.
Garbage.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
A Comprehensive Review of "The Catcher in the Rye"
There are two typical reviews of The Catcher in the Rye that you see. One is
- i had to read the catcher in the rye for my english class and it sucked so bad.
The other is
- I love The Catcher in the Rye so much. I can see why it became a classic. J.D. Salinger really captured the essence of a teenage boy. I read the book once in high school and have just now gotten around to reading it again as an English professor, and I think everyone in the world should read it too. It's the best book I've read in a long time.
...But typically about three times that length. We don't really have to mention the obvious irony of a 50-year-old English professor claiming to know exactly how the essence of a teenage boy is, so I'll just jump right in now with my review, which is intended to be a compromise-- between the viewpoint of the first reviewer and the competency of the second.
--I'm not a discriminating reader. I generally like pretty much any book I read. We read The Jungle last year in history class and everyone says it was the most awful book they've ever read, but I kind of liked it. However, I did not like The Catcher in the Rye at all. I think the main reason is that absolutely nothing happens. In this book, we start out with the focus on a guy, Holden Caulfield, sitting there telling us why he doesn't feel like telling us the story he's about to tell us. He goes and talks to one of his professors, an old man who picks his nose, and then goes back to his dorm room. Then his neighbor comes in the room and clips his toenails. A little while later Holden decides to leave the school he's at altogether. This isn't exactly shocking, because he was recently kicked out for flunking all of his classes except English. I'm surprised he passed even that. The writing style of this book is the turdiest I've ever read. I've read funny, I've read dry, I've read florid, and I've read boring. But never before had I read a book as told by a moron. This Holden Caulfield seems to know around one hundred words and repeat them over and over again. At least three times in a page he will say "goddam". He writes as he thinks, too, and the problem with that is that he doesn't think about anything interesting. After he takes his old, ratty suitcase out of the dorm room and checks it at the subway station, very little else happens, and here's how it does.
-He goes out to a hotel near where he is in New York and, on his way up to his room, he meets the elevator guy, who also happens to be a pimp. The elevator guy sends his least exciting girl up to Holden's room. She takes off most of her clothes, and they talk for a while about where she used to go to school. Then she puts her clothes back on. A little while later the elevator guy comes back with the prostitute and steals five dollars from Holden. So after that, he goes down to the hotel's night club and dances with a blonde girl, who, by Holden's own condemnation, is very boring. All throughout this time Holden keeps making points about how phony everyone is and how he hates phonies. He then leaves and has a date with a phony girl the next day.
-He also buys his sister a record, and goes to the museum too. A while after that he talks to a former friend in a boring bar with a pianist who's phony. He drinks a lot and then soaks his head in the sink. He comes out and drunkenly calls up a girl he knows, offering to help her trim her Christmas tree. After she hangs up on him, he walks through Central Park and drops and breaks the record he bought for his sister. He sits in front of the pond and realizes his wet hair is frozen in the winter air and starts thinking about how depressed he'd be if he died of pneumonia. He decides to go to his sister's house.
-She's ten years old and the only thing she does is hide her head in a pillow and say "Daddy's going to kill you" (for getting flunked out). He sticks around for several hours, smoking some cigarettes, and then scrams when his parents get home. Soon enough he finds it's daylight and leaves a note with his sister's school's secretary to the effect that she should meet him at the museum. She does and gives him back a hat he gave her, and then they say goodbye. Then, abruptly, the book ends. Were you looking for a plot? Guess what: There isn't one! It's just some stupid kid who swears a lot complaining about how crappy his life is and how phony everyone he knows is. This book might be tolerable if J.D. Salinger had given Holden a less idiotic writing style and made him actually do something, but as it is it's just a piece of garbage. I have no idea why it's treated as a classic. I suspect that it's because it's a cheap book to buy and thus English teachers value it because they can buy a lot of them for only a few dollars. One thing's for sure, though: if you're looking to read something interesting, thought-provoking, good, or even competently written, look somewhere else.
- i had to read the catcher in the rye for my english class and it sucked so bad.
The other is
- I love The Catcher in the Rye so much. I can see why it became a classic. J.D. Salinger really captured the essence of a teenage boy. I read the book once in high school and have just now gotten around to reading it again as an English professor, and I think everyone in the world should read it too. It's the best book I've read in a long time.
...But typically about three times that length. We don't really have to mention the obvious irony of a 50-year-old English professor claiming to know exactly how the essence of a teenage boy is, so I'll just jump right in now with my review, which is intended to be a compromise-- between the viewpoint of the first reviewer and the competency of the second.
--I'm not a discriminating reader. I generally like pretty much any book I read. We read The Jungle last year in history class and everyone says it was the most awful book they've ever read, but I kind of liked it. However, I did not like The Catcher in the Rye at all. I think the main reason is that absolutely nothing happens. In this book, we start out with the focus on a guy, Holden Caulfield, sitting there telling us why he doesn't feel like telling us the story he's about to tell us. He goes and talks to one of his professors, an old man who picks his nose, and then goes back to his dorm room. Then his neighbor comes in the room and clips his toenails. A little while later Holden decides to leave the school he's at altogether. This isn't exactly shocking, because he was recently kicked out for flunking all of his classes except English. I'm surprised he passed even that. The writing style of this book is the turdiest I've ever read. I've read funny, I've read dry, I've read florid, and I've read boring. But never before had I read a book as told by a moron. This Holden Caulfield seems to know around one hundred words and repeat them over and over again. At least three times in a page he will say "goddam". He writes as he thinks, too, and the problem with that is that he doesn't think about anything interesting. After he takes his old, ratty suitcase out of the dorm room and checks it at the subway station, very little else happens, and here's how it does.
-He goes out to a hotel near where he is in New York and, on his way up to his room, he meets the elevator guy, who also happens to be a pimp. The elevator guy sends his least exciting girl up to Holden's room. She takes off most of her clothes, and they talk for a while about where she used to go to school. Then she puts her clothes back on. A little while later the elevator guy comes back with the prostitute and steals five dollars from Holden. So after that, he goes down to the hotel's night club and dances with a blonde girl, who, by Holden's own condemnation, is very boring. All throughout this time Holden keeps making points about how phony everyone is and how he hates phonies. He then leaves and has a date with a phony girl the next day.
-He also buys his sister a record, and goes to the museum too. A while after that he talks to a former friend in a boring bar with a pianist who's phony. He drinks a lot and then soaks his head in the sink. He comes out and drunkenly calls up a girl he knows, offering to help her trim her Christmas tree. After she hangs up on him, he walks through Central Park and drops and breaks the record he bought for his sister. He sits in front of the pond and realizes his wet hair is frozen in the winter air and starts thinking about how depressed he'd be if he died of pneumonia. He decides to go to his sister's house.
-She's ten years old and the only thing she does is hide her head in a pillow and say "Daddy's going to kill you" (for getting flunked out). He sticks around for several hours, smoking some cigarettes, and then scrams when his parents get home. Soon enough he finds it's daylight and leaves a note with his sister's school's secretary to the effect that she should meet him at the museum. She does and gives him back a hat he gave her, and then they say goodbye. Then, abruptly, the book ends. Were you looking for a plot? Guess what: There isn't one! It's just some stupid kid who swears a lot complaining about how crappy his life is and how phony everyone he knows is. This book might be tolerable if J.D. Salinger had given Holden a less idiotic writing style and made him actually do something, but as it is it's just a piece of garbage. I have no idea why it's treated as a classic. I suspect that it's because it's a cheap book to buy and thus English teachers value it because they can buy a lot of them for only a few dollars. One thing's for sure, though: if you're looking to read something interesting, thought-provoking, good, or even competently written, look somewhere else.
Saturday, September 18, 2004
About time for a new post.
Isn't it, though? It's been almost a week since I wrote anything. And this 'blog is archived weekly. So this week's archive will have two posts in it.
-Yesterday we went to the first home football game. We were out of our form. I didn't play any of the stand songs too well--though that might have something to do with that I didn't have any of my music--and the show could've been better. Probably a lot of our poor performance was due to the fact that Mr. Canter was off practicing for his brother-in-law's wedding or something and couldn't be at the game, leaving us with only the assistant director Mr. Kennedy. And also due to that it was dark outside. I didn't get back to the house until around 2230.
-I thought this up a few days ago when the school was having calzones for lunch: I think it would be funny to, every time you're saying "calzone", say "calzona". Just keep mentioning calzonas until someone goes nuts and yells, "It's calZONE! CALZONE! CALZONE!!" I thought that would be pretty funny. Doesn't have to be "calzone" though--you could do it with some other ward.
-I'm seriously considering getting a summer job at Crowduck. Our family has a summer tradition of, every year, going up to this awesome fishing camp near the Manitoba-Ontario border. It's in the Big Whiteshell Provincial Park, on Crowduck Lake, and it's the place I look forward to most each year. Really, all I'm doing in school each year is waiting until it lets out and we all get to go to Crowduck. It's the greatest place on the face of the planet. The air is clean, the water is clear, the fishing is great, and there's nobody else around for about a hundred miles. The way you get there is you follow a certain highway until it stops abruptly at the shore of Big Whiteshell Lake, and then you call up someone on the crew. They come over on a ten- or twelve-foot boat over Whiteshell to pick you up. You load all your fishing gear for the week on the boat and they ride you two miles over the lake to a dock that you would never see unless you knew exactly where it is. Then the guy who was driving the boat helps you unload all your stuff off the boat and onto a red pickup truck marked "Limousine". From there you're driven another two miles on a bumpy, winding trail through a thick Canadian forest. Just when it seems like the trail will never end, you catch your first glimpse of Crowduck over the trees and decide that even if the ride takes the rest of the day, it'll be worth it. But it doesn't take the rest of the day, and soon enough you find the trail coming out of the forest into the camp, which is a collection of about twelve buildings, eight of which are places for campers to stay. There's a dock at the bottom of a small hill and you can see for miles and miles over the lake's surface. On the other shore there's nothing but trees: no houses, no factories, no towns. The only way in and out is how I told you; or, if you're the owner, Bill, you can take your restored 1944* yellow float plane to a neighboring lake or the nearest store in Sioux Narrows. It's the kind of solitude you get only one place in the world.
-So that's why I'd like to work there. But before I try and get a job there, I want to find out what working at Crowduck would entail. I've heard that the crew usually goes to sleep around 2300 and gets up at about 0500. I also notice that the camp seems to be a pretty high-maintenance kind of place, so I wouldn't get too much rest in between then. Then there's the several skills I'd need to learn first--I don't know just how to drive a boat, how to gut a fish, how to operate the generator, or how to drive a truck. I can learn most of those things, but the important thing is that I don't know them yet. I'll have to get working now if I want to get working later.
-Driving a truck reminds me: Supposedly I can get my temps on the 24th. My dad used to be a Drivers' Ed. instructor, so learning shouldn't be too hard. I just have to listen to all the stuff he tells me to do and then do it and then take a test. Maybe. It's probably a lot more complicated than that.
-
-Okay, now I've caught you up on the last few days. Who knows when I'll be back?, but it probably won't be too far up the road from now.
*I think it's a '44--but it might be a '45.
-Yesterday we went to the first home football game. We were out of our form. I didn't play any of the stand songs too well--though that might have something to do with that I didn't have any of my music--and the show could've been better. Probably a lot of our poor performance was due to the fact that Mr. Canter was off practicing for his brother-in-law's wedding or something and couldn't be at the game, leaving us with only the assistant director Mr. Kennedy. And also due to that it was dark outside. I didn't get back to the house until around 2230.
-I thought this up a few days ago when the school was having calzones for lunch: I think it would be funny to, every time you're saying "calzone", say "calzona". Just keep mentioning calzonas until someone goes nuts and yells, "It's calZONE! CALZONE! CALZONE!!" I thought that would be pretty funny. Doesn't have to be "calzone" though--you could do it with some other ward.
-I'm seriously considering getting a summer job at Crowduck. Our family has a summer tradition of, every year, going up to this awesome fishing camp near the Manitoba-Ontario border. It's in the Big Whiteshell Provincial Park, on Crowduck Lake, and it's the place I look forward to most each year. Really, all I'm doing in school each year is waiting until it lets out and we all get to go to Crowduck. It's the greatest place on the face of the planet. The air is clean, the water is clear, the fishing is great, and there's nobody else around for about a hundred miles. The way you get there is you follow a certain highway until it stops abruptly at the shore of Big Whiteshell Lake, and then you call up someone on the crew. They come over on a ten- or twelve-foot boat over Whiteshell to pick you up. You load all your fishing gear for the week on the boat and they ride you two miles over the lake to a dock that you would never see unless you knew exactly where it is. Then the guy who was driving the boat helps you unload all your stuff off the boat and onto a red pickup truck marked "Limousine". From there you're driven another two miles on a bumpy, winding trail through a thick Canadian forest. Just when it seems like the trail will never end, you catch your first glimpse of Crowduck over the trees and decide that even if the ride takes the rest of the day, it'll be worth it. But it doesn't take the rest of the day, and soon enough you find the trail coming out of the forest into the camp, which is a collection of about twelve buildings, eight of which are places for campers to stay. There's a dock at the bottom of a small hill and you can see for miles and miles over the lake's surface. On the other shore there's nothing but trees: no houses, no factories, no towns. The only way in and out is how I told you; or, if you're the owner, Bill, you can take your restored 1944* yellow float plane to a neighboring lake or the nearest store in Sioux Narrows. It's the kind of solitude you get only one place in the world.
-So that's why I'd like to work there. But before I try and get a job there, I want to find out what working at Crowduck would entail. I've heard that the crew usually goes to sleep around 2300 and gets up at about 0500. I also notice that the camp seems to be a pretty high-maintenance kind of place, so I wouldn't get too much rest in between then. Then there's the several skills I'd need to learn first--I don't know just how to drive a boat, how to gut a fish, how to operate the generator, or how to drive a truck. I can learn most of those things, but the important thing is that I don't know them yet. I'll have to get working now if I want to get working later.
-Driving a truck reminds me: Supposedly I can get my temps on the 24th. My dad used to be a Drivers' Ed. instructor, so learning shouldn't be too hard. I just have to listen to all the stuff he tells me to do and then do it and then take a test. Maybe. It's probably a lot more complicated than that.
-
-Okay, now I've caught you up on the last few days. Who knows when I'll be back?, but it probably won't be too far up the road from now.
*I think it's a '44--but it might be a '45.
Sunday, September 12, 2004
The competition
I got up at around 1030 and found that family friend Karl was here and about to cook us all breakfast. Karl is one of Dad's buddies. They met in the Army, I think, but they haven't been together in that context for decades. Anyhow, Karl made us breakfast. I had a lot of bacon. I love bacon. (Rosie, if you're reading this, just keep your mouth shut.) Then I sat around for a while; then it was time for the band competition.
-I biked up to the school at 1328ish and we had a short practice for about twenty-five minutes, just fixing small details before we headed off to the 13th annual Talawanda Marching Band Competition. Then we piled into the buses. It was very crowded. Sardines get more maneuvering room in their can. And we had to sit like that for around forty-five minutes--I know how long it is, because my grandparents live in Oxford, where Talawanda is. And for some reason--they said it was to "keep the focus"--we weren't allowed to talk. So I tried to sleep. But I never could do it. Too uncomfortable, I guess. Keep in mind that at this time we were in our monkey suits for band--not the thick red winter jackets, but the pants are more than enough to make you sweat as much as those fat men who hang around in saunas. They're about two feet longer than normal pants because they come up to your armpits, about, and they're made of something like felt. All I know is that it's not comfortable--very itchy and hot. And what's more, they're a particularly dark shade of black, so as to facilitate heatstroke. I hate uniforms.
-We arrived in the Talawanda High School parking lot and scrammed out of the buses real quick-like. Then we stood around sweltering on an area of grass where we weren't allowed to play our instruments unless we wanted to get disqualified. You're not allowed to play your instrument pretty much anywhere at a marching band competition except the Designated Practice Area, because if you do play you get disqualified. A surprising number of things can get you disqualified. For example, if, when you're backfield and waiting for the lady on the loudspeaker to tell you you can Take the Field for Adjudicated Performance, you for whatever reason step over the line and onto the field, you're disqualified. Just like that! Luckily, nobody was stupid enough to do that before we got our clicks to march out to the front hash and change the block we were in into our form.
-It was still very hot. It was like being inside a really fat guy's armpit after an exhausting workout. Nonetheless, drum major Chad Rogers gave us our "dups" and we all brought up whatever instrument we happened to have to start playing our first note.
-DAAAA da da da Dat Dat Dat Dat DAAHHH, ...dadada daaa Daaa DAaa DAAAA-Daat! If you don't read music, that's the first couple of measures in our program for this year. I, just like everyone else, march a very inconcise route around the field, taking a tour of all there is to offer: the front hash, a few numbers, the back hash, and a lot of grass. I have to constantly stay between either Tom and Mike or Mike and Matt, while moving very fast, playing a trumpet, standing exactly straight, and not being allowed to turn my head. About half the time I'm walking blindly backwards. While you march at a competition, there is a judge who walks around out on the field, getting up close and personal while talking into a minicorder. Mr. Canter has instructed us to, if a judge stands in front of us while we're marching, run over him. Apparently this has happened before, somewhere. I did well on the opener once I got into a "groove", and I just kept right on through all the other three pieces. It was still monumentally tiring, though. Once you've marched your first five minutes and your hair has so much sweat in it that it feels like a drowned rat, you think, "Say, let's get out of here," but of course you can't, because aside from the fact that that's just not done and you would make the entire band lose the entire competition, it would probably get you disqualified.
-We finished the show without dying, and immediately I walked a long, circuitous route to the buses to change out of my sweat suit. Good thing for dry cleaning. Then my dad, who had previously shown up a little while earlier, took us to my grandparents' house for Chinese food, which had been ordered from Phan Shin, a local restaurant. I ate every bite of my Szechuan Spicy Chicken and an egg roll and a fortune cookie ("Life is a bold and daring adventure for you") and drank a can of root beer and took another with me to the awards ceremony, which theoretically started at 2000 but in actuality started at around 2115. They announced all the class-C bands first, which didn't take long because they're so small nobody cares about them. For the record, something called Green Marching Band won it. Then they announced the class-B bands, our class. There were a total of two bands competing in class B today, so it wasn't as much of an accomplishment as it could've been when we won the class-B championship over I think Batavia Heights. The judges went on to announce class-A and class-AA bands, and then told us all who had qualified for State competition: two AA bands. Figures, huh? Nothing else mattered after the loudspeaker lady said that, so we stopped listening and a little later I went down to meet Dad to go home.
-I biked up to the school at 1328ish and we had a short practice for about twenty-five minutes, just fixing small details before we headed off to the 13th annual Talawanda Marching Band Competition. Then we piled into the buses. It was very crowded. Sardines get more maneuvering room in their can. And we had to sit like that for around forty-five minutes--I know how long it is, because my grandparents live in Oxford, where Talawanda is. And for some reason--they said it was to "keep the focus"--we weren't allowed to talk. So I tried to sleep. But I never could do it. Too uncomfortable, I guess. Keep in mind that at this time we were in our monkey suits for band--not the thick red winter jackets, but the pants are more than enough to make you sweat as much as those fat men who hang around in saunas. They're about two feet longer than normal pants because they come up to your armpits, about, and they're made of something like felt. All I know is that it's not comfortable--very itchy and hot. And what's more, they're a particularly dark shade of black, so as to facilitate heatstroke. I hate uniforms.
-We arrived in the Talawanda High School parking lot and scrammed out of the buses real quick-like. Then we stood around sweltering on an area of grass where we weren't allowed to play our instruments unless we wanted to get disqualified. You're not allowed to play your instrument pretty much anywhere at a marching band competition except the Designated Practice Area, because if you do play you get disqualified. A surprising number of things can get you disqualified. For example, if, when you're backfield and waiting for the lady on the loudspeaker to tell you you can Take the Field for Adjudicated Performance, you for whatever reason step over the line and onto the field, you're disqualified. Just like that! Luckily, nobody was stupid enough to do that before we got our clicks to march out to the front hash and change the block we were in into our form.
-It was still very hot. It was like being inside a really fat guy's armpit after an exhausting workout. Nonetheless, drum major Chad Rogers gave us our "dups" and we all brought up whatever instrument we happened to have to start playing our first note.
-DAAAA da da da Dat Dat Dat Dat DAAHHH, ...dadada daaa Daaa DAaa DAAAA-Daat! If you don't read music, that's the first couple of measures in our program for this year. I, just like everyone else, march a very inconcise route around the field, taking a tour of all there is to offer: the front hash, a few numbers, the back hash, and a lot of grass. I have to constantly stay between either Tom and Mike or Mike and Matt, while moving very fast, playing a trumpet, standing exactly straight, and not being allowed to turn my head. About half the time I'm walking blindly backwards. While you march at a competition, there is a judge who walks around out on the field, getting up close and personal while talking into a minicorder. Mr. Canter has instructed us to, if a judge stands in front of us while we're marching, run over him. Apparently this has happened before, somewhere. I did well on the opener once I got into a "groove", and I just kept right on through all the other three pieces. It was still monumentally tiring, though. Once you've marched your first five minutes and your hair has so much sweat in it that it feels like a drowned rat, you think, "Say, let's get out of here," but of course you can't, because aside from the fact that that's just not done and you would make the entire band lose the entire competition, it would probably get you disqualified.
-We finished the show without dying, and immediately I walked a long, circuitous route to the buses to change out of my sweat suit. Good thing for dry cleaning. Then my dad, who had previously shown up a little while earlier, took us to my grandparents' house for Chinese food, which had been ordered from Phan Shin, a local restaurant. I ate every bite of my Szechuan Spicy Chicken and an egg roll and a fortune cookie ("Life is a bold and daring adventure for you") and drank a can of root beer and took another with me to the awards ceremony, which theoretically started at 2000 but in actuality started at around 2115. They announced all the class-C bands first, which didn't take long because they're so small nobody cares about them. For the record, something called Green Marching Band won it. Then they announced the class-B bands, our class. There were a total of two bands competing in class B today, so it wasn't as much of an accomplishment as it could've been when we won the class-B championship over I think Batavia Heights. The judges went on to announce class-A and class-AA bands, and then told us all who had qualified for State competition: two AA bands. Figures, huh? Nothing else mattered after the loudspeaker lady said that, so we stopped listening and a little later I went down to meet Dad to go home.
Friday, September 10, 2004
The Show
Today we did our first march of the show.
-Our show is the music of Chuck Mangione. You can find a copy of it to listen to at here, under, suitably, "Mangione Magic". There are four songs: Mangione Opener, Feels So Good, Echano, and El Gato Triste ("The Sad Cat").
-We were at an away game today, at Reading. Don't ask me where that is. I just know that I got there. The bus driver can worry about how to get there. Carrying our instruments, we marched away from our buses into, approaching it from the back, the Reading stadium, a hulking, unimaginative concrete structure with a view of the field and a nearby street. There was one scoreboard at the near end of the field. We were on the left side of the stadium, with the Readingites at the right side. Finneytown scored first, amazingly. Everyone cheered at our touchdown. I'll bet they would've cheered harder if they'd known those were the only seven points we'd get.
-We played some stand songs for the first two quarters, and then filed out onto the track to get on the field. In marching band, you don't just walk onto the field. You line up at the back and march onto it. We did that, and then drum major Chad Rogers gave us our dups, to begin playing and marching around.
-Marching isn't nearly as easy as it looks, and it probably looks pretty hard. There are about nineteen things you have to be considering simultaneously at any given moment, some of which are: keeping the right tempo, not missing any notes, whether you're in step, whether you're in phase, what the form is looking like, where you're about to go, what size steps to take, your roll step, and whether that noise behind you is a train or just a really loud tuba. As it turned out, it was a train, rolling along on a track that's apparently somewhere very close to the field. The train blocked out about the last half of El Gato Triste, but I don't think it had anything to do with me messing up right up near the end. I just forgot what was happening, forgot where I was supposed to be going. But all in all I did fairly well; perhaps not as well as I'll have to do in the contest tomorrow, but fairly well. Final football game score: Us, 7; Them, 30.
-Yep, we get to go to a contest in Oxford tomorrow, rather than sit on our butts like we ought to be allowed to do after the first show. I have to be up by 1340. This will be a challenge. I'm tired. Good night.
-Our show is the music of Chuck Mangione. You can find a copy of it to listen to at here, under, suitably, "Mangione Magic". There are four songs: Mangione Opener, Feels So Good, Echano, and El Gato Triste ("The Sad Cat").
-We were at an away game today, at Reading. Don't ask me where that is. I just know that I got there. The bus driver can worry about how to get there. Carrying our instruments, we marched away from our buses into, approaching it from the back, the Reading stadium, a hulking, unimaginative concrete structure with a view of the field and a nearby street. There was one scoreboard at the near end of the field. We were on the left side of the stadium, with the Readingites at the right side. Finneytown scored first, amazingly. Everyone cheered at our touchdown. I'll bet they would've cheered harder if they'd known those were the only seven points we'd get.
-We played some stand songs for the first two quarters, and then filed out onto the track to get on the field. In marching band, you don't just walk onto the field. You line up at the back and march onto it. We did that, and then drum major Chad Rogers gave us our dups, to begin playing and marching around.
-Marching isn't nearly as easy as it looks, and it probably looks pretty hard. There are about nineteen things you have to be considering simultaneously at any given moment, some of which are: keeping the right tempo, not missing any notes, whether you're in step, whether you're in phase, what the form is looking like, where you're about to go, what size steps to take, your roll step, and whether that noise behind you is a train or just a really loud tuba. As it turned out, it was a train, rolling along on a track that's apparently somewhere very close to the field. The train blocked out about the last half of El Gato Triste, but I don't think it had anything to do with me messing up right up near the end. I just forgot what was happening, forgot where I was supposed to be going. But all in all I did fairly well; perhaps not as well as I'll have to do in the contest tomorrow, but fairly well. Final football game score: Us, 7; Them, 30.
-Yep, we get to go to a contest in Oxford tomorrow, rather than sit on our butts like we ought to be allowed to do after the first show. I have to be up by 1340. This will be a challenge. I'm tired. Good night.
Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Real fast here, again
I'm in homeroom again, checkin' up on my 'blog. I'm mainly here to post the answers to that puzzle I posited to you all last week or whenever. Here are the answers I have:
CH: Archaic, monarch, chemistry... there are many many of them.
PH: Shepherd.
SH: Dishonor. I knew another but I've forgotten it for the moment.
TH: Thyme. No proper nouns, so I can't accept "Thomas".
-Okay, there you have them. Bye now.
CH: Archaic, monarch, chemistry... there are many many of them.
PH: Shepherd.
SH: Dishonor. I knew another but I've forgotten it for the moment.
TH: Thyme. No proper nouns, so I can't accept "Thomas".
-Okay, there you have them. Bye now.
Sunday, September 5, 2004
Fireworks
Times New Roman now. I'm experimenting.
I did absolutely nothing until about 1940. I knew I ought to be doing something, but I couldn't think of anything in particular. So I just sat around. And lay around. And that kind of stuff.
-But what happened at 1940 was, Mom and Micah and I went off downtown to go see the WEBN Labor Day Fireworks. It's a huge annual event. It's covered by a local news channel, staged on the Ohio River (the fireworks are shot off a barge), and costs probably a million dollars. Or more. And it's awesome.
We parked in a crummy kind of parking space, and waited for things to start at 2105. ('Cause today's 9/05, get it? 9:05 on 9/05?) They hyped things for a few minutes, a deejay made a speech about the Rozzi Family of pyrotechnic engineers, and mentioned the soldiers in Iraq, and then they started things up.
-They shot off a huge beginning round. It brightened the sky. A few seconds later, the sound from it reached us. There's a huge time delay. They fired off more fireworks. Bigger and bigger, in every color of the rainbow. Red, White, Blue, Purple, Orange, Green. There were little paisley type ones, and ones that were like cannons firing off the ground. It's like being inside a 21-gun salute. WEBN played music to go with it, and the sound came at us two seconds late, and the fireworks kept on coming. Bigger and brighter, and brighter! The sky was filled with two giant white marigolds! And then any other kind of flower! Passiflora! Chrysanthemums! Then a waterfall!
-The song changed, and the fireworks changed with it, turning to fit the music perfectly. Two cymbal crashes would coincide with two giant purple fireworks exploding the night, and then American-Flag color ones, and then things got better and better and bigger! The grand finale was like something out of an intergalactic spacefight. They shot about fifty charges into the air at once, and the sky turned blue. They sent up their whole arsenal. The sound, delayed, knocked us over, and, from 0.4 miles away, activated car alarms. The reporter covering things in a helicopter was hurled into the ionosphere. The music reached a fever pitch. The earth shook. Cars exploded. Buildings toppled. The sky caught fire. Then, with a final thrill from the song on the radio, everything went black.
-The WEBN Labor Day Fireworks 2004-
I did absolutely nothing until about 1940. I knew I ought to be doing something, but I couldn't think of anything in particular. So I just sat around. And lay around. And that kind of stuff.
-But what happened at 1940 was, Mom and Micah and I went off downtown to go see the WEBN Labor Day Fireworks. It's a huge annual event. It's covered by a local news channel, staged on the Ohio River (the fireworks are shot off a barge), and costs probably a million dollars. Or more. And it's awesome.
We parked in a crummy kind of parking space, and waited for things to start at 2105. ('Cause today's 9/05, get it? 9:05 on 9/05?) They hyped things for a few minutes, a deejay made a speech about the Rozzi Family of pyrotechnic engineers, and mentioned the soldiers in Iraq, and then they started things up.
-They shot off a huge beginning round. It brightened the sky. A few seconds later, the sound from it reached us. There's a huge time delay. They fired off more fireworks. Bigger and bigger, in every color of the rainbow. Red, White, Blue, Purple, Orange, Green. There were little paisley type ones, and ones that were like cannons firing off the ground. It's like being inside a 21-gun salute. WEBN played music to go with it, and the sound came at us two seconds late, and the fireworks kept on coming. Bigger and brighter, and brighter! The sky was filled with two giant white marigolds! And then any other kind of flower! Passiflora! Chrysanthemums! Then a waterfall!
-The song changed, and the fireworks changed with it, turning to fit the music perfectly. Two cymbal crashes would coincide with two giant purple fireworks exploding the night, and then American-Flag color ones, and then things got better and better and bigger! The grand finale was like something out of an intergalactic spacefight. They shot about fifty charges into the air at once, and the sky turned blue. They sent up their whole arsenal. The sound, delayed, knocked us over, and, from 0.4 miles away, activated car alarms. The reporter covering things in a helicopter was hurled into the ionosphere. The music reached a fever pitch. The earth shook. Cars exploded. Buildings toppled. The sky caught fire. Then, with a final thrill from the song on the radio, everything went black.
-The WEBN Labor Day Fireworks 2004-
Incredible!
Oh hey. I took out the first half of this post because it was basically just a bunch of personal information about me and I'm trying to step up my internet privacy. It was just my schedule for 10th grade. The second half of the post isn't really worth much either, but I decided not to mess up by post count. Whatever.
Thursday, September 2, 2004
Finally, back online
...However temporarily. I'm sorry for not posting in the last... week or so, but our Internet connection has been down the whole freaking time. Our house seems to have something against the Internet. We've had three Zoomtown people out to look at it, but as soon as the last one left, it reverted into its crappy state.
-I have a freakin' lot to cover. I think I already covered the hike, so I'll start with my first day of school, which was Monday. I woke up at freaking 0620. Then, with nobody to see me off because it was so early, I rode off into the dark on my 21-speed, to the Finneytown High School.
-Band was my first class. It was just as bad as it usually is in the practices after school on Mondays Wednesdays Thursdays. So I went to my first bell with a sort of "fleeing" mentality, even though my first bell was one I had been looking forward to with a bit of foreboding: art class. I knew as soon as I got in the room that this wasn't the right class at all for me. Everyone in the room was a year younger than me at least, it seemed; it was only a remediation class for 10th-graders. I paid very little attention to anything that bell. It has now been changed to accounting.
-Second bell was math. It's taught by a very boring guy named Mr. Rahn. We got an obscenely thick textbook and told us our homework to get it covered, and let us off to our next class.
-Third bell was history, where we talked about Indians with a not boring guy named Mr. McGlade. We've talked about Indians the last four days in history now. Well, it's still kind of interesting. Incidentally, in the Cherokee language (I didn't actually learn this in class--I have a Cherokee book in my room for some reason) there are some verbs that you have to put a syllable into to indicate whether the verb's object is alive, flexible, long, or liquid, and you can sometimes switch them around to say funny things, which might loosely correspond to "pour me some turkey!" or "slice me some gravy!"
-Fourth bell--Spanish class. My teacher Mrs. O'Connor just got over the cancer and is now back to normal, teaching Spanish like any other day. She's a fun person. Yep.
-Fifth bell is, retardedly, split into two halves, in between which is lunch. I spend it with my friend Aaron Bell, who I think I've mentioned before. It's very fun, but not for the class--we've been assigned Catcher in the Rye, which is, so far, about the crappiest book I've ever read. It's fun because Aaron's there and we can make up idiotic inside jokes pretty much at liberty. To make things better, my old old friend Lamont Giles sits right next to me too, and he makes up all sorts of funny crap. Like, the other day he made up three comic strips: Boxy Brown, which is about a cardboard box with an afro, Action Hank, who comes with Action Night Vision Goggles and Action Bills, and committed suicide in the first strip with his Action Letter Opener when Boxy Brown asked him what he needed the goggles for, and Muscly Arm Paperboy, who thwarted a weird old man who wanted to have popsicles with him in his cellar by riding off on his bike.
-Sixth Bell was woodshop, where I got to do nothing, and seventh bell was chemistry, where we heard about what exactly chemistry is. So there. That was my first day.
-After school I had another freaking band practice. And I also just got back from one. And furthermore I have a lot of homework to do. I've got to go away now.
-I have a freakin' lot to cover. I think I already covered the hike, so I'll start with my first day of school, which was Monday. I woke up at freaking 0620. Then, with nobody to see me off because it was so early, I rode off into the dark on my 21-speed, to the Finneytown High School.
-Band was my first class. It was just as bad as it usually is in the practices after school on Mondays Wednesdays Thursdays. So I went to my first bell with a sort of "fleeing" mentality, even though my first bell was one I had been looking forward to with a bit of foreboding: art class. I knew as soon as I got in the room that this wasn't the right class at all for me. Everyone in the room was a year younger than me at least, it seemed; it was only a remediation class for 10th-graders. I paid very little attention to anything that bell. It has now been changed to accounting.
-Second bell was math. It's taught by a very boring guy named Mr. Rahn. We got an obscenely thick textbook and told us our homework to get it covered, and let us off to our next class.
-Third bell was history, where we talked about Indians with a not boring guy named Mr. McGlade. We've talked about Indians the last four days in history now. Well, it's still kind of interesting. Incidentally, in the Cherokee language (I didn't actually learn this in class--I have a Cherokee book in my room for some reason) there are some verbs that you have to put a syllable into to indicate whether the verb's object is alive, flexible, long, or liquid, and you can sometimes switch them around to say funny things, which might loosely correspond to "pour me some turkey!" or "slice me some gravy!"
-Fourth bell--Spanish class. My teacher Mrs. O'Connor just got over the cancer and is now back to normal, teaching Spanish like any other day. She's a fun person. Yep.
-Fifth bell is, retardedly, split into two halves, in between which is lunch. I spend it with my friend Aaron Bell, who I think I've mentioned before. It's very fun, but not for the class--we've been assigned Catcher in the Rye, which is, so far, about the crappiest book I've ever read. It's fun because Aaron's there and we can make up idiotic inside jokes pretty much at liberty. To make things better, my old old friend Lamont Giles sits right next to me too, and he makes up all sorts of funny crap. Like, the other day he made up three comic strips: Boxy Brown, which is about a cardboard box with an afro, Action Hank, who comes with Action Night Vision Goggles and Action Bills, and committed suicide in the first strip with his Action Letter Opener when Boxy Brown asked him what he needed the goggles for, and Muscly Arm Paperboy, who thwarted a weird old man who wanted to have popsicles with him in his cellar by riding off on his bike.
-Sixth Bell was woodshop, where I got to do nothing, and seventh bell was chemistry, where we heard about what exactly chemistry is. So there. That was my first day.
-After school I had another freaking band practice. And I also just got back from one. And furthermore I have a lot of homework to do. I've got to go away now.
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