Funny Stuff

I don't know about you, but I could use a good laugh right now. So here's some funny stuff I've found recently.

First off, I recently found a blog in the tradition of the FAIL Blog, called People of Wal-Mart. Basically, the idea is that people see funny people in Wal-Mart, cars in the parking lot, or general funny/weird stuff at Wal-Mart, they take a picture, and submit it to the blog. It can be hit or miss, but now and then something truly bizarre and hilarious shows up. Here are a couple of my favorite examples:

Okay... there's something personally funny about this last one. I haven't posted anything about my geology field camp class yet (I'll fix that soon, I promise!), but here's a photo of me pretending I can slackline after a hard day of hiking and mapping:

Okay, I'm scared now....

The next funny thing is this music video I found. Any of you who know me personally or have read more than a few posts on this blog know that I have a thing for Icelandic music. Okay... I'm obsessed with it. Björk, Emíliana Torrini, múm, Ólafur Arnalds, GusGus, Sigur Rós... I can't get enough. But! It's not all good, and this is an example (though my wife claims she likes this one). I dare you to watch it all the way to the end. This video is for serious. Also, it was made in 2003, despite looking like it was made in the 70s and the music sounding like the worst of 90s white rap. The group is Quarashi, and the song is called Orð Morð. My favorite is the old guy in sunglasses that sings the chorus. If you watch to the end you get a good laugh at the drummer, but at least watch a minute; you have to see this to believe it:

You watched it, you can't unwatch it!

Last thing. Early last month I posted photos of my beard in a post called Pogonology. When I was on my internship, a friend told me of a website called Beards.org, and suggested I submit my beard. I did, and nothing happened. Yesterday I got an email saying sorry for the delay, asking what kind of school doesn't allow beards ("I have to assume that you are out of high school by now!"), and that my beard was now added to the gallery. So check out my now world-famous beard, and then go look at some of the others there. There are some really good ones!

Okay, that is all for now.

Adults Are Just Obsolete Children and the Hell with Them

The title of this post is a quote by Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, about writing for adults. Yesterday was the 18th anniversary of Dr. Seuss' death, and I figured I'd make note of it. I grew up reading The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Yertle the Turtle, There's a Wocket in My Pocket!, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and other classics.

I don't have a lot to say on the subject, but I thought I'd share this video from Saturday Night Live shortly after his death. Sadly I can't embed the video here, but it is well worth one and a half minutes of your time to enjoy Jesse Jackson reading from Green Eggs and Ham as if it were a religious sermon. Yes, it's really him, and it is very funny.

By the way, if anyone tries to tell you that you're supposed to pronounce Seuss as if it rhymed with "Joyce", tell them they're dumb. The "Seuss" in "Theodore Seuss Geisel" is indeed pronounced "Soyce", but the "Seuss" in "Dr. Seuss" is supposed to be "Soos", to rhyme with "Mother Goose". The anglicization is correct in this case. Now you can annoy the rare person who might correct you on that by being nerdier than them!

Bilgeous Bogwallow

Just a quick post to prove this blog is still alive. I am very busy with school, and since I am a glutton for punishment I decided it would be a good idea to volunteer to compile all the field camp maps into one map to present at the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous.

This year I am taking second semester chemistry, Applied GIS, Old Testament, a physics lab that is insultingly dull (think sixth grade physics) and a technical writing class as well as participating in the Trombone master class again. This semester will either force me to learn to manage my time efficiently or kill me. Or both.

I may post more on some classes later if there is anything worth posting, but for now I will just share an assignment from my technical writing class. Today in class we split into groups to practice writing effective paragraph transitions. To do this, Professor Williams had each group take a paragraph he'd written that began a ridiculously silly story and each member of the group was to come up with a paragraph, in turn, that continued the story. I typed it all up as we went. The next step was to improve the transitions between paragraphs, the challenge being that each paragraph had a different author. Our final result was more ridiculous than even I could have predicted. It is bad. Hilariously bad. Maybe you won't think so, but I think so. I actually contributed two paragraphs to the story. Here it is in its entirety, with the first paragraph being provided by Professor Williams, and my two paragraphs in orange:

Bilgeous Bogwallow was a very pretty little girl with an unfortunate name. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bogwallow, felt there was something poetic about the way it sounded when spoken aloud, which is why they settled on “Bilgeous” in the first place. “It trips nicely off the tongue,” her father said when Bilgeous first started to complain. “No Bogwallow could ask for better.” Bilgeous, who had endured an endless stream of taunting and ridicule since the day she entered kindergarten, couldn’t have disagreed more. One afternoon, as a crowd of third-graders chanting “Bilgeous Bogwallow boils bunions” pelted her with clumps of dirt and grass, Bilgeous decided that it was time for a change.

Bilgeous’ face flushed red with hatred as the chants grew louder. Bilgeous decided she didn’t like the way Jimmy looked. She thought Jimmy looked like a frog, and to the children’s surprise, he began to grow green. It started with his hair and spread down his face. Warts sprung up all over his skin.

As his dramatic transformation drew to a close, the crowd began to realize what had happened, and came out of their stunned silence. “She turned him into a newt!” Cried a student. Before long the other children had tackled Bilgeous to the ground, and were yelling accusations of witchcraft and devilry, attracting the attention of a nearby teacher, who came over to see what the ruckus was about. The teacher could not have known what she was in for.

To the surprise of everyone, Harry Potter came flying in on his Nimbus 2000 and turned the boy back to a normal boy. He told Bilgeous that she shouldn’t use magic in such a way. Then Harry told Bilgeous that she should come to Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to learn true magic. From nowhere, Draco Malfoy appeared and returned Jimmy to his newtish form, prompting a duel between Harry and Draco over Bilgeous and Jimmy.

Dumbledore appeared with a loud crack, broke up the fight, and confiscated Draco’s and Malfoy’s powers for having used them inappropriately. He then called everyone’s parents and told them of this dreadful event. Then Dumbledore changed Bilgeous’ name to Minerva McGonnagal, so she would never be made fun of again.

Unexpectedly, Minerva decided with her newfound powers Bilgeous was a fine name after all, and hurled a powerful curse at the school which promptly disappeared, leaving nothing but a crater. From then on, Bilgeous was known as a hero for ending the tyranny of school forever!

So there you have it. Yes, most of the characters from Harry Potter make appearances. No, this does not fit the Harry Potter canon, nor is it endorsed in any way by J.K. Rowling. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you didn't, well, you read it, you can't unread it!

Save the Hot Dogs

School is about to start again. Even though it's technically only been six weeks since I was in class, that didn't feel much like school since the class was Field Camp, and the classroom was several locations in Idaho and Wyoming, where we camped and made geologic maps. If I weren't too lazy to keep this blog constantly up to date, the entry on Field Camp would have come a month ago, but I am and it didn't. You'll have to deal with it being out of order chronologically. Deal with it.

That being said, though the first day of the semester is Thursday, for a few of us it started last Monday. If you are one of my nearly half a dozen loyal readers, you will remember a post from last year about a field trip I took prior to the semester's start. I took that same field trip this year, but as a TA instead of a student. So this year, I got to visit the same places and see the same views, but instead of paying the tuition and being graded on my notes and quizzes, I got paid to go. All I had to do was drive, cook, and answer geology-related questions from the students. Not a bad deal.

The trip was a lot of fun. There were twelve students in total, six in my van, including my younger brother who is also a geology major. Since it is the same trip as last year, I will only cover a couple highlights. We missed out on Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone due to road construction, meaning we had to detour through the park to get to our first real stop. We saw buffalo on the road. I took pictures, but I had to take them with my brother's camera since mine drowned. I'll upload them to a follow-up post later.

The most memorable night was Tuesday night, when we camped at Boysen Lake near Riverton, WY. It started with a student reciting the entire plot of Avatar, and ended with everyone getting soaked. Also, it was chili night, but that's not important. The weather was clear enough every night that many of us, myself included, slept out under the stars. This class had used this campsite every year for five years, but this year camped at the other end because our usual spot was in use. Turns out this end has sprinklers. We didn't worry, though, since the camp host said the first of them went off at 10am, and we camped away from those. I set up my sleeping bag and blankets on a nice, comfortable picnic table, read for a bit, then went to sleep listening to my iPod.

At 1:15am, the sprinklers came on. I jumped up, grabbed my bedding, and took it to the dry road. Then I realized my iPod was under the picnic table, getting soaked. I ran back and rescued it (it is fine), and then helped move the two tents that were getting pummeled by sprinklers. The next morning we asked the camp host why it happened, and apparently a ranger had done maintenance on the system and accidentally set the sprinklers for am instead of pm. Oops. Still, it makes me wonder whose bright idea is it to have sprinklers at a campsite anyway. Sure, it was very green, but they were watering mostly weeds. Plus, even if they come on in the afternoon, what if you wanted to camp there for a week? You'll still get soaked unless you strike camp every day. Not the greatest idea ever.

Also, I lost my pillowcase.

There was another memorable moment, this time happening in the van I was driving. This one involves politics, and to those of you who get bored with this subject, please know that it is more important than it ever was, and the facts related in this discussion may be surprising to you.

There is a student in the class who is very intelligent, very funny, a great guy, but also very liberal, and he rode in the back of my van. My brother knew how this guy was with politics, having attempted a debate with him before, but I only knew he was left-leaning. A few of us got into a discussion of socialism, global warming, and health care, talking about the ridiculous things Congress is trying to shove down our throats. All through the discussion, my brother was bracing himself for the explosion he knew was coming.

The trigger was hot dogs. When I made the claim that there are political forces who want to ban hot dogs, a previously silent voice suddenly boomed out from the back of the van, "Excuse me, but that is the biggest load of bullshit I have ever heard!"

"What?" I said.

"They want to ban hot dogs? Where do you get your sources, the YouTube comments? Did you find this out at imafreakingidiotretardedconsipiracytheorist.com?" said this student, who continued in this same vein with hardly a breath for several minutes as I tried to interject reasonable arguments with real sources into the debate. The rest of the van was laughing very hard at this unexpected outburst of entertainment. The student kept saying things like "Who is this 'they'? Is there a secret panel of government officials who say 'let's take away hot dogs'? Do the hot dog gnomes come into your house at night and steal your beef franks?" (He didn't really say that last one, but it's on par with the other comments.) The best part came as I was trying to explain who "they" is, and finally as he asked again "who is this they?" my brother and I in unison said "CONGRESS!"

It's true. For serious. The student tried to point out how ridiculous this claim is, and I have to agree with him. It is ridiculous. I never thought I'd come to a point where I would ever with a straight face be able to utter the phrase "Congress wants to ban your hot dogs". In fact, at this point in American history, it is my opinion that the most patriotic thing you can do for your country is hoard up a stash of ammunition, incandescent light bulbs, and hot dogs. And I'm not even joking.

Real quick here, for those of you who don't believe me, here are the facts. There is a lobbyist group called The Cancer Project who has a press release with the following headline: "Doctors Seek to Ban Hot Dogs and Similar Meats from School Lunches; Federal Petition for Rulemaking Filed with USDA Just Before National School Lunch Week". So there's a major lobbyist group trying to get the USDA to ban hot dogs, citing studies that say it increases your chances of colorectal cancer (that's butt cancer, if you didn't know). One of the doctors involved in the petition says that "This would be a valuable first step toward encouraging the elimination of processed meat from the diet of all consumers."

What? I'm a consumer! He wants to tell me I can't eat hot dogs or bologna anymore? What right does he have? Sure, it's not the healthiest thing, but whose right is it to say I'm not allowed to eat it? For any given food, processed or otherwise, there are dozens of studies that say it will kill you next week, and dozens more that say it helps prevent something else that will kill you. For example, apparently the blue dye in M&Ms can help with spinal cord injuries!

In my opinion, it makes no sense to vilify the diet and lifestyle of Americans as getting worse and worse when contrary to what you'd expect if that were true life expectancies are getting better and infant mortality is down. I think that means we're doing something right. So eating a hot dog per day makes you a bit more likely to develop colorectal cancer. What about the benefits? Could it be that the nutritional benefits for people who can only afford processed meat outweigh the risks, especially considering that they can't often afford quality meat?

It's the same with fruit. I don't have the reference on-hand, but I read it in a brilliant book called "The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Bjørn Lomborg, with dozens of scientific references. I highly recommend giving this book a look if you care about environmental issues. The claims are that eating fruit sprayed with pesticides increases the risk of cancer. It turns out that the increased risk of cancer is completely overshadowed by the benefits of affordable fruit for all Americans, who without pesticide-sprayed fruit would be at higher risk for not having fruit at all. That's right, the pesticides increase the risk of cancer negligibly, while the fruit itself helps prevent it quite a bit. Pesticides make the fruit more affordable, and therefore accessible, and therefore reduce the risk of cancer. Incidentally, organic food is actually no healthier than non-organic food. It's a scam.

Banning hot dogs is just the start, though. If they can ban or tax one unhealthy food, why not others? How about soda? Oh, right, they've tried that. New York Governor David Patterson recently proposed an 18% tax on soda, which fortunately was dropped. Congress right now is considering a tax on sugary drinks to pay for the health care plan. Supposedly this will discourage unhealthy habits and reduce health care costs as well, just like eliminating smoking was supposed to do these last few decades. Well, we've cut smoking in half, and have costs gone down? No.

As soon as Congress can decide what is and isn't a healthy diet, and ban or tax what they find inappropriate, our freedom to choose what we eat is gone. That is one of the most sinister things about the health care bill being discussed in Congress right now. It's not about health care, it's about control. A tax on hot dogs, soda, processed cheese, fast food, you name it, along with mandated exercise, is where this particular bit of the bill is headed. In fact, they want to tax you just for being fat. Yes, I have sources. Here's one, here's another one, and here's yet another one. Even beyond this, if certain diets are punished by Big Government, maybe other lifestyle choices will be, too. This is just the beginning.

Give me hot dogs, or give me death!