So. Umm. Can someone explain the whole Foreman grill thing to me? We have one at home. I made a burger with it once. My roommates use it tons. It's ok.

What I don't get is this: it's a freakin waffle iron! This is not new technology. Why has it suddenly gotten so popular?! Has the waffle iron's time just come? I suppose no other waffle iron has had this much marketing effort behind it. The damn thing is in Amazon's best seller list. Who's buying them? I don't think college kids can have them in the dorms? I might be wrong but it would strike me odd since they can't have other dangerous heat sources... like candles :P

Anyway...

....

At a friend's suggestion I've been eating a bowl of oatmeal before I come to work. It's made a surprising difference in how I feel all day. I recommend it. Just plain old Quaker Oats (the right thing to do (tm)) with maybe a touch of honey or real maple syrup. It's good.

Historically, breakfast and I have never gotten along too well. I have trouble waking up in the morning (perhaps because I stay up too late) and the last thing I want to do right away is eat something. I think my body has adapted to this state of affairs over the years but would be happier with some kind of energy (other than a coke) to start the day.

Speaking of history, I've been reading Richard Leakey's _Origins Revisited_ over the course of the last few days. The guy's not a bad writer for a specialist. It's a reasonably well-written book. My mother recommended it to me for the discussion of the origins of conciousness in the latter chapters. That's a topic that absolutely fascinates me.

Over the course of the book there has been one thing that's really stood out: from a scientific standpoint anthropology is an amazingly sloppy field. Perhaps Leakey is leaving out descriptions of the rigourous sorts of things anthropologists do for the sake of writing a book that doesn't cause narcoleptic seizures. I don't know. The amazing amount of wishful thinking, speculation, imposition of personal desires, etc he paints in to the anthropological community really makes me wonder, though.

In all fairness, anthropologists are sort of out on a limb. Let's say that there are 5000 hominid skeletons spanning a period from 2.5 million years ago until 250,000 years ago. That's not a very large sample for a set of that magnitude. It's got to be fairly hard to do more than conjecture.

I suppose there is some hope for the field, though. Modern genetics can offer some powerful tools for the sorts of analysis that will interest anthropologists.

All that said, it's still a fascinating business. If nothing else, it makes for entertaining and plausible fiction. I'm glad that there are people that are still working on tracing out the descent of man.

...

Things are strange at work today. The "big" TU OU game is tonight and it's like a circus around the campus. *boggles* I don't get this game. OU could play their third-string all night and still hand us our asses. In a way I really feel worst for the players on both sides. Our guys are going to get killed out there and the OU guys are going to have to figure out some way to make the whole thing sportsman-like. I can just imagine. "Uh... guys... the score is 73 to 3 now... should we let them score again?"

I'm not maligning our football team at all. I'm sure those guys play their hearts out. This match is just so lopsided that it's not even funny. I guess it's just a publicity stunt... but it's kind of a sad one.