Guy wonders why I need to get up at 4am and why I need that stay-awake drug. So, let me take you thru my morning…

At approximately 4am, the cats (all 4 of them) begin to stir. This wakes the dog, who feels it is incumbent upon him to protect us from the intrusion of the cats. He jumps out of the bed, chases a cat down the stairs, then returns to pounce on the bed and alert us in celebration of his victory. He repeats this for each cat.

By this time it is 4:30am and my alarm starts its insistent bleating at a frequency carefully calibrated to make my abdominal muscles contract, lifting me into a fully sitting position. When I finally find the snooze button (which seems to migrate around the top of the clock radio so it is never where I expect it to be) so to silence my alarm, Jenn’s alarm sounds, blasting bad nu-metal at 130dB just in case Pete Townsend needed to hear Puddle of Mudd through his tinnitus while standing next to the nacelle of a 767. She doesn’t hear it.

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Great Names for Bands Dep’t:
Tension Dam in the Trough of Urine

…may pass right by your house. Over each of the next 38 years, approximately 2760 trucks will travel US roads carying nuclear waste on its way to Yucca Mountain in Nevada, where it is to be permanently stored.
Want to see how close it’ll come to your house? Visit the Environmental Working Group’s Nuclear Waste Route Atlas.
Doing a few calculations on some numbers I picked up from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s “Traffic Safety Facts 2000: Large Trucks” publication, I come up with these figures:

• approximately 8,000,000 large trucks registered in the US in 2000
• approximately 450,000 large trucks involved in crashes in 2000
• that makes an accident rate of about 17%

Believe me: I know my methodology is not perfect when I say that if we apply this rate to the 2760 trucks carrying nuclear waste around the country each year, we can expect about 490 accidents involving these vehicles each year for the next 4 decades.

Sure, most of these accidents will be minor fender benders, but someone tell me: what are the odds that some of these accidents are not going to be minor?

And… do I even need to talk about the possibility of terrorism? (Or of earthquakes once the waste gets to Yucca Mountain?)

Can you spell “inevitable”?

It’s a slow Monday at work after a busy weekend. At 10:30, I’m having a hell of a time keeping my eyes open. This is not unusual; in fact it’ll happen to me again at around 4:00 this afternoon, as it does nearly every day. Luckily, I drive a desktop, so I’m not endangering anyone else with my dozing.
I hate it: that inability to give in to a pleasant nap coming at the same instant as the inability to stay awake. I start daydreaming about bringing a cot in to work or closing myself in one of the “workforce reduction”-vacated offices and snoring away for an hour or so. Then I read this article in the WaPo about modafinil (brand name Provigil), a miracle drug which can let me go for forty hours without sleep, without speed jitters, without the amphetamine crash, and most importantly, without the loss of focus other stimulants leave you with.
Had this drug been more widely known, perhaps the US Air National Guard would not have “accidentally” bombed and killed Canadian troops in Afghanistan. Perhaps we could keep medical residents working their average 93-hour workweek.

I wonder, though, is it normal to be looking for more hours in the day to be busy, to get things done, to work, to study? Or is it something which, on other continents, they’ll be saying: “It’s just an American thing.”

The New York Times has this interesting headline:
Forest Worker Is Held in Fire in Colorado
Must be a new Ashcroft policy.