I'm going to be landing in Saint Louis this Friday on a one-way airline ticket. It will be the first time my brother, my sister, my parents, and I will all be in the same place at the same time in over a decade. I'm looking very much forward to this.

Sunday, we will all be heading down for the day to Murphysboro, Illinois - where I was born - to see my family down there.

Sometime during my stay in Missouri I hope to see type_40.

I also want to find a way to get to Columbia, I haven't seen the town for a long while and I'd really like to meet up with ceruleanct11. However my tight budget and the infrequent bus schedule very well might thwart that endeavour.

I plan to go home via rail and/or bus, but that leg of the trip has not been fully set in place. I will definitely be stopping in Saint Thomas, Ontario on the way back to spend some time with goldmourn.

I'm also hoping to meet up with likeamermaid on my journey, but if that will occur is not certain as of yet.

While this isn't well planned out, I have a good feeling about it. I'm sure it will be an adventure at the very least.

As if being a tween is not hard enough, scientists now call the years between 9 and 12 a time when girls are especially at risk of getting fat. Girls are more likely to become overweight in those preteen years than when they are teenagers, researchers report Monday in The Journal of Pediatrics. The study did not say why that was and did not examine boys to know whether they face a similar risk. ... Parents should pay attention to creeping waistlines and poor dietary habits, particularly in this age group, said Dr. Denise Simons-Mortonof the National Institutes of Health, which funded the research. ... "It should be cool to be physically active, and attractive," [Simons-Mortonof] said. full article

There you have it. Dr. Denise Simons-Mortonof believes it's vitally important that 9-12 year old girls be "attractive". Apparently she thinks that the drive to meet the media's demented beauty standards simply isn't pushed hard enough on these girls. Surely, with a little effort, the rates of anorexia and bulimia can be doubled.

I just received a anonymous spam comment in this journal with a link to a page on Blogger (a.k.a. Blogspot, owned by Google). LiveJournal generally does a good job at weeding out spam, but blogger's recent "improvements" appear as if they're aimed at aiding spamblogs. They've removed the "flag as objectionable" feature from the blog pages so that there is now clearcut and intuitive way to call out spam. I wonder if Blogger/Google simply see no motivation to fight the spamblogs. A large percentage of the Blogger spamblogs use Google Adsense and all of them pull traffic into Blogger, so Google actually makes money on them.

However, I suspect Google's effective spam-tolerance may capsize them in the end. The Google search engine, and especially their blogsearch, is rapidly sinking into a bog of junk and spam. The Search Wikia project, due to launch this year, could start seriously nibbling at Google's marketshare by providing a less spam-ridden alternative. That not only translates to less traffic at google.com, but less traffic for the multitude of adsense-using spamsites and spamblogs as well. If Google doesn't get serious about fighting spam soon, it could be their undoing.