May 2002
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The big news from yesterday is that my rubber plant has hit the growing season again! Whew, I was about to think he wasn't going to make it, as last autumn he took a turn for the worse. I think he didn't like the drafts in my room at that time of year, and started losing a lot of leaves on the underside. But now that I've moved him to my room here and given him fresh water after a week alone in my old apartment, he's sprouting on the top! And to replace those leaves lost on the bottom of the three main stems, there are about 4 smaller stems that should shoot up nicely now and fill things out. Definitely good news.
"There are two things great fighters possess. They will fight and they will box,'' [Evander] Holyfield said. "You have to fight for respect and then after you get respect you outbox them.''
I think this quote is poignant in almost anything, much more than just boxing. You get their respect, and then you outdo them. This even goes beyond sports I think...I like it.
"The last man in all the world sat in his house. Suddenly there was a knock at the door."
Beautiful, no? I found this somewhere long lost from memory years ago, and I just looked it up again and wanted to post it for my benefit. I think this is awesome, and is a lot better than many full-length stories. You have the unexplained, a setting, a character, a mystery, and all sorts of open questions that immediately offer an endless stream of ideas through the imagination. Brilliant.
"Towery, a 36-year-old office manager from Portland, Oregon, beat Neleh Dennis, a 21-year-old psychology student from Layton, Utah., after the parchment ballots were tallied live at the conclusion of CBS' "Survivor 4" Sunday night.
In an interview after the telecast, Towery said she had arrived in the South Pacific's Marquesas Islands last November ready for an early departure, with a parting speech in hand. 'It's important to be humble. But I had the feeling that God would lead me (to victory), and he did.'"
Another news quote from cnn.com. I am not the biggest religious person around, but it actually offends me when someone says something like, "God would lead me to victory." What the hell (pardon the expression) would God want with someone to win Survivor? There are people who pray to win football games, baseball games. "Please help me to hit a home run this time at bat." Give me a break....
There are people who are superstitious in sports. There are people who wear lucky socks, do special routines, and use special equipment (you know, the proverbial lucky underwear that doesn't get washed). Why is it not equally as "superstitious" to ask for God to help win a sporting event, or whathaveyou? I think it'd be more important to be asking God for other things in life, and not for the things we just want. And when we get them? I doubt very much it's in someone's plans that way.
And with that note, the cynical me is getting back to work...
I saw three movies this weekend. Yup, been busy. Here's a quick rundown before I post them on the Movies page.
Friday night I saw Spider-Man. Now, pea-sized attention span on high school kids, stereo cutting in and out every 10 seconds for the first 1/4, and a few film skips aside, I liked the movie. Very Spider-Man-true. Very cool, and really neat effects that basically made the comic series come to life. My only complaint: sitting through two too many MJ-Peter Parker "we meet again on the same random street in NYC(?) let's talk a bit" scenes that I had to sit through. Also, the product-placement and wrestling bits I could have done without. I think Wolverine in X-Men had a much truer and less "Hollywood is pleasing the kids" moment with character introduction. I'd give it a 3.5 for effort and the moments it had.
Star Wars Episode II I saw Saturday afternoon with Chad and his brother Jared. The plot was a heck of a lot better this time around, but the acting was abyssmal, the dialogue was even more abyssmal, and I can only take so many landscapes done in matte painting with some CG animation thrown in to make it come alive. The sub-plot with Jenga and Boba Fett was awesome. Yoda's moment at the end was cool (albeit way too short). And people died this time! That's a plus (not that I like people dying, but it adds something to a movie...). And Natalie Portman was the best eye-candy for a film in years. But what else was there? Cringing through the same bad dialogue with the same bad acting waiting for action scenes that never really developed. Honestly, I think I liked Episode I better solely because of the one reason I liked that one in the first place: awesome choreography in the end scene. That made the movie for me. This one had none of that. I'd rate it a 3.0 for the much better plot line.
And this evening I watched Panic Room. Forest Whittaker was awesome, as was Jodie Foster. I was actually wondering what would happen next, cringed in places, and noticed that I was getting pretty suspensed in the process. Coupled with really good dialogue for once this weekend, and awesome camera shots, I'd have to say this experience was my best of the weekend. A good 3.7 because it was more than the trailer alluded to and was a solid movie that did me no real wrongs.
child development article on cnn.com
This is a cool article and goes along with that whole, "all I need to know I learned in kindergarten" sort of thinking. I also think it helps to support the similar feeling that sometimes thinking gets in the way. As we grow older, we think more and react/do less. Sometimes our higher level cognition really does hamper humans? Also could be related to "ignorance is bliss."
I see my entry about Bush's warnings before the 9/11 tragedy was a bit early, and now it is snowballing even more into some carnival of a media frenzy.
Oops, in making my introduction to a topic, I forgot the topic...give me a second here...
(opening and popping in another starburst) Ahh yes. I can get back to my characterization of the 1990's as the "Age of the Victim." I had not yet come up with something for the new millenia, but I think it is fast forming, albeit my terms are not the best yet.
It seems to me that so many people in this society through the 90's started to take zero responsibility for anything with all those lawsuits about how "it's not my fault is must be someone else's." I'm surprised there have been no lawsuits against nature, parents for donating the wrong genes to someone, or God. I can already see people shaking fists at all three objects and laying blame...
But something else has sort of come to me after seeing the rise of CNN and the "interactive, live war" coverage styles. It reminds me too much of Fahrenheit 451. It seems to me that people are living vicariously. Not vicariously through someone else, or for something else, but just plain vicariously in everything. Parents relive childhood through their kids' sports programs, or academic success. People live through the survivors on Survivor, the contestants on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, the Osbournes on The Osbournes, the soldiers in Afghanistan on CNN's coverage...
We all live our lives half in our reality, and maybe more than half in some other reality where everything happens beyond this wall of a computer screen or television set or newspaper headline. I'm probably as much at fault as most people, unfortunately. Someone's tragedy and heartache is another person's soap opera to watch from a safe distance. (On a side note, I once heard that all humor was based on someone else's misfortune or hurt...I had a few jokes that didn't fit that like Knock-Knock jokes, but for the most part, that's pretty true...)
At any rate, it seems that too much anymore, lives are being lived from afar, through others, and for others that I sometimes wonder if someday in the far future we will lose the term "I" or "self."
(After re-reading that little unrevised bit of musing, I find that I have to practice that whole bit a few more times to clean it up....ick.)
Another example of the media trying too hard to make news and not just report it:
"President Bush was warned in intelligence briefings before the September 11 terror attacks that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network might try to hijack a U.S.-based airliner, senior administration officials said." -from cnn.com.
What a lose-lose situation that is. Even if he knew more than he did (he being the whole administration), what exactly do people expect him to have done? Stopped all airlines for a month? Perhaps spend money and beef up airline security? I'm sure airlines would shell out money for that, and I bet that sort of spending would go over real well with taxpayers and the public. What would the media say then? Pretty obviously: "Our President is a paranoid." Again, a nice way to go down.
People are always so quick to jump on the things someone may have done wrong, but what else was there to do? I'll be the last person to support Bush in anything he's doing (like destroying the Artic National Wildlife Refuge like he did Texas), but I won't shortchange him for lose-lose situations.
Is it just me still, or does it seem like the media loves to create the controversies, kinda like that kid in elementary that egged everyone else on to do naughty things and get in trouble while the egger reveled in the acts vicariously from afar.
I don't think I could make my moving this week any more complicated. I'm trying to minimize the amount of effort I put my car through, so I'm putting things into storage after work (only about a mile away from where I work) for the next three days. On Wednesday evening, I'm going to drive home, pack the rest of the stuff and move to Ames....then over the next week or so move my things from storage to Ames as I come home from work...hehe. All this while still trying to get home to visit Chad and borrow the pickup to move my bed. I guess that's the simple version that makes no sense.
In other news, work is fun!
It's reading stories like these that make me wish I had stuck with something more in the environmental sciences, especially when I get to the end of the article. Ahh well...part of me says it'd be nice to rescue her, and another part says that this is nature. As much as we humans love to destroy, rape, and take from the earth, we still have this almost equally destructive thinking that we can fix it all and play god with nature; to be the caretaker in something that is far beyond us; to save every little ailing animal, or even the big ones; that we can defeat virii and bacteria as we ignore every sign of natural selection on a microscopic level. Ahh...yes...
I don't know who will even understand this that reads my page, but this can be mostly for my own benefit in seeking out a new computer this summer. Thankfully, instead of buying some box on a finance plan, I hope to just buy a piece here and a piece there over the summer months until it's complete. This should spread out the cost nicely.
$193 - Athlon XP 2000+
$153 - DDRAM 512MB|64X64 PC-2100 MUSHKIN
$115 - EPOX 8K3A+ KT333CE DDR333 266MHz FSB ATA133 RAID
$180 - nVidia GF4 Ti 4200 - waiting for release
$305 - NEC MultiSync FE950+ BK 19" (BLACK) FLAT MONITOR
$88 - Antec 1030b Case - 300W
$189 - Western Digital Caviar 100GB 7200RPM
or
$192 - Maxtor 60GB 7200RPM (x2)
$67 - LiteOn 16x DVD
$12 - Panasonic Black Floppy Drive
$61 - Creative Labs Audigy
Total: <$1500.00
Jeremiah has a chess board, and I played him and Adam a few times in the past few days. Ahh, I think I've played a whole half dozen games of chess since my elementary days when we played it day in and day out, at least a half dozen games per day in class! I actually miss the strategy and thinking involved. Unfortunately, I'm not very fast at the game, heh.
Also, just sort of to drive home the idea in my head for posterity's sake, Adam mentioned something about a marble/stone chess board. I think it would be neat to get a hold of one, as a sort of decor piece for a stand or coffee table. You can never go wrong with a nice looking chess set sitting around.
About a month ago, I decided I had enough of spam mail, and decided to start taking steps to reduce my spam mail. By law, companies are now forced to provide "removal" instructions on their spam mail. Usually this consists of a web page that you click "ok" on or to reply to the email with "REMOVE" in the subject line, or other rather unconfirmed means of getting myself removed. There's even an occassional one that prays on people like me: I won't call up some customer service number just to have my email taken off their list. So those just get deleted.
Unfortunately, even though I have not really submitted my name to anything new online, I seem to be getting MORE spam instead of LESS spam. I think what has happened is that a company says they'll take up to 72 hours to process the removal claim. But until that time is up, they KNOW your email address is legit since you replied to it, and they ramp up sending it out or selling it. That's my theory anyway...and it sucks.
I am starting to relook at what cars I like, and the Eclipse still tops my picks really. Here is my current list of "contenders" in general order:
Mitsubishi Eclipse GT (I think it is, the high end one)
Hyunadi Tiburon
Toyota Camry Solara
Nissan Altima
Honda Accord
Nissan SE-R
Pontiac Grand Prix
Pontiac Grand Am
Mazda Miata (just to have it on there)
