Micah-Circuitry

This is what happens when I think too hard about something simple

2011-12-15T21:07:00.000-06:00

The internet is, in essence, a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters. Occasionally, it is the best of times, but much more often it is the blurst of times.

I can't quite determine where this falls, though. It seems both really creepy and really good at the same time, but also very... odd, in general.

I suppose that this brings me to the question: why am I watching an internationally acclaimed actor read the Apple end-user license agreement?

My answer, per usual, is just "it's the internet". But does that even mean anything? Why do total non sequitors amuse us so much for no reason at all? I mean, I would understand if this was humor, but while watching the above video, I don't think I laughed once. My thought process was pretty much this:

"Hey, this is cool.

Things are happening.

These things are unexpected, but not in a funny way!

I have been satiated for the day.

Now I must go share my newfound discovery with others so that they too may be fulfilled!"

I'm ashamed to admit it, but even after four years of blogging and (having been born in the mid-90s) growing up with it, I still don't have the slightest idea what the heck the deal is with the internet.

Twins! When Nature Goes Awry

2011-12-13T17:02:00.000-06:00

[above: the post that follows goes a bit out of the bounds of political correctness (unless you happen to live in 1045), so here's a reassuring picture of Greenland. Nice, happy Greenland. Everybody in Greenland is happy. Let's all be happy too. Now when you read my incredibly offensive post, just remember Greenland.]

I have a friend on the staff of the school newspaper who, despite being a great writer, often has trouble working on her leads for stories. This issue, she was assigned a feature on a pair of notable twins at our high school. She came to me for help, and I helped her a bit, but she seemed oddly unhappy at what I wrote. I was baffled, as I thought that my intro was one of the finest I had ever penned.

Thus, we decided to put my lead to the ultimate test - that of the Internet.

I'll let you, my readers, decide for yourselves, but I think you'll find that my piece is a fine example of proper and politically correct writing.

Twins!: When Nature Goes Awry

A Feature

In the brighter times of the past, when the miracle of birth resulted in the production of not one beautiful child but two malformed beasts, the creatures, weak and frail as they were, were quickly put out of their misery and the whole unfortunate incident was forgotten. Sadly, this is no longer the case in America, and these atrocities or, as they are called nowadays, “twins”, are cruelly allowed to grow to adulthood. They live amongst us, trying as hard as their horridly disfigured brains can allow them, to fit into human society, despite being as hideously deformed as those who favor their left hand...

Oh no! It's the holidays!

2011-12-11T21:30:00.000-06:00

As I've heard my more conservative friends discuss recently, there are some people who find the term "the holidays" incredibly offensive to their idea of Christmas.

However, it's always struck me that these people are the same people who are constantly complaining about the way that Christmas is commercialized (which is something that I agree with) by corporations. These people have constantly tried to make these corporations attempt to stop making Christmas into a day to capitalize on - to, in their words, surrender the war on Christmas.

Has it ever struck these people that they have won?

The use of the term "the holidays" is quite general, and pretty much refers to an ambiguous season lasting from about about December 1st to January 2nd. Thus far in this "holiday season", I haven't seen any circulars, posters, or other ads that actually mention Christmas, or, for that matter, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa.

Therefore, if the critics believe that Christmas was being commercialized, then why don't they recognize their victory? Christmas is no longer being promoted as an occasion for patronizing stores - stores have found a new way to profit off of the winter.

My thesis: Some people just like complaining.

Is this the only Christmas movie that I like? Yes, it is.

2011-12-09T21:22:00.000-06:00

A proposal

2011-12-07T20:26:00.000-06:00

[above: it kind of helps if you picture my newspaper staff as these guys.]

A sincere apology for my lack of recent blogging - a veritable flood of activities have invaded my life. However, I'm pretty happy with the stuff I've been writing recently, and I personally would say that it's far better to write something meaningful once every other day than to write something devoid of meaning daily.

However, on an entirely different topic, I have recently been confronted with an offer to have my blog incorporated into my school newspaper's website. The conversation that initiated it pretty much went like this:

Adviser: We need a better Internet presence [ed. note: she's been drilling this into us for the last few weeks]. Does anybody have any ideas for blogs?

Newspaper People: [silence]

Adviser: Okay... does anybody want to start a blog?

Newspaper People: [silence, except for this one guy who's been coughing all day. Adviser looks imploringly at him, hoping that his attempt to clear his throat was an indication that he wanted to start a blog. Unfortunately-Timed-Cough-Guy slowly shakes his head. Silence again.]

Adviser: Uh... does anybody have a blog already?

Micah: [weakly] Yeah, I kind of have a blog...

Adviser: Great! Can you incorporate it into our website?

Micah: Uh, it's kind of a personal blog...

Adviser: I understand. Do you only post every month or something?

Micah: No, I usually post every day...

Adviser: Oh, do you blog about personal stuff?

Micah: Kind of, but not really...

Friend of Micah: Yeah, his posts actually aren't all that personal!

Adviser: So, will you do it?

Micah: [timidly] Can I think about it?

Adviser: Sure, I guess.

So, should I do it?

An impenetrable fog

2011-12-05T18:55:00.003-06:00

Firstly, a big congratulations to Jeremy of Alico Dreams, who has not only revived his blog, but has revived it as a rather good repository of poetic analysis, including quite a bit by my favorite poet, Robert Frost. An aside: the only poem I have committed to memory is Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, and one can hear me reciting it often during these twilit months.

Jeremy's analysis, however, seems to be an exception in the field of literary analysis. During English class today, my teacher handed out copies of an analysis of Richard Wright's astonishing autobiography Black Boy (which may be one of the best books I've ever read), warning us that it was a "little dense", but that we could probably get through it. He also warned us that the writing was pretty foggy, but that the author had some good ideas, and, if anything, this should be an example of how not to write (my English teacher is pretty awesome).

He was totally correct. The entire article, while containing some interesting insights, was obscured by a thick, repulsive film of unnecessary wording and pointlessly complex phrasing. While I should probably not be the one to criticize people for being eloquent (my propensity for polysyllabic verbage was actually the subject of a prayer by my youth minister once), I came away, not just with some ideas about Wright's feelings when he wrote his seminal book, but with a disdain for the incredibly pretentious bent of literary criticism.

For example, the author of the article used the world "dysconscious" four times, despite the fact that the only dictionary entries I can find for it redirect me to "subconscious". As well, the phrase "psychic modes" clearly stood out to me as a bit of pandering to those who can read the phrases as opposed to those who can understand the ideas. I can't see why else somebody would use this confusing phrase to say "mental states" besides to deliberately make somebody think that their article was "intellectual". It seemed like the author of the article, which used eight pages to barely prove a single point, was just trying to make others believe that his ideas were correct because he was able to use long words.

I've never been a big fan of people who try to use writing as a tool for distortion and cloudiness instead of truth and clarity, but the work this was written about brings the irony to a whole new level. Richard Wright had an exceptional gift for being both eloquent and understandable in his writing. Some of those who analyze his work are neither.

Post script: As usual, somebody else has said the same thing as I have, but much more precisely and beautifully.

Tweet?

2011-12-03T20:39:00.001-06:00

Despite the fact that I attend a high school where 66%* of the student body uses Twitter, I still adamantly refuse to tweet.

Why, you may ask? Well, I have two styles of writing - short-form and long-form. Of course, long-long-form is still an option for school papers, and if I ever try to write a novel, long-long-long-form may emerge, but for now, those are my two modes. If I just want to express a sentiment in as few words as possible, or if I want to share something that is too personal to put in the general realms of the Internet, I turn to Facebook. If I, however, find myself needing to write something longer, I can do so on my blog.

Twitter seems like an amalgamation of status updates and blogging, as evidenced by the name for its breed of service, microblogging. It seems like the only uses for this system are celebrities posting quick updates about themselves without their loyal fans having to go to all that work to sign into Facebook, amateur comedians trying their hand at the latest trend, and average people posting irrelevant details about their current lives.

As I'm clearly not a celebrity, far below amateur on the Universal Comedian Scale, and generally think that rambling about your life online is about the equivalent of a vagrant telling a brick wall about how a pigeon's been stealing his thoughts, I don't really have a Twitter niche.

Are there any other uses for Twitter that I'm missing?

-----

*Poll conducted by me of three people totally random** from my school.

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**As total randomness is unattainable, I just used some of my friends, who happen to be somewhat random.

Most annoying TV shows to be forced to listen to from another room

2011-12-01T20:46:00.001-06:00

All choices are select freely by you and many color available.

from least to most annoying

1. Freaks and Geeks (bonus: great music)
2. The Simpsons
3. The Office (bonus: bad songs sung badly, making them therefore good)

...

4,987. The Brady Bunch Hour
4,988. When Buildings Collapse
4,989. iCarly

Revolution, man.

2011-11-30T21:54:00.000-06:00

While this isn't nearly as entertaining as the video that we watched in AP European History today (The Learning Corporation of America Presents: The French Revolution - The Terror), it captures the general spirit. Just replace Jesus with Supreme Being and Scotty with Robespierre and you've got the gist of it.

The actual video's data can be found here, but that's the only shred of it I could garner from the Internet. If I can ever manage to record some of it and post it on YouTube, I will do so, but for now, it'll have to stay forever imprisoned in 1971.

Its fictional quote from Maximillian Robespierre, however, may be one of my new personal favorites, mostly because I can't figure out what it's supposed to mean: "First, you know what you want. Then you get power. Then... [dramatic pause] you do it."

Oregon

2011-11-29T21:03:00.000-06:00

A few days ago, the Governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, chose to halt all executions in his state, declaring, simply, that he couldn't allow the executions to happen while being true to his morals.

As I reflected on this decision, which has drawn responses ranging from outrage to astonishment, I can't help but think about what I've learned so far this year in AP European History and, in particular, the Enlightenment and Age of Revolution.

The French Revolution and the American Revolution were, clearly, similar events where small differences led to drastically different outcomes. For one thing, the French Revolution lacked clear leaders like Washington or Jefferson to gently nudge it in a clear direction, and it lacked the single-minded focus of the American Revolution. It was also aided, of course, by the fact that the king who ruled over the colonies lived 3,000 miles from Boston on an island in the North Sea.

Another issue, though, is that of mercy.

By the time the French Revolution occurred, America already had a Constitution. Enshrined in this Constitution was, as Mark Osler points out in his linked article above, was the ideal that the executive can wield the power of mercy - that is to say, he or she can commute or pardon prisoners. This power is given in lieu of the prevailing powers given to heads of state at the time - those of arbitrary arrest and executive executions.

This, of course, is in stark contrast to the powers given to the French legislators. While both nations embraced the Rousseauian concept that the general will should sometimes prevail over the majority's will, France used these powers to overrule the general consensus about executing those that paranoid committees deemed enemies of the state. None of France's numerous constitutions during this time even came close to showing the executive mercy expressed in America's.

Like it or not, the ability of executives to follow their own convictions towards mercy is a part of our collective history, and perhaps may be a not-so-small part of the reason that we are where we are today.

And for that, I am glad.

A snow conundrum!

2011-11-27T20:59:00.000-06:00

[above: a serious proponent of Option 5]

I believe that I've already informed you, my most loyal readers, that I made the decision to join Nordic ski this year. While it was, undoubtedly, a decision for the better - so far, I've made a sizable amount of friends and I've gained a slight amount of upper-body strength, which is a serious improvement considering that I lacked anything of the sort when the season began - but there is one serious issue.

There's no snow, and the forecast is not looking too good.

Here are my options as I see them at this point:

1) Call upon the fearsome snow demons

Pros: Calvin-and-Hobbes approved, pretty sure it's not technically Satanism

Cons: Demonic onslaught of snow isn't exactly what I want.

2) Turn ice maker on "high", bring ice to school in backpack, coat trails

Pros: Solidified water on the ground now, cheap and efficient

Cons: Would blow out ice maker motor, barely coat a square foot of the ground, and would ruin my homework if the temperature inside is above freezing.

3) Team up with Dr. Malevolence on weather machine project

Pros: Easy, effective, would probably get paid

Cons: Might get assigned to germ warfare or ray gun divisions by accident

4) Move to Colorado

Pros: Very effective, high altitude ensures food is properly cooked

Cons: Costly, probably no Nordic ski team at Colorado high schools

5) Use granulated sugar substitute as snow alternative

Pros: Useful sweetener/propellant combination

Cons: Sticky, hard to get enough to coat ground effectively

So, what should I do?

After-Thanksgiving lull

2011-11-27T17:56:00.003-06:00

So, the leftover sandwich that I posted about yesterday?

Well, I actually did it today, and it was pretty amazing. It turns out that stuffing, when properly heated, works pretty well as a condiment, and spreading it on the bread right above the turkey was a good idea. I honestly wish that I'd taken a photo, but I was already sinking into the post-Thanksgiving state of being that is nameless - not quite relaxation, but not quite apathy.

Unfortunately, I have little to blog about today due to this irrepressible force, which is even keeping me from writing to my best friend who I haven't seen in two years or practicing the piano, both of which I promised myself I would do today. Today is a day for reading, for talking with friends, for seeing a movie, and for forgetting, if only for a second, about the world or even the neverending gray drizzle outside the window.

Post-Thanksgiving traditions at my house

2011-11-25T09:47:00.000-06:00

1) Watching An Awful Hallmark Channel Movie

As I believe I've mentioned some times before, every year after Thanksgiving, my family settles in to watch what will invariably be one of the worst films of all time. While this is a fairly new tradition - we only began it last year with The Town that Christmas Forgot - it is now as revered as all of our others. Our film this year - Silver Bells, the plot of which I pretty much failed to understand entirely. All I know is that some guy got punched in the face by a 16-year-old boy, which I feel reflects poorly on my kind.

2) Absurd Sandwiches

While this may be a nationwide tradition, there are few things that people in my family love more than creating Frankenstinian creations out of leftovers. Personally, I prefer a simple stuffing-turkey-gravy-cheese sandwich with some potatoes on the side, but I've heard reports of others in my nuclear family attempting to combine all the leftovers (including cranberry sauce, aka degenerate sluice) into one megasandwich, but I've never actually witnessed the feat myself.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T09:06:00.000-06:00

[above: Minnesota around Thanksgiving, usually]

I think that I said everything that I needed to about thankfulness yesterday, so just a few ruminations on the holiday:

1) What, exactly, is the advantage of calling Thanksgiving Turkey Day? I mean, the only possible time I would think that it would be closer to acceptable would be with younger children who can't pronounce Thanksgiving, but isn't the whole point to be thankful for what we have, an association with which Turkey Day kind of strikes out. Also, for kids who, like my younger brother, eat turkey sandwiches every day, the phrase kind of loses its meaning.

2) On a similar topic, I see how turkey-based arts and crafts are the perfect activities for younger children around Thanksgiving (no, I'm not going to be a total crab and say that they should be doing thankfulness-related activities), but at a certain point, isn't it a bit scary to think that the animal that they now love so much is the one whose carbonized carcass they're about to devour?

3) Are there other parts of the U.S. where it's pretty regular to have a snowy Thanksgiving (besides Wisconsin and Alaska)? I'm pretty upset that our snow melted before Thanksgiving, but when I try voicing this frustration to my friends in Texas, they're pretty unreceptive.

On the eve

2011-11-23T21:38:00.000-06:00

Much like last week, I am tonight on the cusp of what may be my favorite holiday - Thanksgiving. It is, simply put, one of the few holidays left unmolested by commercialism (in fact, the only way that businesses seem to be able to profit off of it is by making up a faux-holiday that happens to take place near Thanksgiving).

Every Thanksgiving Eve, my parents host a party for our friends, and this year's, thus far, is going very well. In the living room, a theological discussion is burning, the topic of which I have yet to gather; in the dining room, groups of small children huddle around platters of freshly-baked food, the creation of which decimated my home's butter supply; in the basement, my fellow teenagers talk, play pool, and spontaneously burst into song; in the den, mothers and fathers young and old huddle around an infant.

For this world in which I am so improbably a resident, for this island of warmth and light in a vast ocean of troubles, for the comfort and pliant strength of friendship - for these, I am truly thankful.

Unintentionally hilarious things in everyday life

2011-11-22T22:30:00.000-06:00

1. Black Friday and the commercials contained therein. Even worse - I heard a radio version of this ad today.

2. People Who Needlessly Capitalize Every Word As If That Makes It More Important.

3. The Hallmark Channel in general and in specific. I'm currently watching my family's traditional post-Thanksgiving Hallmark Channel movie, and a character just said something about doing "odd jobs at the museum". Which museum is this, I wonder, and why would they hire the mopey fourteen-year-old to do the aforementioned "odd jobs" with no sort of identification whatsoever?

Another recipe

2011-11-21T17:44:00.000-06:00

Obviously, I don't spend most of my time creating recipes, but I did make this one up on the spot yesterday when my brothers needed sustenance after a rather bad lunch (how was I supposed to know that 1 box of Macaroni and Cheese isn't enough for three people? It says "serves three" on the Nutrition Facts!), and it's not half bad.

Micah's Famous-esque Potato Chips! In Technicolor®!

Serves anywhere from two to eight.

Ingredients

3 medium-sized potatoes
Salt
Black pepper
Olive oil
Rosemary

Instructions

0. (because I'm adding this late in my post and don't want to go back and change all the numbers) Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

1. Wash the potatoes and slice them thin. I mean thin, like 1/16th of an inch thin. A mandoline would be cool, but I don't have one either. My advice is to do one end first, then plunk the potato cut side down on the cutting board and slice from the bottom up. It's fast once you get the hang of it.

2. This is important: blanch the potatoes in boiling, salted water for one minute. After they finish, immediately drain them and proceed to step three. Otherwise, they get all sticky and gross.

3. Place the potatoes on as many baking sheets as is necessary, but try not to overcrowd them.

4. Drizzle a tablespoon or two of olive oil over the potatoes. Make sure they get thoroughly coated.

5. Sprinkle on salt, pepper, and rosemary to taste.

6. Put the potatoes in the oven for 6-8 minutes, then take them out and flip them. Put them in for another 6 minutes. Drain on paper towels and enjoy!

Dance All Night!

2011-11-20T18:28:00.002-06:00

This song is great for three reasons:

1. It has an amazing harmonica part that seems like it would be hard to replicate live, but doesn't really appear to be.

2. It's genre-transcendent. While it seems like a country song, as soon as I start to consciously categorize it as country, certain elements like the bass line and Ryan Adams' voice suddenly stick out as un-country.

3. Its title doesn't imply at all what the song will be like. In fact, it probably has the least Ryan Adams-ish title of any song, ever. Besides maybe In da Club.

Wonder

2011-11-19T18:53:00.001-06:00

As I was walking to town today, supposedly to buy groceries, but, in all honesty, just to take a walk through the snow, I found myself, for the first time in years, truly alone.

It was by the creek, walking over a bridge buried in snow. It was while whistling a Sufjan Stevens song, while constantly digging out my camera to take pictures of the beautiful landscape, while admiring the beauty of the world, that I stopped dead. I looked around, from every angle, from every direction. Something amazing had happened.

I was truly on my own, for a moment, at least.

I stood there in the park, just staring. I must have been a sight - a sixteen-year-old boy, standing on a tiny bridge over a frozen creek in the middle of a park at 2 PM, gaping at nothingness. However, as the landscape hit me, I thought nothing of other perceptions. For this moment, I was with only myself and my thoughts.

It's ironic that the phrase "words cannot express..." itself has become a cliché, being a tool for avoiding clichés as it is, but, honestly, I can't express in words what I felt like at that moment. The closest approximation I can think of is standing at the summit of a mountain at sundown, looking down, but without the acrophobic elements, simply distilled to the sheer power it exudes.

A dog ran up to me as I sat there and started barking at me. Its owner, not far behind, came up to me, apologizing for the lack of a leash. The spell, strong as it was, had been broken.

Moments like those are rare, perhaps too much so. However, I know that for thirty seconds today, I saw something that moved me to wonder, and for that, I am truly blessed.

Ante

2011-11-18T18:09:00.001-06:00

Spring arrives slowly and noticeably, gently washing the landscape in vivid color. Summer sneaks up on you, arriving just when you think that the weather should be warming up some time soon. Fall is simply summer's means of fading out in multicolored glory.

Winter, on the other hand, is the only season that just happens.

After a string of sub-30 days here in Minnesota, we're expecting a medium-sized snowstorm (four to five inches) tomorrow. As I look out the window onto the grass, green and brown under the oppressive cold, I can't help but think that its colors, some of the few remaining in a world where the pastels of spring, the lushness of summer, and the vivid gems of fall have all passed on, leaving nothing but a few patches of green and piles of brown leaves at the feet of pedestrians, will soon be gone too, departing with their brethren - not forever, but at least for a few more months.

The time has come for nature to change the entire world, however briefly and faintly, into a monochromatic sea, regardless of anything or anyone, place or time, and to let the towns and fields of Minnesota become, for a fleeting time, something truly beautiful.

Criticism

2011-11-17T20:24:00.004-06:00

[above: why? No reason. I just like this song, plus a girl that I'm friends with recently told me that it was her favorite song, which is pretty awesome.]

On the ride back from the trip to New York, the bus stopped in Madison, Wisconsin to let us finally eat lunch (it was 3:30 PM by that point) at a rather inauthentic college-town Mexican place. While my friends and I were waiting for our table to be called, I mentioned that I had a blog.

Immediately, one of my friends, John, piped up. "Oh, I knew that. I read it all the time," he said. Then one of my other friends pointed out that he reads it as well. When I asked them if they were sure (as part of my odd fear that, somewhere in the vast multiverse, there exists some other Micah-Circuitry that is the converse of this one in every way - succinct, clearly written posts encouraging drug abuse and containing a lot of capital letters), they both recited a clear summary of the last few weeks of activity to me.

Obviously, I saw a unique opportunity, as I had the majority of my readership sitting right across the table from me. I asked them what they thought of my blog, and they said that it was pretty good (an endorsement I plan to put at the top of the page). Eventually, I asked them if they read it every day.

"Well," John said, "I don't really need to. You usually only post about once a month, and if you post more than that, it's to apologize for not posting more often."

As we sat there, eating our far-from-Mexican Chicken Tacos with Cheese Sauce and Cheesy Tortilla Sandwiches, the realization dawned on me that this was the most insightful piece of criticism I had ever received.

So, thank you, John. Thank you for somehow managing to guilt me into blogging more often in a kind way, and thank you for not complaining about my long-windedness or my propensity for unnecessarily eclectic and plentiful verbiage.

Actually, now that I think about it, both my friends mentioned that they'd read the entire archives of my blog, a Sisyphean task I don't really fancy doing myself. So thank you for enduring that, too.

NYC and other such things

2011-11-16T20:49:00.004-06:00

Sorry about my inexplicable absence - I was actually on a band trip in New York City, and I was expecting that the bus would have Wi-Fi (as promised) that didn't depend solely on what seems to be a manual Internet generator (the bus had to be moving up at least 35 MPH to actually allow it to work), nor did I expect that my computer would only have an hour of battery life per charge, all of which I would have to use to do homework. Therefore, my post was lost in the aether.

However, I did take some o.k. pictures (or at least I think so):

This is rather unfortunate

2011-11-06T21:02:00.004-06:00

Okay, so I wrote an enormous post (approx. 1,000 words) about virtuosity, but Blogger decided to delete it, and I'm pretty angry, so here's a video of Ben Folds. Sorry about this, but I have some choice words for some Google engineers right now, and they aren't appropriate for mixed audiences.

I may rewrite the post tomorrow when I'm less angry, but not now.

Urinetown

2011-11-05T17:42:00.003-05:00

I recently got the chance to see an Edina High School performance of the somewhat-popular early-2000's musical Urinetown, which bears the unique distinction of having a name more offensive than the show itself. One of my good friends was in it, the ticket price was almost negligible ($3 for students, even those at other districts!), and I'd heard the score to the musical during a bizarre eleven-hour church youth group bus ride two years prior, so I decided to give it a try.

I'll spare you a summary of the plot, as I'm pretty bad at writing them and because Urinetown is probably a musical best experienced without much background knowledge, but I'll say this - most of the pee jokes are compressed into the first 10 minutes or so of the show, leaving the rest as a brilliant satire of musicals such as Les Miserables, Fiddler on the Roof, and West Side Story, not to mention having an ending that most people seeing the play will love (but for very different reasons than you might expect).

I'm not generally a fan of musicals - to me, their appeal lies mostly in their bizarre format and the fact that most viewers are utterly immune to the weirdness going on around them (for instance, am I the only person who finds it weird that the Jets try to assert their toughness through singing and dancing?). However, I will say this - Urinetown is an amazing show in its own right, and the very strong leads and smatterings of inside jokes will probably please the kind of people who put cuts from The Phantom of the Opera on mix CDs. For the rest of us who find the idea of grown people dressed up as enormous cats and singing versions of T.S. Eliot poems a little off-putting, though, Urinetown is worth it. Just trust me on this one.

Does anybody really know what's happening?

2011-11-03T17:21:00.000-05:00

Due to circumstances beyond my control (namely, school), I haven't been keeping up with the Republican presidential race as much as I suppose I should have. However, Herman Cain seems to be having a rather difficult time right now from what I can surmise, as it seems that he's managed to invoke essentially career-crushing statements (whether intentional or not) from Ann Coulter and Politico.

Can anyone tell me what, precisely, is going on?

[sad noise]

2011-11-01T21:03:00.000-05:00

[above: me after listening to talk radio]
Until recently, I was under the delusion that all vitriolic talk radio material came from Rush Limbaugh or his Bozo the Clown-type local cronies - that is, that it was a mostly conservative endeavor and that it was characterized by obese children trapped inside of the bodies of grown men who have no other way to pass the time than to sit around by a microphone and taunt those who don't agree with them without any fear of repercussion.

While the second part of my assumption proved to be correct, I was shown pretty radically that my assumption about the horrid rhetoric coming mostly from the right.

As cross country is over, I've started taking the regular bus home from school as opposed to the "activity bus". My bus driver, a rather grizzled man by the name of either Frank or Fred, always turns on a certain AM station on full blast as we careen down the highway towards my house. Every time that I have listened to the show, it has been nothing but a liberal version of the conservative talk radio that I so despise - cutting off callers who the host disagrees with is a very common tactic, as is outright mocking those who disagree with him.

The saddest thing about this is that I occasionally find myself agreeing with the host's attitude; I slip into a mindless coma of total agreement and partisanship for no reason other than I just want to be on a team, any team at all, as long as I can have somebody to fight against. When I have these moments (and they only last for a minute or so), as soon as I snap out, I have a horrifying sense of perspective, like having slipped on the edge of a cliff and glimpsed the bottom. This is how some people live every single day.

Through this, then, I've come to the conclusion that political talk radio, no matter what your political alignment, serves no purpose other than pandering to extremists and sucking those who aren't yet extreme in their views towards the void of despair.

A very quick review

2011-10-30T21:10:00.000-05:00

Firstly, a sincere apology for not posting more often. This weekend has been especially busy for me, and I honestly have not had time to write anything.

However, I did get a chance to listen to Mylo Xyloto (finally)! My two cents: no, this is not my favorite Coldplay album, but if Paradise and Princess of China (my two least favorite songs) are ignored, the album itself is actually very good - about on the level of X & Y.

My favorite track on it, though, is still one that was released way back when in June - Major Minus:

Poorly Informed Bicycle Safety Man! A Play in Three Scenes

2011-10-28T21:33:00.000-05:00

I am utterly convinced that an anonymous old man with a very nasally voice and a moderate Italian accent is stalking me and dispensing unnecessary bicycling safety tips.

While that last sentence could probably be used as evidence for proving incompetence to stand trial (in some states, at least), it also is completely true. To illustrate this point, I have written a one-act play, entitled Poorly Informed Bicycle Safety Man! The Musical (music to be written at a later date) presented for your entertainment below.

Note: you may purchase performance rights to PIBSM:TM for $300, payable to MicahCo®, The Micah Corporation.

Scene I.

Setting: A dark and cold March evening, right after the first track meet of the season. Micah is bicycling home, having just run a pretty good race and, not coincidentally, feeling sort of exhausted. A foreboding mist is in the air, and twilight is falling. As Micah approaches a busy street, he stops at the stop sign and walks his bicycle up a few feet to see around a blind corner caused by some incredibly tall hedges that seem to serve no purpose other than to cause auto accidents and look pretentious.

Micah: Boy, am I tired! That was some hard running.

[an older man, wearing a fraying gray ski hat, a blue hooded sweatshirt, a red polo shirt, and some very beat-up looking pants, approaches on a mountain bicycle. He nearly collides with the very visible and well-lit Micah.]

Older man: Hey, you dere kid! What whats you's doin!

Micah: Pardon?

Man: Dat dere's a stop sign! Yous is supposed to stop at it!

Micah: But I did... [sighs as Poorly Informed Bicycle Safety Man rides off into the distance].

Scene II.

Setting: In front of a grocery store on an overcast day. Micah is locking his bicycle to a bicycle rack on an island in the parking lot. It is late summer now, and the characters are dressed appropriately.

Micah: This sure is hard to lock! I wish I had spent more than $3 on a bike lock*.

[an ominous gray convertible drives up between Micah and the store. In it is the older man, who heretofore will be referred to as Poorly Informed Bicycle Safety Man, wearing the exact same clothes as he was before. This is not so as to eliminate a costume change as much as it's just how PIBSM works.]

Poorly Informed Bicycle Safety Man: Hey, you dere kid!

Micah: Yes, sir?

PIBSM: You's is lockings it wrong!

Micah: How so, sir?

PIBSM: You's can't just lock dat dere tire to dat post. Some of dem guys could just come and take off dat tire dere and steal the rest of your bike.

Micah: [looking flustered, as he has, in fact, locked the frame of his bike to the rack] I understand, sir. That's why I've locked the frame to the post as well.

PIBSM: [drives away muttering]

Scene III.

Setting: a brilliantly sunny day on a bicycle trail in Minnesota in late October (it is an unusually warm late October, so light sweatshirts and such will be fine). Micah is placidly riding along as usual. Micah notices somebody riding along right behind him, obviously trying to pass him. PIBSM is still wearing the same uniform - perhaps the official garb of the International Bicycle Misinformation Squad?

Micah: Go ahead.

PIBSM: On yous left.

Micah: Thanks! [about to turn off the trail to get home]

PIBSM: Dem dere shoes ain't right, you knows.

Micah: [looks at feet, which are clad in slightly dilapidated Nike running shoes] What, sir?

PIBSM: You heards me. Dem sandals ain't goods for yous heels**.

Micah: But I'm not wearing... [trails off as PIBSM rides off into the distance, perhaps planning his next escapade]

FIN.

*True story.

**I have no idea why this might be and, in fact, my wondering about this earlier today eventually made me realize that these three incidences from my past were actually perpetrated by the same person.

Meet Ben the Benchman!

2011-10-26T22:19:00.000-05:00

I found this fascinating slip of paper while I was cleaning the basement, and thus far, nobody can seem to identify the author or give me any hint of what exactly a "benchman" is supposed to be.

Is this a horrifying tale of a life gone awry or the opening lines of a really postmodern novel? It's up to you to decide.

86% circus animals, some filler

2011-10-25T20:28:00.000-05:00

I had something pretty great to post today, but Blogger, unfortunately, isn't allowing images today due to an internal error, which sounds pretty bad.

Therefore, I'd recommend just reveling in the amazingness of the Black Keys:

Disappointment

2011-10-24T18:08:00.001-05:00

So, the day I've waited for three years for has arrived...

...and, unfortunately, it seems that my expectations were a tad bit too high.

One look at the Metacritic page for Mylo Xyloto probably tells you all that you need to know about Coldplay's newest album. Honestly, I thought that Coldplay was getting slowly better with time, with A Rush of Blood to the Head being amazing, but still being bested by X&Y, and then seeing both of those trumped by what may be one of my favorite albums of all time, Viva la Vida. It seems that my expectation - that Coldplay continue to put out high-quality albums that, while still being catchy, managed to surpass the pop mainstream in quality - was just a bit too high.

A caveat: I'm judging this album solely from the few songs that I've heard so far - I haven't got around to purchasing the full album yet. Expect my disappointments to be either qualified or healed in a few days, when I can give it a good listen.

However, until then, I'm just going to pretend that Coldplay still flies around in their EMI-subsidized UFO (with 3D goggles on) and spend their time singing to giant robots.

Number unknown

2011-10-21T19:45:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, while riding my bicycle to the grocery store to pick up ingredients for a salad that I make pretty often for my family (it includes bacon, apples, Gorgonzola, Craisins, toasted walnuts, and a maple syrup dressing - it's basically crack cocaine in a bowl with lettuce), I received a text message from an area code I used to live in, but from a number that I didn't recognize. I pulled over to the side of the road and read the message, which simply read "Hi", with no punctuation or other garnish of any kind. I chose the simplest path, responding with the word "Hello", similarly unadorned.

Thankfully, my mystery friend decided to keep from texting me again until I was actually in the store, at which point he/she/it responded with a similarly broad statement: "How are you?" I decided at that point, while trying to fit an orange into a plastic bag with a hand already occupied by a bag of Craisins, that I would try to put my forgetfulness to the test - I would continue a conversation with this person until I figured out who was on the other end of the line. My reply was "Pretty well. How are you?"

The conversation continued for at least five more exchange, perhaps more (my phone has memory "issues", so I've had to delete all my texts from up until a few weeks ago). From these, I simply figured out that the person on the other end was a fellow high school student, had friends who were surprisingly dramatic, and was a reluctant Catholic (he or she was texting during Mass). Combined with the area code, I was pretty sure that I knew who this was - she (if my guess was correct and it was a girl) had been my friend since third grade.

As I've described before, though, many bad experiences with failing to correctly identify people kept me quiet. I continued to have a conversation with her (or possibly him, if I was wrong) for the next five minutes while awkwardly wandering around the grocery store and probably embodying the stereotypical distracted teenager to all the other patrons of the store. I tried to keep my responses ambiguous, so as to cover all of my bases.

Finally, after a full twenty-minute conversation, I finally asked the person who they were.

While, as it turned out, my suspicions of her identity were correct (she had recently changed her number), I managed to make a longtime friend think that I was suffering from some sort of mental handicap, make the many good patrons of Lund's Groceries think that I was a bumbling nincompoop, and manage to forget the walnuts, all within the span of twenty minutes.

I may not yet be the Village Idiot of Grand Marais, but I'm sure getting there fast.

Not quite dead yet

2011-10-20T18:00:00.004-05:00

[above: click to make it bigger. Mr. Apology is holding a sign that I wrote just for you. He is also standing in front of the Tree of Apology, which has turned red in mourning.]

Firstly, an apology: this has been my first unexplained absence from posting in over a year, and I was hoping to go as long as I could without mysteriously dropping out of the blogosphere. Honestly, though, I think that I accomplished my goal - I physically could't find the time to blog any more, with band, cross country, the school newspaper, AP European History, moonlighting as Punctuation-Lad and fighting tyranny in the name of truth, justice, and the MLA Standard English Style Guidelines - Eighth Revision, and AP Stats each eating up a large fraction of the precious fifteen hours I'm awake for every day. Add in studying for the PSAT, copious amounts of homework, and an increasing awareness of how few people read my futile attempts to etch out a niche for myself in the internet, and in a whiff of logic, blogging disappears.

However, marching band is over, I only have one more cross country meet left in the year (although I'm thinking about doing nordic ski this winter - more on that later), and the Homework Gods have decided to have mercy on me for the time being, so as of October 20, 2011, I can officially declare Micah-Circuitry re-opened.

However, I am quite aware that some significant events happened during my absence. Occasionally, it was frustrating to read about something that I would have blogged about at any other point but now and feel the burning desire to write - a desire I, unfortunately, lacked the time to fulfill. Even more than I'm addicted to Facebook or Honeycrisp apples, I think I've become addicted to blogging. ANYWAY, here's a brief rundown for the few unfortunate people who use my blog as a primary news source:

-Moammar Gadhafi is dead, but it's unclear what, exactly, the Libyan rebels will do now. Hopefully the name of Libya's next leader, though, will have a standardized spelling as opposed to Kadhafi/Qadhafy/Gaddafi here.

-Michele Bachmann has essentially self-destructed by failing to have a clear message of any kind besides being sort of creepy. This is a development that, at least in my humble opinion, is good for my home state of Minnesota in the long run in that we'll be spared the consequences that, say, Texas might suffer if Perry wins the nomination.

-As I alluded to earlier, Wilco's new album is pretty generally awesome.

-In my school district, at what I presume is an attempt at egalitarianism, there are far more dances in which girls ask guys than those in which guys ask girls (by a 2:1 ratio). Last weekend, one of my friends did in fact ask me to the next dance, which kind of made my week (although the actual dance isn't for another two months).

-Something about smurfs is happening at the Razor.

-My mom has become obsessed with a National Geographic article about the teenage brain. It's unclear whether this is a good or a bad development.

-During my absence, I received 13 spam messages, 2 of which were for a Cheap Zojirushi Bread Machine.

One of these things is not like the others

2011-10-02T21:05:00.002-05:00

Notice anything odd about this "classics library"? Here, I'll help you out:

Also, my recent purchase of Wilco's album The Whole Love seems, so far, to have been a very good one; review coming soon!

Autumn in Minnesota, pt. i

2011-10-01T21:03:00.000-05:00

Homecoming!

2011-09-30T01:00:00.000-05:00

Currently, I'm doing something or other involving Homecoming, which is keeping me occupied from 6 in the morning to 9:30 at night (not a joke).

Therefore, I suggest you watch this video. Interpret it as you wish.

On having a really bad fever

2011-09-29T19:34:00.004-05:00

As the title implies, for the last few days, I've been out of commission with a high-grade fever (reaching up into the 103's at one point), and it's been pretty awful. Honestly, I can't think of a worse feeling (besides "in intense pain", perhaps) than feverish - you want water but you're too weak to get up to get it, you feel like you're on fire but at the same time are shivering uncontrollably, etc. Thankfully, a trip to the doctor wasn't necessary, as my disease ended up being some permutation of a basic cold and went away rather fast.

However, some segments of my fever near the end (during which I'm pretty sure I was slipping into a slightly delusional state) were a little bit trippy. This took place, unfortunately, when I was practicing piano. Despite my body's constant warning (probably correct) that I should refrain from doing so, I willed myself to walk over to the bench, sat down, and started (trying, futilely) to play. For the first few minutes, it was all OK, except I wasn't entirely clear on why the lights wouldn't stop going in and out.

However, by about ten minutes in, it was getting pretty interesting. You see, at this point in my life, two of my great loves are piano and European history. Therefore, my fever-addled neurons decided to attempt an ill-conceived blending of the two and latched on to whatever was closest - the piano. While trying to learn a certain segment of Mozart's Fantasia in D Minor, I became instantaneously and utterly convinced that it was about the Protestant Reformation. Now, while this may seem odd (and that's because it is), in my defense, the passage I was playing did have a significant descant part that may have seemed vaguely like something rebellious back then.

Thankfully, my loving mother came to my aid after hearing me play the same notes approximately 30,000 times in the span of twenty minutes. She told me (accurately) that I needed some rest and should go to bed, so I did so, despite the fact that it was 8 PM.

My dreams that night seemed to involve mostly bright secondary colors and some very odd permutations of animals such as elephants.

Another desperate attempt to garner hits!

2011-09-27T21:18:00.008-05:00

I've noticed recently a trend towards fewer and fewer comments and hits. I asked around, and I received some sage advice from a fellow blogger: post a lot of pictures of Steve Bartman and the hits will roll in.

Therefore, I present Bartmania! A Retrospective, the first totally comprehensive gallery of Bartman photos!

Here's a photo of Bartman doing what he does best: being Bartman!

What is Bartman looking at? We might never know, but this photo only exemplifies the mysterious aura exuded by photography's most interesting study - Steven Bartman!

A screenshot from Bartman V: The Walkman of Destiny, coming this fall for Xbox and Playstation!

Another mystery unfolds itself as Bartman holds off the ball with the sheer force of his unbending glare.

Just as he can cast stray balls off their paths, Bartman can make the marshmallows in his cereal levitate from sheer Bartmanity.

The most puzzling photo of Bartman ever unearthed, this one, coming from Rush Limbaugh's website, seems to show Bartman in disguise as a rather unhappy older man, his ever-present cap and mono headphones absent for reasons only the gods shall ever fathom.

Critical-consumer consensus on various media (a.k.a. the post with the exorbitantly pretentious-sounding)

2011-09-26T19:02:00.008-05:00

Just a quick little comparison, brought on by a 102 degree fever and way too much grape juice coupled with a teenagerhood wasted on the New York Times Arts section.

From least to greatest correlation.

1) Video Games: Greatest correlation by far.

Honestly, most every game that makes it to a prominent place in pop culture is a game praised by critics. While, as with everything else, terrible games will develop a kind of cult following, these games are generally those considered "so bad it's good" - i.e. games that display an enormous amount of effort on the part of the creator and a mostly unique vision before something went horrifically, horrifically wrong in the creation process. There's a reason that Metacritic only considers a game highly acclaimed if reviewers give it a 9/10 average or above: in an industry where reviews are almost totally correlated to consumer pleasure, only the best games win.

2) Television Shows: 2nd greatest correlation

Almost exclusively, the TV shows that succeed are those that are critically acclaimed, usually because they, well, are pretty good shows. This is another industry where pleasure is closely tied to critical acclaim. Generally, a show like LOST succeeds because there are people out there who like being incredibly nerdy about a fictional universe, and shows like The Simpsons succeed because viewers and critics alike like well-written, insightful humor.

3) Movies: medium correlation

While most of us would profess to loving critical darlings such as last year's Inception or The King's Speech, we also flock in droves to incredibly dumb movies like Transformers 2 - Blitzen's Revenge or whatever it's called.

4) Books: less-than-average correlation

While some books are works of true literary grace and climb up the sales chart indefinitely, those books are usually overshadowed by others and its cheap demon spawn.

5) Music: little to no correlation

Look, I could spend even more time on this post and write about how good artists get ignored in the sluice of backwash-esque Top 40 songs (this has been true for quite a while and will continue to be true for the foreseeable future - it's not a recent trend), but I wrote a whole article about it that's coming out later this week, so I'll just link to that to prove my little point.

On missing a day or two

2011-09-25T13:24:00.004-05:00

[above: since I link to quite a few of my early posts here, I figured it would be a good change of pace to use what is far and away the most overused photograph of my first year of blogging as today's picture.]

Firstly, I'd like to sincerely apologize for the substantial amount of missed days recently. I wish that I could offer an explanation that would be even close to satisfactory (Martians stole my Wi-Fi, I've come down with a debilitating illness that requires immediate medical attention, Dick Cheney hit me over the head with his wooden leg, etc.), but I don't really have one. Honestly, 10th grade is much more work than I had anticipated, and I just don't have enough time to blog every single day.

To avoid filler, ideas stolen almost verbatim from their originator, and various artificial posts added for flavor, I'm going to begin to take a slightly more relaxed stance on posting. Will I try my hardest to do it every day? Absolutely! Will I let posting get in the way of my homework? No, although it is quite good for study breaks relative to other things.

I'm just going to hope that everybody's okay with that, because the last time that I decided to try to post every day and do tons of other stuff, my brain kind of spontaneously combusted and leaked cranial fluid, which also caught on fire (note - the linked post is, for some reason, the most viewed post I've ever had. I attribute this to the fact that people really, really like bizarre pictures of Photoshopped squirrels that still bear the watermark of their original site.). Here's to that not happening again!

Autumn

2011-09-23T14:13:00.000-05:00

Today, as I walked into the newsroom at my school, I was carrying four of my favorite albums (The Suburbs, Helplessness Blues, Transatlanticism, and Vampire Weekend) for a photo feature to accompany my article in this month's issue that, essentially, argues that indie rock isn't all that snooty and pretentious and is actually pretty good.

As soon as I sat down at my computer to write, I heard a voice coming from behind me. "Is that Helplessness Blues?" it asked. I turned around and saw one of the members of the editorial board, an intimidating figure to be sure, standing behind me. I was scared and had no idea what to say, but she just picked up the CD and started looking at the incredibly intricate, 60's-esque artwork on the front. We soon started talking about music in general, and then decided to start an intra-newspaper CD exchange. By this point, five or six other people were standing around, talking about music and passing around my CD's. I got very little writing done (which was okay, because my article was finished), but it was worth it.

At around one-fourty-five, I got dismissed from school to go to a cross country meet. However, something happened that simply isn't supposed to happen - the bus didn't show up. We waited around for over an hour before the bus driver - a sixtysomething who was evidently new to our town - finally pulled up. To pass the time while we waited, the other cross country runners and I invented what may just be the simplest and dumbest game ever played by a group of high school students with an average GPA of 3.9 or so - we found sticks on the ground and tried to put them on top of each others' heads without the other person noticing. Eventually, as the bus failed to show up, new challenges emerged - put it on their shoulder! Do it while holding the stick in your mouth! Try to throw the stick! (note: the last one didn't end that well) - but it was one of those times that is undiscernably good - truly great for reasons you can't quite place.

Eventually, we arrived at the meet. I am always very nervous before a race, but today, like always, that nervousness disappeared like smoke in the wind when the gun went off. All that was on my mind was running. Honestly, the concept of thinking about things while running to try to get your mind off of your exhaustion has never appealed to me, for the simple reason that when I run, my mind goes into a semi-vegetative state. All I can think about is the rush of the breeze past me, the people in front of and behind me, and perhaps the rate at which my legs are moving.

Nineteen minutes later, as I ran into the finish, I could see my friends and family cheering me on, the autumn wind rushing all around, invisibly transforming the world into a firey sea of orange.

Immorality

2011-09-21T17:57:00.003-05:00

I had a long post prepared today that apologized for my occasional daily absences and asked readers to stay with my blog as I try to manage 10th grade. It wasn't really a piece that I cared that much about, just a semi-impassioned plea to keep all 3 of my readers on board.

However, I decided to delete the whole thing after, during one of my Facebook breaks, a friend led me to this.

How capital punishment remains considered constitutional is something that I still cannot understand to this day, nor can I understand how followers of Christianity can actually support a punishment condemned in their ("our" would probably be more appropriate here) religion twice (by both God in the Ten Commandments and His Son through the tale of the adulteress), but I digress. The issue in this case is even more specific than the awful punishment in question - it's that there is a serious doubt on the legitimacy of Troy Davis' conviction in the first place. Seven out of the nine key witnesses in the trial have recanted their testimony in part or in whole, and there is no DNA or other scientific evidence at all linking the murder in question to Davis.

This conviction honestly goes against every single thing that I learned in Mock Trial last year. In short, there is no way that a mock trial team armed with the evidence given against Davis would ever win a single trial.

This is the kind of thing that makes some people question the merits of the American justice system. For me, though, it makes me realize how much better this nation would be if people actually abided by the rules in place, namely the concept of reasonable doubt.

I cannot adequately express how angry I am at this conviction, and I can only hope that some person, somewhere in the system, realizes how utterly wrong this is and remedies one of the worst judicial mistakes in recent history.

A brief treatise on spam

2011-09-20T20:56:00.004-05:00

For somebody like me who revels in junk mail, not out of a prevailing sense of irony, but just because it's clear that this stuff is never intended to be read by a mass audience. My personal favorites are always ads from car dealerships (especially those that come with free keys - this is how I pretend to have a car instead of just a key to my band locker), and second best are ones from Hong Kong-based suit retailers (they are always a great source of air mail envelopes to make my letters to my best friend seem that much cooler).

However, the Internet, as amazing as it is, just gives out troves upon troves of the same kind of derivative drivel. Once you've read one spam message, essentially, you've read them all (unless you're lucky enough to be the target of a Nigerian 409 scam - those are incredibly entertaining).

However, once in a while, you hit upon a piece of junk that is so out of place, it changes the way you view the world. Usually, these messages are incredibly funny, but you can't help but think of the starving teenager in some country where English is like an endangered species of whale - having seen it in its natural habitat is rare, and very few people who use it in their work have a full working knowledge of it - who inevitably typed it out, hoping to perhaps receive a small check from some land far away, but feeling awful that, in return, he won't be able to provide the 2.000 INCH Plassma Screan T-V Feat Uring Hi Defining that he so eloquently promised in his message.

However, I can't quite say the same about this odd missive which I received today:

"Awesome survey! I love your article. Cheap Zojirushi Bread Machine."

Actually, now that I read it again, I'm realizing that this, in fact, does fit my idea of the starving deaf deaf boy on shores far away. Zojirushi bread (a mixture of ground wheat, yeast, zucchini powder, oats, gravel, and Tang, baked at 700 degrees for 45 seconds) is a staple of this faraway mystical land, a special treat reserved for those who mine a quartic hectare of plutonium for use in the Zojirian military tank machine engine craft in the span of only one Standard Uniform Government Happy Week. Of course, like every other man, woman, and child in Zojir, poor Kromsnkfkl (that's our guy's name) owns a food product carbonation mechanism specifically made for creating Zojirushi Bread. Having displeased his superiors at the plutonium fields, little Krk (as his friends call him) is driven to his nocturnal stationment facility in a Zojir Auto Concern Land Yacht and is left there, never to bring home a paycheck of 49 Wkroscnnk again. Driven by his dissatisfied parents, the poor little fella is forced to try to sell his Zojirushi Bread Machine for only enough Kropniks to keep meat product on the table for about another month.

Don't worry, little Krk! Micah's coming! I'll buy your Zojirushi Bread Machine! Oh, wait, you forgot to specify an address or even a price.

Well, that was certainly depressing.

Anonymity, the Internet, etc.

2011-09-18T20:34:00.003-05:00

Thankfully, I've never had a truly virulent commenter on any of my posts. My commenter mostly consist of my teachers, some of my friends who also happen to be lawyers, some of my friends who don't happen to be lawyers, some guys from India, the Lord of Evil, and various friends, family members, and well-wishers.

However, there seems to be a bit of a problem on the Razor regarding a rather unpleasant and uninformed commenter. Professor Osler responded in the best possible manner - he was semi-polite but harsh in his condemnation of an ad homenim personal attack against him on a post that was about civility in discussions.

My question is: how are you supposed to deal with these people? Attacking somebody anonymously through the internet is always a terrible choice, but as the administrator of a blog, I'm probably going to have to deal with it at some point or another. When the time inevitably comes, what should I do? Unfortunately, I probably won't have the perfectly-worded, eloquent response that Osler had.

Random statistics from Wolfram Alpha

2011-09-17T15:32:00.004-05:00

[above: the creator of The Apprentice, in all his evil glory.]

(mad props to Justin T. for showing me this)

See if you can guess the one I totally made up!

Number of calories in a cubic yard of fried chicken: 1,700,000, or 86,486% of the recommended daily intake.

John Bonham's middle name: Henry

Flava Flav: no data. This is very disappointing, as I wanted to know how much his clock weighs.

The word piracy has no rhymes, but is linguistically similar to the word papacy.

Jello is only 0.1 gram/cm^3 denser than water.

"Fire" is the world's 745th most commonly written word, with only less than one percent being used as a verb (mostly from transcripts of The Apprentice, we can assume).

D minor is the saddest of all keys.

The iPhone 4 is 0.37 inches deep.

Calories in pluto: no results.

Winnipeg is known as the Slurpee Capital of Canada.

It is impossible to accurately estimate the airspeed velocity of an African swallow (but not a European one, which cruises at 25 mph.)

The word spork originated in the 1700's.

Apparently, it is 3.14 meters from Minneapolis to Minneapolis.

Best/worst commercial ever.

2011-09-16T20:56:00.003-05:00

I've become incredibly obsessed with reading very deep meanings into pointless things recently (this was sparked by a certain Super Sugar Bear commercial), and I just can't stop thinking about the horrifying dystopia portrayed in this commercial. It seems that the world, regulated to the will of the Visa corporation, which has apparently taken the place of any sort of government, has been reduced to people in brightly-colored t-shirts walking around in circles. The shot of people moving in and out, at a steady march, of the food depository gave the commercial a particularly horrifying, Soylent Green-esque touch.

Now, here's a brief quiz about the video. This will count as 40% of your final semester grade:

1. What relationship is there between the rapid pulling of tabs and the hanging-up of receipts, if any?
2. Where does one acquire a toaster that shoots toast straight into the air?
3. On a scale of one to ten, exactly how dangerous is it to toss plates directly into the cafeteria where people are eating?
4. At around the twenty-second mark, our protagonist, Dark-Shirt Guy, holds up one finger, signaling the cook to toss him a pre-assembeled bag with what we can only assume is the governmental seal of approval staring back at him. What, exactly, is in the bag?
5. Does the panel of cheese-throwers at the back of the restaurant moonlight as a vigilante group? If so, what is their motto?
6. After, as we can only assume, Dark-Shirt Guy is dragged out by the Gold Rewards Plus Secret Police to be tortured, interrogated, and eventually "disposed of", how does the Visa-based government keep the facts of his death from leaking out to the public?

A very brief post written after a homework-filled night.

2011-09-15T23:20:00.000-05:00

Homework is not my friend, as it appeared at first.

Also, I just finished my first article for the school newspaper! As anybody who has ever heard me rant about how much I want to write for a school newspaper can attest, this is a major milestone for me.

So... uh... what do you think of... uh... food?

Bands that should be popular, but aren't

2011-09-14T20:55:00.003-05:00

Just yesterday, the Razor ran a post about a band, that, in the good Professor's words, about "how the music I like is so often... well, not so popular."

This is totally true of much of the music I listen to. This isn't because I consciously try to pick bands that nobody else has ever heard of - in fact, I usually just assume that artists that I like are really popular. It's just that I'm usually pretty wrong about it. Nor is it that I try to feel superior to other people by listening to music that few others listen to - I genuinely believe that, much like how even though The King's Speech was made with a fraction of the publicity or funding of Transformers 2, it was far and away a better film in every possible way, the best artists often survive and thrive by living outside of the Top 40. That is, there's no pressure on them to make music that executives want them to make, so they can focus on making music that pleases themselves and those who listen to it.

In that vein, here are a few of the bands that I always assumed were popular... but aren't.

1. Frightened Rabbit

They sound just like Mumford and Sons, except with an even sharper ear for motifs, electric guitars, and awesome Scottish accents. I'm sure that somewhere in the multiverse, they're just rakin' in the cash.

2. Andrew Bird

Probably the world's most rockin' proponent of the Suzuki method, bizarre, incredibly catchy psychedelic violin-based pop songs are his forte. For the longest time, I just assumed that he was really popular because my aunt who always seems to be on the cutting edge of musical trends listens to his stuff a ton.

3. the Local Natives

This isn't even close to one of their most popular songs, yet it's endlessly catchy and sounds like a band with a much higher production budget.

Expect another installment soon.

A query

2011-09-13T21:03:00.002-05:00

Just a quick note...

I've noticed that my friends and I are often able to have reasoned, level debates about political issues ranging from such trivial things as whether to use the C.E. system or the A.D. system to seriously contentious issues such as gay marriage and the federal budget without resorting to name-calling or general unhappiness.

This is rather odd for two reasons: 1. we've been raised in a society that pretty much discourages reasoned discourse at every turn, and 2. we're in 10th grade.

Now, maybe I just have exceptional friends. I do know that my friends are rather amazing, both in terms of intellect and in terms of personality. However, I wouldn't think that this would carry over to political discourse.

Essentially, I've come to the conclusion that if at least one party (in pretty much any situation) wants to have a normal, polite conversation that deals with facts instead of ideologies, the other party will usually oblige somewhere along the line. This theory holds true in almost any circumstance - in person, on Facebook, over the phone, via text message, even in a classroom.

Why doesn't this tactic hold true in Congress? I can't imagine that there's not a single representative who is willing to hold a respectful debate.

9.11

2011-09-11T20:47:00.002-05:00

Today isn't a day for long-winded speeches about crushing terrorism abroad or endless playback of the latest "new" shot of the tragic events that unfolded a decade ago. Those won't heal anything, and I think that everybody knows it and just doesn't want to admit that they don't know how to fix what happened.

And nor do I. No amount of cable coverage or pictures of cartoon characters crying can bring back to life the thousands upon thousands who died that day, but I don't have any better way to memorialize them up my sleeve, nor am I going to pretend to.

However, I'm just going to simply say this:

Somewhere along the line, during the hours upon hours upon hours of coverage on the War on Terror, I think that we, as a nation, forgot what the word "terrorism" means. It doesn't mean an event that is meant to cause destruction, although it often causes that as a side effect, nor is it necessary for terrorists to kill people, although they so often do. In fact, the true meaning of terrorism is embedded within the word itself - the point is to strike true, deep terror into the hearts of your enemies. There is no greater weapon than fear. Somehow, through the media fanaticism that surrounded the worst terror attack in U.S. history, we let the terrorists achieve what was, by definition, their goal: to make us afraid to live our lives.

If we allow ourselves to be afraid to the point of not leaving the house, we're simply playing into the hands of the people who killed multitudes of our family members, friends, and fellow citizens.

We can never, must never, forget what happened on September 11th, but we also must commit the ultimate act of defiance in the face of despair: we can't be afraid to live lives that are full of joy, lives that are fulfilling, and lives that gladden the hearts of our fellow human beings as we float through nothingness on our tiny ball of rock, hurtling towards infinity.

Guest Blogger: Justin T.

2011-09-10T21:28:00.006-05:00

[above: Justin T., or at least one Justin T. I think this is the one I know. I can't be sure since I've never met him, though.]

Ed. Note: A while back, I asked my good friend Justin T. to write a guest post for my blog. Unfortunately, I didn't recieve a response back for quite some time and was forced to simply post a picture of an anonymous kitten yesterday. However, today I received an anonymous e-mail message that I, of course, presumed was Justin finally sending me his guest post. While my own opinions differ from those he makes throughout his piece (I'll discuss these reservations at a later point), I personally believe this to be a lawyerly essay of the first order, and one that deserves to be read. Take it away, Justin!

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One needs a website which will help them to do all the work and ensure that there are high number of visitors on the website, which will make it success and popular and increase sells. Justin T. is one such, and rather the best one in the opinion of Justin T.

Justin T. is very reliable and offers high quality services. They charge very nominal rates which can be afforded by any business and the increase in revenue that they cause is an increase in revenue. By investing small amounts.

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I feel ashamed to post this.

2011-09-09T21:49:00.001-05:00

The lethal combination of a football game and cross country practice has made blogging impossible today, and my hope for salvation through a guest post has fallen through.

Therefore, I've been reduced to posting a picture of a kitten.

However, it is a rather cute kitten. I've never met this particular kitten, but whenever I see its picture, I always affectionately refer to it as "Vermin Killer".

Here it is:

This is what you've reduced me to, people.

P.S. - I didn't actually play in the football game. I marched in the band during the football game.

If you thought I played football, you obviously don't know me well enough.

Best. Cover. Ever.

2011-09-08T01:00:00.000-05:00

Well, maybe not THE best, but that honor goes to a Ben Folds/Dr. Dre song with an unprintable title that, blogging for a family audience, I can't reprint.

However, Wilco's new single is equally awesome:

Ouch...

2011-09-07T18:18:00.004-05:00

[above: I had a photo I wanted to use for this, but I can't seem to find it, so this will have to do.]

Okay, so I'm one day into high school and I already have a major problem.

See, the high school I go to is incredibly large, and because of this (coupled with our short passing time), we carry almost all of our stuff in our backpacks. Seriously, you don't even get a locker unless you request one, and even so, it's impossible to use your locker because they're placed at incredibly inconvenient locations.

As readers of this blog know, I am an acceptably good distance runner and can type/play piano faster than you probably can, but other than those skills, I'm a pretty major wimp. Due to this, I feel like I've had a boulder on top of my back all day (which I essentially have - I need to weigh my backpack at some point, but I'd estimate its weight at about 35-40 lbs.). Therefore, I've decided to try to explore other backpack options. My main two contenders at this point are a regular rolling backpack, which would save me an incredible amount of trouble but would be a pain to carry up stairs, or a helium backpack, which would be the preferable option if only I could find out whether it actually contained helium (the Amazon description is lacking in many ways).

What do you think I should do?

Day one

2011-09-06T19:17:00.003-05:00

Pros of the first day of sophomore year:

1. Oddly, unlike during freshman year, we were welcomed into the school by the student leadership team, the student council, the cheerleaders, the band, and what appeared to be a guy in an enormous bug costume.

2. My chemistry teacher is a recent immigrant from Scotland, and referred to "wee ones" during class today, which was an amazing experience. As well, he's much nicer and much, MUCH better than chemistry than the Scot pictured above.

3. I'm very, very, VERY excited for being part of the staff of the school newspaper. Apparently, the editor-in-chief has been reading my blog pretty regularly for the last few months, which is both creepy and awesome at the same time.

Cons of the first day of sophomore year:

1. The opening assembly was held in the gym, which has TERRIBLE acoustics, rendering anything the administrators said both very loud and totally incomprehensible (a rare combination that you never want to hear).

2. Due to some creative locker placement and a short passing time, we pretty much have to carry everything for the day around in our backpacks. While I'm sure this is good for keeping our stuff with us, it sure isn't good for spinal health.

3. I know relatively few people in my classes.

On the whole, I'm pretty excited for this year.

Labor Day

2011-09-05T08:13:00.003-05:00

Fall arrived secretly this year, waiting to be discovered.

Last Thursday was the first real cross country meet of the season, and while I did well, the weather was astonishingly hot and humid, which was surprising for the first day of September. A few people actually dropped out of the race midway though because it was so incredibly hot.

Therefore, I made the mistaken assumption that we were in for another long Indian summer this year.

However, on Saturday night, things changed. My dad had just come home, and everybody was sitting around inside. I had gone outside earlier that day, and it was just as hot as I remembered it being recently, so I wondered why we weren't eating outside tonight. Soon, though, I came to a few realizations.

Firstly, I saw that it was only 7:15, but the sky was already getting dark.

Secondly, my younger brother opened the door to come in, and I felt a breeze of 60-degree air - air that just barely hints of the winter to come, but somehow is also inviting, almost asking for friends and family to share it with.

Finally, I realized that my dad and brothers were watching football.

It's not often that moments like this happen, but when they do, it's astonishing. A flash of realization hit me then, that summer was over, that it was time to begin anew.

And, as the smell of walnuts roasting drifted in from the kitchen, I knew I was ready. This school year is going to be a challenge. There's no doubt about that. But, then again, this summer was quite a challenge too, and I got over it just fine, with an advancement in math and a lifeguarding license to show for it. Autumn has arrived, and after this short but full summer, I'm ready to embrace it.

New ideas

2011-08-21T18:05:00.005-05:00

For the last few days, I've been pondering a question that, one can only presume, plagues all bloggers who aren't billionaires/don't have contracts with major agencies/etc.: why doesn't anybody read the stuff I spend oh so much time writing each and every day?

While I came up with some pretty good answers (I use way too many parenthetical statements, approximately 78% of my posts begin with the word "recently", the John F. Kennedy assassination was staged by Nazi Communist spacemen from beyond the moon to distract us from their horrible ploy to fluoridate the tap water of the City of New Orleans), my overuse of the words "immediately", "however", and "etc." have finally begun to tick some people off, etc.), none of them really explained why my blog doesn't have a larger following. Like all writer, I have my bizarre idiosyncrasies, but I think I'm a pretty good writer, at least for a tenth grader, and that I have some interesting stuff to say.

I've concluded that the thing that separates me from other, more successful blogs is that I don't have a hook. Therefore, I'm going to list a few gimmicks, and I want you, my dear readers, to say which one you like the best.

Before I begin, though, I need to list my three fundamental flaws that would make me a very popular columnist in one of Chicago's 39 papers in the late 19th century but make me a less-than-popular blogger:

1. I always try as hard as I can to use correct grammar, mostly to ensure total cromulence and correctitude (note: I'm not nearly as strict about spelling - see my previous sentence).

2. I very rarely swear. The only time you'll ever hear (or hear the disembodied voice inside your head saying as you read my writing) a swear word in one of my blog posts is when I'm really agitated. Swear words are not a renewable resource, and if you use them all the time, it really deprives them of any meaning.

C. While I'm not quite sure whether my moral compass is pointed perfectly north, I am sure that it's very insistent in its opinions. Therefore, I have never illegally downloaded anything and never plan to, as my conscience would eat me from the inside out.

Option One: Music Reviewer!

Pros: -I could write about something I love, and get writing practice at the same time.
- I think I have okay taste in music, I guess.

Cons: -Because of my limited budget (most of my income comes from occasional payments from my parents, usually in odd increments of $3.27 or $2.94, for mowing the lawn and such), my choices for music purchasing are nowhere near the level required to be a serious critic.
-Illegally downloading music conflicts with point C above.
-Don't even think about asking me to review a Katy Perry album.

Option Two: Movie Critic

Pros: -Still writing about something I love.
-I think I also have okay taste in movies

Cons: -While my parents pay for my movie tickets, these are usually to movies that they also want to see, and, invariably, my dad takes us to amazing movies. Writing only four-star reviews would get incredibly boring.
-There's no key for half an asterisk.

Option Three: Snarky Guy Who Hates Everything With a Holier-Than-Thou Attitude

Pros: -According to some rather agitated commentators, I already possess the skills to write this way
-Irritates my enemies

Cons: -Irritates everybody else too.

Option Four: Blog From the Perspective of a Harry Potter Character

Pros: -I know way too much about Harry Potter, and this would be a way to put that unnecessary knowledge to good use.
-Can redifine characters to my own bizarre whims

Cons: -Has almost undoubtedly already been done, so the only characters that I could do it from the perspective of would be Professor Sprout or Argus Filch.

Option Five: Cooking Blog

Pros: -Most of my past recipes have been from dishes concocted by my younger brother, and have received fine reviews from dining guides worldwide.
-Suits my inherent ironic character.
-I like cooking anyway.

Cons: -My brother's recipes have recently begun to degrade to "mash everything up in a frying pan and fry it". That would get rather tedious to read about after a while.

So, which one?

P.S.: I'm going to be gone for the next week, so as to give proper voting time and to allow me to remain sane while juggling band camp and cross country (perhaps the dorkiest combination of activities ever, but whatever).

America's Worst Trophy!

2011-08-20T07:27:00.002-05:00

This has to be, beyond a doubt, the dumbest trophy, of any kind, ever invented. While its genesis is detailed here, I'm just going to point out some things that make it such a terrible football trophy:

1. It appears that the poor farming family pictured has only managed to procure five ears of corn from an entire year of farming, which are placed haphazardly in a very short trash can (which, I may point out, is already filled with garbage from the farm) at the wife's feet.

2. It also seems that, as a show of ultimate devotion to his wife, the farmer in question has shucked two of the five ears of corn, apparently for immediate consumption. Maybe they'll sell the other three? Who knows?

3. Actually, it looks like the father is giving his son a boring lecture on corn production, while his wife and daughter look on, smirking, while they realize that they will never have to do anything on the squalid, low-producing farm in question due to the antiquated system of gender roles apparently inherent to grain production.

D. It has nothing to do with football. At all.

5. The farmer in the picture, who may actually be proposing to the woman pictured with ears of corn (it's an Iowa thing), looks disturbingly like Dick Cheney

More Sortin'!

2011-08-19T18:03:00.003-05:00

[above: No, I don't know. Go do your homework.]

First off, to sort some suggestions by Professor Osler:

President Obama: Ravenclaw!

Vice-President Biden: Slytherin! (but one of the more benign ones - he is known for swearing at clerks who disagree with him, but isn't actually evil. Honestly, the person I think of as being the most like him is Professor Slughorn, who is, in fact, a non-evil Slytherin)

Dick Cheney: Slytherin! (Unlike his compatriot, ex-Vice President Dick "Undisclosed" Cheney is, in fact, evil.)

George W. Bush: Hufflepuff! ("Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?")

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe: Gryffindor! (bravery: check. Gutsiness: check. Above-average intellect: check. Slightly inflated sense of self: check. Greed for fame: check. Total Gryffindor material)

Also, I just took my final Advanced Algebra test. It was shockingly easy, and I only had to get an 80% on it, so I'm not too worried.

Post 891, in which I utilize my Harry Potter geekery for political ends

2011-08-18T19:18:00.005-05:00

Today, while browsing the web, I saw something rather interesting on the Razor - a question about which Hogwarts house the current GOP candidates would be sorted into.

This, of course, gave me an idea - what about sorting the candidates he gave us, but also some additional candidates that have either dropped out, declined a nomination, or are yet to declare their candidacy? I've followed the lead of some commenters and added in a few Wizarding academies across the globe as well as the four houses.

Note: this works better if you imagine the Sorting Hat calling out each name in a shrill British accent.

Michelle Bachmann: Slytherin!

Mitt Romney: Hufflepuff!

Rick Perry: Slytherin!

Ron Paul: Ravenclaw/Gryffindor!

Jon Huntsman: Hufflepuff!

Tim Pawlenty: Durmstrang! (he's not a Slytherin because I think he actually believes himself when he talks about the "good" he's done for Minnesota - inaccurate and slightly delusional, but not "evil", per se)

Sarah Palin: Slytherin! (really, I think that anyone with a reality TV show about themselves should be delegated to Slytherin)

Donald Trump: The darkest pits of Hell!

Newt Gingrich: Ravenclaw! (note: remember, not all Ravenclaws are good, they're just intelligent. Some choose to use their intelligence for more malevolent ends)

Jimmy McMillan: New York City!

Bobby Jindal: Hufflepuff! (Hufflepuff seems to be the place to be for somebody who decided to change his name based on a few episodes of the Brady Bunch - true story)

Scott Brown: American Magic Academy of Magic! (He drives a truck!)

Note that Ron Paul is the only potential Gryffindor on the list, as he's one of the few who actually try to be honest and stick up for their ideals (okay, many on this list also try to stick up for their ideals, but their ideals mostly consist of blaming other people and yelling a lot).

Anyone else I should list?

In The Hall of the Mountain King

2011-08-17T12:22:00.003-05:00

This is a video of me playing Edvard "Crazy Moose" Grieg's famous piece "In The Hall of the Mountain King". While I didn't actually shoot this video on a piece of film equipment from the 1800's, the horrible sound quality of the camera I used and the fact that my piano is so out of tune contributed to the effect.

Anyway, the piece was also used pretty well in The Social Network:

Vacation Mini-Essays, pt. 2

2011-08-16T15:41:00.002-05:00

This is something that happens to me all the time: I'm writing something (blog post, short story, essay for English class, poem about Jesus, scathing review of a recent episode of Glee, etc.) when I have an amazing revelation about what I should write next. Immediately, I start writing whatever it is I'm writing at the moment much faster, so that I can start on my new, amazing idea as soon as I possibly can. Idiotically, instead of writing down my amazing idea, I just keep on writing, figuring that since it's so good, I'm bound to remember.

A few minutes later, when I'm nearing completion of my current piece, a family member or friend calls me for something, most often dinner. Being a fan of dinner, I usually just save my work really quickly and rush to the kitchen. I briefly think about what I'm going to write next, but my main concentration by that point is on the food I'm about to eat.

Fast-forward about an hour. After dinner, I come back to the computer/desk/etc. and finish what I was writing earlier (I often leave my work in mid-sentence). However, try as I might, I can't remember the brilliant idea that I had earlier. It's incredibly frustrating, mostly because the one thing I remember is how good the idea was. This is one of my more frustrating habits, but I'm perfectly aware that it's all my own fault for not writing it down. Still, it'll take a lot of effort to break this - this happens almost weekly.

I wonder - does this happen to all writers?

Runimations on Coldplay

2011-08-15T20:29:00.002-05:00

I'm skipping today in my cavalcade of reflection 'n' such for two reasons. Firstly, I'm very tired from the first day of cross country. Secondly, and more importantly, Coldplay announced a new album today!

In keeping with their bizarre album-naming tradition, it's called Mylo Xyloto. Yup. I don't know how to pronounce it either.

While I have taken a lot of flack for this from my more music-loving friends, I am a Coldplay fan (in fact, they're the one popular band I really like), and am unapologetic about it, and here's why:

1. Chris Martin has a gift for melody that is almost unsurpassed in this day and age. While most artists need a crack team of writers to crank out a forgettable single (I believe that one of Katy Perry's songs had as many as 14 writers), Clocks, a brilliant song that's still popular a decade after its release, took four people to write (all Coldplay songs are credited to all the members), and we all know that out of those four people, there was one man in particular who pulled more than his fair share. Anyone can play broken chords, but it takes a genius to turn those chords into music. In my opinion, this incredible knack for melody makes me overlook their mediocre lyrics.

2. Coldplay writes popular music, but that doesn't mean that it's bad by definition. A wise friend of mine gave me some advice recently that I think applies to almost anything: don't be a fundamentalist, because there's always going to be an exception. He was saying this in regards to vinyl records (he's a record collector and vinyl aficionado, but also showed me the infamous American vinyl pressing of the Beatles' "I Feel Fine", of which the CD is far superior), but it holds true for pop music as well. Certainly one can say (like I do) that quite a bit of good music goes unappreciated by the masses. But does that mean that the masses are always wrong? Absolutely not. Coldplay's songs are catchy, but they're also just plain good.

3. The more I think about it, the more I realize that Coldplay is a mutant version of U2. They write echo-y, sometimes sappy ballads filled with synthesizer and piano, they make what is undoubtedly popular music, but whether it's pop or rock is hard to say, they are led by a charismatic egomaniacal environmentalist who has a very distinctive and powerful voice, they are produced by Brian Eno, and they even have the same sort of lineup as U2. Sure, they're not Irish, and sure, they're not quite as good as U2, but I'll take what I can get.

While the will of the majority may not always be correct, what the heck, sometimes it is.

Bizarre Vacation Induced Reflections, Pt. 1

2011-08-14T19:14:00.002-05:00

Is it kind of sad that when I fantasize about my future, like every other teenager in America does, I see myself not as President (everybody blames you for anything wrong with the nation and your real power is actually pretty limited) or as a celebrity or winning the Super Bowl (see above), but as the subject of an article in the New York Times Magazine?

Yes. Yes it is.

This is compounded by the unfortunate fact, that, whenever I visualize this scenario, my profile isn't even the cover story. In fact, it's not even one of the features listed in bold text on the cover. It's just an article, maybe three pages long, about my life and my work (I hope to be profiled for something I've written). It might seem odd that a teen in the 21st century dreams of recognition by the New York Times, but that's just the truth.

In fact, my desire to be recognized by the Times and such literary institutions far eclipses my essentially nonexistent desire for fame. The way I figure it, being famous consists mostly of three activities: a) owning a fleet of Hummers, to be driven by your chauffeur, b) being seen in public carrying a very small, very irritating dog, and c) filing frivolous litigation against other celebrities that you think you can get even more money from or just plain don't like very much. None of these three things seem like anything I'd ever want to do. In fact, even the lives of local celebrities seems to primarily involve playing golf, which I'm terrible at, and appearing on the front page of local magazines every time you do something tangentially important.

I'm pretty sure that this reveals something very deep about my psyche, but, besides that I would rather be recognized for doing something important that few people care about than something stupid many, many people care about, I'm not quite sure what it is. Also, on a more depressing note, I just realized that the New York Times Magazine will almost undoubtedly be long gone in a few decades.

Oh well. I can always dream.

Book time!

2011-08-13T17:08:00.003-05:00

I'm going to delay the trip musings for a day or so to plug two books new to the Kindle store (both, coincidentally, by Mark Osler):

1. A Sentimental and Highly Inaccurate History of Baylor University

This book has been floating around the Internet for quite a while in various forms (for quite a while, it was an online exclusive item that, when ordered, turned out to be a poorly bound and wholly unedited tome available only in a flimsy, magazine-sized edition), but it has finally been given a proper release, in both Kindle format and print, although I would highly recommend the Kindle edition, as it only costs $5.

Believe me, you've never seen Baylor like this.

2. Water Behind Us

While this novel (which, I must say, is excellent) is available for free online on Le Rasoir, it would probably hurt your eyes a lot less to just spend $5 and buy the Kindle edition. Trust me, it's worth it.

Back from the dead

2011-08-12T17:59:00.004-05:00

[above: the creepy guy who keeps showing up on my "Next Blog" button. Why is his picture up there? Because I don't have an appropriate picture for today, so why not? Also, what is he drinking?]

I'm back!

While I was gone, I did keep a journal of my thoughts that, like most other things that I write, ended up in a format similar to this blog. For the next few days, I'll be posting some of my more interesting musings from the Undisclosed Location, although I'm certain that whatever I produce will never equal the sheer brute-force literary attack that is Professor Osler's Annual Cavalcade of Poetry.

I have noticed something odd about the way that my blog works: every time I go on summer hiatus, the last thing I post becomes the target of spam. For example, this post (quick note on the linked post: what the heck was going on in my head when I wrote that? I think it was meant as some sort of weird send-up of weird people who impersonate celebrities online, but it just ended up seeming like summer turns my brain into a grayish Jell-O salad) has generated more spam than any other that I've ever written. For the longest time, I had no idea why it was generating so much junk. I proposed many theories - as the post in question was written in a pseudo-spam type style, maybe scammers are just attracted to their own kind? - but none really held true, especially since no other post in that vein generated the same type of rubbish.

However, I just recently noticed that my last post before going away, the rather short "Dang It!" (as seen below - I've got enough links already), has been getting quite a bit of advertising (much of it containing what I suspect are axioms such as "God helps those who help themselves" or "A fool and his money are soon parted" translated to Chinese by way of Korean and then back in English, resulting in "The fate smiles on thems who do the work of the plow" and other like phrases). After eliminating some early theories (scamsters love Gary Gackstatter, exclamation points in post titles set the Web afire, etc.), I realized the one thing both of these posts had in common - they were the final (or near-final) post before a long hiatus, which led people to think that the blog had been abandoned and the only life would be in the comments section (a false supposition, after all).

I really should take some measure to try to stop it, but the marketing is too unintentionally hilarious to resist.

Dang it...

2011-07-22T08:50:00.000-05:00

Oh great. Now I'm leaving for another trip without Internet access. This summer really isn't turning out well for consistent blogging.

In terms of Harry Potter 7:2, I essentially agree with Professor Osler on the subject, although I would say that Mrs. Weasley's murder of Piglet should be interpreted as a metaphor for modern agricultural practices, rather than taken entirely straight.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Film 7: Part 2: The Final Battle: In 3D and IMAX!

2011-07-21T11:24:00.003-05:00

Tonight, I plan to go see the final Harry Potter movie. This is kind of a big deal for me, as I'm kind of a Harry Potter geek. I went to the midnight release of the final two books, and have seen most of the movies on opening day.

Thankfully, two of my most trusted critics, Mark Osler and the Pope, have given the film very good reviews.

Anyway, I'm still secretly hoping that director David Yates will sneak in a few scenes of the Potter Puppet Pals:

Great/bad

2011-07-20T16:39:00.003-05:00

[above: imagine if, instead of carrying the week's mail of the providence of New Brunswick, the man above is carrying a cooler full of Mexican popsicles. Mmmm.]

During a ride around one of Minnesota's abundant lakes today, I noticed two vendors who apparently operate on two very different intellect levels:

Great Idea: Selling Homemade Mexican Popsicles Next To The Lake

Unfortunately, my brother and I had already purchased some ice cream from the ice cream man (who, in Minnesota at least, uses a bicycle instead of a truck for the heat of the summer), but this seems like a great idea, especially since I like Mexican popsicles a whole lot. When I make a return journey, I will definitely bring some cash to buy one or three.

Horrible Idea: Selling Bottled Water Next To a Water Fountain At A Giant Mark-Up

There's so much ridiculous about $2 bottled water in the first place, especially in a place like southern Minnesota where clean, cold tap water is abundant, but selling it right next to a water fountain is just plain ridiculous. The guy selling it didn't seem to be doing very well - he appeared to be morbidly obese, for one thing, and was sitting on top of the cooler that apparently contained the water he was selling. Also, I think he misspelled "bottled" on his homemade sign.

Meh...

2011-07-19T16:22:00.004-05:00

[above: if only thinking of ideas was as easy as plugging in a Brain Enlargenator...]

Somehow, somehow, Professor Osler managed to perfectly and succinctly capture the way I'm feeling right now in his blog post today:

"I'm having mid-summer melancholy... which seems to involve a lot of sitting and staring into the middle distance."

Any advice on how to break out of it?

Chapter 9, in Which Micah Returns to the Land of the Blog

2011-07-18T11:51:00.003-05:00

[above: one of the bizarre lawn statues]

I'm back!

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to leave again soon (i.e. in a week), but hey, at least I'm back for a little while.

While this mission trip did not include the stress-relief spear or the laser-tag extravaganza that the last one did, it did include some great things, like:

-lots and lots of paint
-Badlands
-bizarre garden statues
-one of America's most bizarre tourist traps (not the Mystery Spot, unfortunately, although it appears that said Spot's website is run by Rebecca Black)
-an enormous amount of photos on Facebook
-a new, less embarrassing nickname for me than my previous one.
-many, many rounds of the game "Producer"
-Sufjan Stevens
-more windmills than I thought I would ever see in one place
-some awesome kids
-40 trash bags full of moldy old clothes (okay, I suppose this is more "disgusting" than "great).
-the "Party Van"
-one very tiny speaker that somehow put out enough sound to fill a rather large van filled with teenagers talking loudly

Oh, you silly Flintstones!

2011-07-09T15:21:00.002-05:00

Bad news: I have to leave on another mission trip come tomorrow, so I'll be offline for a while.

Better news: I found some truly tasteless commercials!

Somehow, somehow, each of these "half-advertisements" (they were shown during the show) manages to have something even more wrong with it than the concept of children's cartoon characters pitching cigarettes:

Commercial One [blatantly sexist as well as positive towards cigarettes]:

Commercial Two [this seems really unsanitary, as the cashier is handing Fred a box of already opened cigarettes and then proceeds to run his hands all over them. No wonder Fred never paid for them.]:

Ruminations on Atlantis

2011-07-08T11:02:00.005-05:00

The final space shuttle mission launched a few minutes ago, and I'm not quite sure how I feel.

I suppose that space shuttle launches are kind of like the war in Iraq or the Internet to my generation - we take for granted that they will always be there, as we've grown up surrounded by them. To use an example I think I've used before, I was never bothered by the fact that the U.S. was fighting two wars, not because of some deep-seated warmongering urge (I mean, it's not like I was happy that we were involved in these wars), but because we'd been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan since I started following the news, and while I had lived in a world where the U.S. wasn't at war, I was too young to remember what it was like.

It was similar with the shuttle program. I've heard it said that one of the goals of the program was to make going into space feel routine and normal. This succeeded entirely, although, I must say, it's hard to imagine a person who would actually want to accomplish these goals. Certainly, the fact that we are constantly going into space (or were constantly going into space) is a cool, sci-fi idea. However, it robs spaceflight of one of its biggest draws - the sheer wonder of voyages to the heavens. I know that for the longest time, I never felt any sense of awe at humankind going into space. It was just something we did.

However, today, I sat down in front of the TV and, for the first time that I can remember, watched a space shuttle launch live. Watching what was really going on when I read in the paper about a shuttle launch opened my eyes to the wonders involved. I suppose part of my lack of amazement at space launches was due to the fact that I receive my news mostly though writing, and that journalists have a terrible habit of downplaying the emotional appeal of positive events. While an article on the devastation of a war can easily make you cry, it's rare that you will find an article that invokes the same sense of overpowering emotion in an article about an astonishing achievement.

Needless to say, I was speechless as I saw the shuttle launching, climbing upwards. The fact that CNN had a counter next to it detailing its speed (upwards of 17,000 miles per hour at the edge of space) and altitude (100 miles or so above Earth's surface when I stopped watching) didn't hurt, either.

This is truly the end of an era - melancholy in that it will most likely be replaced with something better (hopefully, no astronauts will be killed this time around), but is the end of something, the shuttle, that more than anything is a symbol: of America, of achievement, and of wonder or, possibly, the lack thereof.

On justice

2011-07-07T10:50:00.003-05:00

This whole Casey Anthony thing struck me as a surprise. Apparently, it's been big news for the last few years, but I'd never even heard about it until last week. I chalk this up to the fact that I am an avid consumer of print journalism, and that the Anthony phenomena was almost exclusively a case of a TV sensationalism.

However, in the last few days, my Facebook news feed has been flooded with messages about the Anthony trial. This is a typical one:

"The not guilty verdict is crap! What is with our corrupt judicial system?!"

The more I read about this trial, the more I find myself disagreeing with my friend. Here are two reasons why:

1) Juries are sequestered from outside influence for a reason - that sensational media coverage of a trial like Anthony's can skew opinions based on "facts" not presented or moderated in a fair courtroom setting. The twelve jurors that decided on the Anthony verdict are the same type of people who would be calling for a different verdict right now had they not been sequestered - average Americans. If we trust ourselves to make these decisions, then why don't we trust these jurors, who know so much more about the case and the applicable laws than we do and came to a decision based on hard evidence (or, more accurately, the lack thereof)?

2) This, in my mind, is the more important mind: there is no way to prove that Casey Anthony killed her daughter, and the prosecution's attempts to do so have failed. Simply put, you cannot convict someone of a crime that you can't prove that they committed. Anthony was convicted of four counts of lying to investigators, and rightly so, as there was evidence that she had told lies. However, the prosecution's case against Anthony on the count of first-degree murder was flimsy at best. Certainly, they succeeded in proving that Anthony was a person who had made bad decisions in the past and was a liar. They also proved that she had the opportunity to kill her daughter. But - and this is the important part - they failed to prove that she killed her daughter. To break it down, just because somebody has character flaws and had an opportunity to commit a crime does not suggest beyond a reasonable doubt that they did, in fact, commit the crime. Would it have been possible to prove that Anthony was guilty of gross neglect? Absolutely, because there is evidence to show it. Can it be proven that Anthony is a murderer? No.

While I believe that Anthony probably was guilty on at least some level, there is no way to prove it, and I would rather stand behind a justice system that helps to prevent the conviction of innocents than a gut instinct based on hearsay and character evidence.

Oh, great, a stalker...

2011-07-06T10:22:00.003-05:00

Up until a few weeks ago, I could get away with anything on this blog. Of course, I blog semi-anonymously (people I know read the blog while knowing my true identity, but anonymous readers don't have a clue), and I took that as a license to perpetrate fiction occasionally (although, I must say, it was pretty obvious to anyone who was able to comprehend satire).

However, that is all starting to change, thanks to a mysterious, anonymous fact-checker who seems to have attached herself to this blog.

Going under the pseudonym of "Love, Mom", this person appeared on my blog a few months ago, promising things like hot chocolate that never arrived and attempting to downplay dangerous conditions as just a little "frosting on a cupcake", probably in an attempt to injure me.

This would usually just point to an unusually fervent commenter, but it gets scarier. Recently, as I pointed out earlier, Love, Mom has taken to fact-checking my posts. On my most recent post, she pointed out that it was my mother, not my father, who had the blades sharpened on the lawnmower. A trivial detail, right? Well, the creepy part is that she's totally correct. It was my mother, not my father, who took the lawnmower in to have the blades sharpened, although it was my father who picked it up and mowed the lawn immediately afterward.

I'm convinced that this "Mom" character is stalking me. She seems to know where I live, what I do, even the tiniest details of my everyday life.

What should I do?

Lawnmower options

2011-07-05T12:02:00.003-05:00

[above: option 2]

For as long as I can remember, my family has had the same rotary-blade lawnmower, and I, being the oldest child, have had the job of mowing the lawn. Until about two weeks ago, it would take almost an hour and a half to fully mow my family's rather small lawn, not because the grass grew abnormally fast, but because the blades were so dull that they seemed to dully bludgeon the grass instead of cutting it, making it look even worse. Thankfully, my dad finally had the blades sharpened, and the mower works fine now. However, before he made that fateful decision, I had been considering possible replacement mowers. Here they are, in ascending order of quality/price:

1) Swiss Army Knife ($5 to $20)

Pros: Cheap, many different grass-cutting utensils (scissors, serrated knife, butter knife, nail file, corkscrew, etc.), distinctive red paint job, portable

Cons: Enormous amount of labor required to cut small area of grass, slow, inefficient

2) Used pair of scissors ($10)

Pros: Larger surface area than Swiss Army Knife, probably already have a pair at home, convenient "handles", able to cut more than one blade of grass at once

Cons: Still quite slow, get dull easily, hard to keep grass clippings separate

3) Boomerang ($30)

Pros: Fun to use, can cut large areas of grass at once if blades are affixed properly, versatile, conveniently returns after being thrown

Cons: Originated in a God-forsaken prison colony, hard to aim properly, blades, if affixed to edges, would slice deep into hand upon return, still no way to keep grass clippings separate.

4) Medium to large cow ($200)

Pros: Fun, source of income (milk, cheese, possibly beef later), keeps grass clippings separate

Cons: Pretty sure it violates city ordinances, no way to deal with droppings, may end up grazing yard to a brown dust field and then move on to the neighbor's yard.

5) GrassBott 9000 ($3,999.99)

Pros: Fun, attractive, disposes of clippings properly, easy to use, less work in general

Cons: Exorbitant cost, may turn on its human masters if mistreated, might accidentally run over many squirrels and rabbits that live in our yard

Bad trailers

2011-07-04T12:26:00.002-05:00

Okay, I still think that Super 8 was the best movie I've seen so far this year, but the trailer is really terrible at describing the tone of the movie at all. Essentially, through the trailer, J.J. Abrams is trying to set people up for Cloverfield 2 (which, of course, would reduce the effect of the original), then pulls a total bait-and-switch when the movie turns out more like E.T. Watch for yourself:

Summer Movies: Quick Edition

2011-07-03T09:16:00.000-05:00

Recently, my friends/admirers/acquaintances/enemies have been asking me, "What should I see this summer, Micah?" Well, I've been giving them long, personalized responses, but I recently realized that it would be much, much easier just to make a list of movies currently in theaters that I've either seen or heard about with my snide remarks and e-mail them the link. You're welcome!

Midnight in Paris: My advice: go see it as soon as possible. Bring friends that you want to impress with your good taste in movies/Transformers fans that you want to alienate.

Cars 2: Haven't seen it yet, but I've heard varying reports, ranging from "great James Bond homage" to "terrible". I suppose your affinity for spy movies will decide if you like this or not.

Green Lantern: A great choice for people with an affinity for the color green, plot holes, or villains with unnaturally large heads. For others, it's a bizarre experience.

Transformers 3: Apparently, it's better than the first two movies, which really isn't saying much, but I'm probably going to see it anyway.

X-Men: While this is most likely odd for a movie in a series that's produced such movies as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, this movie, I've heard from a variety of sources, is very good.

Super 8: Please, just go see it. It might not be amazing, blow-you-away good, but it's the best movie I've seen in 2011 so far. Besides, the back-from-the-dead Magnificent Vista liked it (by the way, the blog's looking great!).

Some things I did on Mission Trip

2011-07-01T11:33:00.005-05:00

1. Sorted approximately 7.9 trillion almonds into individual boxes of 180 packages each. I'm sure that this helped more in the long run than it did at the time, but it still didn't feel much like "Mission" work.

2. Played a truly amazing game of Ultimate Frisbee in the pool, which unfortunately resulted in quite a few injuries and a noise complaint delivered to us by a very large hotel security officer. Whatever. It was worth it.

3. Bagged an astonishing amount of carrots. Quite truthfully, I'm not sure how I'm going to eat another carrot after this. Essentially, we had an enormous box of carrots (5 feet tall or so) that we had to scoop into individual 5 pound bags. This wouldn't have been nearly so bad if the carrots hadn't been frozen into a single congealed mass, which necessitated an enormous metal spear to break them apart. Truthfully, that spear was a better anger-management tool than any other I've ever heard of.

4. Weeded an enormous weed-ridden "failed garden". This would have been less remarkable had we not been given the order "just dig everything up". I suspect that Mason, our volunteer coordinator, wouldn't have given these instructions had he known how literally my youth group would take them. With each three-foot-tall shrub we dug up came a certain feeling of victory that, I suspect, Sarah Palin and her hunting ilk must feel when they bag an enormous moose from a helicopter or something.

5. Played an amazing few games of Laser Tag. I did pretty terribly for the first few games (and by "pretty", I mean "really), but I found a good strategy for the last game - stand with my back to a wall and just shoot everyone that comes in front of me. It worked amazingly well, and I think I got in the top few players for that game, but I'm pretty sure that some impartial observers would consider this strategy "cheating".

6. Had an amazing Harry Potter-based dive contest on the last day. Unfortunately, I made two very poor decisions: firstly, I decided to recreate Snape's death, which I thought was a good choice, as old Severus isn't the most popular character in my youth group. However, I made the poor choice of not killing him off in a gruesome enough manner. As well, my simulation of Sirius Black's death (you know, that time that he somehow gets killed by falling into a curtain) turned out badly, as it ended with a quite painful back flop on my part.

Why I hate Comcast

2011-06-30T12:05:00.004-05:00

[above: I'd expect that even the Spiderman musical works better than Comcast. Mostly, anyway.]

Dear Comcast,

You happen to be the only internet company that I've ever had the distinct displeasure to use that is just... so... BAD.

Oh, this is worse than the other stuff you've done over the years. Yes, the fact that you have your own 404 error pages is kind of irritating, especially since they have creepily targeted advertising on them. Your sporadic outages are often enraging, especially when I have a project due online. I still find it hard to believe that there still exists Internet service so bad that it actually slows down significantly when we use the telephone.

But that's not what I'm mad about. Oh, no. This is far worse.

About two weeks ago, I got on the computer, ready to blog. However, no page I opened would load. I would try again every thirty minutes or so, but my internet seemed to be trapped in a perpetual state of brokenness. I went to bed without blogging.

The next morning, I woke up, expecting the internet to be working again. But no, it still wouldn't load anything.

This kept happening for the next few days until I had to leave for Mission Trip (which was amazing, more on that later). Apparently, the internet was fixed while I was gone, and what was the cause of this outage?

The rain.

No, I'm not joking. My internet went out because of the rain (keep in mind that internet cables are buried underground).

In conclusion, please stop being evil and start actually doing the work that we pay you to do.

Sincerely,

Micah

Gone

2011-06-20T13:52:00.003-05:00

[this is where a photo would go if I was on my own computer. Here, I'll draw a little smiley face looking vaguely like Dick Cheney to make up for it:

------------
( 0 0 )
( | )
( _______ )
( | \ )
------------

There, isn' that better?]

Due to circumstances beyond my control (i.e. Comcast), I have not been able to get on the Internet for quite a while. As well, I'm not going to be able to post again for at least another week, if not more.

Therefore, I'm going to leave you with a discussion question: does the success of Ke$ha embody everything that's wrong with the music industry?

Hey hey hey! It's Intranest link day!

2011-06-16T17:32:00.003-05:00

[above: Gradually, the rioters turned their attention to breaking into local stores, including Hudson Bay and this Sears store.]

1. If you, like me, enjoy epic showdowns in the comments sections of various blogs (and admit it, on some level, you do), make reading the recent Waco Farmer vs. Osler smackdown a priority.

2. However, let's say you don't like that. "Micah," you say, "while that's pretty postmodernist in terms of entertainment, I prefer to cynically laugh at the failure of others in an entirely 21st-century manner, namely involving the internet and people's failures of judgment on weblogs."

Well, distressed reader, I would first like to point out that I own this stupid blog and that if you don't like it, you should just go start your own. However, in my own self-interest, I'll also point out the disconnect between the Springfield-esque mob destruction (really, this happens in Canada?) pictured and the placid captions in this post (example above) is pretty dang entertaining to an Internet-age cynic with no real interest in the betterment of mankind.

On having others recognize me.

2011-06-15T17:16:00.004-05:00

As faithful readers of my blog/stalkers/people who possess the ability to read my mind know, this was my first year at a regular neighborhood school, after elementary school at a private school and middle school at a charter school. For the most part, it was an entirely positive experience.

One side effect of it that I've never experienced before, though, is the fact that I essentially know all the other teenagers in the community. It's a little bit odd, to tell the truth. Today, I just went for a short bike ride around town, and at least five people I knew from school said hello to me.

This is not a bad thing in any respect at all. I like knowing people. I like having people know me. I'm not a weird introverted Metallica fan (in that I'm not introverted nor am I a Metallica fan; I'm quite aware of my weirdness). However, it's a bit weird because, truthfully, I've never had this happen before. Before, whenever I saw teens in the neighborhood, I would wish that I knew them, but wouldn't ever actually try to meet them, as they went to a different school and, most often, were with friends.

Anyway, I'm glad that they know my name, because I clearly don't know theirs.

Ask Aaron the Gigantic Advertising Beagle!

2011-06-14T18:02:00.004-05:00

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On addiction

2011-06-13T17:30:00.003-05:00

Addiction is a very, very dangerous thing. In essence, elements of your live are devoted to an object or thing - it can be to a chemical, to a drink, to an experience, to an emotion.

Or, in my case, to a website.

A wise friend of mine once said to choose one's addictions wisely, as it's in human nature to be addicted. This is incredibly good advice. While there is undoubtedly a difference between liking something and being addicted to it, trying to avoid addiction entirely necessitates total balance in one's life, which in itself necessitates utilizing everything in precisely equal amounts, ignoring the difference between what one likes and what one despises. The philosophical arguments involved in this can be debated endlessly, but, upon consideration, it can be easily shown that this is impossible for anyone but a perfect person (which none of us are) to maintain forever. Therefore, it's better to have a set of mild addictions (which can be described more eloquently as hobbies) than to have one or two enormous addictions, whether to video games or methamphetamine.

My problem is thus: I think I'm addicted to Facebook, and I don't know if that's a mild or a serious addiction.

Amongst my friends (in real life, not amongst my Facebook "friends", who range from very vague acquaintances to those as close as, well, my parents, siblings, and cousins), I wouldn't be considered a very heavy Facebook user - I log on twice or thrice a day, and am a creator of content, which is perceived as better than a consumer (or, colloquially, a stalker). However, it's pretty clear that this is just a case of us as a society being addicted - I visit Facebook far more than any other site.

For the longest time, I've justified this in this way: If I spent this amount of time talking with my friends, it wouldn't be considered bad by any means. It would be considered socially healthy. Facebook is just a conduit for this type of interaction and isn't inherently addictive any more than friendship is addictive. However, the more I think about it, the more this argument falls apart. I'm not addicted to friendship, I'm addicted to the feeling of overload I get from seeing all the content generated by my "friends". This is not quite as defensible.

Is moderate Facebook addiction a harmful addiction?

Eternal questions

2011-06-12T09:29:00.005-05:00

1. Which album is the "Listeners Also Bought" section above taken from? Obviously, I know the answer (I took the picture), so I guess it's more of a quiz, but anyway, I still don't get how any album could dare to unite the amazing Arcade Fire with the atrocious Avenged Sevenfold.

2. Why does sunscreen expire? This is more of an open-ended question than the last one, but is there anything wrong with expired sunscreen? Wouldn't the incredibly artificial sunscreen agents kill bacteria after a while?

3. Is being sarcastic on Facebook a sin, even if the other person really deserves it?

4. Why does it appear that every single video on Sub Pop's YouTube channel not by the Fleet Foxes is either a. artsy footage that has no meaning, b. adults pretending to be children and not doing it very well, or c. children pretending to be adults and not doing it very well? And who knew that Band of Horses had so many videos?

5. Is it just me, or have we as the human race been subliminally conditioned to have Facebook as our natural "rest" state online, and one has to work pretty hard to stop this after doing it for a while?

6. What is it with the Futura typeface and "indie" music (more a hollow label than ever considering the number of "indie" bands who are on major labels)? (examples can be found here, here, and here.

Even more dumb games

2011-06-11T11:43:00.002-05:00

I just realized that I entirely forgot to post yesterday. I don't feel that bad about it, frankly, because I had just got home from a day at an amusement park with my class and was dead tired.

Anyway, I was reminded by my mom that I had missed one thing on my list of games my brothers and I had invented.

Oof!

A very primitive game, I believe this one was invented by one of my younger brothers (I forget which one), but I suppose that I may have been an accessory in its creation as I did nothing to try to stop it from being played, as I should have.

Oof consists of two players, each armed with an oversized cushion from the couch. Each player holds the pillow against their stomach/chest and slams into the other player head-on. After the collision, each player is allowed to offer a distinctive type of grunt based on the pain they have endured: "Oof!" if they aren't hurt, and "Owf!" (a phrase I'm certain did not exist until this game was invented) if they are. The goal is to get the other player to say "Owf!" 18 (yes, eighteen) times in a row.

Now, there are an immense amount of flaws with this atrocious game, a few of which I've listed below:

1. Not only does it encourage injuring others, but injuring others is the only purpose of the game.
2. Due to the difficulty of making the other player do the exact same thing eighteen times in a row, nobody is known to have ever completed a full game.
3. Actually, it's incredibly hard to get the other player to say "Owf!" even one time: the honor system should not be applied to contact sports.

What other flaws can you find in this "game"?

The school year is over!

2011-06-09T17:44:00.002-05:00

Finally! Now I can get back to the important things in life, like:

-sitting around and doing nothing
-taking self-absorbed pictures of my vacation that nobody wants to see and posting them on Facebook
-helping in a modest manner with my brothers' inevitable lemonade stands
-listening to great music (see above)
-doing an advanced algebra course (sad, but necessary if I want to skip up to double-advanced math)
-sitting around
-doing nothing
-making snide comments
-reading the New York Times
-practicing piano
-running
-eating
-sleeping
-complaining about being bored
-sitting around/doing nothing
-writing, directing, and filming an alternate ending for Inception
-being utterly terrified of my 10th grade class schedule
-thinking about writing to try to practice for the school newspaper
-(possibly) actually bringing myself to practice writing for the school newspaper
-building a functioning snowmobile out of 12' of copper wire and small amounts of plutonium
-eating some more

"And there's Kobayashi using his technique..."

2011-06-08T16:27:00.002-05:00

To maintain my sanity in the face of finals, I've been reduced to watching dumb internet videos ad nauseum.

In relation to the specific dumb internet video above, be sure to notice:

1. The incredibly annoying announcer,
2. It's entirely unclear when, where, or why this event happened, but we know it's on Fox.
3. The bear's handler is Steve Martin.
4. At one point, Steve Martin says the following: "Welllll... ya know... when a bear comes in, a this [sic] bear is really hungry, so when they come in like that, they're gonna chow right down."
5. The incredibly annoying theme music.
6. The bear is invariably referred to as "The Beast", despite being very docile and amicable.
7. The contest is totally unfair - the bear clearly has the advantage, as the contest begins once he's eaten the first hot dog.

A brief history of games that my brothers and I have invented

2011-06-07T15:35:00.008-05:00

Believe me, there are more, but these are probably the most notable, and are in chronological order:

Balloon Ball

This was, by far, the first sport invented by my brothers and I, and it shows. In essence, the game's objective is to keep a partially deflated balloon (usually a few days old) from touching the ground. While I am certain that this is a pastime enjoyed by many bored children, we made it "special" in our own way by adding in bizarre rules that changed every time we began a new game. For example, while one game may involve trying to get a touchdown by moving the balloon (without carrying it) to a specified endzone, the next game might involve more chaotic, dodgeball-like elements. Truthfully, I can't remember whether we meant it to be like Calvinball or not, but it sure turned out that way.

Inception Cowboy Hide-and-Go-Seek Biatholon

Where Balloon Ball fails in terms of complexity, the Inception Cowboy Hide-and-Go-Seek Biathlon succeeds. As can be gathered from its name, it began more simply - as Inception Hide-and-Go-Seek - but quickly picked up steam. Unlike Balloon Ball, I am still known to indulge in a game of ICHaGSB occasionally. The rules are similar to those of Hide-and-Go-Seek, but with the following addenda:

1) The seeker, or "it", must wear the Cowboy hat at all times. No exceptions.
2) The seeker must also carry a Nerf dart gun. Once the seeker find a person, a chase ensues. If the hider is hit with a dart, they go into the next layer of the "dream" (i.e. the next round).
3) After all the players are out, the first one to be found faces off against the last one to be found in a basement game of "speed pool" (essentially pool, played very fast and with lots of egregious cheating - this is where the biathlon part comes in). The loser is "it" for the next round.

Aquatic Basketball

Despite what you may think, this is not basketball played in a pool (therefore the picture to the left is inaccurate - I just put it up there for no particular reason). Oh no. This is my brothers' most recent invention, and I am proud to say I had no part in its creation. In essence, the hose is used to flood the portion of our driveway with a basketball hoop on it, and then standard one-on-one basketball is played on the now slippery surface that's inch-deep in water. While the first match of this game isn't yet over (it was invented very recently), I suspect that a few repercussions will include the part of our lawn near that area dying and an angry visit from Al Gore concerning the waste of water.

Fan mail!

2011-06-06T15:15:00.003-05:00

As, at this point, my life consists of one main thing (finals), very little is going on that is quite blog-worthy. Thus, I've decided to take this as an opportunity to respond to my enormous comment backlog.

From Anonymous:

your criticism+140 character limit=light chuckles throughout my day.

Dear Anonymous,

First of all, Anonymous, why are you wasting time posting on my blog? You're supposed to, you know, be hacking and stuff. Anyway, I'm glad to see that this got through to someone, even if that someone is a multinational cyber-sabotage organization.

From Pippy:

You can stash your weed in there! [there referring to my hollowed out Contracts book]

Dear Pippy,

I don't know who you are, although I can just assume you are one of the Pips who decided to take on a Seven Dwarfs-esque title, but I do know that you think that I am a pothead. While some of my observations seem to be drug-induced to a frightening degree, I can assure you, that's just from me being high on life (which in itself presents many more serious issues).

From Anonymous:

Undisclosed Circumstances? Are you doing stuff with Dick Cheney again? [on yesterday's post]

Dear Anonymous,

Really, why do you keep reading my blog? Shouldn't you be taking care of those "operations in Libya" you were talking about when you took over the Westboro Baptist Church website? Anyway, while I fervently deny any rumors of being ex-Vice President Cheney's "young ward", I cannot disclose at this time whether I have re-initiated contact with him after the failure of "Project Death Mountain".

Judging a book by its cover

2011-06-05T18:03:00.003-05:00

[above: I wish they'd played this at the choir concert, but, alas...]

Okay, here's the truth: while I've often been of the vocal opinion that Glee is bad, evil, the devil, a product of the former Soviet Bloc, etc., I really can't judge it without actually watching it, and I just can't bring myself to do that. While I've received differing opinions on the show itself (in the positive corner: a whole lot of 14-year-old girls! In the negative corner: Justin T.!), that really doesn't tell me much.

Therefore, I'm forced to consider its indirect consequences on society:

Cons:

1. Glee versions of songs are often very annoying, and, with very few exceptions, inferior to the original recording. As well, they have an annoying habit of selling better than the originals.

2. Unfortunately, the songs selected by Glee that get an instant popularity boost are often very bad songs - apparently, one of the top qualifications for being selected is being Auto-Tuned.

3. The show seems to have a horrifying charm to it - that is, it draws people in based on how bizarre it is.

Pros (sigh...):

1. Occasionally, Glee uses its influence in a good way, i.e. a few weeks ago when Fleetwood Mac's album Rumours inexplicably climbed up the charts. I found out in school that this was because the entire album had been featured on Glee.

2. It has certainly made choir concerts more interesting - under undisclosed circumstances, I was made to go to a choir concert a few days ago, and it was far better than I'd expected, due in no small part to the fact that the production values were pretty high, a phenomena I'd attribute to the Glee Effect.

It's a beautiful day/Whoa/Don't let it get away (repeat ad infitium)

2011-06-04T13:05:00.003-05:00

It's such an amazing day outside that a planned early morning drive to get doughnuts turned into a hour-and-a-half long bike ride odyssey that involved purchasing the doughnuts, eating said doughnuts after a ride around the lake, and then stopping at the local farmer's market to get stuff for dinner.

Hopefully, this is what summer is going to be like (as opposed to the oppressive, evil heat of yesterweek).

Add in confirmation about my trip to California and a Fleet Foxes concert this July and I think I've got a pretty good summer coming up. Now if finals would just end...

Selections From a Pointless Conversation About Greenland

2011-06-03T15:13:00.004-05:00

Note: this all comes from a discussion of Greenland that took place during Econ class today, and was assisted immensely by Wikipedia. Don't ask why. I don't really know either.

Facts About Greenland

"Wow! It's giant!"
"Hey, check it out on Google Maps! It's just, like, white, but not just in the north part, like Canada or something!"
"Is that all snow?"
"I bet there are more people, in, like, Montana than in Greenland!"
"No, that can't be true."
"I heard that a tenth of Greenland's population lives in one apartment."
"Okay, let's check out the population... whoa. It's only, like, 50,000 people."
"So 5,000 people live in one apartment?"
"That can't be comfortable."

Theories About a Greenlandic City

"Look up the smallest city in Greenland."
"Here it is. It's called Moriusaq. There are only 2 people in there."
"Why?"
[small conversation gap for frantic Googling]
"Okay, so there were five people there, and now there are two. So, one guy got killed in 2009, right?"
"Yeah. Then the schoolteacher left."
"But then that's still three."
"The murderer probably left too, right?"
"That brings us down to two."
"Wow, that's a high murder rate. 1 in 5."

and an Exceptionally Bad Idea About Greenland

"You know, taking over Greenland would be like taking over some tiny suburb."
"Well, then why don't we?"
"Because the Danes would get mad."
"Look, the whole place has less people in it than there would be at a baseball game. It wouldn't be that hard to take over."
"But then what would we do with it?"
"Two words: prison colony."
"Yeah!"
"I can see it now: 'Come visit Greenland, the Australia of the Americas!'"

Finals and other such things

2011-06-02T15:21:00.003-05:00

[above: watch out for the duck. He may look harmless, but enraged ducks have been known to seriously wound humans who irritate them by throwing bread at their heads, allowing their children to chase them, attempting to shoot them for food, etc.]
Ugh... final exams are not fun.

This is really the first time in my life that I've had a real "finals week", and it's much different than I imagined. For one thing, there's much less review than I thought. This isn't to say that I've been doing badly on finals - in fact, on the ones that I know about, I've received all A's.

The main purpose of this post is to warn that my life is getting to be a bit too, well... monotonous to have that much to say. So until about a week from now, expect shorter blog posts.

Anyway, this is all just making me even more excited for summertime. There may be a chance that my incredibly crammed schedule may change to include yet another trip - this time to Oregon, home of America's most most disturbingly fitness-obsessed mascot.

Want some Hotmail accounts? Well, has Rob got a deal for you!

2011-06-01T16:44:00.000-05:00

[above: just a little Fake Science that has nothing to do with this post, but non sequitors are quite fun, when you get used to the randomness factor.]
"I don't usually send out a PM to my fellow forum buddies but this site just showed up in my email and I wanted to share it

What it is is an account making site. For example... If your like me and need lots of gmail and hotmail accounts then

you will need to go to this site because they are [url=]CHEAP[/url] !!

I just bought 1000 hotmail accounts for I think it was $30. So go check them out, I thought you might like this!

Ttyl,

Rob"

Okay, just a few things:

1. This isn't a message board, and it most definitely isn't a private message form. I'd recommend learning to "read" as a prerequisite for getting into these jobs.

2. What is this suggesting about the people that you apparently wanted to private message this to? I genuinely can't think of a single legitimate reason to want thousands of Gmail addresses. However, I can think of plenty of illegitimate purposes, so this guy is implying that I want to follow in his footsteps and start spamming people

3. I really think that it would somehow violate Google's terms of service to buy thousands of their addresses, so this site you're talking about it illegal too.

4. Even if, as we've assumed above, you are a spammer looking for an illegal way to obtain email addresses, why would you buy them? These addresses are free. You can create as many as you want. Look, here's an example. Here's another..

5. In the Magical Land of Spam, where I assume all these spammers live, copy-and-paste technology is apparently far behind that of the United States, as they all try, in vain, to add in a web address, but are never able to do so.

What I did this weekend - an essay in photos

2011-05-31T16:45:00.006-05:00

After finding some old law books in the garage this past Saturday, I decided to make something useful out of them: a method of hiding various things (I'm currently using it to hold CD's) inside of what appears to be a contracts textbook!

These are the tools of the trade: scissors (to the right, green), glue gun (not pictured).

Here's the shell of the books after thorough gouging.

After a surprisingly long time, I finally manage to saw through the cardboard.

And... the final product! Isn't it beautiful?

Unfortunately, though, I don't think it's considered "normal" for a fifteen-year-old to walk around holding a contracts textbook, but whatever.

Here comes the summer

2011-05-30T08:16:00.003-05:00

Just like almost every other student in the United States, I'm excited for summer vacation, which is coming up very, very fast - it's only nine school days away!

However, I'm wondering whether it'll be busier than the school year.

Somehow, over the course of the year, the events 'n' such have piled up so as to create an impenetrable wall of activities this summer. Here's what I'm talking about:

1. Lifeguard training
2. Vacation halfway across the country
3. Mission trip
4. Second mission trip with another church
5. Vacation to California
6. Vacation to Canada
7. Driver's ed
8. (over the course of the summer) Playing piano at retirement homes
9. (over the course of the summer) Teaching myself advanced algebra to move up to AP Stats & Trig next year.

Undoubtedly, there are pros and cons to this type of scheduling. On the good side, I'm lucky to have all these activities and they'll create a lot of good memories (except for #7 and #9). On the bad side, I'm not sure when I'm going to find time to participate in typical teenage summertime activities, such as loitering and complaining about being bored.