Friday, October 15

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I'm in a bloggy mood, but unfortunately I can't think of anything to write. Well Exams are over and that is a major relief. Actually they weren't expecially difficult this time around. I was rather disappointed that I found my Engrish exam easier than my Latin exam, but that was about the only disappointment this week. I wasn't the least bit disappointed when I saw that it was still raining after exams yesterday. Running in the rain is so much fun. Only rarely can you see where you're going, and you forget the cold after a few minutes or running. You also need to keep a sharp eye out for muddy areas and puddles. Sloshing through those is the most exhilarating part of running in the rain. I'm probably going to be sick in a few days, but it was worth it.

After practice, I waited too long for my ride, but luckily I found Eddie and his 2 underclassmen slaves. We managed to enertain ourselves with a boxful of Mardi Gras-style Valentine-colored beads foollishly left out for the Mother's Club (NOT GAMBLING) Card Party at which there will be absolutely NO gambling, just card playing. Gambling is against the rules, but apparently it's okay for a school sponsored events to involve a deck of cards (supplied by the school) when we students are strictly forbidden from so much as using the phrases "ace in the hole" or "jace". Anyways, after we got bored with those and after Eddie got tired of trying to remove all functionality of our retinas (retinae?), we tried to go to the lobby, but Secret Service was there because some "very important individuals" were going to be having a very official meeting which our presence was somehow interrupting. Luckily the Secret Service guys (complete with bugs in their ears!) didn't notice the bomb strapped onto my chest and we were able to escape without any trouble. I'm glad those guys don't run security at our school; we'd have multiple breakins on the same day if they did. (I think one of them had a seeing eye dog.)

Eddie apparently had to help aforementioned "very important individuals" get to and from their cars, so he went into the locker room to suit up for th event. However he left his badges in the car so he sent one of the sophomores to get it. I was suprised when the kid actually agreed to do it. He probably liked helping out a senior though. Underclassmen have the strange notion that doing such menial tasks for us will make us like them and make them the cool kids with senior friends when really they're just being used. But don't tell them that; I left my shoes in my car. But no! that was Eddie! He again sent poor, obsequious Alex out into the rain to get those. Sophomores are so entertaining. I suppose I have to like the guy though, because most sophomores have the mentality that since they survived a year of high school they're automatically the coolest thing since bread in a can. He and the other kid John weren't like that at all. The rest of their class could learn a thing or two from them. Like bathing.

Today was a marvelous screw up of a day. I was going to go to the park for lunch at 11:30 with a few kids from SLUH and some St. Joe girls, but of course my mom took the car and didn't come back until 1 so I arrived fashionably late. And of course since I was so incredibly late my arrival was all the more fashionable. We tossed a frizbee (is there a correct spelling for that word?) and played some variation of whiffleball which involved no bases and excessively windy conditions to maximize the fun. A word of advice to those who would anger Nick "Angryman" Anglim when he's holding a harmless frizbie (yeah there's only one correct spelling): DON'T DO IT. Frizbees are lethal in his hands. He took out Lily's knee while he was running (a truly amazing feat), nailed me in the jaw, and managed to shatter one of his weapons. Bring him cookies or something. If you get on his bad side, you too will have your jaw wired shut for six to eight weeks.

Currently listening to: Stuck in the Middle with You� Steve Miller Band (happy music for a happy scene in a happy movie)

|473r.

Friday, October 8

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::MAJOR BLOG UPDATE::
I was blog surfing and I came across and interesting minimessage board and I just had to have it so I made it my own. My precioussss. If I see it gets a lot of use, I may post it on C-B as well. Actually, I know I'm going to do it eventually so I might as well just do that now. Off to CONGLOMO BLOG.

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Yowza. Today was an incredible day. Pysch test: finished it in 20ish minutes and got to have the rest of the period off. Then in anatomy, while we were reviewing for the exam, some members of our class took it upon themselves to do the world a great service and take pictures of an unsuspecting plumber (you know what I mean) and then brushed it with a piece of paper. The good news: the kid with the camera phone got the paper brushed in his face by one of his accomplices. Then I burned my activity period in The Shrine chatting with Magistra et al. about politics and the Latin Club (rather paradoxical conversations).

Then came the highlight of my day and certainly of my high school Engrish class career. I walk into the classroom, anxious that my teacher might collect some 7 journals we've done over the course of the year and all of which I left at home. He came in the room and said we'd get to the movie quickly because we needed to finish it today. Before we started, he handed back the first set of essays a la advanc� de pla��mente. I was expecting a B+ if I was lucky, but probably closer to a C simply because I seem to have on my head a curse which causes me to begin each year of Engrish piss-poorly until I work my way up to A- ish. I had no reason to believe that American Lit would be any differnt. I am elated to announce that the curse has been lifted! I got a 95, which, thanks to the Evil Engrish Grading Scale, rounds up to a C+. Luckily for me, Mr. Vespucci doesn't adhere to normal Engrish Dept. standards so I got an A. Not my first A on an English essay, but one of my highest and definitely a first time for the first essay of the year. I'm so incredibly excited about this! This will do wonders for my GPA, but I have a feeling my ego now has an inoperable, malignant cancer. I care not. Mr. Vespucci wrote on my essay that he liked my writing style too which I hope means he got the $60.24 and complementary jar of dil pickels I included with my essay and will continue to grade my essays as well as this one. If not, I'll make sure he doesn't sleep well for a week.

Well after getting our essays back we finished Chinatown which is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. I highly recommend it if you're into dark, film noir, crimey movies (like Resevoir Dogs or Zoolander). It has a lot of plot twists so all I can tell you without ruining it is that it's about a guy who meets a lady and stuff goes horribly wrong. People start dying. Noses start bleeding. Shoes get lost. Shit hits fans. Chaos is come again. Watch the movie. You'll enjoy it.

Back to school now. Maybe I'll finish this blog entry some time soon.

l473r.

Fresh out of Coke

WOO! This is an incredibly good week indeed. Mr. Coke was kicked off of cross country this week! Yay! No more will he disgrace everything our team stands for with his childish antics. Justice may be blind but when Coke kept throwing twigs, acorns and "poopdicks" at her, she played a little game of pi�ata (and won!) What happened was that he skipped last Saturday's race for his girlfriend's dance after he asked coach if he could do so and was denied permission. Then on Tuesday(ish) coach yelled at and de-teamified him. Our team is once again worthy of the respect of the other teams in the area.

During practice today I helped my coaches prepare for the next meet. I had to go to the art department to get poster board and that made me sad at first. I miss my drawing classes. I got over that in a few seconds however when I walked in the art room and saw not 1, but THREE iMac G5s. My jaw pretty much dropped because they've only been out for less than a month I think, and then suddenly three of the gems were staring me in the face. But they were so incredibly beautiful, so unbelievably compact that I couldn't resist hugging one of them. Now I've got a sexual harassment lawsuit to deal with, but it was worth it.

Anyways, I came back to the Coach's Commons (why is there a massive TV and a comfy couch in there? Kinda suspicious, though not nearly as bad as the nurse's office. His office looks like the office of a well-paid clinical psychologist complete with leather chairs and modern colorful bubbly things whose soul purpose is to exist and waste water and electricity. Yeah that guy is clearly overpaid.) and coach tells me to turn the posterboard into a grid for team results. I'll have to remember to do the math on how big the grids should be next time because I ended up erasing and redoing it twice. I probably didn't need to the second time, but it didn't look right and I'm a perfectionist when it comes to designing pretty much anything. I didn't want it to look like crap (it did anyways) and it needed to be the right size so that it could be seen from a distance. Well, the coaches are stuck with what I gave them: a rushed and somewhat shabby "spreadsheet" and a pencil which lost 90% of its eraser in battle.

The rest of this week has gone fairly smoothly despite the usual high concentration of tests in the week before exams. I've got my psychology exam tomorrow because apparently it isn't important enough of a class to make it on the real exam schedule. Of course that means I don't have to show up on Tuesday next week until almost 10, so I'm quite happy. I'm not expecting any exam to be particularly difficult. Probably the most difficult part of next week as well as the following weeks will be finding the time to watch movies. I've got a film project to do and I have to watch 10 classics by December 1.

Movies I'll be Watching:
  • The Godfather
  • The Godfather 2
  • Citizen Kane
  • Casablanca
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
  • The French Connection
  • To Kill a Mockinbird
  • Duck Soup
  • The Manchurian Candidate (not the DJ Shpazzlemasta DanceDance Remix)
  • Apocalypse Now
Sorry, Audrizzle. No Blue Velvet for me. But I'm really excited about this project despite the fact that it's going to sextuple my workload. Oh well. It'll be worth it. I hear they're pretty good movies.

Back to work for me. Tests, quizzes and an SAT to come. I miss having weekends.

l473r.

Monday, October 4

A 2004 Special Limited Edition Great Depression Anniversary Penny for Your Thoughts

Just for the sake of future generations, I thought I'd post this here as well. Enjoy.

I suppose the craze started back in the time of the ancient Romans when going out in public in the modern equivalent of a bathrobe was "in" and massacres were considered the highest form of entertainment. Yes before the Roman Empire, coins were difficult to make, easily counterfeited, and worst of all boring. Then my favorite person of all time, Julius "I got a month and a method of baby-extraction named after me" Caesar, came on the scene and revolutionized the way the world bought their tunics and war slaves; he put his face on every coin. Coined currency became an instant success and prostitutes all over the Roman empire no longer asked for three goats in exchange for their "services." Now they could use a defined set of currency to charge their clients! Because of their J. Caesar's overwhelmingly successful coin, the Augustus Caesar Coin was released after Julius' death and it had a younger, sexier visage on its face. Roman currency became a fad that just wouldn't die.

Then the Roman Empire collapsed; feifs, serfdom, kingdoms, and the overall regression of human knowledge took over Europe; and currency was buried along with Incitatus' senatorial toga. But this dark era of darkness and lack of light in the form of shiney coins didn't last long� one, one and a half millenia at most. Then the Renaissance brought "intelligence" back to the world, and a few years later, George Washington was leading a revolution of his own. The war was eventually won and Britain sent home in tears. For leading the revolution and being the first president of the United States (and the only one most people can seem to name as coming before Clinton) Washington was eventually memorialized on not one, but two forms of currency and his own short-lived reality TV show. His face was the coolest face to ever grace a quarter or one dollar bill. And, unlike the times of ancient Rome, the great thing was that in America, people didn't have any choice as to what currency they had to use to pay for goods and/or services. United States' citizens HAD to use United States' currency in United States' stores to buy Taiwanese goods. We still have to use good olde American pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars (yes, we have half dollars), dollar coins, dollar bills, 2 dollar bills (still legal!), five dollar bills and on and on and you get the point. We have an established legal tender. But it was just too boring, and the good people at the US mint will not stand for boring pennies!

The attempted US Coin Revolution began in an attempt to end the 1998 LA Coin Riots whichstarted when LAtians got fed up with their boring old quarters and burned as many as they could find. When they realized that quarters don't burn well, they all grabbed for their coins, burned their hands, and ran madly through the streets cursing Washington's good name. The US mint immediately responded by announcing their 10 Year Plan; to prevent further riots (and to make Nebraska feel important) each state was to be given its very own quarter featuring the most irrelevant, obscure, or historically inaccurate event that an in-state failure of an artist could come up with. The Mint made a deal with Conan O'Brien in which he would reveal some of the new quarters in exchange for his first born child. He agreed and showed the mint's plans fo
r Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, and a few others. (See below.)






The plan w
orked and people started using quarters again, but then NICKEL usage began to suffer severly. The solution? Immortalize Leif Ericson on the nickel because he embodies the spirit of freedom of spirit and pillaging which America has come to idolize. I can only hope that when penny usage hits an all-time low we can have a memorial to the Confederacy on the opposite side of Honest Abe's coin. Until then, I'm going to head over to Walgreens and spend my entire life savings on Skittles.