So today kind of sucked. I rear-ended a fellow at the traffic circle - not one of my finer moments, especially since I just now found out I gave the officer the wrong insurance card - and there are the ever present girl issues, but I won’t delve into those. Overall, not a very enjoyable day.

That said, I feel very petty when I think of my problems in comparison to the Virginia Tech shootings that happened just today. As soon as I remember them, I feel rather selfish. Where do my problems stand in the grand scheme of things, when 32 innocent students have just been killed by a rampaging lunatic? Furthermore, what kind of sick, twisted, perverted mind would even think to do such a thing? At least he had the decency to turn the gun on himself, but he should have done that first, not after. My greatest condolences go out to the families of those victims. It defies description to write about those events - I’m at a loss for words. What can I possibly say that would offer any kind of consolation to anyone about it? There’s nothing remotely redeeming in said events: man kills people, man kills self, without any sort of rhyme or reason or general purpose of any sort. It sickens me to think of it.

Onto topics of a lighter nature, the Percussion Ensemble leaves for Ohio in two days. Then, I come back, see my uncle who I haven’t seen in a few years as we celebrate my aunt’s birthday, and then it’s on another plane to Santa Barbara the following Tuesday. Come back Thursday, and hopefully manage a ride to Vermont to visit a friend. That leaves me perhaps Saturday and Sunday, or maybe just Sunday, to do things around good old Newington and Portsmouth. I can’t say I’m too heart-broken though, it’ll be a breath of fresh air, going all over the place.

Not much else to say. There isn’t much for the writing, but hopefully that will change as time goes on. I’m taking a laptop to Ohio, so I’m sure I’ll have things to write about there - maybe even pictures.

I’m out.

Later.

The things some people ask. (He meant bank.)

I wrote an…well, it wasn’t angry, more annoyed, but not-in-a-happy-mood letter today to my principal. Not anything about him, but he’s new this year and seems especially receptive, so I’m directing my complaints to him to see what happens. Fact is, I’m at my wit’s end with the school’s firewalls and filters. SonicWall can go jump off a cliff for all I care. Actually, it isn’t even the filter, just the fact that the school (or maybe just the tech department) seems to baby all the students.

My main problem is that YouTube and Google Images are blocked. Now, I’m sure every school in the country has Google Images blocked, and for a good reason: SafeSearch is entirely changeable by whoever is using the computer, and of course one can find all kinds of nasty stuff on there. Fact is, though, many kids just want to use it to find pictures for their project or poster or something, and it can’t be done. I often find myself on google.de just to find a picture of, say, the Chernobyl sarcophagus. Harmless.

YouTube’s another story. If you’ve ever uploaded anything to YouTube - heck, even if you’ve just been to YouTube - you know that there isn’t anything undesirable on there, at least not in the way of exposed body parts and such. There’s the occasional curb-stomping video and maybe a weird Japanese reality show, but that’s about the worst of it. On the flip side, there are plenty of enjoyable, innocent, and dare I say educational videos to be found on YouTube. Even my teachers have expressed distaste in the absurdity of it all. It comes down to the principle of the matter, not that we can’t access those specific sites, but that the school doesn’t trust students or teachers to use the Internet responsibly. Granted, there are people who would use the Internet for porn and general crap like that, but there are so few of those individuals they could be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. No need to penalize everyone for it. Needless frustration.

That’s really that, though. It’s the weekend now, and I need to find something to do. Next week looks like this: Monday & Tuesday: school; Wednesday-Early Sunday: Ohio for WGI Percussion World Championships; Late Sunday-Monday (Vacation): Green Mountain college to visit a friend; Tuesday-Thursday: California to visit UC Santa Barbara; home. Then who knows. Busy week ahead of me.

I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We’re watching it in Visual Literature, and it’s fantastic.

I’m out.

Later.

Today I heard some rather disheartening news: Imus, of the MSNBC radio show Imus in the Morning, was fired after insulting women’s basketball and I guess making some slightly race-y jokes. I had always been under the impression that he’d die before he was fired or quit or stopped doing the show for whatever other reason. I didn’t necessarily believe this solely because he was so dedicated to the show, but also because of his rather wild past, which honestly couldn’t have been good for his long term health. Either way, there are things I find wrong with him being fired.

I guess it’s mostly the fact that in pop culture - that is, on television, in songs, in movies, on the radio, etc. - there are things flying around that are much worse. Some rap revolves entirely around the degradation of women. Some movies, a few even starring said rappers, make the same kind of jokes Imus made one time. I even saw a show on Nickelodeon that showed two teens watching women’s basketball and watching the foul shots eagerly (ending with a “woo!” after it was clear the woman had jumped and shot the ball). Imus gets fired for making one minor comment that probably wasn’t even serious? There’s something wrong with that, especially considering what his ranch has done for children with cancer, the amount of money (probably reaching into the “hundreds of thousands” layer of monetary atmosphere) he’s donated to charity, and the other things he’s accomplished over the years. I know it doesn’t seem directly related to the issue at hand, but if you consider the issue to be him being fired, then it certainly is: I could understand maybe a verbal reprimand, a slap on the wrist, if you will, but not being fired. It’s just outrageous.

That aside, not much else seems to be important news. The Portsmouth High School Percussion Ensemble leaves for Ohio next Wednesday to compete in the WGI World Championships, playing our adaptation of the classical piece Festive Overture by Dmitri Shostakovich. 18-hour bus ride will be great fun. Seriously, I like long trips. Unfortunately there’s no way to differentiate online between what is sarcasm and what is serious, but I assure you, I am serious when I express my liking for long road trips.

For your viewing entertainment, I present to you Guitar Hero II fans a poor-quality, off-sync video of me playing Arterial Black, messing with my webcam and seeing what kind of quality I could achieve (final verdict: not good, at least when put on YouTube).

I’m out.

Later.

I just finished watching Pulp Fiction for the first time. Or, well, I should say watching the whole movie for the first time; I can’t count how many times I’ve seen the first half hour or so (which is a good half hour, let me tell you). Quentin Tarantino is most definitely the kind of director you can either absolutely love or absolutely hate. The way he goes about story telling, with multiple plot lines and a sort of circular motion in the way things meet up, is unique to him and him alone.

The movie reminded me of Sin City, which needless to say would have been the other way around if I had seen Pulp Fiction first, but that was a lot of fluff to bulk up the first sentence of this paragraph. It caters to those who enjoy blood and occasional gore (or more appropriately, the thought of occasional gore, since a lot of it is implied, rather than shown), and most certainly who enjoy a twisted sense of humor. My dad came down for the last third of the movie or so, and he was laughing along with me, but on my end it was that nervous sort of “they use the N-word an awful lot” laugh. But hey, nothing like a family movie.

Of course, the question on everyone who’s seen its mind is, what the heck is in that case? I’m taking a class on mythological and biblical allusions, and so I’m noticing them left and right now, although it doesn’t take a religious scholar to see the significance of the lock code on the briefcase (666), not to mention Jules comes right out and prefaces his long quotations with the fact that they’re from the bible, but nevertheless, I can’t help but try to make some kind of biblical connection to the briefcase. What do I think is in there? I have no clue. Kind of a buzz kill to this whole paragraph, but whatever. Whatever I think it is, it’s probably not right, so it doesn’t matter, but it’s fun to think about anyway.

I’ve got lots of Easter chocolate and candy sitting next to me, uneaten. What’s going on? I’m positive there’s some unspoken rule that chocolate should never last beyond some specific amount of time if a person is within a specific radius surrounding it. I’m eying it now, hungrily. Some carnal, chocolate-craving instinct brews inside me, hungering for what my ancestors maybe feasted upon most heartily in those times of celebration (or maybe whenever they were hungry). We’re talking jillions of years ago. How long has chocolate been around, anyway?

I’m out.

Later.

The title doesn’t have anything to do with this post, unless you’re talking about odd numbers and ends of paragraphs, in which case I’m sure this post will contain both. Most certainly the latter.

I visited WPI today. Initial impressions are positive. I got the grand tour by Bizzy’s brother Colin Cowles, and I was impressed. I was warned right away that the food quality was sub-par, but to be fair, it was at least on-par with school food, which personally I don’t really mind, so I could live with it. I checked out a lot of the campus, which is all within a pretty small, easily accessible area. Everything took less than 10 minutes to walk to, which I enjoy the thought of, especially since being situated in Worcester, MA means for the better part of the school year temperatures will be not so hot. Excuse the pun.

As a more technical, engineering/computer-geared school, it definitely caters to my geekier side. 10-15mb/s wired LAN, every file you can think of (and the ones you can’t or the ones they somehow don’t have can be acquired by the resident group [40Thieves], who have figured out a way to get around the campus internet security and use Bit Torrent), and more gamers than you can shake a stick at. Or perhaps a Wiimote.
I did learn a lot about the school. Instruments and practice rooms, for example, are readily available, which I enjoy, and the actual setup of semesters and quarters and such is pretty unique, with 7-week quarters, three classes per quarter, and curriculum rather condensed but still covering the important stuff. Population’s pretty small, I think, something like 4,000 undergrads, so perhaps too small for my tastes, but we’ll see.

On the way back my suspicions were confirmed that Massachusetts drivers are, in fact, the worst drivers to ever grace the highway. I was being tailgated and passed like I had a bumper sticker advising the person driving behind me to do both of those things. One particular instance sticks out in my mind. I was cruising at a good 80mph, minding my own business, enjoying Eddie Izzard’s stand-up comedy, and I look in my rear view mirror to see a green van giving my bumper an Eskimo kiss. So, naturally, I dart into the middle lane (clearly I’m not going fast enough in the fast lane), and he zooms by me. In a van. Going a clean 90mph, at least. I’ve never seen anything of the sort.

Then, later, I’m driving, angry at some other guy and giving him a hard time by closing in on his bumper, and I look up and there’s a cop behind me (lights not on, mind you). And then he passes me! I’m still doing 80, going with the flow of traffic, so I guess I also learned that you can go however fast you’d like to on the highway.

All in all, that was my day. Give this a whirl, courtesy of Liam, if you’d like a small laugh.

Go here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&tab=wl&q 
Go to the “Directions” tab
Go from New York, New York, to Paris, France
Look at instruction #23

Enjoy.

I’m out.

Later.

Jim Gaffigan wins.

So I’m rather tired today. That’s understandable, I think. The body works in mysterious - nay, frustrating - ways. The moment you throw off your sleep pattern, it’s all over. I was going fine, getting to sleep at about 10:30 every night, but one night of going to bed at 3 in the morning, and bam, I’m up watching Mythbusters at 12:00 Monday morning.

It completely slipped my mind that I’m going to see Gabriela Montero on the 29th of April. If you haven’t heard of Gabriela Montero, well, I don’t blame you. She isn’t exactly a household name, but what she does is really unique. She takes classical pieces and improvises on their themes, which sounds mundane in nature, but it makes for good listening. The only problem I have with the date is that I’m also planning on seeing Wolfmother that same day (you’re held slightly more accountable if you haven’t heard of Wolfmother, essentially a modern day Led Zeppelin), but I’ll work something out.

I have just been informed of the existence of “gangster Asians.” I wasn’t aware such a thing was in existence. Certainly it’s better structured than your run-of-the-mill gangster group. I imagine it being some kind of gangster conglomerate, running like a well-oiled, profane, blinged-out machine. Guaranteed they’re more efficient, converting those pounds of cocaine to the more acceptable kilogram, and similarly dollars to yen to prepare such items for sale on the black market.

I’m sure it’s nothing like that at all. Wouldn’t that be great though?

I’m out.

Later.

So I guess Muse and My Chemical Romance are playing at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland on May 6th. Oddly enough, Liam and I were just talking the very same day I discovered this (which would be yesterday) about the prospect of Muse performing somewhere within a drivable proximity to us. I think next time we should casually discuss money raining from the sky and there ever finally being a good video-game-to-movie adaptation; who knows what could happen.

Happy Easter everyone.

I’m out.

Later.

I find that the above phrase is not used often enough. In fact, so infrequently is it used, that some these days do not know what it means. To clarify, gathering one’s personal effects simply refers to one gathering their personal items. It is often used in a postmortem context, gathering a deceased individuals personal items, but can easily be applied to the living (which is good news, since I don’t plan on dying or killing anyone so I can use the phrase).

The past few days haven’t been very eventful. Actually, that’s not true. Szmyd and I went “Guitar Hero II on the 360 Demo Kiosk”-hunting (I’d make a lame pun about hunting game at this point, but I’ll spare you) yesterday in the abundance of free time I found myself with, now that percussion is in a sort of miniature break until we leave for Dayton and I’ve got fourth block off. The venture was pretty unsuccessful - the only location with a 360 kiosk and the demo was Best Buy, and their controller was absolute rubbish. Turns out there are certain models of the included guitar (based on the Gibson X-Plorer) that are simply shoddy in all areas, from the whammy bar which suffers from lack of confidence or something, causing it to droop down, to the actual strum bar, which John and I discovered registers strums about an eighth note (or close) too late. Alas, Best Buy received one of these awful models, and largely defeated the point of even having the game on display. Oh well.

Getting back to my weekend, John and I then headed over to his girlfriend Emily’s house, where we lounged around, watched Borat, and had a generally good time. Plus I met some great people. Doesn’t really get much better than that. Then I went home, exerted my extra energy obtained from the snow day Thursday and the leisurely Friday in the form of watching TV (which, as one might guess, doesn’t really exert any energy at all), and fell asleep about 2 hours later, at 3AM. Woke up at 8 or 9 the next morning (too early!), didn’t do a whole heck of a lot, and here I am.

I feel better updating this thing. It’s fun to just write. I feel like I want to include some kind of recurring feature for each post, like a song of the moment or something. I think I’ll do that.

[ Song of the Moment: Drist - "Arterial Black" ]

I’m out.

Later.