Space Cadet

Some people try to be weird to stand out. ...Others were born that way and need years to come to terms with it before they finally say f-it and can accept it as a compliment. But weirdness does like company. :wacko:

Can't sleep. Monkey's going to eat me. :stunned:

Zot. :hat2: :vanish:

Yep! :D You have until midnight tonight GMT if you want to make any changes. (That's 7pm EST) I'm putting you on the list tentatively, but you do need a 5th album by this evening. Hmm. Have you tried Doves' album, Kingdom of Rust? (look on Grooveshark http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/album/Kingdom+Of+Rust/3051085 ) Or if you want something easy to stream that I think you might possibly like, there's a wonderful band around here called In-Flight Safety with a new album out called "We are an Empire, My Dear": http://www.inflightsafety.ca/ you can listen to the whole thing in their music section. Well it has certainly been the women's year this year, but it's different. There are actual proper rock chicks who do really interesting non-mainstream stuff who aren't annoying or syrupy. And Emily Haines rules them all. :nice: Well they're working on one right now. (Yay!) But every album has been different for them. It may take it a while to come together. And Thom has a history of getting stressed out and going a bit bibbledy during recording, so they'll probably go at a pace that will make sure he's ok. They don't have a recording contract anymore, so they can take as long or as short as they want, and release their music however they want.

Good morning! :D 9 hours left. :surprised: Major snowstorm here. If the power goes out I'll keep an eye on things with my phone, but will have to do all last-minute housekeeping when it comes on/in the morning. Still on now, though.

Yeah, you keep saying that, and I keep having trouble believing you, cute accent or no cute accent. :P So where did it all go wrong? :thinking:

Bump! 19 1/2 hours left!!! :dance:

What the hooey is a regular person? :mad: ...We're all mad here... :clown:

Any (noncynical :P) guesses on the top 5?

So are you ever going to write a list?;) Well, they've been popular. They've certainly got a good shot at the top 5 I would guess... :thinking::sneaky:

^Yeah... hmm... I'm beginning to wonder if he thinks he can act like a jerk because he got away with it as a kid by being cute. I just picture this 6-year-old version of him yelling "you suck!" and all the grownups going "ohh, isn't he adorable? Here, have a biscuit." :sneaky::lol::P

My card has unfortunately been delayed this week due to unforeseen circumstances, but it will be sent next week as soon as I can get to a post office.

Bump! :hat2:

Less than 2 days left!!! Please make sure your list appears on the first page so that it will be counted. :escaping2:

Sorry to be a pain, but it's only once a year... :embarassed: Albums of the Year ends this Sunday at 7:00pm EST That's midnight GMT. P.S. stay tuned for the final countdown sometime next weekend. If everything works, there may even be a webcast. :cool: :vanish:

Songs from the old animated version of Return of the King. Those who saw it as small children have a slight tendency to randomly sing them in public very loudly when reminded. They're so brilliantly cheesetastic. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzl1iDuE-2I]YouTube- 1970s Return of the King "Frodo of the Nine Fingers"[/ame] [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdXQJS3Yv0Y]YouTube- Where there's a whip, there's a way![/ame]

^Ahh, thanks. :D

And if they make bad decisions based on lies friends, teachers, doctors, and drug companies tell them, was it ever their own choice at all? I never said I was for or against. I just said that if it is legalized, people have to address the question. How many may die? And control goes both ways: See question #2- I'll write that rant later. But food for thought: If a teacher has a problem with you and tells you she won't let you pass unless you take a drug, was that your choice? If parents want a healthy normal kid to get good grades and force him to take these drugs with all their side effects and repercussions just because it's legal, is that his choice? If a boss lays off half his staff and forces the rest to take drugs so that they can pick up the slack, is that their choice? What if all bosses do that? What if you can't get a job unless you're willing to take drugs you don't need and don't want? What happens when people start dying from that? Don't think it can't happen. It's like with sports teams before drug testing was so common. If you want to compete, you have to get on the roids. If you don't, you're off the team.

Ok, I'm sorry, I'm trying really hard not to, but :singer: Frodo of the nine fingers, and the ring of doooooooooooom!!! :laugh3: p.s. :singer: But where there's a whip there's a waaay.... :whip: :freak: Sorry, continue.

Oh, don't panic them... they're so cute and naive and fragile. :p

Good grief... it's just Briggins trying to stir the hornet's nest again with a bunch of intentionally false assumptions. :P The live album didn't have anything to do with Mew beyond rumor to begin with.

http://mewsite.tumblr.com/ Pitchfork misunderstood.

Some thoughts on question #3: I used Ritalin (and for a time one of its cousins) for what worked out to about two and a half or three years. Over that time I worked in a call center for about a year and then went to university. There were times it really worked for me, and there were times it didn’t work so well. The side effects weren’t so great. If I wasn’t careful I got really horrible headaches. One doctor’s solution was to take a large amount of extra strength Tylenol whenever I took the meds. I finally figured out that if I drank massive amounts of water constantly, it kept them away. Well, more or less. Another side effect was sleep problems. If I took Ritalin too late in the day, I couldn’t sleep. If I didn’t take days off the meds, I couldn’t sleep. When I tried higher doses (because I needed them) I couldn’t sleep. If I missed much sleep, the meds would keep me awake, but because I was overtired they wouldn’t really help me concentrate anymore. But the nastiest part, the part that sent me running in the other direction once I figured out what happened, the part that happened when I did everything right, was all the time I spent asleep but not really sleeping. I would get in bed, fall asleep instantly, and wake up effortlessly a moment before my alarm went off, feeling like I had been asleep for 5 minutes. I didn’t dream anymore. I missed dreaming. I was tired all the time, but as long as I stayed on the meds, it couldn’t really affect me. It eventually got to the point where I was as bad as I had been before the meds, except now the moment they started to wear off I was worse. I was so sleep deprived and I couldn’t even feel it. I couldn’t imagine either, because I didn’t dream. My work suffered. There were two choices at that point: increase the amount I was taking, or try to live without them at all. I chose the latter, and I didn’t regret it. Some people who use Ritalin don’t just have sleep issues like I did, they have permanent insomnia. They wear themselves out and they just have to keep taking higher and higher doses to overcome the sleep deprivation. Many of them have doctors who think the same way mine did about the headaches. If you have a problem, use another drug. So now they’re on Ritalin during the day, and powerful sleeping pills at night. They are completely cut off from what their body and circadian rhythms are telling them. They take one pill to be asleep, and one pill to be awake. And they hope that their pharmacist knows to keep an eye on them, because if enough of the two drugs are leftover in their system at the same time, that can be a disaster waiting to happen. Now how much more of a chance do those people have of having headaches do you think? What about other problems? What drugs are their doctors going to put them on for those symptoms? At what point do they accidentally take too many pills at once and not wake up again? If Ritalin is legalized for all, how many people will go through that? How many are going to die?

Mo's essay part 2 Some thoughts behind question #1: The thing about ADD (at least in my opinion and experience) is that it's not so much a disorder as a brain and personality style. Ask a highly organized lawyer to create a piece of abstract art in any medium depicting the emotional ramifications of the colour blue, and they'll probably struggle. They might paint a picture of water and say here, it's blue, but they won't really 'get' the whole project. Force them to work on it exclusively for a week, and they'll get twitchy and agitated. They'll have trouble concentrating. Basically, they will end up displaying all of the symptoms of ADD. Give them a detailed, ordered list of fixed tasks to follow to complete the project with minimal creative effort and they will be fine. Now a person with ADD will probably thrive with an active, abstract project like that. They can run around everywhere like a messy crazy person and still get lots of work done. If they're really into it they'll probably work at it for days without much sleep. However, if you give them a list that they have to follow- in order- if they want to work on the project, then it will all fall apart for them. The joy and the focus will be gone, and they will start acting just like the lawyer did before he was given the list. Society values organized lawyers, not abstract artists. So the latter personality is labeled as disordered. ADD truly is a modern disorder. A century or two ago, someone who had it would never have been thought disordered. They were the farmers, the painters, the blacksmiths, the weavers, the carpenters, and the cooks. They built things, created things, and fixed things. They usually dropped out of school at a very early age to study a trade, and no one would worry because hey, Dad really needs help on the farm or hey, they have a fantastic future in a trade. Physically running around doing things was their strong point, and since most jobs required that, no one ever noticed if they were a little bit different. So today's disability was yesterday's need. Today we have desk jobs. We have to spend 13 years of our childhoods trapped behind a desk listening and writing and memorizing. We spend our free time sitting in front of computers or televisions. We graduate from school and then we go to another school with more desks and essays and focusing on bits of paper or computer screens. We graduate from that and we get a desk job shuffling more bits of paper around and filling in boxes for the rest of our lives. The people who can't handle it get jobs in stores or restaurants trapped behind a cash register earning minimum wage, and because they can't handle that kind of work they don't last in any job for very long. They become failures. Meanwhile, the manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. The farms are run by big corporations with machines. The other formerly hands-on jobs also have machines to do them now. Most things that need to be fixed are replaced instead because the components are too tiny or too cheap to change by hand. Sure the trades that are left are desperate for people, and some of them pay well, but they're seen as 'lower class' so in today's arrogant, me-first society hardly anyone tries them. (I did. It's the first time I've ever belonged anywhere. It was like being on Ritalin without the drugs.) Oh, and to get into a trade you have to survive high school and trade school- i.e. lots of time behind a desk looking at bits of paper. For a person with ADD the entire modern system is torture. It's as bad and as unrealistic as asking the lawyer who likes organized lists and paperwork to understand and enjoy emotional abstract art FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE. And since ADD is a personality trait- and therefore genetic, the decedents of all those displaced farmers and craftspeople are being born into a world they weren't evolved (or created) for. Just look at the way perceptions of ADD have changed since it was "discovered". First it was a childhood disease. You had it when you were trapped in the modern school system. It was discovered around the time that society shifted so that fewer jobs were available without a high school diploma. Supposedly, it went away when you grew up and got a job- usually in the trades. Now, within the last 10 or 20 years it is starting to be seen as a lifelong disease that the sufferer brings into the workplace with them. Now look at when all the manufacturing jobs left. Look at how much more popular desk work is these days. Notice a pattern? ADD happened because for the first time society as a whole began to value one type of brain function, and one style of working over another on a large scale. That's where the drugs come in. The drugs are a tool that let you sit behind a desk reading bits of paper without going crazy, even if you aren't suited to it. They change how your brain processes the information. If a brain is already suited to sitting still focusing on a piece of paper, the drugs will enhance that ability. If a brain is not suited to it, they will magnify what little ability is there to the point where the person almost seems 'normal' i.e. the drugs can change their personality, but they will never work as well as they do for the person who already enjoys that sort of thing. And really, they are only targeting that one little piece of the ADD puzzle; true ADD works on many levels. Ritalin targets one type of skill. Specifically the one skill modern society suddenly values in a new way. So, question one. Are we as a society willing to face up to this? Are we willing to question whether we have our priorities mixed up? Are we willing to look at different ways of structuring things so that more than one specific personality type can be a productive part of society? I'm guessing we want the quick fix. Hand out the drugs like candy so that we can have the skills nature wouldn't give us. It's not healthy, but it's not surprising either. Want to know why we're obese? The obese crowd who avoid restaurants eat less fat than they used to. But we all sit behind desks all day looking at screens or bits of paper.

That's everyone's best guess. Yay! :nice: