Boo-Boo is in heat again. I hadn't expected her to go into it so soon; I'd been planning on getting her fixed next week.

Of course, since she's Siamese, she's got one heck of a set of pipes on her; even with the bedroom door closed, her hallway yowling resonates at human-baby pitch (reason #768 why Karen and I will never have children — we both like our sleep too much). Fortunately, since she's a cat, we can take steps that would land us in big trouble if we tried it with human children: last night, I closed her in the room diametrically opposite the bedroom, with a litterbox and food. She had all the necessities, and she could scream her head off without disturbing us. Everybody wins!

Well, except me; I thought of this plan after Karen went to bed, and when she got up, she assumed Boo-Boo had gotten trapped accidentally, and let her out — so I woke up to the head-splitting wail of a cat desperately in need of a shag (thus making it clear to me why the German word for "hangover" literally translates to "cats' discomfort").

I'll say one thing; Boo-Boo did manage to get me up faster than my alarm clock usually does; she has no snooze button. Unfortunately.

The United States of America is not a Christian nation, and probably never will be.

By "Christian nation", I don't mean "composed of Christians", because as long as the Constitution remains in effect, the government can't prohibit other religions from existing or even flourishing within the nation's borders. Rather, I mean "following the teachings of Christ" — for despite some politicians' fervent avowals that they're good Christians, they don't (and can't) apply the teachings of their religion to the offices they hold.

The most obvious example, of course, is the President. Despite his claims to be a Christian (and his statement that Jesus was the philosopher he admires most), George W. Bush did not in fact "turn the other cheek" when America was attacked, as Jesus taught. Rather, he ignored that teaching (as well as the commandment "Thou shalt not kill"), in order to strike back at those who attacked us (showing that, to Dubya, man's desire for retribution takes precedence over the teachings of Christ).

Indeed, Bush could not have done otherwise and still remained President; had he told the nation that, as a Christian, he was choosing to set a Christian example by turning the other cheek, he would have been impeached by angry citizens demanding retribution for the attacks of September Eleventh.

As long as America institutes capital punishment, builds lethal weapons and trains its armies to kill, it is not — and cannot legitimately claim to be — a Christian nation, despite the religious right's insistence that we are. (Then again, the religious right has always comprised those "Christians" who pick and choose which of Christ's teachings they want to follow, and ignore the ones they find inconvenient.)

Every day, out of morbid curiosity, I click on the True North link to see when they'll finally take the page down. Apparently, Kevin Frank, the strip's creator, decided to pack it in (naturally, just after I'd been told about it and found I liked it).

There was a new strip up today. Did Frank change his mind and resurrect the strip? Or were they simply putting up an orphaned strip that hadn't run yet? Since it's a Sunday strip, today is Tuesday, and it wasn't there yesterday, I kind of suspect the latter. But I can always hope.

I was in the kitchen, with Karen and some friends watching TV in the living room. As I passed by the sink, I noticed that it was making a quiet, high-pitched noise, as though metal were constantly scraping against metal.

I turned on the faucet, to see if that was the cause, and instantly there was a banging noise. I thought it was the pipes banging, but then I realized it was the downstairs neighbors (which, in real life, don't exist, as I live in a house. But this is dreamworld, where such things are infinitely malleable).

For some reason, the banging filled me with a nameless dread. I felt the blood drain from my face, and a chill spread over my body, and then I found myself wide awake in bed, unable to get back to sleep.

So here I am, posting at 4:10 AM. Wheee.

I try not to re-post links from Fark, but this one blew my mind: Astronomers may have found Earth's third moon. Third?!?! I never knew we had two! So... Luna, Cruithne and a moon to be named later.

I dunno; is Cruithne (pronounced cru·een·ya) actually a moon? It's technically an asteroid, but Phobos and Deimos may be C-type asteroids, too. On the other hand, at 5 KM diameter, it's less than half the size of Deimos. Does size matter when classifying something as a moon? I don't know. What I do know is that some joker named it after some Celtic goddess whose name is pronouced even less like it's spelled than most French words.

This morning, I received an email from some anonymous person "in a small village in southeastern Ontario (province), Canada (big country north of the usa)". This person (using AOL for Windows CA — is everything in Canada branded with the country's name?) requested information about something on my site, then ended the email with:

thanks...and ps, please don't try to answer to this addy...won't take any mail

Um... Hello, genius?

I ordered my upgrade from Cakewalk Home Studio 2002 to Sonar 2.0 today, and asked if by any chance it could be shipped in time to reach me Thursday.

"No," replied the salesdroid, "our standard shipping is 5-7 business days."

"You can't ship it overnight?" I asked.

"Well, we do have an express order," he conceded. "It'll cost $30, and it'll get there in 4-6 business days."

What, these folks have never heard of FedEx? Or UPS? Or even USPS Priority Mail? Sorry, but $22 extra for one day earlier just isn't worth it.

I love getting free software.

A couple of weeks ago, on the Animation:Master mailing list, the company rep announced the next animation contest topic: do anything you want, and export it to ArcticPigs format. ArcticPigs is a 3D plugin (for Windows Internet Explorer only, unfortunately) which permits the Web browser to download and render realtime 3D animations. It can produce better quality than a video file, because it doesn't have to compress the hell out of each frame, since all the data is actually rendered on the viewer's computer. But since the model and choreography data is fairly efficient, the file sizes are relatively quite small.

Anyway, to get things started, the rep offered a free copy of the ArcticPigs exporter to anyone who had won a Hash image/animation contest before. They quickly changed this to "anyone who'd placed in a contest", and a couple of days later, offered it to anyone who'd even entered a Hash competition.

Hooray! I'd entered one once, so I dutifully sent in my contact information, and last night it was waiting for me when I got home.

Unfortunately, my modelling style is kind of incompatible with the ArcticPigs requirements; I do a lot of tweaking in order to round the edges of inorganic models, and AP completely ignores the tweaks I do, so my rounded edges end up sharply beveled. Still, it only took me a few hours last night to fix a lute model that had taken me about a week to build. I still need to texture it, as the AP plugin doesn't support the kind of textures I used.

The AP export is pretty cool; you can rotate, move and zoom around the models, even if there's no animation going on. My lute model generates thousands upon thousands of polygons, and it renders surprisingly quickly under ArcticPigs. I think I'm going to have fun with it...

Since I'll be driving my car up to Jacksonville this weekend, I decided it would probably be a good idea to renew my license tag, which was slightly expired. Fortunately, the penalty was only $15, but I wasted a check because I called ahead to find out how much it would cost, and filled out the check ahead of time — and the woman at the counter quoted me a different price. I asked her to double-check, because her price was $11.50 lower then what I had been told to pay, and she seemed surprised that I hadn't just silently accepted the lower price.

She was also amazed that I hadn't been pulled over for the expired plate. Considering that a friend of mine was pulled over in November for a plate that expired in November, I guess I've been lucky over the past ten months. I've got to learn how to stop procrastinating.

In other news, the UN has supported France's ban on dwarf-tossing, in order to "preserve human dignity". I'm sure they'll be censuring their member nations that practice slavery, child labor and clitoridectomies any day now.