That’s the state of my rubix 4-cube, which I recently re-noticed, hiding behind a vase. The core was not too bad, but the edges were a pain; I never really figured out the rules. I just kept trying different things and hoping my pattern recognition circuits were being subliminally helpful. In the end, it’s been reduced to a 3-cube, which is all that really matters: the rest is (in theory) a bunch of vertex swaps, vertex shuffles and edge swap/shuffles. (Oh and don’t get too comfy with the edges lined up… they’re gonna be re-positioned… though hopefully* not scrambled, during the final steps).
But it’s not the edge shuffles I’m not worried about… basic twists’ll do, and occasionally the Deanster, my pet eponym for the algorithm a friend taught me a long time ago for edge shuffles. It’s beautifully poetic… almost sing-song… have a listen:
“up, around, up, around, up around – around,
down, around, down, around, down around – around”.
Nihilism seems to have undertones of apathy, doesn’t it? There’s something about it like a big sigh. A world-weary, ‘ho hum’ sort of way of being at the core of it.
Male heroism, at least in the movies, is a simplistic thing: upper body strength, good reaction times, speed/agility, nerves of steel. Around that you can wrap slightly less essential things: good looks, a way with the women (or at least the leading lady), and erm… puzzle-solving, I guess. They will be on a quest of some sort, after all. Then there’s the slightly more esoteric things like supernatural agency and descendancy from (or ascendancy into) one pantheon or another.
Regardless of what your new agey friends have told you, goddesses don’t wander the earth mewling for validation. Divas are at the very least people who can sing. Princesses are the daughters of recognized monarchs and Queens are these latter’s female biological antecedents. 
I went to see these two goofballs at left, in the movie “
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You should probably know what words I’ve hijacked in order to complete this blog post. By hijack, I mean these are my definitions; they are local to this blog post… they last until the end of the post, at which point they vanish into thin air.
I was just musing over how incredibly annoying ads are these days… and then Heineken’s ‘The Date’ concept burst onto the scene. (Well, OK… ‘my awareness’. It’s been on ‘the scene’ for a good while already).
So, when trundling along between the movator lanes at the airport (San Francisco), what do you expect to see? OK, what do you totally not expect to see? A totally awesome exhibit on the history of television, that’s what… right smack dab in the middle of the thoroughfare between the security-heads and the gate you’re supposed to wait patiently at.