Oh, man. Isn't that a great title? Obviously it's completely irrelevant, but isn't it great?
I had a birthday this Friday. I'd say several factors contributed to it being the best birthday I've had in several years. First, during band, Matt Rebman and Jess Scholl surprised me with a blue mylar balloon, festooned with permanent marker renditions of drawings from shirts from my store (visit it, www.cafepress.com/permanentmarker . BUY STUFF) and "Happy Birthday". I tied it to my wrist. Later I found out they had decorated my locker too. Isn't it great? In history we read out of some old books, but on a whim I decided to achieve neutral buoyancy with my balloon by tying stuff to it. I soon found about the right balance of pencils and rubber bands to keep it hovering in the air, not sinking and not rising. By the time I got it, a lot of people were watching me, including Mr Volz. (I also that bell mentioned I was in the process of creating a shirt with a picture of Alan Greenspan really digging it on a wicked electric guitar, but I sucked at drawing guitars, and he drew some for me.) In math we had a test, but it was only a slight blemish because the stuff was easy and I feel reasonably confident I got a 100% on it. Afterwards I worked toward neutral buoyancy again, with more precision. Gradually everyone became riveted by the process. I tied a receipt to the string with the rest of the ballast and tore off little bits of it at a time. Once, I thought I had gotten it, but then Cait Pantano, sounding tragedy-stricken, said, "No, it's going down!" and I had to tear a little more off. Finally I tore off what seemed like a little too much--it almost imperceptibly started rising--but declared it a victory after it also started falling, a little later, and attributed the variations to air currents. I really had an audience, and they were enthralled. Thanks, Matt and Jess, for the balloon.
-I rode home with it on my bike, which was interesting, and then had chips and salsa until my mom came home and took me to Fuddrucker's. Nobody else came, because Dad was getting home late, and Micah's suspension deal has morphed into a kind of home-schooling thing because they won't let him back in, and we dumped him on Dad's parents in West Virginia for a week. Now, the only thing is, Fuddrucker's has kind of gone down in quality. They still have the World's Greatest Hamburgers, but they don't put that sprinkling of spices on the fries anymore, and that was what made them so great. They also were out of root beer that day. But still, subbing in Dr Pepper, I had a great and also very fulfilling dinner. I opened my presents from Mom: two CDs (Bernstein and Pachelbel/others) and five books. The books were Ethan Frome, Oliver Twist, Night, The Grapes of Wrath, and Moby-Dick. Mom knows I'm trying to get my foot into the classics. Right now I've read about 80 pages of Oliver Twist. After dinner the I found out the staff was calling out trivia questions over the loudspeaker. I got one right--the answer was "Polyester"--and they gave me a free card good for a half-pound burger. Just before we left, I got another one right ("depression") and they gave me another. Finally, to close out a great day, at home I loitered around the Internet long past curfew and went to bed for a long time.
-The thread on the screw-down crown of my watch has been deteriorating for a long time, but today it finally became officially stripped, as in I can't screw it down anymore. I'm going to have to take it up to some watch expert's place, like at the mall I guess, and have them overhaul it. Dad says they'll also want to do a cleaning, and it'll set me back about $50. That's too much. But it's cheaper than buying a new one. I paid $200 for this. Maybe it's under warranty, though. I'll see if I can find my thingy. Warranty sheet, or whatever.
-Third quarter's over. I'd say I did well. I hope I did well.
-Oh! Plus, this last week, we had a freak March snow day! It was great. About three inches of snow came down. The roads were more or less totally clear, so I didn't even check to see if we had anything, but Mom was listening to the radio that morning and shouted we had a two-hour delay. I went back to sleep, and when I woke up I checked the WLW SchoolWatch and it was a snow day. The roads were still pretty much clear, and I realized the staff had wanted a snow day just as much as I did, so they just used this as an excuse. That's the one good thing the administration has done for me this year.
-I'm thirsty. I'm going to get a glass of milk. I sure do hope I'm cleared of any wrongdoing involving those squeegees.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Buy now while supplies
Last time I updated, it seems, was in January. Well. I, uh, I guess I don't really have an excuse to give you. I mean, I could think one up, but--well, actually...
-After school all days of the week until late at night I had to go to my special apprenticeship to Trent Lott. I was thus unable to update my blog.
Well, now that that's settled, let's get down to buisness. Here in Cincinnati our crappy start to the winter led directly into a crappy end to the winter, making for an all-around crappy winter. I think we got maybe five inches of snow the whole time. Sometimes people ask me why I like snow and cold weather. I can't really say why. I suppose part of it is that I really hate being hot; every summer, lulled into complacency by an idyllic period of temperate weather, I realize again with renewed feeling how much I hate it. When you're hot, there's no escape unless you have the air conditioning up really high (thus spending money better usable elsewhere) or you're willing to go all the way to an air-conditioned restaurant or the pool. Another part is that I like it when there's snow on the ground. I mean, I don't know; I just like it. A lot of this is going to be personal taste. Ooh, here's another one: I'm a night person, and winter has longer nights. Of course, Minnesota has summers too, with long days, but they have good winters, unlike here. I think another reason is that, though summers aren't too bad and they certainly offer some good opportunities for recreation, they need to be balanced out by a winter. A good winter. I'm just kind of rambling here, though.
-In band we just kept on playing that music. We got it quite good. There was this one day that Mr Canter realized we were all really just burnt out on band, so he gave us Friday off of X-Period in exchange for a promise that we'd all practice 20 minutes that weekend. Finally, last Saturday, we took two buses on down to Winton Woods High School, which I discovered is actually about as close to Winton Woods as Finneytown is, and did our contest performance. The stage there was really crowded. I performed pretty much right on it, I suppose. I gave it some punch, anyhow. The three pieces we did were New Dawn, The Awakening, and National Emblem. I think I like New Dawn or maybe National Emblem best. Anyhow, then we went on to the sight-reading room (their library) and played Whispers of the Wind, which was about on a seventh-grade level. We shuffled off to the cafeteria and, directly, found out we got a I. Huzzah! They say it's the first time in history we Finneytowners have gotten a I in Class A. Okay!
-So anyhow, the end result is we're now going to State and we've retired The Awakening and National Emblem in favor of something called Loudoun Praises, and something else TBA.
-On other fronts, I wrote an article for the newspaper about why watching TV is bad. A lot of my source material was this, which, though in need of some aggressive editing, has some good material. I encourage you to read it some time. I have sworn off TV except for shows like Jeopardy! and the occasional dose of something else like The Simpsons, which can at times be just as interesting as a book, or, if not, at least has a lot more comedic value. For this reason I also enjoy Dave Letterman, though I'm rarely up that late. Sounds like a lot of exceptions, but, then again, think of how many shows you watch. Oh, you say you don't even have time to watch TV, so you don't. Well, that's because you're a high school/college student, in which case you probably watch a fair amount nevertheless. If you aren't a student and you still say that you're most likely a liar.
-I guess that qualifies as a rant. But it's a very civilized and abbreviated one.
-Today in math we were working on probability; we were doing a problem about phone numbers. It had to do with how many possibilities there are for each group of numbers ((aaa) bbb-cccc) when figuring in given restrictions (such as: in the area code the first digit can't be 1 or 0, and the second digit has to be either 1 or 0). Well, for the last four digits, the restriction was that at least one of them has to be something other than 0. How many possible four-digit combinations are there in that system? The way the class has learned to work it, you multiply 10 × 10 × 10 × 9 and get 9000, because one of them has to be restricted to nine digits. If you're a thinking person, this will immediately jump out at you as incorrect. The correct way to figure it is to realize that by requiring that at least one digit not be zero, the only combination they have excluded is 0000, which is one of 10,000 possibilities. This leaves 9999 viable combinations, which is considerably more than 9000. However, Mrs Otten didn't object at all when someone wrote it on the board the other way, and neither did anyone else in the class. Just having realized they were doing this problem at the board (I'm prone to bouts of apathy in math, wherein I just doodle on a sheet of paper), I raised my hand to tell her the way I did it, but, because I had made a comment about just excluding 0000 earlier while I was only listening and not watching--a comment that apparently went unheard except by Mrs Otten--she told me, "I knew you were going to say that," and then gave me the "wait a second" sign, meaning she'd come back to it later. She didn't; she just kept on doing the problem until it was done, wrong, with the answers all about ten percent off. I raised my hand again. She came over and squatted down next to my desk and told me in a confidential voice that, yes, technically that was the correct way, but the simple way gave an answer that wasn't all that far off and anyhow this kind of situation didn't come up that often, so she had made a decision that she wasn't going to bother teaching the right way to get the answer. Then she walked away and I chewed on that for a while. Gradually I started getting more and more righteously incensed by this deliberate miseducation. Toward the end of class I raised my hand again. I came over and told her, "I've been thinking about this--", but she instantly cut me off and started getting defensive and angry and told me that she had made the decision to let this mistake ride because it didn't really come up that often and if I wanted to debate her on it we could do it in private. I started to make the argument that none of the other stuff we learned in math class came up that often, or, indeed, ever, and the fact that there was even a real-life example of this should give it some special consideration, but she wouldn't give me the chance. It was the end of the bell, so I stopped arguing and got ready to leave. Later I realized that I shouldn't have given in to her: I was clearly in the right; in fact, I was mathematically proven to be in the right, so I should have kept on arguing it with her until she was forced to concede, and not just let her change reality because she gets paid to illuminate it to us! I realized this while I was walking to my next class. Later, I thought: how much has Mrs Otten been miseducating us about? Who else has been lying to us? Why now should I trust any of the faculty? I've had my feelings that the staff around here was a bit dubious: problems with discipline, unquestioning acceptance of totalitarian regulations. Usually I've been able to overlook it and figure that I simply misunderstood or didn't well enough understand the situation. Perhaps that guy's swearing and slurring wasn't actually against the rules severely enough to warrant action, even though it seemed to be. Or, maybe there's a good reason that the main entrance to the high school is still blocked by mud and construction fence more than four months after the water main was replaced. Dr Tracy was willing to give reasons for things that seemed illogical. I figured usually these reasons at least had a hint of reason in them, somewhere, or he wouldn't give them. (There were exceptions to this, such as when I noted, "Isn't it funny how the cheerleaders' uniforms are so against the dress code?" and he said, "I don't know which parts of the dress code you would be talking about...".) But now I'm disillusioned. If there's corruption that's this outright, then I really have no reason to trust anything a staff member says again. I'm now thrilled by the revelation that this school is a place where lying is commonplace and not really frowned on at all! It explains so much! Why do we have to tuck in our shirts? No reason; they're just lying because they thought it would create "common decency" and they don't want to admit it did nothing but seriously make students mad at them. Why is that construction project still unfinished? When I asked Dr Tracy, he said it was because the winter wasn't a good time of the year to plant grass, and they wanted to do the whole thing at once. At first I thought that was just a true reason that happened to be absolutely ridiculous; now I realize that it was total bull. The thing it doesn't explain is: Why am I letting this group of people take charge of my learning, my intellect, and my future?
-That's a rant.
-After school all days of the week until late at night I had to go to my special apprenticeship to Trent Lott. I was thus unable to update my blog.
Well, now that that's settled, let's get down to buisness. Here in Cincinnati our crappy start to the winter led directly into a crappy end to the winter, making for an all-around crappy winter. I think we got maybe five inches of snow the whole time. Sometimes people ask me why I like snow and cold weather. I can't really say why. I suppose part of it is that I really hate being hot; every summer, lulled into complacency by an idyllic period of temperate weather, I realize again with renewed feeling how much I hate it. When you're hot, there's no escape unless you have the air conditioning up really high (thus spending money better usable elsewhere) or you're willing to go all the way to an air-conditioned restaurant or the pool. Another part is that I like it when there's snow on the ground. I mean, I don't know; I just like it. A lot of this is going to be personal taste. Ooh, here's another one: I'm a night person, and winter has longer nights. Of course, Minnesota has summers too, with long days, but they have good winters, unlike here. I think another reason is that, though summers aren't too bad and they certainly offer some good opportunities for recreation, they need to be balanced out by a winter. A good winter. I'm just kind of rambling here, though.
-In band we just kept on playing that music. We got it quite good. There was this one day that Mr Canter realized we were all really just burnt out on band, so he gave us Friday off of X-Period in exchange for a promise that we'd all practice 20 minutes that weekend. Finally, last Saturday, we took two buses on down to Winton Woods High School, which I discovered is actually about as close to Winton Woods as Finneytown is, and did our contest performance. The stage there was really crowded. I performed pretty much right on it, I suppose. I gave it some punch, anyhow. The three pieces we did were New Dawn, The Awakening, and National Emblem. I think I like New Dawn or maybe National Emblem best. Anyhow, then we went on to the sight-reading room (their library) and played Whispers of the Wind, which was about on a seventh-grade level. We shuffled off to the cafeteria and, directly, found out we got a I. Huzzah! They say it's the first time in history we Finneytowners have gotten a I in Class A. Okay!
-So anyhow, the end result is we're now going to State and we've retired The Awakening and National Emblem in favor of something called Loudoun Praises, and something else TBA.
-On other fronts, I wrote an article for the newspaper about why watching TV is bad. A lot of my source material was this, which, though in need of some aggressive editing, has some good material. I encourage you to read it some time. I have sworn off TV except for shows like Jeopardy! and the occasional dose of something else like The Simpsons, which can at times be just as interesting as a book, or, if not, at least has a lot more comedic value. For this reason I also enjoy Dave Letterman, though I'm rarely up that late. Sounds like a lot of exceptions, but, then again, think of how many shows you watch. Oh, you say you don't even have time to watch TV, so you don't. Well, that's because you're a high school/college student, in which case you probably watch a fair amount nevertheless. If you aren't a student and you still say that you're most likely a liar.
-I guess that qualifies as a rant. But it's a very civilized and abbreviated one.
-Today in math we were working on probability; we were doing a problem about phone numbers. It had to do with how many possibilities there are for each group of numbers ((aaa) bbb-cccc) when figuring in given restrictions (such as: in the area code the first digit can't be 1 or 0, and the second digit has to be either 1 or 0). Well, for the last four digits, the restriction was that at least one of them has to be something other than 0. How many possible four-digit combinations are there in that system? The way the class has learned to work it, you multiply 10 × 10 × 10 × 9 and get 9000, because one of them has to be restricted to nine digits. If you're a thinking person, this will immediately jump out at you as incorrect. The correct way to figure it is to realize that by requiring that at least one digit not be zero, the only combination they have excluded is 0000, which is one of 10,000 possibilities. This leaves 9999 viable combinations, which is considerably more than 9000. However, Mrs Otten didn't object at all when someone wrote it on the board the other way, and neither did anyone else in the class. Just having realized they were doing this problem at the board (I'm prone to bouts of apathy in math, wherein I just doodle on a sheet of paper), I raised my hand to tell her the way I did it, but, because I had made a comment about just excluding 0000 earlier while I was only listening and not watching--a comment that apparently went unheard except by Mrs Otten--she told me, "I knew you were going to say that," and then gave me the "wait a second" sign, meaning she'd come back to it later. She didn't; she just kept on doing the problem until it was done, wrong, with the answers all about ten percent off. I raised my hand again. She came over and squatted down next to my desk and told me in a confidential voice that, yes, technically that was the correct way, but the simple way gave an answer that wasn't all that far off and anyhow this kind of situation didn't come up that often, so she had made a decision that she wasn't going to bother teaching the right way to get the answer. Then she walked away and I chewed on that for a while. Gradually I started getting more and more righteously incensed by this deliberate miseducation. Toward the end of class I raised my hand again. I came over and told her, "I've been thinking about this--", but she instantly cut me off and started getting defensive and angry and told me that she had made the decision to let this mistake ride because it didn't really come up that often and if I wanted to debate her on it we could do it in private. I started to make the argument that none of the other stuff we learned in math class came up that often, or, indeed, ever, and the fact that there was even a real-life example of this should give it some special consideration, but she wouldn't give me the chance. It was the end of the bell, so I stopped arguing and got ready to leave. Later I realized that I shouldn't have given in to her: I was clearly in the right; in fact, I was mathematically proven to be in the right, so I should have kept on arguing it with her until she was forced to concede, and not just let her change reality because she gets paid to illuminate it to us! I realized this while I was walking to my next class. Later, I thought: how much has Mrs Otten been miseducating us about? Who else has been lying to us? Why now should I trust any of the faculty? I've had my feelings that the staff around here was a bit dubious: problems with discipline, unquestioning acceptance of totalitarian regulations. Usually I've been able to overlook it and figure that I simply misunderstood or didn't well enough understand the situation. Perhaps that guy's swearing and slurring wasn't actually against the rules severely enough to warrant action, even though it seemed to be. Or, maybe there's a good reason that the main entrance to the high school is still blocked by mud and construction fence more than four months after the water main was replaced. Dr Tracy was willing to give reasons for things that seemed illogical. I figured usually these reasons at least had a hint of reason in them, somewhere, or he wouldn't give them. (There were exceptions to this, such as when I noted, "Isn't it funny how the cheerleaders' uniforms are so against the dress code?" and he said, "I don't know which parts of the dress code you would be talking about...".) But now I'm disillusioned. If there's corruption that's this outright, then I really have no reason to trust anything a staff member says again. I'm now thrilled by the revelation that this school is a place where lying is commonplace and not really frowned on at all! It explains so much! Why do we have to tuck in our shirts? No reason; they're just lying because they thought it would create "common decency" and they don't want to admit it did nothing but seriously make students mad at them. Why is that construction project still unfinished? When I asked Dr Tracy, he said it was because the winter wasn't a good time of the year to plant grass, and they wanted to do the whole thing at once. At first I thought that was just a true reason that happened to be absolutely ridiculous; now I realize that it was total bull. The thing it doesn't explain is: Why am I letting this group of people take charge of my learning, my intellect, and my future?
-That's a rant.
What?
Honestly, I don't know why you bother coming back here to keep checking if I don't write anything. Hold on, because I've got to switch to the computer in my room. This one is outfitted with The Virtually Indestructible Keyboard, which is a great idea but the absolute worst computer keyboard as far as typing ergonomics goes. It rates only a step above manual typewriter, and it's considerably below an electric one.
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