Scandal! (More of the same)

I've reported on an ugly scandal that's rocking my church and the school associated with it. I thought it was pretty much over with until I heard that on Sunday, there were protesters when the Archbishop came to bless the new school buildings.

To most of the people analyzing the situation, the whole thing comes down to this: either Mrs. O'Leary (the former principal) stole money, or Father Gabriel (the pastor) fired her for no reason. My parents are taking Gabriel's side, but I'm not going to take sides. I don't feel sufficiently informed, and I don't like either of them enough to say that he or she "would never do that!"

No -- rather than pointing my finger at either one of them, I point at them both. Because I go to the church and went to the school, both Father Gabriel and Mrs. O'Leary have been responsible for my moral and spiritual development. And now one of them is a big liar and a hypocrite. But, neither of them is producing hard and fast evidence that the other is a crook. Gabriel won't show people the books, and O'Leary won't say anything. So, if neither of them can prove their innocence, then we must conclude that they're both big liars. It's certainly possible. And I want you to think about that. I want everyone who has ever been a part of St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church or St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic School to think about that. Look at the hypocrites you've been following! You have to do something. What are you going to do?

It bothers me a lot, that all of this is happening. I'm troubled and disturbed by it. But I know how I can ease my mind and resolve the situation with myself. It'll be quite simple and pleasant -- for me, anyway. In fact, I wonder how so few people have thought of it before. But now isn't the time for such things.

On Monday, the Sun-Sentinel published this article entitled "Parish Scrutiny Demanded" (subtitled "Parishioners Want Financial Books Opened"). The version on the web site had a different title, as you will read. But it's informative just the same.

And here's a pretty picture:

The Jedermann Project makes average composites of faces. They all look weird.

I guess the idea of Phoneswarm is that they pick a payphone and post the number on the Internet for everyone to call. Neat.

The following bit was inspired by Scotto, although he hasn't been doing it lately. It's a sort of "Today in History" thing regarding old posts. Though he describes his posts from one, two, three, four, and five years ago when he links to them, I figure a quotation from each post should be enough to interest you in clicking. We'll see if it's a good way to promote my large archive of posts (although it pales by comparison to Scotto's, of course). After all, they're there to be enjoyed, and I enjoy them. Without further ado...

One year ago: "He was 26 years old and was planning to propose to his girlfriend."
Two years ago: "But after all, it is Wal-Mart."

Stupid Annoying Test

Last night my dad flagged me down and made me register for the SAT®, The Test You Have To Take™. Apparently my sister had already registered, so I had to also because we're twins and that's cute. Since she chose to take the test on January 28, I have to do that too. And since she chose to take it at Cardinal Gibbons High School, her favorite school that she's never gone to, I have to go there too. I love how I get a choice in the matter. It's great. If I have twins I'm going to give them up for adoption to different parents, or do something less humane.

The registration process was brutal. They want to know things like what classes you've taken, sports you play, your parents' level of education, whether you've had a job, your religion (yes, really), and other things I'd rather not divulge. The whole ordeal of creating an account on the site and registering for the test murdered a good half an hour, my self-respect, and $41.50.

I had been thinking about registering for the SAT for January 28, but the fact that I had no choice makes me angry. I was considering taking it later, because then I would have learned more in school and therefore done better on the test. Furthermore, I have to take the test at a school that my sister picked just because all her friends go there. I'd rather go to a school close to my house, so I wouldn't waste my precious time except for the 4 or 5 hours (yes) spent taking the test.

Anyway, I guess I should study up, because this test is going to be hard. I've taken the PSAT (Pretty Stupid Annoying Test) twice already. When I get my latest results in a few weeks, I'll have to see what my strengths and weaknesses are right now. And also, I have to practice writing essays about random topics, because that's a new section on the SAT that no one cares about even though it accounts for a third of your score.

Follow the Journey of Mankind (Flash, sound). This is very interesting stuff. It's interesting to find how they can trace back the paths of human migration using DNA and all sorts of archeological and climatological evidence.

If you've played Tetris obsessively like me, then maybe you've experienced "Tetris dreams" in which you imagine playing the game while you sleep (or, like me, just at random times). Apparently there's been at least one study looking into the phenomenon.

I feel the burn!

I've pledged to exercise with the shovelglove for 14 minutes a day, as recommended. I've decided that right after I get out of bed would be the best time for this exercise. Today I actually went for the 14 minutes, but I ended up giving up around 12 because I thought I was going to die. Did I say that the sledgehammer was too light? Too light, my foot.

My arms have been aching all day. I guess it would be a good ache if I were able to do ordinary things more easily. For example, when I ate my sugar-free breakfast cereal, I sort of had to bring my mouth to the spoon because I couldn't bring the spoon all the way to my mouth. And when I brushed my teeth, I had to shake my head back and forth because my arm couldn't do all the brush's work. I've gradually regained mobility, though. I'd say I now have it all back.

I guess this means I can only take it better tomorrow... hopefully.

For the record, this was my exercise regimen last week:

• Shoveling (10 left, 10 right)
• Churning Butter (4 left, 4 right)
• Chopping Wood (4 left, 4 right)
• No Name/Flip the Lever/Curl Swings (2 left, 2 right)
• Repeat

I did these movements for 4 minutes on Monday and Tuesday, and 5 minutes on Wednesday and Friday (Thursday was a prescribed day off).

And this my much less wimpy 14-minute regimen starting today:

• Shoveling (50 left, 50 right)
• Churning Butter (20 left, 20 right)
• Chopping Wood (20 left, 20 right)
• No Name/Flip the Lever/Curl Swings (8 left, 8 right)
• Repeat

How to Destroy Your VCR. This is brutal -- brutally funny, that is. Take the walkthrough showing the things one bloke did when he decided he'd had it with his old, faulty VCR. Then watch the video footage of the abuse. It's great.

See where the line between today and tomorrow (or today and yesterday) is passing: Where in the World Is Tomorrow Now?

No loss?

As I've said, I don't think I'm losing much weight on the No S Diet so far. In fact, I don't feel like I've lost an ounce. I realized last night as I was eating a greasy cheeseburger and onion rings at IHOP that although I've been sticking to negative changes -- no snacks, no sweets, no seconds -- I've made few positive changes, like actually eating healthier foods. I have changed my cereal to one without sugar, and I'm eating fruit at lunch to replace my afternoon snack, which was usually chips or something. But that's all I've really been doing.

It's hard to imagine that anyone could lose weight this way, but I guess the weight loss would be slow. After all, according to the 14 words that describe the diet, you only have to eliminate snacks, sweets, and seconds. I'm sure it's recommended that you make positive changes, but it's by no means official. I've been browsing the No S Diet bulletin boards and reading about people who are glad that they've lost weight while still being able to eat a lot of the stuff they want. Also, I guess that I'd rather lose weight slowly eating big cheeseburgers than losing it all in a week by eating... oatmeal... or... collard greens. But still, it's frustrating.

I only started exercising (with the shovelglove) a week ago, so my total weight lost for the month can't be that much. This past week I've been getting into the shovelgloving gently: 4 to 5 minutes a day. But I really have to get into it now. Tomorrow I'm going to go for the full 14 minutes. Also, I might need to get a heavier sledgehammer. I hope I can exchange mine. But I'll try it for another week to see if that's necessary.

I thought I'd be lucky this month to lose 4 lbs., but that's probably an unrealistic expectation. On the other hand, since I've been eschewing snacks, sweets, and seconds on most days, I must be losing some weight, no matter how little. And since I've been doing a few minutes of sledgehammer workouts that I wouldn't have otherwise done, I must be losing a little weight there. Hopefully it'll be enough for the scale to notice. To get my pre-diet weight, I weighed myself on October 31, November 1, and November 2 and averaged those numbers (your weight fluctuates a bit, and scales aren't very accurate). I plan to do the same thing to find my November weight. So come December 2, I'll know how much this is working.

Last night I finally saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Even though it was long (over two and a half hours), it was still very good -- better than the last one, in my opinion. It's true that they had to cut a lot of subplots, but I think it improved the movie.

I didn't watch much of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday, but I did happen to see that instead of showing the M&M's balloon, they cut to footage of it from last year. I thought that that was kind of strange, but I didn't think too much of it. Now, you've probably heard about this, but it turns out that the balloon crashed into a lamppost, injuring two people. NBC, which aired the parade, was the only network not to report the accident while it unfolded -- the parade's tightly scripted, y'know.

Someone was trying to sell the Hollywood Sign on eBay. Starting bid: $300,000. No one bid before the auction was ended. Apparently they were the letters of the original sign, not the sign that has been there since 1978 or the land upon which it sits.

Out of step

I had a pretty good Thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving weekend is not without homework. Some people ask me how I can always manage to do my homework. Actually, they don't. But many people I've talked to are just too lazy to do it, and that's the only reason they have bad grades (according to them, anyway).

I guess I picked up in psychology class that your experiences early in life mold who you are. Before going to Pompano Beach High, I went to a Catholic school -- St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic School, to be exact -- for nine years. Life was good there. We were naive. And we were basically all white. I didn't know the meaning of ghetto. I think there were maybe two ghetto kids in the whole school, and one of them was white. In eighth grade there was this new girl who smoked cigarettes and had done the deed. I couldn't believe it. And of course, no one dated or anything, except maybe Carlos and Breonka, and that was probably once. Coincidentally, there was none of this so-called "drama." (Well, I don't think so, anyway. I wasn't a girl.) We were really sheltered.

Of course, there wasn't much of an opportunity to develop valuable social skills at a place like this. The extent of it was pretty much the dances for the junior high students. Admission was five bucks, not 50 like some schools I go to right now. Plus, they could actually have them fairly often: they didn't need to book a place; they just cleared the cafeteria and had it there. (If Pompano had dances in either of its two gyms, the price wouldn't be astronomical and so people would flock in. I bet they'd make money.)

Anyway, I loved those dances. There were some good times to be had there. They didn't even make you pay for the food, usually. And I got to slowdance with pretty much any girl I wanted -- well, any one who was there, anyway. That's probably how I learned to slowdance (not like there's anything to it). It was either there or at my friend Reid's first dance party, whichever came first. Other than that, I can't dance at all. When they would play "The Electric Slide," "The Cha Cha Slide," "Macarena," or "YMCA" (which, as I can't resist mentioning, is about meeting for gay sexual encounters), I would run away. I can't stand those types of dances. There was other music too, but no one really danced to that. Still, those dances made for relatively fun Friday nights.

But things were tough during the weekdays. With our uniforms we had to wear belts. And our socks had to be a certain height -- above the ankle, anyway. I didn't see the point of having them lower than that, though. Starting in third grade, if you did something wrong, you got demerits and detentions. Demerits, if you don't know, are basically points toward getting a detention. If you got five demerits, you had to stay after school Wednesday for detention. And of course, the most flagrant offenses, like the seldom-enforced "hurting the feelings of others," amounted to an automatic detention.

I got some demerits. And detentions. I got a detention for socking one to the principal's boy, and another for the equally heinous offense of letting people copy my work. I also got one for flicking a tiny ball of paper off my desk during class. I think the reasoning was that it could have poked someone's eye out. Of course, that person would have to be about three feet tall and standing right in front of my desk. But I 'fessed up to the crime. They are tough on those detentions in third grade.

If I remember correctly, not doing homework was also demerits or detentions or something. So as you can imagine, we did our homework. I made it a priority. Yeah, I remember what it was now. It was one demerit for not doing your homework, I think. And it happened to me. I would get into a lot of trouble for it. Because when you got a demerit, you had to take it home to your parents so they could sign it. They had to know eventually. So that's pretty much why I did my homework.

Now you know a little bit more about me, if you didn't know all that before. And you can sort of get an idea of where I'm coming from and why I am who I am.

Slow Wave: An artist illustrates your dreams. Like a comic strip. Cool.

Wikipedia has a list of unusual deaths and, similarly, a list of people who died in the bathroom. People have been dying in bathrooms since ancient times.

Merry Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving today. Thanksgiving was historically a day of giving thanks for the harvest. Today it's stereotypically (but quite correctly) depicted as a day for eating turkey, bickering with relatives, and watching football.

What happened? Well, we sort of don't grow our own crops anymore. I can see Thanksgiving having a significance to some farming family outside Zuquardic, Nebraska. They raise their own grain and vegetables, I guess. And they grow their turkey themselves. Father, in his overalls and farmer's hat, slaughters the turkey in the barn, and mother cooks it and everything else all nice and old-timey. Mashed potatoes 'n' gravy, green beans, corn on the cob, yams, cranberry sauce, whatever. And the farmer's hot daughter churns the butter. Yeah. They have a feast tonight, and then tomorrow morning they start working again.

But for the rest of us, we can't help but trivialize the holiday. Like every other holiday in Western culture (except maybe Passover), we seem to have lost touch with its origins. Last year, a classmate of mine who didn't spend much of her childhood in America decried Thanksgiving as a celebration of gluttony. I didn't believe her, but now I realize that she's right. Today Thanksgiving really is all about the meal. Everyone who calls Thanksgiving "Turkey Day" knows this, subconsciously or otherwise.

Furthermore, Thanksgiving has traditionally been regarded as the gateway to Christmas. Franklin Roosevelt knew this when he changed Thanksgiving from the last Thursday to the second-to-last Thursday in November (rationale: longer Christmas season = stores make more money = no more Great Depression). He and Congress hammered out a compromise: it's now the fourth Thursday in November, which is sometimes the last and sometimes not. But now stores are going back even farther than Thanksgiving, no matter what the date. I started seeing Christmas decorations and stuff a couple weeks ago. It makes me want to puke.

I'm going to put the "Thanks" and "giving" back in Thanksgiving by giving thanks for things I'm thankful for. The other day I scribbled down a little list:

• Friends and family... duh!
• My willpower & desire to always improve myself.
• Good teachers, especially Dear Mrs. Vazquez [who, as I failed to mention, actually moved to Puerto Rico].
• Reinhard Engels for the No S Diet & shovelglove
• The people I've communicated with in Esperanto
• My chiropractor

I added that last one because the day before, I had been a little overzealous with the shovelglove. But I'm thankful for her anyway. I haven't missed a day of school in about three years because she keeps me healthy.

Today, some relatives will be coming for Thanksgiving dinner at our house, as usual. I like it best that way because if it were anyone else's house, it just wouldn't be the same. Part of the reason is that we have a large dining room table, so there's a lot of room for everything and everyone. The table's here in the room with the computer (or vice versa). It's already set for dinner (which will probably be in the late afternoon/early evening). My mom started setting it last night.

Are you going to fry your turkey? UL (as in "UL Listed") has a video saying that you might want to be careful. (You know the video's going to be great when you see a firefighter carefully placing the turkey in the fryer.)

And today Snopes (once again) tackles the question: Does eating turkey make you sleepy? Their answer, in a nutshell:

It's not the turkey that makes you tired, it's all the food. Who'd have thought?

I think too much

Random thoughts:

• If you were playing "20 questions" and the other person asked you "Is it bigger than a breadbox?" and you were actually thinking of a breadbox, what would you say?
• Does Home Depot smell like the things in it, or do the things in it smell like Home Depot?
• Girls are like parking spaces: all the good ones are taken. The only ones left are the handicapped ones and the ones that are way out there.
• As a rule of thumb I avoid white people who always wear black and black people who always wear white.

I authored all of those quotable bits. Cite your sources.

I'm not going to partition my hard drive to fit Ubuntu Linux. I'm going to buy a new hard drive instead. I think it would be a better idea, and I'm sure you would agree too. If I don't go through with the whole Linux thing, well, at least I have a second hard drive. Not that I need one. But if that happens.

Today I got my school picture. Picture day was rather chaotic as I had to have my picture taken twice for some reason. Alas, I got prints of only one picture, and I saw that it was good -- better than last year's, anyway, where my body looks like a monolith because my head is framed really high in the picture.

Ask Jordon! No, really, ask him.

Dullah: Me from UK, and just wondering is it hard to drive a stick shift in the US? coz youre controlling the gears with ur right hand...

Me from US, and me don't really know whether it would be hard or not because me not yet learn to drive. However, it can't be impossible, because there are left-handed drivers and there are cars with manual transmissions, so the two groups must overlap to some degree. Speaking as a southpaw, it's not very hard to learn how to do something with your right hand if it's not complicated and you can't already do it with your left hand. Don't ask me why, but that's the way it seems to me. I learned to play the guitar right-handed and I don't think it gave me much more difficulty than it would a righty.

What would happen if you invested in stocks that spam e-mails recommended? The guy who created Spam Stock Tracker decided to find out. He's pretending that he's invested $17,405. And the net profit after six months? -($8,613.80).

Here's a fan-made video [embedded Quicktime video with sound] for a song called "Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)" by a group called Grandaddy. The video starts off slow, but keep watching. It's really an impressive feat, considering the whole thing was done on a 1979 Apple II Plus. Good song, too.

Shovelglove

"Ah, crazy Jordon," you say to yourself, "He's doing that No S Diet thing. What else does he have up his sleeve?"

Would you believe me if I said "A sledgehammer"?

From the creator of the No S Diet is the shovelglove. Simply put, it's a workout tool for your upper body. To make one, just get a sledgehammer and wrap a sweater around the end. It seems infinitely better than boring workout machines because the idea of using the shovelglove is to simulate real motions like digging, chopping wood, and churning butter -- things our ancestors did that helped them stay in shape.

The other thing about it is that you're not encouraged to use it for a marathon session -- only 14 minutes every weekday. Why not, say, half an hour, or maybe an hour? Because then you'll never do it. Just 14 minutes won't leave a mark on your schedule.

So yesterday I went out and bought a 3.6-kg sledgehammer and a timer to time myself. I don't think I'll start into the 14 minutes right away. I'll do just a few to start with.

I've decided that I'm not going to put a sweater over the end of the sledgehammer because:

1. I live in South Florida and only have one sweater,
2. I can't tie it around the end really well, and
3. My floor is carpeted anyway, so if it hits the floor, nothing will happen.

My only real concern is using proper form for the workouts. I'll have to examine the videos on the shovelglove site more closely to make sure I'm doing everything right. I don't want to pull a muscle or something.

So, tomorrow I start shovelgloving. Wish me luck, success, a new car, and so on.

Design a Planet (Flash, sound) and see whether it would be able to sustain life.

The Mario Opera: It's an opera based on Super Mario Bros. Really. Listen to some songs on the show's MySpace (sound warning).

Stream of consciousness

I'm going to put down some random flying thoughts instead of my usual structured post. For this it will be hard to avoid the backspace key. But I'm going to try.

I should stop trashing people here. It would be good to talk about myself instead of others for a while, anyway. When I say "trashing," I mean any sort of thing that might be taken by others as trashing. You know.

I was going to see Harry Potter tonight, but I couldn't at all. My dad's out of town, my mom went out, my sister went to see it with her friend, Sean had to go to a game, I couldn't get in touch with Nick, Mike was already seeing it when I called his house, and Kevin is leaving for London. That leaves me here to do nothing. Maybe I'll go tomorrow if someone wants to go with me. I'm tempted to be all like "hey hit up the cell if you wants to do sumthing tomorrow" but I won't. I'm hoping this will be construed as an invitation to any interested party.

I wish I could drive. Then I could go places. Going to the movie theater by myself sounds like a great way to beat loneliness.

By the way, I don't want to die alone.

Maybe I should change my haircut. Somebody suggested that I should. The other day, Justin showed me his friend Alex, who has the same haircut as me. I had never seen someone who had hair so similar to mine. It was scary. I thought I was looking at myself, and that was unsettling.

Other things that are unsettling include being in complete darkness, like in a cave. I've been in a couple of caves, where they give you a tour and switch off the lights at one point. It's really crazy when you can't see in front of your face and it doesn't make a difference when you close your eyes.

I don't think I'm losing weight on the No S Diet. I have a hard time discerning what's "Sweets" and what's not. I eat sugar cereal for breakfast. I'm going to pick new cereal soon. Also, I still don't exercise because I haven't gotten a shovelglove. I must do that tomorrow. I need a sledgehammer and a timer; I already have the sweater.

However, losing weight will only make me skinny and exercising will only make me muscular. There are other problems you can't really fix...

[Current music: Relient K - Pirates Who Don't Do Anything]

[It's in my head. Is that what "current music" means?]

I'm not otherwise interested in Relient K, or Veggie Tales for that matter. I was listening to a '50s rock and roll CD earlier. So there you go.

Speaking of which, I haven't played the guitar a whole lot lately. I was going to, but then I was like, "Hey, I should blog." Don't get me wrong, I have played, but just not as much. I think.

I guess that should do it. No going back and changing anything or anything (except fixing typos). Now let's do the links.

Are you an indie filmmaker? Try IndieFlix.

Do you have a camera? I mean, like, a digital one? If so, set it for a long exposure, go someplace dark with a few lights, and throw your camera around (being careful not to smash the thing). It's Camera Toss, and it can produce some smashingly (har har) beautiful results.

Viva la Vazquez!

Yesterday in European History we had a clueless sub, and so Mr. Firestone, whom I've previously had for Global Studies and Psychology, was called in. Now that he's Mr. Head of the Social Studies Department, he's all important and stuff... or, he thinks he is, at least.

He's explained that although he loves teaching, he's trying to climb his way up to being an assistant principal or something so that he can make enough money to support his wife and kid (who, by the way, is two years old now; man, do I feel old). In order to kiss enough ass to be rocket-boosted into the principal's chair, he's got to maintain a professional attitude at all times. In other words, he has to keep up a force field of arrogance while remaining icily condescending to students.

Anyway, he came in to handle the critical situation. Someone asked who had been hired to replace our teacher, who was going away. As far as I remember, he flatly ignored the question while trying to set up a lesson or something. Then as he was walking out (Give them a video! Mission accomplished!), he stopped in the doorway, did one of those dramatic turns, and said pompously, "Oh, and to answer your question... You'll find out tomorrow."

Don't get me wrong; he's a great guy once you've had him in two classes, but those moments give me a bad impression of him. Mrs. Vazquez was the same: I remember seeing her for the first time, during my freshman year. She stormed into my English class to talk to the teacher and yelled at some random students in the process. I became afraid of her. But this post is not as much about Mr. Firestone as it is Mrs. Vazquez.

Today was Mrs. Vazquez's last day as teacher of the European History class. Her recent announcement that she was moving was totally unexpected because she loves teaching the class and the people in it. (She picked most of them herself.) Our new teacher, as it turns out, is going to be the substitute teacher that we had had last week, to whom I erroneously referred as Mr. Whatever in the linked post. His name is actually Mr. -- oh, I forget again. It's been a long day. It's some common name like Griffiths or Richards or Roberts or something.

So at the beginning of class we were reintroduced to Mr. Whatever, and Mrs. Vazquez personally introduced him to each of us. It was then that I realized that we've got a whole cast of characters: geeks, tree hugger(s), the Harry Potter nerd, the foreigner, some kind of punk kids, blondes who (in their opinion) are really awesome, and all the people who never talk. Ms. V. told Mr. W. something about each and every one of us. She called me her "pride and joy."

For the rest of the period, we pretty much talked amongst ourselves and stuff while the outgoing teacher showed the incoming teacher "the ropes." Oh yeah, and Schindler's List was playing, but only a few people were really watching it. I tried to.

Mr. Miller! That's his name. Did I mention I'm not good with remembering names?

After the bell rang, Mrs. Vazquez exchanged hugs with everybody who was hanging around. She said she'd miss me. I said I'd miss her too. I really will. I had lunch next and was willing to stand in a long line just to get some time to say goodbye.

I had said that I might switch out if I didn't like Mr. Miller. But if he is bad, I doubt he'll be so bad that it'll make me want to switch out. I'd just have to get used to him. If I did switch out, Mr. Firestone would jump on me about taking his AP Psychology class next semester (he's done it before). I'm pretty sure that this is going to be his last year -- I've heard he's going to be a school administrator somewhere else -- but I feel that I've spent enough time as his student, and I want to or have to take all the classes I'm having next semester. After all, 2004 was Year of the Firestone. And 2005 will be remembered as Year of the Vazquez.