Sometimes I become so enmeshed in the daily dramas of life that I forget to recognize the important milestones of those I hold dear. In such cases of neglect, the sin is not selfishness--I care, I really do--but rather self-absorption. My life is like a gripping suspense film. I...just...can't...turn...away. Not because my life is particularly interesting. It just happens to be mine. In addition, I have an attention absorption problem. I can't even turn away from an episode of Elmo's World. (My nephew and I like to spend quality time with our furry red monster friend.) [Read more]

If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation (sic) unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.

This according to an article at the BBC Web site that reports on a scientific paper written by researchers in Canada. It’s almost as if Bob and Doug MacKenzie were unleashed on an unsuspecting university math department.

The researchers say that, although they realize that zombies are not real, their findings could have real world applications in fighting infectious diseases. They also say “the key difference between the zombies and the spread of real infections is that ‘zombies can come back to life.'” [Read more]

Great answers to Part I of the regrets column. Here are my other 5 top regrets.

6) I regret being afraid of dying. In some ways, I feel my whole life's purpose is to finally accept (at least on a Zen-like level) the inevitability of my death. Instead, the concept so terrifies me that it has clearly kept me from being as adventurous and/or productive as I could have been. A little caution can be a good thing, perhaps, but to live without fear of death sounds so freeing. (To be completely accurate, it's more the pain of dying than the actual being dead part that scares me). [Read more]

In a post long ago, I talked about regrets and how I view them as a natural part of the examined life, something to be embraced, not feared. A person who claims he has no regrets is either a magnificent liar or an unreflective fool.

You can learn a lot from your regrets, and the only goal should be to minimize their occurrence as you grow older.

I didn't go into much detail discussing the specifics of my actual regrets, but I've now decided to list the top 10 regrets of my life to date, thinking that it could actually be a useful exercise for me and an enjoyable, potentially educational, but very long read for others (so long in fact that I've decided to divide the column into two). [Read more]

I don't actually know how the folks who manage Eve Online plan to deal with this, except that they've booted the virtual fraudster out of the game.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/07/03/science-online-bank-heist.html

The scary part is that he successfully traded the "interstellar kredits" he stole for real-life money. Only $5,000 or so -- but still! If what you stole doesn't really exist, can you be accused of committing a crime in the real world? Especially when the virtual world permits and even encourages illegal activities? Suppose you libel a fellow player in an interactive game. Does he or she have recourse in a real-world court? [Read more]

Happy Canada Day, everyone. Snap quiz, if you're up to it:
1. Exactly what are we celebrating the anniversary of?
2. Who gets top billing as "Father of Confederation?"
3. Name one other.
4. Where exactly is the Canada-U.S. border (I mean the long straight part)?
5. Why did Canadians decide they wanted a country anyway?
6. What's the national anthem? Fairly easy one.
7. What's the flag? Ditto.
8. What's the national sport? What, another gimme?
9. How many provinces are there? Territories?
10. Aside from free-trade squabbles, what's our biggest looming dispute with the U.S.?

It's been a long time since I've written a Questions column, but now that we have so many new contributors and commenters, I think it's about time we get to know each other a bit better.

Alas, now that online poker has sapped my soul and absconded with my muse to a faraway island, I am forced to look to Cosmo magazine for inspiration. [Read more]

I should disclose at the outset that this is not a "How To" piece. If I knew how to find my joy, I'd surely have located it by now. But I've been thinking about happiness since Ross "What Women Want" Douthat declared why women are unhappy in his New York Times column last week.

I'm sure the people who worked on that study went to a lot of time and effort to come to their conclusion that women today are not as happy as their 1960s counterparts. I have a sneaking suspicion that it's at least in part because it's not as easy to get valium. But I also wonder if it's really true that women today are less content. [Read more]

You might think of couchsurfing as the exploitation of your friends' living room furniture. That is so old school. Welcome to couchsurfing 2.0, where you can travel the world via the living room furniture of complete strangers. The CouchSurfing Project is a social networking site where you can offer your home to travelers and take advantage of the couches, guest beds, and floor spaces of others when you travel. It was launched in 2004 and now has more than a million members in 232 countries. It's the most popular hospitality site on the internet, averaging more than 30 million daily page views (which is slightly higher than dagblog.com). It's mission: Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch at a Time. [Read more]

Is it bad form to mention a blogger on another blog? I don't know much about blog etiquette. Until about a year ago, I thought blogs were like MySpace pages: self-indulgent and of very little interest to anyone except the author and the author's close friends. 

That's not to say that I didn't read a couple. I do have some close friends, after all. But until I found myself starved for information about the Democratic primary campaign last winter, I'd never heard of Kos or TPM. I didn't know about Crooks and Liars or Five Thirty-Eight. I was so woefully uninformed. I thought if I wanted political news I had to read the paper or watch the increasingly inane television news.   [Read more]

This financial crisis is more than what it appears.

It is symptomatic of a society that at some point over the last 30 years lost its way by seeking not the road less traveled, but instead the quickest route.

It is the culmination of a mindset that increasingly became interested in pursuing immediate gratification at any cost.

Look around you. In every area of modern life, the shortcut has become the rule, not the exception.

In sports, we substituted medicine for athleticism as steroids offered the quickest path to success (And I cheered as Mark McGwire belted homer after homer chasing down Maris' record). [Read more]

Happy Earth Hour, everyone! In a gesture of appreciation for our beautiful planet, which if all goes according to plan will slowly simmer to death sometime this century, dagblog is joining the stampede of environmentally concerned municipalities and other organizations turning the lights off major landmarks for one hour this evening. Though dagblog doesn't yet own any landmarks, DF and Deadman are feverishly negotiating to acquire the Largest Ball of Twine in time to turn the lights off there at 8:30 CST. In the meantime, we are honoring Earth Hour by going black. [Read more]

But we're never gonna survive unless ... We get a little bit crazy. - Seal

So-called normal people are boring. A little crazy is good. In fact, it's a perfectly normal response to life.  Frankly, the only truly crazy people in this world are the ones who think they're normal.

I certainly harbor no illusions of normalcy. In this long-overdue questions column, I point out some of my personal quirks of which I am most proud. And then I want you to rate them on the 1-10 crazy scale, 1 being 'That makes perfect sense', 3 being 'I guess I can kind of understand that', 5 being 'Um, ok.' 7 being 'You are effin' loco, deadman' and 10 being 'The authorities have been contacted.' [Read more]

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