The Armchair Politician

The MESSENGER probe successfully completed its flyby of Venus, and heads towards Mercury.

Seriously, these guys are incredible. We want probes to get where they’re going fast, but going fast in space has one nasty implication: slowing down requires just as much energy as it took to speed up. In order to shed some of that speed, NASA sent their MESSENGER probe past extremely low by Venus to pass excess energy into Venus’ atmosphere.

Now the probe is heading on to do a flyby of Mercury, which will point it straight at the Sun. The technical ability this kind of feat requires is nothing short of astounding. It’s the world’s largest billiards trick shot, with the balls spaced 25 million miles apart.

I’ve been playing poker online for awhile. Still in the red, but I’m coming back quite nicely as of late. Anyway, I had just about the funniest thing ever happen in a game tonight. Long story short, I bluff early on and get called on it; however, I get lucky as hell and end up winning the hand anyway. Two of the players at the table taunt me for about five or ten minutes, leaning hard on me every pot I’m in. And then I take both of them out, winning about $100 of their money in the process.
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Sometimes people on the Internet are just fun. But first, a little backstory to this one. I’m on FaceTheJury, where my AIM screen name is posted. Occasionally, I’ll have someone message me completely out of nowhere four or five months after we talked last. This usually means that I’ve been on their buddy list for a few months, and they have absolutely no clue who I am.

This happened to me last night. She signed off, and about five minutes later I get a completely random message from somebody I’ve never met. I pretty much figured out what was going on right from the bat, but I get great pleasure out of driving people absolutely insane.
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I like Saved by the Bell. I feel that it and its derivative works (excluding The New Class, which is impressive in that it didn’t let the fact that it was a festering pile of ass stop it from airing for something like eight years) are collectively the pinnacle of all human achievement.

Yesterday morning, I turned on my TV to discover that The College Years was on. To my delight, they played six episodes! However, it got me thinking: not a single person on the entire cast ever ended up actually amounting to anything.
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Remember David Everywhere? Well, he’s still made of rubber, and he’s still dancing. Unbelievable.

If you didn’t get a chance to see the first video, do so. Both of these are just incredible–if I had could do shit like that, well, I wouldn’t play so much Pump It Up.

Speaking of which, Kennesaw State put in a Pump It Up arcade machine in the game room! As Jordi can probably assume, I’m happier than a pig in poop, and dumped about $40 into the machine over the past week. Of course, that provided for about 15 hours of dancing goodness, so it’s all good. I just feel sorry for anyone who had to sit in a chair after me, for I was in a perpetual state of sweatiness the entire week.

Yeah, yeah, a few days too late. Anyways, I can’t think of a single self-respecting girl who wouldn’t want this.

Jordi has invited me to Orkut, an invite-only social networking service brought to us by the fine folks at Google. So far, it’s only been around for a few weeks, and it’s grown exponentially, to the point where it’s even larger than Friendster (a similar service, which has been around for awhile). It seems like it might have some interesting potential, so if any of you are interested, let me know and I’ll send you an invite (assuming you’re a friend).

…scary. The human body was not designed to do this (approx. 45 seconds into the clip).