i love the visual thesaurus, and you will too. i promise. especially if you are mimi smartypants.

this morning on npr, they were talking about aids and how it's ravaging the population of africa and how it's therefore really good and nice that bush promised $15 billion to help combat and treat aids in africa, with both prevention (condoms and education) and treatment (anti retrovirals). anyhow, the point is not that africans are dying of aids in crazybig numbers or that bush is finally coming around to the right point of view on the subject, but that i get cranky at flawed analogies, even when the point is unaffected. said flawed analogy was that aids is to current-day africa as the bubonic plague was to 14th century europe. okay, see, i get it. the point is that it's killing lots and lots of people and there's not much (practical) (possible) to be done about it. but i get all twisted up and grumpy about it because, see, it is possible to live around people with aids and not get it yourself, if you practice safe/no sex, don't use dirty needles, etc. but it wasn't possible to live around people with the plague and not get it, or at least, not guarantee that you wouldn't get it. yes, i know, the point is unaffected. but still.

as the trolley pulls up to the stop this morning, a thirty- or forty-something man rushes to the door to get on first. there are 6-7 people waiting at the stop, and he was not the first one there (i know this because karl and i were the first ones there). dude, getting on the trolley before everyone else is not going to get you there any faster. but whatever--it's a nice day here (up to the freezing point today, so balmy!) and i'm not in a rush to get on the trolley. but shouldn't it be the case, generally, that those who arrive at the stop first, and have thus been waiting out in the cold/rain/wind/snow longest should be able to get on first? this is of course especially relevant on those days that the trolley is full and not everyone at the stop will make it on this car. but shouldn't that just be the default? exceptions, of course, for frail senior citizens, pregnant women, and parents with small children.

in other trolley news, the stairs at the 36th street exit have been maliciously designed to kick my ass. it's just STAIRS. and i climb a lot of stairs. but climbing these particular stairs exhausts me. i'm like a 300 pound woman who can barely lift my leg as i'm nearing the top. and it's not like the 36th steet station is some kind of bomb shelter, located hundreds of feet below the surface, with stairs that recede into the distance like a beginning art student's perspective drawing project. it's just two flights of stairs. i climb two flights to my apartment. i climb three flights to the lab. nothing gets me like these two flights out of the trolley station. whatever the stair standard is for width and rise is being defiantly flouted.

hack is filming on my block today. meant i had to move my car, or the philadelphia police would "relocate it to another street in the area". why is it that i feel the need to figure out which episode this footage will be in, and watch it? what, i want to see my building on tv? like i don't know what my building looks like? XXX S. XXth Street, starring today in hack. geeeez. (but you so know i'm tivoing hack from now on)