I remember the first time I heard this word; my friend Liam threw it out there, nonchalantly, as though it were a word I ought to have heard before. No such luck. It ended up meaning something along the lines of “excess fat,” in the figurative sense; that is, garbage that manifests itself in various ways, from extraneous words or sentences in a paragraph to the dark lining around bread - wait, that’s crust. You get the idea.

The whole Bush Waterboard veto thing has me sort of confused. For those who haven’t heard very much about this: Bush vetoed legislation that would prevent the CIA from using, among other shady techniques, the practice of “waterboarding” on captured terrorists and other high-profile enemy figures. Waterboarding involves strapping someone down, orientating them so they’re flat on their back facing up, and pouring water over their head. This simulates the feeling of drowning, and panic sets in, and so on until the person gives up whatever information they’re withholding.

This sounds like torture to me, I’ll say that much. Official political and military designation notwithstanding, tricking someone’s senses into feeling as though one is dying is a number of rungs down on the humane interrogation ladder. The support for it isn’t convincing - an ex-CIA operative saying the technique “saved lives” would have more impact if it was conclusively shown that any and all of the CIA’s 19 available legal interrogation techniques had virtually no success in extracting information. Simply saying “the United States does not torture” does nothing to change mine (or anyone else’s, hopefully) opinions of this. At least, I certainly hope people aren’t standing there, listening to him say this and then nudging their buddy and going, “Oh, hey, it’s ok, we don’t torture, it’s not torture man.” All in all, this is to me just another bad move by Bush that will forever secure his place in history as an ill-informed, misguided president.

In local news, it’s almost dead week (actually, it is dead week, but I like to think “tomorrow” doesn’t become “today” until I go to sleep and wake up again), which means I’ll be studying until my brain sizzles with the searing-hot ore of knowledge, a wealth of information extracted from those ancient and mystic texts. My venture will not be without its perils - it would be easy to find myself consumed by an excess of worthless words and diagrams, so it’ll be an exercise in revealing the gems of useful information from the rough of the books themselves.

I have officially finished my first week’s schedule at the dining commons. All in all, it’s really not a bad job. I’ve met some extremely nice people, and the actual work isn’t terribly demanding. And the cooks make us food sometimes! That’s a nice perk. Yeah, I think I’ll stay.

I’m out.

Later.

This was my proposal, to which my good friend Ryan responded that he had in fact been president, for about an hour and a half…and he did pretty well.

Words can’t describe my anticipation of the new Indiana Jones. The anticipation was almost too much; I found myself going back to watch the original three, something which I haven’t quite finished doing, but I’m awfully close. Something about Jones just makes me smile when I watch those movies; perhaps it’s his cock-eyed smile, wry wit, his ability to wriggle out of situations that are almost too hairy for comfort, or something else entirely, but he’s a real hero, the kind I’d follow into a series of dark, bug-ridden tunnels any day.

I got a job at the dining commons, something which I had previously thought to be no longer a real possibility. However, when I discovered that all I had to do was work mornings (I say this now, but I know in the back of my mind that it’s going to be rather…awful sometimes), I jumped at the possibility, and tomorrow is my first day working for $8.00/hour doing next to nothing. Sounds good to me.

I think I need to do some restructuring of this site; new layout, maybe a new direction? I don’t think I’d follow this blog if I were anyone else, I need some recurring content that perhaps my peers can relate to. I’ll see what I can do.

Also, please check out my friend Dan’s blog, located in the links to the right, “Full Combo.” He’s a good friend of mine writing about video games and his thoughts on them, and his stuff is well worth reading.
I’m out.

Later.