I can totally relate to Adrien Brody’s character in King Kong. It’s a familiar story; sensitive writer falls for a beautiful ingenue, but he has to compete with a brooding jock-type for her attention. The writer expresses his love for the ingenue by writing a play for her. The big lug expresses his love by killing T. Rexes and beating the shit out of other people. The ingenue knows the writer is a good guy, but she can’t help but feel a more primal attraction to the vocabulary-challenged dude with the big pecs and the anger-management issues.
Story of my life.
As I was writing this, I received an e-mail from a woman on Match.com. Here’s an excerpt:
I dream to create family and to care of my husband. I want, that me liked and also cared. I like tenderness and kindness in the person. Also I like the decent and fair person. I still young and I want to think of my family. I want to create healthy and strong family in a lot of good statuses for a life!
She then goes on to ask that I e-mail her at an address ending with a Russian domain name. I have to say, the prominent mention of “husband” is a little off-putting, but I’m willing to chalk that up to simple overeagerness. I looked at her profile and she’s looking for guys between 3’0″ and 8’0″, so I’m covered there. And as an attorney and civil servant, I’ve got “good statuses” written all over me. Plus, I really dig women with Slavic accents. I think I have a good feeling about this one. Now all I have to do is e-mail her back. It’s a little weird that she asked me to attach PDFs of my bank statements and pay stubs, but she’s probably been burned by other guys in the past and she’s just trying to be careful. And I’d better start checking on ticket prices to Moscow or St Petersburg or wherever because she’s probably going to want to introduce me to the family.
I knew this on-line dating thing would pay off sooner or later.

Sasha the Agoraphobic Dog arrived with my parents last night. It’s a bit sad to see how she’s aging. My parents bought her as a puppy when I was a senior in college. Now, her face is completely white and I can tell that her hips bother her when she stands up after lying down for an extended time. I’m glad for these times when I get to see her. I don’t have the time to care for a dog of my own, but it was nice to have her greet me at my door when I came home from running an errand last night.
From up here on The 19th Floor, I want to wish everyone the happiest of holidays, regardless of what you do or don’t celebrate. I hope that wherever you are, the food is good, the company is pleasant, and that it’s where you want to be.
I need to wrap some presents. I hate how the Scotch tape sticks to my tongue and how the gift wrap leaves little paper cuts inside my mouth. But I do it all out of love, baby.

Minneapolis is one step closer to becoming a wireless city. The city is currently considering two proposals, one from Earthlink and one from local company US Internet, to construct and maintain a citywide wi-fi network. I do wish the city would own and operate its own network. Internet access has saturated the country to such a point and has become so critical to our infrastructure that it should be considered a public utility. However, the political realities confronting Minneapolis probably make public ownership unlikely. If the city moved in this direction, it would likely face legal action from the big telecoms like Qwest, much as Philadelphia did when it began planning its own municipal wi-fi network. But I am pleased to see that the proposed prices for wi-fi network could be substantially lower than what I’m paying now to Time Warner. If I can get consistent speeds of 6Mbps on the wi-fi network, I’ll gladly switch.

A couple weeks ago, I read an excellent New Yorker story covering the “intelligent design” trial in Dover, Pennsylvania. The writer expressed admiration for the judge overseeing the trial and predicted the judge would strike down the school board’s attempt to bring the philosophy of intelligent design into public school science classrooms. And that’s exactly what happened. I find this whole “controversy” to be both amusing and a little sad. People who support the teaching of ID tend to be fundamentalist Christians who are normally quite vocal in their faith, but they get all coy when they’re asked to identify who the intelligent designer might be behind such wonders as the human appendix and the blind spot in the human eye. Was it a race of superintelligent aliens? God? The Flying Spaghetti Monster?
On this question, ID proponents are oddly silent.
I’m an atheist, but I understand the need to believe that there is an order, a purpose, to our lives. Life, even at its best, is difficult and it’s so comforting to think that we are all part of some grand design overseen by a benevolent and omniscient power. And people should feel free to believe that if it makes existence more bearable. However, it’s impossible to ground this belief in science. Science is the ongoing endeavor to observe and explain natural phenomena through methods that can be tested and proven. It’s not wish fulfillment.

For the past couple days, I’ve been experimenting with Konfabulator Yahoo Widgets. It’s a program that allows the user to run all kinds of widgets on the desktop. Right now, I have widgets showing me the weather forecast, my system’s hard disk and memory usage, and an analog clock. I’m not sure how useful these widgets actually are, but they do look kind of cool sitting there on my desktop. And I like the idea of being able to glance at my desktop for critical but generic information. I’m of the basic philosophy that you can never have too much information at your fingertips. People who complain about information overload are really saying they don’t have the patience to filter out the signal from the noise. I don’t have the problem.