A collection of kisses: [link]

I have made the lovely discovery that the new Kellogg's Chocolate Mini-Bites taste exactly like Cocoa Puffs used to, back when they were plastered with sugar.

Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs!

Anyone else wondering if the top was billytea's bitrhday cake? [link]

Oh, Tom, thank you so much for that link! Bushels of virtual kisses to you in return.

Ugh - just got hit with a random wave of vertigo. I feel like I just stepped off a rollercoaster.

No fun. As much as I like rollercoasters, I've been having this happen way too much lately. To the point where I started PT for "vestibular rehabilitation" yesterday. Vertigo isn't gone, but I'm much more aware of my neck (where he was manipulating me) than I usually am.

Hopefully I'm just hungry - I went out for Chinese food as soon as I felt comfortable standing, and am now counting on the healing power of orange chicken and fried rice,

I want that cure.

There is no orange chicken anywhere near me.

Why has God forsaken me? (I mean, besides the not believing in Him thing....)

Reading Kafka improves learning?

New research suggest that exposure to bizarre, surreal storylines such as Kafka's "The Country Doctor" can improve learning. Apparently, when your brain is presented with total absurdity or nonsense, it will work extra hard to find structure elsewhere. In the study by the University of British Columbia psychologists, subjects read The Country Doctor and then took a test where they had to identify patterns in strings of letters. They performed much better than the control group. From Science Daily (Wikimedia Commons image):

People who read the nonsensical story checked off more letter strings –– clearly they were motivated to find structure," said Proulx. "But what's more important is that they were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did."

In a second study, the same results were evident among people who were led to feel alienated about themselves as they considered how their past actions were often contradictory. "You get the same pattern of effects whether you're reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity," Proulx explained. "People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns."

Go Team Kafka!

This sounds reasonable as long as it isn't a mechanism to avoid state regulation sort of like how all credit cards seem to come from Delaware.

That's pretty much exactly what it is.

Also, while Dreher isn't particularly hateful, he's not usually a good example of a rational conservative. He may not like Limbaugh to express his racism outright, but only because it exposes his own. He is on the Ed board of the DMN and can pretty much be counted on for any "why can't those muslim, black, hispanic, youngsters, women [insert minority here] just behave like us rich white men?"