Templeton is the brown rattie, and Gir is white with red eyes. It's hard to get good pictures of rats because they're not fond of bright lights. The last thing I want to do to a brand new pet is shove a flashbulb in his face.

I got them from a locally owned pet store. So far, they're still skittish. They'll come to the cage door to take treats from my hand, but that's as far as they've come in trusting me. I think they were bred to be snakefood, not pets, and they're not used to being handled.* I'm trying to do "trust training" with them, which basically involves sitting at the cage door and chanting "heeeere, boy!" while holding out a sunflower seed as an incentive to approach me.

I might be getting another rat from one of the local rescues this weekend. There's one available, and they're having a hard time placing him for adoption (I can't imagine why. *giggle*) And since I already have two males that are the same size and gender, they'd probably get along well. Taking care of three rats isn't any harder than two.

I am absolutely drawing the line at three, though. I have a few decades to go before I am allowed to become "the crazy rat lady."

*I know some people are squeamish around rats. Personally, I can't understand why anyone would want to have a giant, rat-eating snake as a pet. You can't play with them, they don't like you, and I'm guessing that an eight-foot-long Boa Constrictor isn't going to be too happy spending its life in an aquarium. I can't imagine waking up every morning, knowing that there's an animal in the house that WANTS ME DEAD and would literally squeeze the life out of me given a chance.

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I've been following the Viacom lawsuit against Youtube because I'm really interested to see how it ends and whether or not it will change the policies of other content hosting sites. It got a lot of attention last week when Viacom demanded that Youtube turn over logs of every video ever watched, along with unique user ids. They've since said that they don't want ip addresses, but this has still been a huge controversy.

This article assures us youtube users that we have nothing to fear:

Viacom (VIAB) doesn't want the names and IP addresses of YouTube users, and the company is trying to find a way to differentiate users without identifying them.

Well, that's awful nice of them and all, but it still misses the point by a mile. There is personal data on these videos; even if they are technically "public," most people never intended for large corporations to comb through them, looking for material.

I think that involving the end users in any way sets a bad legal precedent, and it's a slippery slope from here to monitoring people's personal computers. It's not as steep as some alarmists would imply; I'm not saying that it's going to turn into 1984 overnight. It's just a step in the wrong direction.

I'm not going to win any friends on the Internet with this statement, but I think it's the truth: youtube has had a lawsuit coming since they began. I say that as a regular user who hasn't paid any attention to whether or not the video uploaders held the copyrights. I don't want to lose the freedom to watch tv shows or movies on the Internet, but I have a hard time arguing that media companies don't have the right to decide where they want their content to be hosted. Would you like it if someone re-posted your blog entries or personal photos on another site without your consent? That being said, how could they need logs of anything to prove their case? Besides, many youtube users aren't even U.S. citizens, which adds a whole other set of questions about how to determine fair use and copyright law. Does this mean that I think suing Google was a brilliant move? Hardly.

The smart thing for Viacom to have done would have been to steal a play from NBC's book, & to broadcast episodes on their own website. I'm sure there are other people like me who don't have a television set and who watch TV shows and DVDs exclusively on their computers. This would have given them an opportunity to air advertisements and to profit from streaming video technology rather than fighting against it.

On a lighter note, does anyone else wonder whose job it's going to be to go through every single video on youtube looking for copyrighted Viacom content? I know that's probably not what's going to happen, but I 'm picturing some poor bastard having to watch all those videos of guys playing swearing at each other while playing Halo 3. I'd go insane before I even finished the stupid pet tricks.

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I love to see good photographs of fireworks because I can appreciate the talent and timing that people have to have in order to snap just the right moment. Some of the shots at flickr and getty images are breath taking. Nothing like the Internet to both inspire you and give you a reality check.

Because they're basically streaks of light across a dark background, you have to keep the exposure high. This also means that it takes longer to snap the photo, so you have to be able to push the button about 2 seconds before you actually want it to take an image.

I'm not a professional photographer; I took about 100 photos, and six turned out halfway decent.




This sign also made me laugh:


Only in the American south would anyone even consider doing such a thing.

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Note to self: You know perfectly well from experience that eating sugar makes you feel like crap. You also know that caffeine will keep you from sleeping, & that not exercising will make you grouchy and tired. If you persist in eating four chocolate chip cookies and washing it down with a cup of coffee, you have no right to complain about feeling crappy four hours later.

As a matter of fact, it is "four hours later" right now. I've been grousing over arguments that happened two weeks ago and problems that are all solvable- some easily, and some not so easily. Putting this into writing is helping me get a sense of perspective, and seeing that, yes, it is just me and the dramatic drop in my blood sugar.

Grr. I meant to catch up on the news, but I think I'm going to take a nap instead.

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The interesting thing about blogging is that the things you think are going to cause a reaction never do. Likewise, the things you write as throwaway jokes or snide comments end up getting you several emails and cause you to have to explain what you meant.

Out of all the things in this rant, the last thing I expected anyone to react to was the Tom Cruise reference.

I had a friend tell me that he would never take antidepressants because he didn't want to be brainwashed...and no, my friend is not Tom Cruise.

I got a couple of emails telling me that I'm being intolerant of Cruise and his religious beliefs. If they had been flames, I wouldn't have even bothered to mention them; but they were very polite.

The thing is, my post had nothing to do with the religion of Scientology. It was about clinical depression, medications, and the social stigma attached to people who deal with depression. Aside from looking it up on wikipedia out of curiosity, I haven't done any research on Scientology (that would involve, um, caring about it or Tom Cruise). Apart from all the celebrity criticisms of SSR inhibitors, I don't know anything about the religion. I don't have to.

If Tom Cruise wants "religious tolerance" in the sense of "never being criticized for anything he says, even when it flies in the face of psychiatric research and he has no credentials," he will be waiting a long time. When someone says that it's wrong for me to take the medication that helps to correct a chemical imbalance, I think that being a smartass is an appropriate response. Whatever his religious beliefs may be, this is one topic that I think Cruise is simply wrong about.

Apparently, being famous means you know everything about brain chemistry even without an m.d. Who knew?

In that same post, I spent a lot more time criticizing a Christian minister who said that people with clinical depression "just need God, not medication." This had a much more profound & negative effect on me than anything a famous, total stranger could say. It has also made me very suspicious of anyone that would make blanket statements like this. I worry that other people who have a legitimite need for treatment will listen to celebrities instead of doing their own research and deciding what's best for them.

That being said, Scientology's critics are no more a threat to Tom Cruise's religious freedom than Richard Dawkins is to mine. No matter what your beliefs are, not everybody is going to agree with you. Not everybody is going to like you. I wouldn't have it any other way. I think that the world needs debate and thoughtful examination. These things are very much a part of religious tolerance.

I am all for religious tolerance, meaning that I think people have the right to believe and practice whatever religions they wish as long as they don't infringe on other people's rights. I mean, I believe that a liberal Jewish philosopher rose from the dead 2,000 years ago. I symbolically ingest his blood and body at services every week. Believe me, I don't have a problem with people who have "weird" beliefs. That doesn't mean I'm going to accept those beliefs without question or reflection.

Now I'm going to read something that isn't about celebrities to clear my head.

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