despised so much in committing those heinous acts.

I am not in favor of the death penalty because I carry revenge in my heart; I feel nothing more than the soberness of doing what must be done to preserve the social fabric for those who remain in the free world.  I am not in favor of the death penalty out of some sense of "playing God" with the lives of men; that would be no different than how the killers played God with the Petit family and found them unworthy of life.

Some may suggest that the world is nothing more than random events, that bad things happen to good people for no reason.  I think this is a naive worldview, and I hope to return to this topic before the year is up.

BOGO Cobbler

I bought some BOGO blueberries from the supermarket -- hey, it's summer in Chile! Thank goodness for the global marketplace.

I used most of them in this attempt a cooking a blueberry cobbler. It came out tasting delicious, but more gooey than I would have expected a cobbler. I think I'll wait for the summer to try a different recipe so that I can use fresh farm blueberries from Wales.

(January 25)

My sister pointed me in the direction of the page-a-day Doomsday Calendar, and I ordered a copy -- can't wait to share with the blog!

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 26, 330 days remaining

Made a credit card payment!

Debt Mission Update: 1 / 11 payments = 9%

On the Job

(January 24)

Today was a couple of milestones for me at my new(ish) job: I gave a presentation to my team about the software project I am working on and I attended my first company training course, which was all about self-development.  So, I spent 3 hours of TLY this afternoon learning how to write an annual plan for self-development (which I will do FTVLT).

Seriously, though, having moved from a small company to a large one, I am grateful for the abundance of offered training programs, as well as the stated expectation that employees will work toward their individual development each quarter.  A common refrain during the afternoon class was that, despite those expectations, many of our employees are not able to spend time on their development goals because of their business priorities.  At this early stage I can only hope that I am able to sustain a balanced approach to business needs and self-development.  Time will tell.

Enter the Dragon

In celebration of the Lunar New Year FTVLT, I decided to create a Chinese name for myself.  With the help of this online tool, I generated the name Meng Tian-han.  Meng is the same surname of Meng Tzu, 'Tian' means sky/heaven/celestial, and 'Han' in this sense means 'writing.'  Hope you find my writing heavenly ;-)

Here are the Chinese characters for Meng Tian-han.  I'm looking for comments from my Chinese friends about whether I have chosen my appellation well!



I learned from a Chinese colleague today that because of the Dragon year there will be a bit of a baby boom during this sign.  (My protestations about EOTW notwithstanding...)  Well, I for one think it somehow fitting that we will all go out in the year of the Dragon!

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 23, 333 days remaining

The Devil in the Dark  (Spock mind-melds with a rock creature.)
Errand of Mercy  (Enter the Klingons.  Features Baltar of Battlestar Galactica.)

Video Mission Update: 27 / 728 hours = 3.7%

Super Bowl-bound

Tom Brady returns to the Super Bowl for the 5th time in his career, even though, as he said in his own words after the game that his performance sucked against the Ravens.  Well, the game was a taut nail-biter throughout, and this posting pretty much sums up my feelings after the game.  Yup.  It really comes down to a few key plays in the end.

The great news for the Pats is that their D kept them in a game in which Brady was off his mark, mind you, at this late stage of the playoffs.  It means that they WILL contend in Super Bowl.  It does not matter how much we maligned the defense in the regular season; they picked a hell of a time to gel.  Nice going.

The game was enjoyed together with family and of course, great gameday snacks.  I whipped up a batch of chicken quesadillas and fresh guacamole from scratch.  Now I have two weeks to figure out my next gameday menu ... suggestions, please!  :-)

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 22, 334 days remaining

Court Martial  (1/19, Kirk's old school legal defender)
The Return of the Archons  (1/20, a festival of primal violence and lust ... from which Kirk refrained?  ;-) )
Space Seed  (1/21, Enter: Khan.  Yes, Ricardo Montalban really is mas macho.)
A Taste of Armageddon  (1/21, great premise: real war is better than virtual war)
This Side of Paradise  (1/22, the spores of love.)

Video Mission Update: 25 / 728 hours = 3.4%


Refinanced my auto loan at DCU on Thursday.  I was fortunate to still qualify for the new auto interest rate of 1.99%!  Savings of $96/month.

Monthly Expense Mission Update: $199 / $400 per month = 50%

Time Travel

Few concepts provide me as much entertainment -- mental gymnastics -- as time travel does.  We enjoy a rich history of fictional literature and video that explore time travel and its consequences.  (And, if any of you are looking for an interesting project for TLY, consider finishing this Wikipedia page; I'd be eternally grateful!)

Time travelers in fiction come in all forms, from Dr. Who to the novice Hiro in NBC's Heroes, whose antics provided the comic foil to the darker themes presented by the serial.  Wells' The Time Machine depicts the time traveler travelling all the way to a distant end-of-the-world vista, and the film adaptations have the traveler narrowly escaping an apocalyptic event (nuclear holocaust, or the destruction of the moon) via time travel.  Alas, we earthlings of 2012 do not appear to have this means of escaping EOTW.

So, the question of the day is: Is time travel really possible?  Einstein's Relativity gives us a blueprint for how we might experience forward time travel using gravitational time dilation.  Cryogenics / suspended animation might also be considered a form of forward time travel, and this is used as a plot device in films such as Demolition Man and Idiocracy.

Traveling back in time appears to be a different story.  I have personally settled on the notion that we would have enough anecdotal evidence in our lives by now to support that travelers visited us from the future, and since we do not have that evidence, the prospect of traveling back in time is very doubtful.  Stephen Hawking speaks of this absence of time tourists in the same manner, although to be comprehensive he gives us some possible reasons why we may not have encountered time tourists yet.  I personally think the reason is chillingly simple:  time travel is not invented before EOTW.

At least fiction continues to provide us with the rich imagination of what might transpire if we time travel to the past.  We might alter the future through a small unintended change in the past (e.g. Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder); or we may send agents back in time to intentionally alter a dire future state (e.g. Terminator).

Or, we may unintentionally travel through time and find ourselves trapped in the past.  Such is the case of my second classic Star Trek episode, "Tomorrow is Yesterday," in which the Enterprise and its intrepid crew is time warped back to 1960s Earth.  Kirk, Spock and the gang must give consideration to how to leave the inhabitants of that period in an unaltered state, so as not to jeopardize their own history.  Also revealed is the "slingshot around the sun" technique (gravitational time dilation?) to return them to the point in time they left. Star Trek IV fans should recognize this device.

Time travel storylines have appeared in a lot of Star Trek episodes throughout the entire opus.  This was the first episode devoted to that concept, and it was right up my alley.  There's a lot of buzz around the upcoming first season episode "City on the Edge of Forever," another time travel story...

And on another note, my new Sony noise-canceling headphones are pretty good so far.  I'm test-driving them on Best of Bowie.  My only complaint so far is that the time dilation feature doesn't seem to work ;-)

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 16, 340 days remaining

Tomorrow is Yesterday  (Welcome to the 1960s)

Video Mission Update: 20 / 728 hours = 2.7%

Catch-up

Sitting here with a Heineken and a bowl of Angelica's rajebi (ramyun + sujebi) and watching the Giants and Packers duke it out.  Except for the Patriots blowout last night, all the games this weekend have been pretty close and eminently watchable.  Yesterday's Saints at 49ers game was an instant classic.

I also donned my oven mitts and attempted some baking with whole wheat flour; produced a banana bread and some biscotti with hazelnuts.

Playoff football, spicy food with beer, baked goods, outside temperature at 14 degrees F. -- what better backdrop to catch up on this last week of missed blog entries?

(Thursday, 1/12)

One of the cool things about my employer of two months is their cafeteria system, which offers good food at subsidized prices.  Suffice it to say that during TLY I will be well-fed, and I hope that counts for something, even if it means my Health mission is at risk!  I finally tried my cafeteria's homemade pizza (sausage and caramelized onions) and found it to be to be crispy and delicious, definitely not FTVLT.

(Tuesday, 1/10)

I've been a Redbox user for a few years now, and I like the iPhone app to locate the closest kiosk carrying a desired title.  I finally tried online reservation of DVDs, and watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Super 8.  Starting to fall behind on my Star Trek mission, though...

(Monday, 1/9)

Found a cool site for the New Year where they offer free coding lessons.  I played around on the site a bit and earned a "FizzBuzz" medal.  Signed up for email notifications when Python lessons become available.

(Sunday, 1/8)

Went running in the clear but 40 degree weather and found that I need a pair of gloves.  So afterwards I warmed up with a McDonald's Peppermint Mocha, which didn't really do it for me, and I ordered a pair of Reebok fleece gloves.  I think I have all the other pieces to get some outdoor running in over the next weeks.  Mostly I'll be indoors on the treadmill, though.

Slimming down

With the clock ticking down to EOTW, what would you strive for; consuming as much as possible before the end, or pursuing less material goals?  I'm somewhere in the middle.  You already know by now that food and Star Trek are a big part of the plans for this year, so is losing some weight (yeah, good luck with that, right?)

I also want to shed some of my debt and material possessions. Yup, strange as it may sound for those who want to live it up this year, I'd like to leave the world a little bit lighter!

Bucket Mission: Debt

Pay off the one credit card on which I carry over a balance from one month to the next.  I'm not going to tell you how much that is until the end  :-)  Suffice it to say that I have divided the balance by 11 and will pay it off before EOTW!

To help with the credit card debt project, I have two additional trackable goals:

• Reduce monthly expenses by $400/month.  This is not going to be easy...
• Earn $2,500 through the sale of some of my possessions.  I have lots of excess stuff to get rid of!

In the spirit of slimming down, Marcie and I stopped at some donation drop boxes today, where I dropped off books in a "Big Hearted Books" collection box.  They also accept video and audio media, too, so I'll have to keep that in mind.

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 14, 342 days remaining

Balance of Terror  (1/7, Run Silent, Run Deep ... Starship style)
Shore Leave  (1/7, a day at the Amusement Planet)
The Galileo Seven (1/8, those spears made me laugh)
The Squire of Gothos  (1/12, Kirk should have given him a timeout)

Arena  (1/14, Kirk mano a mano with a lizard-man)

Video Mission Update: 19 / 728 hours = 2.6%


OK, so I got off to a good start with the debt project by closing down my Extra Space storage unit.  No sense keeping a unit of stuff that Darrell Sheets would bid $1 on!

Monthly Expense Mission Update: $103 / $400 per month = 26%

Sinfully delicious

Today is Friday the 13th, the first of three Friday the 13ths for the year. I saw a rainbow today; how messed up is that?

I think my company's code repository is trying to tell me something.

So, I decided to cook Shrimp Fra Diavolo (alla Giada) and it came out sinfully delicious. Served on top of Angel hair pasta :-)

If you need some divine inspiration after reading this post, try Tebowie.

Energize...

How do you prefer to get your energy fix, coffee?  Coke?  Coke  ;-) ?

I'm not one to usually caffeinate myself in the morning, but after a four day bender of no blog posts, I figured a SoBe Citrus Energy drink would help, and I definitely feel it. And, that reminds me, we'd all better stock up on Twinkies to keep up that sugar high. If the government decides to launch one final space probe containing human artifacts, I vote to include Twinkies in the cargo.  The paragon of snacks; they last forever.

Lucky You!

(Friday, 1/6)

I just realized for the first time that my countdown to EOTW was off by a day. It's a Leap Year!  A whole extra day -- use it well, my friends.

What is luck?  Would you consider yourself lucky?  Was I unlucky not to win the prize in today's WEEI text-in contest on the D&C show?  Was I lucky to catch a glimpse of this fiery sunset from my deck?

As the sun sets on this day, stop to think about the things that are good in your life.  And, the things you need to fix in your life.

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 6, 350 days remaining

The Conscience of the King (Shakespeare in Space)

Video Mission Update: 14 / 728 hours = 1.9%

Health Mission Update: BMI down 0.1 / 2.0 = 5%

QR codes

(Thursday, 1/5)

I downloaded the RedLaser bar code reader and used it to read a QR code for the Stop & Shop 'Scan It!' app for iPhone.  Very cool how these bar code readers work.  I don't know if the afterlife has QR codes, so be sure to play with them now!

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 5, 351 days remaining

The Menagerie, Part 1 (Spock's mutiny...)
The Menagerie, Part 2 (...Pike's retirement.)

Video Mission Update: 13 / 728 hours = 1.8%

Thai times

Milford, Massachusetts, has three Thai restaurants within about a 0.1 mile radius, and they're all good. We went to Mango for lunch today and now I've been to all three. I'm not going to say I've been to them FTVLT because I love Thai food too much to let go :-)

Note to self: Mango serves Som Tam, which was recommended by another colleague who didn't find it at Thai Pepper.  Be sure to try it before EOTW!

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Thai+Restaurants+near+Milford,+MA&hl=en&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=53.609468,78.662109&vpsrc=0&hq=Thai+Restaurants&hnear=Milford,+Worcester,+Massachusetts&t=m&z=15

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 4, 352 days remaining

Dagger of the Mind (penal colony)
The Corbomite Maneuver (Kirk's poker bluff, and Clint Howard!)

Video Mission Update: 11 / 728 hours = 1.5%

A breath of fresh air

Good health starts with good breathing, and now I will admit to another condition: chronic nasal congestion.  Allergic rhinitis, to the best of my ability to self-diagnose.  It seems pretty clear to me that I developed this condition during my years in Seoul, where the sooty mucus I would frequently blow out was worrisome, and excessive clearing of my nose led to nosebleeds by 1999, my last year in Korea.  Things improved somewhat after I returned to the U.S.  The overall level of congestion subsided some, and I stopped having random nosebleeds by the summer of 2000.  Still, not a day goes by that I don't feel the congestion.

In the hopes that I will spend TLY with an improved quality of breathing, I invested in a NeilMed Sinugator (instead of my original intention of buying a neti pot).  I plan to wash with the device once per day starting today, possibly up to twice per day, and will report on my findings later!


Breathing better will help out with my next revealed mission...


Bucket Mission: Health & Fitness

Synopsis

There are two concrete parts to this mission.

• Lower my BMI by 2 points.  This won't take me out of the overweight range, but it's a worthy objective for TLY.
• Run 5K in under 30 minutes.  I began running again in 2010 for the first time since college, and my current 5K record is 33'30".

Metric

I will report on each measurable record setting value for lower BMI and speedier 5K as I work toward mission completion.  The theory is that working toward my 5K record should help me work toward my BMI goal.  We shall see; the clock is ticking.

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 3, 353 days remaining

What Are Little Girls Made Of? (Andrea... a picture is worth a thousand words)
Miri (that's one planet I wouldn't want to grow up on)

Video Mission Update: 9 / 728 hours = 1.2%

Homo Superior

In younger years I was an avid reader of Marvel comics:  X-Men and all the Mutant spin-offs mostly, but I followed certain storylines across the entire Marvel universe.  Their stories dealt with all manners of beings: gods, aliens, and humans, and it is the latter that I want to talk about now.

I think there were roughly three divisions of "super-powered" humans in the comics: those who were genetically predisposed to manifesting powers (mutants, like the X-Men); those who were at one time "normal" but obtained powers after an altering phenomenon (consider the Fantastic Four and their cosmic rays); and those who use technology to alter their natural abilities (e.g. Iron Man).

Marvel seemed to apply "Homo Superior" in the context of mutants specifically, for these humans could propagate their genes to the next generation of mutants.  Mutants were treated with suspicion to outright hostility by the non-endowed human race and it is fair to say as a reader that an appealing part of the mutant saga is their struggle to simply fit in.  The X-Men had two fronts of the struggle: normal humans on one side and on the other the bad guy mutants who would abuse their powers and give mutantkind a bad name.  Interestingly, the Fantastic Four didn't have it nearly as tough with their New York neighbors -- nay, they were heroes to the human populace and treated as such.

The third group, the bridgers of the technology-biology divide, are the most provocative to me, and truly where the comics meet the real world.  Were it not for EOTW, transhumanism would really have had a legitimate shot at the title of Homo Superior.

Which brings us to my first classic episode of Star Trek TOS: "Where No Man Has Gone Before," featuring Lt. Cmdr Gary Mitchell as the guy who has the life-altering event that makes him Starship Enterprise's resident Homo Superior.  Kirk, Spock and the gang must make the tough decision on what to do with Mitchell as his power (and ego) grow exponentially.  Interestingly, this was supposed to be the second pilot episode and did not feature Bones or Uhura yet.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying all of the episodes, and today's batch of four were all good. "The Enemy Within" was made even better with a Papa Gino's Super Steak pizza.



Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 2, 354 days remaining

Where No Man Has Gone Before (there's a universe in those eyes)
The Naked Time (Sulu the swashbuckler, and Spock gets weepy)
The Enemy Within (my evil twin did it)
Mudd's Women (beauty is just one pill away)

Video Mission Update: 7 / 728 hours = 1%

To Boldly Go...

Star Trek was one of the significant threads in my cultural fabric, but I am ashamed to say that I have seen fewer episodes than the ones I have never seen!  This definitely needs to be corrected before EOTW.

Bucket Mission: Video

Synopsis

Watch as much of the Star Trek video opus as possible in relative order. I will take this to mean the six major television series and the ten feature films before the 2009 reboot (which I have seen -- more than once).  Since I have Netflix and it provides pretty much all of this content, unless I state otherwise Netflix is what I am watching.

Metric

I will count up the hours watched.  Episodes are one hour each, except The Animated Series, which are half hour.  I will count films as 2 hours each.

The Original Series: 80 hours
The Animated Series: 11 hours (22 episodes)
The Next Generation: 176 hours
Deep Space 9: 173 hours
Voyager: 170 hours
Enterprise: 98 hours
10 films: 20 hours
TOTAL: 728 hours or about 2 hours/day to complete this mission during TLY.  Time to get watching!

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Jan. 1, 355 days remaining

The Cage (Pike's peak)
The Man Trap (looks are deceiving)
Charlie X (boy meets girl, and goes bonkers)

Video Mission Update: 3 / 728 hours = 0.4% 

Some things will never change

I broke out the bubbly this afternoon when the New England Patriots had scored 42 unanswered points against Buffalo, assuring the #1 seed in the AFC playoffs run.

I may indeed have a bucket list to get rolling on, but some things will never change, Earth's imminent demise or not:  watching Patriots football, for one.  In fact, please remind me to petition the NFL to start the 2012 season early so we can get in a full one before EOTW.  It's what Tom Brady would want!

What about that champagne, you say?  I confess, it's what was left of the bottle of Moet I popped at 12 AM.  Oh, I still haven't found the cork yet.

Blog rules

Happy New Year, world!

(So sorry that this will be the last time we'll ring in a new year...)

The rules of this blog are pretty simple.

I may use some abbreviations, like:

     EOTW = End Of The World
     YLYOE = Your Last Year On Earth
     TLY = The Last Year
     FTVLT = For The Very Last Time

I use highlighting to indicate something I am trying for the first time.

I moderate the comments.  You will have a better chance of getting your comments posted if:

• they are on topic
• they do not contain profanity or discriminatory content
• they do not try to prove that I am a crackpot and the Earth will not end this year

Let's have a little fun and get motivated!