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July 22, 2004
Blawgscavation
Every couple of days I go over to my old blawg to see how many hits it still gets. The number of visitors there is surprising high, although almost all of them come from Underneath Their Robes. I'm sure the lovely and talented Article III Groupie is much too busy with her sudden anonymous fame to update her blogroll. But, hey, I'm only one degree from someone whose been written about in Newsweek, so who can complain.
I still get a few weird google hits, too, such as "why are some baseball players wearing their hats cocked to one side" (no quotes in the search string. I'm sure that that was fruitful search.). My couple of posts about the meth scourge in rural Nebraska has attracted a good share of assholes searching for "cooking crystalmeth", "cooking meth" and the like, usually via AOL. Imagine that.
Then there's some band named Half Cocked who apparently have a cover of Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" on the Shrek soundtrack. It's odd that a stupid little blawg is the #1 hit on Google for "Half Cocked" when that band is out there. There's also a movie called Half-Cocked which actually sounds pretty good. Some of my favorite indie rawkers from the early 90's including Slant 6, Helium, Polvo, Rodan, Grifters and Unwound are on the soundtrack.
For searchers, I'm sorry I don't know anything about the movie, the band or the soundtrack.
Meth junkies, go read the article in the New York Times titled "This is Your Brain on Meth: A 'Forest Fire' of Damage". Here's a quote based on a study of 10-year meth addicts:
The limbic region, involved in drug craving, reward, mood and emotion, lost 11 percent of its tissue. "The cells are dead and gone," Dr. Thompson said. Addicts were depressed, anxious and unable to concentrate.The brain's center for making new memories, the hippocampus, lost 8 percent of its tissue, comparable to the brain deficits in early Alzheimer's. The methamphetamine addicts fared significantly worse on memory tests than healthy people the same age.
Early Alzheimer's at age 30 or earlier sure sounds fun, doesn't it?
Posted by Half-Cocked at July 22, 2004 09:42 PM