the wonderful and lovely becca has donated $100 to my fundraising, for which i send a billion kisses her way. becca is one of my major inspirations for the fundraising and marathoning, for two reasons - her mother is currently fighting breast cancer, and i never would have started long-distance running/racing in the first place if it weren't for becca's help and motivation. she's done two marathons herself, and was the one who convinced me to run a half-marathon a year ago. she hasn't been able to run in ages because she needs knee surgery (which she's getting next week), but i hope she can be my running buddy again very soon. yay becca!

so, i'm not too good with the math, or with, you know, simple addition, but as far as i can tell, i have...$1400! that means only $600 to go! with the fundraiser next week, and a letter-writing thing i'm doing today, i will hopefully be done with this in the very near future.

geez. let me tell you, i will never look at people's fundraising efforts the same again. this has definitely been one of the harder tasks i've tried to accomplish, what with the constant begging of friends, begging of businesses to donate certificates to our raffle next week, begging of coworkers, begging of family members. but everyone has been amazing -- especially readers of this blog. i really need to throw a party for all of you, or something. honestly, i wouldn't have anywhere near the amount i currently do if it weren't for what readers have chipped in. it's quite amazing. i don't know exactly how to thank everyone, especially those who live far away, but i hope you know that your donations and words of encouragement have meant so much to me.

ps: thanks also to mr. grammar police himself, kriston capps, for his generous donation! everyone rocks! i am so happy!

and thanks to jessica!! so close now. yay.

If, like me, you've read about and been intrigued by the new documentary "What the Bleep Do We Know?", don't miss the article about it in today's issue of Salon.

On its surface, the movie is an inspiring spiel that repackages a number of Saganisms about the wonder of the subatomic universe and uses them to sketch a just-vague-enough picture of God and the Meaning of Life. It's a perfect pitch for wannabe pseudointellectuals like myself -- you get to keep your closely guarded "Fuck-You-Mom-And-Dad" secularism without having to face up to staring into that oh-so inconvenient void.

Unfortunately, it turns out that this uplifting tale of quarks is being spun by disciples of a woman who claims she can channel an ancient Atlantean philosopher named Ramtha. And who knows how this happened, but somehow the taped commentary of many of the experts in the film was horribly twisted from what they intended to say. Whoops!

In general, it's pretty tough to cut through appeals to quantum weirdness because, frankly, it's really weird, even by weirdness standards, and a lot of supposed experts only half-understand it. I don't mean to dismiss all subatomic accounts of the seemingly-supernatural. Some undeniably serious people have put forward metaphysical theories that lean heavily on quantum mechanics -- here I'm specifically thinking of Roger Penrose, who thinks that consciousness arises from quantum wave functions collapsing in your brain's microtubules. I'm not a big fan of that particular theory, but serious people have considered it and concluded that, at the very least, it doesn't rely on the existence of disembodied 30,000 year-old Atlantean philosophers.

Still, when someone starts talking about quantum physics and doesn't look either a) confused or b) exhausted, it might be a good idea to mentally substitute every mention of "quantum" with the word "aether".