March 2004 Archives

There. I've said it. This is the week from hell. I got to school at 7:45 today, left at 2:30, debated from 4:00 to 10:00, and then I got back. The results were good. I was pleased. People were much better at districts than at the invitational tournaments throughout the year. There were 15 teams I believe, in 4 rounds of double elimination with some more rules. Dan and Catherine got 3rd (meaning they go to state and won some points for us), Kim and Jon get 5th (meaning they won some points for us), and Colin and I got 6th (meaning we made it to the final round and lost). But the best part is that 3 of our 4 teams are sophomores (the seniors being Dan and Catherine, who are also the best), and are all pretty good. Meaning that we're going to get a lot better in the next few years. So now I've got to go finish my research paper and do my especially long Murphy outline. I'm almost thinking about not going to school tomorrow. Oh and Dan. I checked out The Slaughterhouse Five two days ago, so it's on my list already. I'll check out the Dostoevsky though. Island has always seemed interesting, but I've never read it. About your comment that someone said it was a horrible conclusion to Huxley's genius: about 20% of all reader reviews I've read of Huxley's books are like that.

I finally got the results from my CT scan of my sinuses. Contrary to my dad's obnoxious sarcastic cynicism against all of medical science and practice, there were very meaningful results. The lining of my left sinus is abnormally thick. I have a pocket in my left sinus which currently has a mixture of mildly infected fluid and air. And I have a deviated septum... AND I will be going to an ear, nose, and throat specialist. The problem is NOT allergies as my dad has long suspected and theorized. Once again, contrary to what my dad would think if reads this, this is not a condition that will just go away. Or it might, but that would mean living through at least several more weeklong bouts of fever running up to 103 degrees F, and multiple courses of antibiotics (AHA! evil, evil!). And probably a couple more years of constant sinus infection (it's been a year and a half thus far).

Here's an interesting personality test that allegedly tells you what famous leader you're like: http://similarminds.com/othertests.html

Apparently I'm Gandhi and Dan is Hitler. For Dan they say: "You are paranoid but killing all your enemies does tend to help. You are Hitler. You tend to see threats everywhere and always focus on worst-case scenarios."

I've got to get my bloody hands on some bloody Rousseau one of these days... first Meiner telling me to, then Dan... Yikes!

I have discovered the greatest word in the world: plutocracy. It is a form of government governed by the wealthy. It comes from the Greek word "ploutos" meaning wealth, and the Latin root "-cratia" meaning government. Hence, wealth-government. However, the astute reader will note in the word "plutocracy" the prefix "pluto", which although literally derived from the Greek "ploutos", reminds one of the planet Pluto. Our modern word Pluto is derived from the Greek "Ploutōn", or god of the underworld. Now wait a second. "Ploutos"... "Ploutōn"... Awfully close. Superficially, they seem to originate from the same Greek root word. Those Greeks were a funny lot now weren't they. And yes for your information, I do look up definitions for new words and the origins of words almost daily. It's a great pleasure, you should try it sometime.

I read Waiting for the Barbarians by the latest Nobel Prize winner for literature. One of his earlier and lesser works, I believe it to be. It was pretty good overall. It's in 1st person present tense, which is interesting. It's a kind of compelling and fairly blatant commentary on modern imperialism (no, no, no! We're not talking about some communist America-hating Frenchman, so you can turn off the anti-Patriot alert if you're sensitive to that kind of thing: it was published in 1980 by a S. African), criticism of bureaucratic centralism (or so it seemed to me, but that may be a long shot), and the kind of attitude where people villify some nebulous semi-nonexistant enemy in order to justify their cruel treatment of them. Chances are that it has something to do with Apartheid, but I have no clue what the connection is. Nevertheless, given the current circumstances of the world, anybody can probably squeeze a gram of relevance out of Waiting for the Barbarians. The thing is though, is that there was this weird long sexual escapade that the protagonist/narrator/basically-the-only-character had, that I could not figure out. It was pretty important to the plot structure, but I haven't the faintest idea what thematic purpose it serves. In all honesty, I don't think I really understand this novel very well. In fact, I don't think I understand it well enough to be writing this. But I'll be frank, Coetzee's writes has a very fresh and talented style that I enjoy. He does a fabulous job of implying things without actually describing them literally. That can get a bit dense and confusing when not reading super deliberately, but it's very cool when you're being attentive. So Nobel Prize worthy? This book definately isn't, but his other books are probably better. Then again, when I think of some other Nobel Prize winning authors I've read... Toni Morrison (I shudder multiple, multiple times....), Aleksandr Solzenitzhen (I don't know how to spell his name, but the only thing that A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich has going for it is that the incredible bleakness and emptiness of the writing serves to mirror and reinforce the incredible emptiness and bleakness of Soviet labor camps; it only serves to bore me. Although I shouldn't say that it was necesarily a bad novel because it wasn't. It's just more historical and factual than really a fictional novel is generally considered. Although the prison slang is really cool!)

I use parentheses that are way too big way too often on here. Too many splintering trains of thought!

I've decided I'm not nearly critical enough when it comes to books. I say wonderful things about all of these books, and then I come across a really, really good one that I rave about. But how is one supposed to separate the decent from the legendary? I will say, that the statements below are not, in the least, hyperbolical. Following in this new order of things, I will issue a just critique of Farenheit 451 which I found to be an above-mediocre novel. It doesn't live up to its hype in my opinion though. However, it's good that they have every child that passes through the US public school system read it. It's just that kind of novel. You have read it, whether you like it or not, because it will inevitably do you a little good.

I don't have much time, so I'll unload my most recent line of thinking. I have a new book to declare on my list of greatest ever: Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley. It is genuine genius. It literally has no plot (Yipee!! Seriously, I'm sick of this continual plot-based monotony that gets shoved down one's esophagus all of the time. It's a good break from the quotidian structure of most novels. This is a novel of ideas.), and consists mostly of relentless philsophical banter between this endless myriad of wealthy, unfaithful, English "intellectuals" of the 1920s. It is a stunningly brilliant description of what is wrong with modern life. Although I can't say that I agree with the conclusion 100%, I still very much agree with it and find it to be a materialization of some vague, disjointed thoughts that have been floating around inside my head for some time now. Of course, I doubt any of you will actually go to the trouble of reading it. It's 432 pages of small print; but I still doubt any of you who even do have time will read it. But you must! The endless pages of bitter, brutalizing, carnal irony and hypocrisy is just too amazing to pass up. Plus it ends with a political murder and this long conversation that serves as an exposition on why all of the false, detestable characters that permeate the novel are VIVISECTING THEMSELVES AND SOCIETY. "Vivisect" is my new favorite verb. I'm going to start using it whenever possible. Admittedly, you do have to realize that you're dealing with Huxley (the same person who brought you The Doors of Perception... something something), and the content is slightly risque by 1920s standards, in terms of the numerous affairs that numerous characters have. But that's an essential part of the structure of the characters and novel. I think philosophy is kind of my new interest. It's tertiary to math and science though (Ye gods, the irony! If only you knew!). Needless to say, this puts M. Shelley's little unknown and impossible-to-find work Valperga--which I though was pretty decent; sort of in the B-ish range--to major shame. I'm reading Crome Yellow next. I read a short thing on it online. Apparently, it's disappointingly ridiculous, but very humorous: A good sort of lighthearted affair to read after this delicious monstrosity.

The cold, sparse air on the oblique peak pulsated with the electricity of exhilaration, or so it seemed to the middle-aged conqueror of the remote nondescript half-pyramid of igneous monotony. The voltage of the charge increased as the climber of the peak continued to ascend the exponentially increasing steepness of boulders. The scene was lifeless; not even insects dared to challenge his progress by showing themselves. Almost there... So close. The adrenaline that charged the air shocked him to his hands and knees, humbling him before the grade of the unstable, rocky slope. The mountain spat out a boulder pivotal for his balance, momentarily destabilizing him. He became frenetic; it was war. He had to conquer that hideous heap of rock. The reason for this was uncertain to him, yet its necessity was clear. Progress must be made, if for no other reason than to progress. As he climbed higher the battle became more fierce and the mountain vomited its rocks out from under him at points. Ever closer, just perhaps 15 meters more; progress cannot be stopped. The slope grew even steeper at the final stage of the peak’s cap. A small gray skyscraper was the uppermost pinnacle of the mountain, upon which there was a small platform bounded by sheer cliff on all sides but one. The man’s feeling of the air had changed from that of electricity to that of a nuclear reaction. He had deduced the mountain’s secrets, and he could predict the rocks that the mountain was about to regurgitate down its face. Progress was made. His hands with their opposable thumbs grasped the edge of the platform and worked the rest of his body onto the mountain’s tabletop.

It was odd. The adrenaline that pounded like nuclear reactions had stopped its fission. He felt uncomfortable kneeling on the exposed peak, trembling as he eased up near the edge of the cliff. The air was devoid of earthly sound save a desolate gust of wind that glanced off the blasted rocks. The top was a true exemplification of perfect desolation. As the man peered over the precipice, Phobos clutched him. He took over the man’s body and reeled it away from the edge. The empty wind blew again as he recoiled.

He paused for a brief moment before gladly retreating back down the mountainside to the trail in the saddle of the range. In his mind, the quandary ran of how the pleasure and maniacal glee of progress could yield something so barren and terrible. The essence of pleasure was indeed the seeking of pleasure itself. There was no pleasure in the product of progress: only emptiness, it seemed.

With a jolt he was scrambling back down the slope, finding his comfortable way once again.

I was reading some Freud for this Oratory on why the motivation of people's actions should be based on rationalism not religion, that I'm writing for speech. I came across this absolutely magnificent piece called "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices". It's bound to offend just about anyone who is religious, but it is brilliant. It compares obsessional neurosis and religious practices, and comes to the conclusion that the two are really the same thing... Hence, the reason many people would very strongly disagree. It's really, really cool though.

"'It's the disease of modern man. I call it Jesus's diseases on the analogy of Bright's disease. Or rather Jesus's and Newton's disease; for the scientists are as much responsible as the Christians. So are the big business men, for that matter. It's Jesus's and Newton's and Henry Ford's disease. Between them, the three have pretty much killed us. Ripped the life out of our bodies and stuffed us with hatred...

'Jesus and the scientists are vivisecting us...'

'But it isn't the same,' the other [the same as in the preceeding paragraph] went on. 'It's just Christianity turned inside out. The ascetic contempt for the body expressed in a different way. Contempt and hatred. That was what I was saying just now. You hate yourselves, you hate life. Your only other alternatives are promiscuity or asceticism. Two forms of death. Why, the Christians themselves understood phallism a great deal better than this godless generation. What's that phrase in the marriage service? "With my body I thee worship." Worshipping with the body--that's the genuine phallism. And if you imagine it has anything to do with the unimpassioned civilized promiscuity of our advanced young people, you're very much mistaken indeed.'"

--Aldous Huxley, selections from Chapter 10 of Point Counter Point. What other author let's his/her ideas flow so freely in such an irreverent dialetical format, without being bogged down by plot? Aha! None.

I just got done practicing my trumpet a little bit, and I have decided that Mr. Duke Ellington is of an unbelievable genius. I never really thought highly enough of him in the past. I mean, he wasn't a bebopper, or part of the cool movement, or free jazz, or avant-garde; he always stuck to pretty dang conservative jazz. But it's a mistake to say that he was part of the swing school too. True, he made heavy use of the big band format, but his music never reflected the rampant pop commercialism that taints much swing. It was fresh. Always. My point with all this is that we're playing "Black and Tan Fantasy" in PYJO, which is by Ellington. The trumpet part is so superficially simple that it appears a 2nd year player could easily play it. Admittedly, there are other horn parts that are more complex, but the score seems reletively simple at first glance. Yet, I would say that this is one of the most difficult pieces I have ever played. The way all of the voicings fit together is soooo, soooooooo cool. It's essentially this kind of work song with a dirge on either end. God, it's amazing. And the trumpet part is great because it is essentially just these long wails with a plunger, but it's incredibly difficult. The notion of wailing with a plunger seems simple, but is in fact incredible difficult. That's what I love about jazz. Seemingly simple things are not as easy as they seem. Quite the contrary. But anyway, I've decided that Ellington is on a plane of creative genius higher than any other jazz composer. I have only begun to understand.

Here's an occasional list of good books I have read recently or am currently reading:
Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley
The History of Jazz - Ted Gioia
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Winnie-La-Pu - A.A. Milne, translated by Ivy Kellerman Reed and Ralph A. Lewin

Mi emas blogi en Esperanto, tial mi enesperantskribas. Estis tago boneta. Mi legis eton de Huksleo, kaj iris al la libraro kaj havigis kelkajn Kafkaon kaj Koetzion. Tiam, mi iris al la lernejo por prepari por la danco ĉi nokte. Tre malmultoj antaŭaĉetis biletojn, kaj tial ni ĉargrenas ke ni eble ne lukros sufiĉan monon por pagi niajn elspezojn. Sed Haninao kaj Aleksino estis tie, tial la okazo estis en ordo. Ĝi havas printemptemon, ĝi okazas ĝuste nun. Mia patrino kaj mi manĝis en nova manĝejo de manĝaĵo Taja. La manĝejo estis tre bone. Sekve, mi manĝos en Akaparo Tajo, pro la rekomendo de Kadiŝo. Miaj Esperantlertaĵoj estas tre malbonaj pro neekzerci. Mi devus enesperantskribi pli ofte.

Dan Szymkowiak is the modern Plato, the great nihilistic philosophical genius of our times who can see through the muddy waters of hypocrisy and contradiction that cover our planet.

I think I'm losing my edge.

We had a practice debate today. It was awful. Hopefully the awfulness of it will make me do better tomorrow at the debate-off for the 3rd and final spot for districts. Seeing as I haven't debated in at least 3 weeks it wasn't much of surprise. The only saving grace is that Leeor and Meghan were almost as bad, so we'll be on somewhat even footing. And the weather has been fiendishly good; it's broken 60 degrees for 4 days straight.

What is the worst though, is that school is getting rather hard. There's something about 3rd quarter that makes one lazy, but at the same time it gets harder. Miserable, that's what it is. And then there's APs coming up in May, for which it's time to study. And I only have to take the US History one. Next year I will have taken enough classes to take a hypothetical total of 7 APs (I think). That would by evil incarnate, so I'd probably ditch either the 2 econ ones, or the 2 government ones (probably government). But enough of that. I'll suffer through that later. Actually, it's not necessarily that school is getting harder, but my grades are lower. My grades are still out of sync with reality from when I was sick a month ago because teachers lost or didn't enter in make-up work. At the mid-term, for instance, I had a B in Spanish, quite possibly the easiest of all classes, because my teacher lost 2 relatively large assignments, and she can't find one of them now. And now I have to do all of this junk for speech and debate and MUN. So it's not shaping out spectacularly, but there is one good thing. I've still got a nearly infinite distance to fall downhill, and a comparatively small distance to reclaim. Or maybe that's not really good at all. I don't know.

My latest venture is perhaps the most ambitious of all. In this occasionally updated series I shall lay out the groundwork and attempt to answer the question of what "blog" fundamentally really is. I claim no mastership of the medium: quite the contrary in fact. But I think that it is useful for myself and others to understand my thoughts on the essence of blog. In a way, it will be kind of like an amateur edition of The Elements of Style for bloggers. Initially, I shall attempt to define the purpose of blog: why and for what it exists; and I shall use this information to create an analysis and style guide for blog. These are difficult questions, and they will surely represent mere dabblings in a great uncharted area of the internet. I hope that this may interest some and help others.

I still have Murphy to do, but I'm really feeling the urge to postulate, and the outline is only 5 pages tonight. Neither Dan, nor Kadish, nor Colin, nor Ted, nor Carlin, nor Lee, nor Hannah (I've come to realize that Hannah is an excellent person with whom to have a conversation of postulation) is around, so I have this strange device called a keyboard and a computer which I shall postulate by pounding at instead. And I won't be postulating on the previous entry on aesthetics, because I'm still formulating a just rebuttal to the claims brought against me: it was written carefree, somewhat exaggerated, but not sarcastically, although it may have been easily misunderstood (because it was words, devices that can only be interpreted, HAHA!!). But anyway, I walked into English today, and I noticed that the desks were arranged in a slightly new pattern. So I sat down in the location that had always been my seat and probably would remain such. But the majority of the class, say 60% maybe, was very confused by this whole new arrangement. The majority of the class, in fact, took at least 1 minute more to sit down in a seat. Please note here, that the general layout of the classroom remains unchanged; perhaps 6-8 desks were moved slightly). Aha! You see my point. Or maybe you don't because I haven't said it yet. Aha! The point is that these people are so entrenched in their routine that the slightest deviation makes them unstable and unable to form decisions as quickly. Even for something as trivial as this, we observe this phenomenon. Now let's digress to my favorite topic: pre-civilization humans, hunter-gatherers, nomads, whatever you like to call them. Let's imagine this extended family of 40 humans of this development level walking through the West African jungle. Something unexpected comes up. They would quickly adapt to the situation and deal with it. Why? Because it could be a threat to their survival if they didn't. Aha! So you can see, what this is showing about our modern society, is that our lives have become such that we don't need the ability to adapt quickly anymore, so we can't do it anymore. Aha! It's the laziness the ague...! The inherent and inescapable lack of variety in modern life is dulling down the general level of adaptability, and, one might go so far as to say: creativity. You can't escape it. I can't escape it. It's killing us all. The only way to combat it is constantly reminding oneself of its existance, and remembering to exercise common sense. Aha! Now you've got it, and I think I do too.

Apparently my idiocy is greater than I thought... And believe me, I have always felt it to be great...

The weather was painfully good today. It really was. I think it may have even hit 70. I think I'm lacking inspiration today. It's the weather; I hate it, I really do. There is something about this absolutely perfect weather that is utterly demoralizing. I didn't get to work today until 2:30. Then, I had trouble writing my rough draft of this research paper on cold fusion by electrolysis of water. It's more of an exposition on the whole fiasco really. We have to have a draft of the 1st 4 pages by tomorrow, so I sat down and I started pounding out some junky background on "hot" nuclear fusion, how it applies to the controversy of "cold" nuclear fusion, and some information on the Coulomb barrier. It was one of those times when you write and then stop to think, and you look at the clock and you realize you've been staring at the computer screen doing absolutely nothing for 15 minutes. It's like you go into a quasi-coma. I then I broke from my trance and had this horribly depressive realization: I'm writing a research paper on electrochemically induced cold fusion for english... ENGLISH. Why? What sort of moron am I?? For god's sake, if my teacher even takes the time to actually think about cold fusion, it's not like he's actually going to think it's interesting. He teaches ENGLISH. Hah! One time at speech and debate practice Dan and Catherine were showing me how to take the integral of this equation, and the ENGLISH teacher whose classroom it's held in started yelling at us for writing math on his chalkboard--I mean dry-erase board. They replaced about 60% of the chalkboards in the school with dry-erase boards about 3 years ago. I guess they stopped because they ran out of money for doing it. But it was the stupidest thing in the world. You want to know how much a stick of chalk costs? Probably about $0.10. You want to know how much a dry erase pen costs? About $1.50. And my math teacher goes through more than 1 a week. Somehow I don't think she would go through 15 sticks of chalk in a week. So essentially they spent money so they could force the teachers to spend more money (NO! The school does not pay for pens, chalk, or anything else like that). I guess they did it because the dust of the chalk is some kind of allergen or carcinagin or toxic cloud, or really I have no idea, but I'm guessing that they were sued, or someone sued someone somewhere, so everyone started replacing chalkboards with dry-erase boards. But back to my paper. So, I've realized that I've set myself up for failure because my teacher can't possibly relate to the topic, unless I sensationalize the heck out of it... Which is interesting. Before about 6 months ago, I was a perpetrator of this rampant senationalism in my serious writing (this blog doesn't count). Now I hate it con pasión. I can't stand journalism, and I write everything as factually and as emotionally detached as possible. So just imagine this paper. A factual, emotionally detached, devoid of figurative language, paper of sorts. It's doomed for failure. That's another thing I can't stand in anything but fiction: FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE. They try to teach you in school that it adds to the meaning of things. They're WRONG. The absolute only thing that it is good for is developing theme, character (only if it develops theme by doing so), or mood (and usually only if it develops theme by doing so) in fiction. That's because the only thing that makes fiction good is theme, if fiction had no themes, it would have no purpose and therefore I would have to say that it could not exists. But then again, there's a lot of pointless things that exist. But back to my original point. When you start putting metaphors in nonfiction, you start opening things up to interperatation and this can lead to multiple meanings for the same fact. It's terrible business, really. Facts are facts and all efforts should be kept to keep them that way. Then there's people that say that figurative language is necessary because it makes things INTERESTING. That's stupid too! If you write something, you shouldn't have to intentionally create ambiguity by using figurative language in order to keep someone's attention. If their attention can't be kept by the facts, the very substance of what is written, then they shouldn't be reading the thing in the first place, or they shouldn't complain. I mean, the level of laziness here is outrageous. People having to require nonfactual distortionary cues to periodically pique their interest in what they're reading... Unbelievable. And to think that I bought into it for all these years is even more disturbing. So the point here is fourfold. Fold the first: don't weight fact, reason, and truth with unnecessary aesthetic baggage. Fold the second: aesthetics must always have a definite purpose, because things without purposes should not exist. Fold the third: good weather is always indicative of irony. And fold the fourth: there is no way that I can write anything without finding some inner contradiction and hypocrisy. And I guess there's also a fifth fold: all writing is hypocritical and contradictory and the only reason it's considered and intellectual process is because sorting through the endless contradictions requires the useless firing of so many random neurons, that the brain is built up for more productive things like math and science.

MUN credentialing was today, and it was a bit of a fiasco. Kvitka has been in Russia for the past two and a half weeks making some documentary of Gorbachev, so Ian and I have been running MUN alone during this normally very hectic time. It was, in fact, a miracle that all of the country notebooks got done and made it to the Lincoln credentialing session this morning. For people on a particular country to be able to be credentialed, the country notebook for that country must be approved. Thankfully we noticed a contradiction on the requirements for the notebook on the OHSIRL site, and were able to adapt our notebooks to fit either standard. So, Ian and I were rather pleased when everything was coming together smoothly at about 8:15 this morning. Then we took all of our notebooks to the room where they were to be approved, handed them to the judges and waited for their approval. Only it didn't go like that. They failed us because they had made a change in the requirements for the country timeline about a week and a half previous and had sent out an email to all of the teacher advisors. Ahhh, but as you know, Kvitka is in Russia, and has been for a while now, so she couldn't get the news to us. So we found ourselves a computer, and Kadish and I feverishly added the necessary facts. To be perfectly honest, it wasn't that bad. We just had to find and write down about 7 more major events in Saudi Arabia during the 1990s. When we were done, Ian took the notebook to the people to be approved. Only it didn't happen that way. They failed it again. This time it was because I had typed the 10 page data sheet. That's right, it was failed because it was typed. This change in requirements and strange departure from past years' policy was apparently included in the same email that Kvitka couldn't tell us about. Apparently they were trying to crack down on people who just copied and pasted the entire CIA World Factbook country profile for their data sheet. This would be a legitimate concern, except for the fact that the CIA World Factbook is in a totally different format, and only has about half the information one needs to fill out the country data sheet. Thankfully, we had six members of the Saudi Arabia delegation present, so we all sat down in the middle of the hall and transcribed all 10 typed pages onto 10 handwritten pages in a mere 10 minutes. We were racing the clock so we could get an early spot to credential. And finally, it did pass. All of the notebooks from our five countries had these same problems, and two countries threw in the towel and just decided to go to a later credentialing session.

Then it came time for credentialing. I got to go last in our country because I'm special--I mean, because I'm on General Assembly B. It was great. They asked me about the first topic for GAB: about Israel-Palestine and the peace roadmap. I talked for about 3 minutes and had really just gotten my feet wet in the subject, when the lady interrupted me and asked me in what year the roadmap was aiming to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict. To be quite honest, that is a rather obscure fact that is somewhat innapropriate for the level of detail that is dealt with at credentialing, but somehow I managed to summon it off the top of my head. It was 2005. So then I started talking again about Israel-Palestine, and they quickly interrupted me once more. They were moving on to the topics from another committee with which I was supposed to have familiarized myself: Disarmament. They chose the topic of WMDs from Disarmament. I spoke no more than one sentence that stated the three major types of WMDs, before they cut me off again and said that they were done. Apparently I passed rather easily.

Needless to say, I was a bit tired after the morning's events, so Kadish, Dan, and I walked over to India House on 11th and Morrison (you really should go), and enjoyed their excellent lunch buffet. It is quite possibly one of the best $7 I have spent in a long time. Kadish was serious about this too. He neglected to eat breakfast so he could consume as much Indian food and mango chutney as possible. And eat we did! We spent 2 hours there. Ian never did show up to lunch because of issues with his ride, but it was still good. And then I went home. The End. Tah dah!

Remember, the highest level of intellectual development is the ability to make fun of oneself.

A brief comment: As a special gift to Ian Rocker, I am writing a song at his request. It's going to be called "Groove für der Rocker".

First Massachusetts, then San Francisco, then a few little podunk places, and now: PORTLAND, OR. Indeed! The City of Portland by a majority vote of the city council, has decided to issue gay-marriage certificates. I'm not even going to go into President George II's proposed constitutional amendment to define marriage. I've vowed not to do it on this forum. All I'll say is that the purpose of the Constitution is not political; that's what POLITICS are for, and it's why they EXIST. The Constitution sets up government, it does not protect morality, nor is it changed unless there is an overwhelming majority of in favor of the change. By overwhelming, we're talking like at least 70%. I mean, for god's sake, does the constitution make murder illegal? No. And that's a whole lot less morally controversial than defining gay marriage. So Bush won't get his constitutional amendment passed, because those are facts that I've just stated. The Constitution isn't some flim-flam that we toss around like a Calzone from Manhattan, and that's saying something.

So in the meantime: HAHHHHHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

You thought I couldn't stoop any lower after my mass emailing? Aha! You're wrong!! In addition to the usual posts, I am now launching a massive propaganda campaign that incorporates various praise that people have had for my blog. As you will see, there is nothing imperfect with my blog. There is nothing imperfect with my blog. There is nothing imperfect with my blog. So here's the first of the evidence:

"Well heck, I'm not sure if there are any other blogs like yours."

--Colin Corbett, singing a note of praise on the uniqueness of content offerred here.

I would also like to add to my previous cryptic warning. If you see any comments that claim to be from famous European soccer players, and are also very cryptic and thoughtprovoking (in the sense, that you have to think about them to decide if there's any implied meaning beyond the senseless exterior, and then you decide that there is none), then disregard them immediately. They are from a foolish miscreant whose company you should seek to avoid.

I would like to briefly remind people that my discussion forum /dev/null is still active and can be viewed by clicking on the link under the discussion section in the left sidebar. Dan recently posted, and is perhaps the first person to do so in 6 months. So let this be a new era! An era where mundi über-homus discuss all of the great things that make them über!

There is one among us by the name of Malcolm G. Sample. A frenchman of sorts he claims to be. He has made multiple threats to write irrelevant, pointless, and perhaps offensive comments. Beware of the cloaked ones, they lurk even in the brightest places.