Terror on the ground

Much has been made recently of the full-body scanners that the Transportation Security Administration is now using at airports nationwide, not to mention the “enhanced pat-down” that awaits travelers who’d rather not have pictures of their naked bodies saved by one of these things.

It comes down to this: There’s a good chance that someone’s going to see or feel your genitalia—not to mention the rest of your body. So basically, you’re screwed (almost literally) either way.

There are so many things wrong here that I don’t even know what’s most disgusting about it. Where do I begin? The constitutional issues? The health issues? The lack-of-security issues?

Maybe the fact that TSA agents are molesting small children, as seen in this TV news segment that’s going viral. The little girl you see screaming and crying is the daughter of the reporter, who, apparently unfazed by an event that could traumatize his child for life, still manages to shrug off the story with that stupid half-smirking TV news reporter voice like a complete tool. I’m glad that guy’s not my father.

How about this? Sexual assault survivors don’t react too well to “enhanced pat-downs” either. Who knew that having a stranger feel your vaginal area would bring back memories… of a stranger feeling your vaginal area?

According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, one in six American women has been the victim of attempted or complete rape. Is Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano one of them? I hope she isn’t and never will be, and it’s no one’s business but her own, but it seems that the answer is no. Otherwise, I don’t think she would allow the TSA to violate millions of women and men who are trying hard to put traumatic events behind them.

Perhaps the worst thing about these “security” procedures is that they won’t work at all. That’s right; they’re causing all these people untold amounts of grief and distress for nothing. Anyone who’s determined enough to blow up a plane is going to smuggle that bomb inside his body. It’s the final frontier, safely out of sight from the peepers and out of reach of the gropers.

If we really want to catch potential terrorists, we need to adopt the strategies used at airports in Israel. Israel, as you will recall, is surrounded by hostile territories and trades fire with them on a regular basis. But, as the Toronto Star reports, “the security set-up at Israel’s largest hub, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002″—and here’s the kicker—”when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight.”

Their secret: they observe how people behave. If people are acting suspiciously, then there’s a reason to be suspicious. If they aren’t, then there isn’t. There’s no reason to confiscate everyone’s liquids and look inside their shoes (while letting potentially explosive laptop batteries get through). It’s all about examining people’s behavior. Look them in the eyes and see if they get nervous.

I know that deep down inside, the TSA gets this. Last year, having touched down after a long trip to Europe with a large bag in tow, I was pulled aside for screening. An agent asked me which countries I had been to (I rattled off the list) and questioned me about the items I had declared (too bad stroopwafels are so hard to describe). But I’m sure he didn’t care about what I was saying as much as how I was saying it. Yes, I was nervous. But I wasn’t extremely, suspiciously, here-come-my-72-virgins nervous. There is a difference.

If this whole controversy had happened a few years ago, I would have found some comfort in the fact that I had no reason to go anywhere by plane. Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case. I’m now torn between avoiding these abhorrent procedures and visiting loved ones. It’s a tough decision to make; I’m more afraid of the TSA than I am of terrorists.

For more information about the invasive body scanners and pat-downs, I highly recommend you read the overview at We Won’t Fly, which also has a blog where travelers’ TSA horror stories are piling up. Noted security expert Bruce Schneier has collected a bunch of links about various facets of the issue as well. You may also be interested in these lists of airports with and without full-body scanners.

I know some of you are going to disagree with me on all this. Will everyone who does please come to my apartment so I can take a picture of you naked or feel your crotch. It’s for national security. After all, you could be carrying a bomb on you at this very moment, couldn’t you?

But seriously: What the hell?

One-day weekend

Veterans Day was on Thursday, so we had a one-day weekend. My roommate Andy went with me to visit my parents, and in a little over 24 hours, Andy and I watched all of the Back to the Future movies and most of the first Harry Potter movie. And we still had time to take a walk around the grounds (yes, we have grounds now) and do some homework. And eat. It was pretty intense. And going back to school and work the next day was awful.

Here are a couple of Ask Jordon questions from Kate:

According to your article, you don’t remember QWERTY. How did you type on my netbook then? Do you use the standard or the left-handed Dvorak?

I wrote that I’d forgotten QWERTY after learning Dvorak. I learned QWERTY again.

Every Russian man 18 years old or older must serve in the army for one year. The conditions are poor and there is a risk of mockeries, hazing and even death. What would you do if you were a Russian boy? (You can Google about current situation.)

Like most young American men, I’ve thought a bit about how I might feel if I were drafted into the US Army, but fortunately, there hasn’t been a draft in a long time. I can’t even imagine how I’d feel about compulsory service, but without the element of surprise in play, at least I might be mentally prepared. If you’re talking about deserting, I don’t think I’d do it. If an army is mad at you, bad things can happen. One year of hell doesn’t sound that bad compared to the risk of a much greater penalty.

Want airport security screeners to see you naked? No? Wednesday, November 24, is National Opt-Out Day. Of course, you can (still) choose not to go through the naked body scanner whenever you fly, but people have promoted opting out on a busy travel day to get their point across. I should point out that the alternative—getting groped—isn’t much more pleasant. The terrorists have won. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Vote yes on 5 and 6

My fellow Floridians:

Most of the time, you don’t get to choose your representatives in the Florida Legislature and in Congress. Instead, they choose you.

Every ten years, state and congressional districts are redrawn to make sure they’re about equal in population. That’s all fine and good. Now here comes the fun part: the legislature—actually, the party that controls the legislature—gets to draw the lines!

When the Democrats are in power, they re-draw their own districts to include more Democratic areas, based on previous election results. And they’ll take a Republican area and split it among several heavily Democratic districts, effectively disenfranchising the people in that community. When the Republicans are in power, they do the same to the Democrats. This practice is known as “gerrymandering.”

The result: Districts are bizarrely-shaped (the original district to which the term applied looked like a salamander, hence the name) and sometimes barely contiguous, with neighborhoods connected only by highways or bodies of water. They often include communities that have little in common other than the fact that they happened to tend toward the same party in the past ten years.

And, more seriously, incumbents almost always win. Often, they aren’t even challenged at all. It’s not because there’s a lack of qualified candidates out there—it’s because politicians have rigged their own elections. They’ve chosen their voters instead of letting their voters choose them.

Amendment 5 will prevent gerrymandering for Legislative districts; Amendment 6 will prevent it for Congressional districts. The summaries you’ll see on your ballot state that

districts or districting plans may not be drawn to favor or disfavor an incumbent or political party. Districts shall not be drawn to deny racial or language minorities the equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice. Districts must be contiguous. Unless otherwise required, districts must be compact, as equal in population as feasible, and where feasible must make use of existing city, county and geographical boundaries.

Sounds like democracy to me. Vote yes on 5 and 6.

For more information, visit FairDistrictsFlorida.org and check out their 30-second TV spot.

For everyone who was bored by the above because it didn’t apply to them: Is this election cycle really the most negative ever? Hear what Founding Fathers and presidential rivals John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had to say about each other: Attack Ads, Circa 1800.

Ugh, why is Jordon writing about football???

October is a busy month. It’s the middle of the semester, so I’ve have a lot of exams and projects and such for my classes. My last hurdle is a paper that’s due on Tuesday, and then I should be less busy for a little while. I hope.

As usual, I’ve been following the football team with interest. It figures that the only year I enter the student football ticket lottery is arguably the Florida Gators’ worst in many years (because why else do people enter the lottery if not to sell their tickets?). Early in the season, I went to the games against South Florida and Kentucky, both decisive victories. Then the team went to Alabama, the top-ranked squad in the nation, and lost—no surprise there. Next, the Gators played Louisiana State at home. I went to that one, but I wish I hadn’t; LSU ended up scoring the game-winning touchdown in the final seconds. What a nail-biter that was. The next week was the homecoming game against Mississippi State—and we dropped that one too. I’m glad I wasn’t there; I listened to it on the radio.

So, the Gators lost three games in a row for the first time since 1999 and lost three regular-season games in a row for the first time since 1988. Fortunately, they had last weekend off. Everyone hoped that they would come out of their bye week with a win. And today, they did, by beating Georgia in overtime. I had never seen a college football game go into overtime, so it was interesting to watch. Of course, it was a nail-biter as well.

It’s just football, you might say. Yeah, I know. But I figured I should mention this stuff so I could put it in 2010: The Year in Review.

I will try to bury this post with other stuff soon.

On Kickstarter: a project to hide corporate logos from your videos. If you like it, you can help fund the project. My favorite feature: replacing a company’s logo with its CEO’s face.

Adventures with Kate, part five

We now return to Adventures with Kate. When we last left our heroes, they had spent a second day in historic St. Augustine.

The next day was Wednesday, August 11. Our host dropped us off at the Greyhound bus stop—St. Augustine doesn’t have an actual station—and, in keeping with his occupation in the home entertainment business, gave us some (solicited) parting advice on buying TVs. (Stick to names that you know, and don’t buy Vizio.)

Our original plan had been to spend the night in Jacksonville and return to Gainesville the next day, but since we couldn’t CouchSurfers to stay with in Jacksonville, we decided to go back to Gainesville that same day. (I apologize to my friends who live in the Jacksonville area, but I forgot about you because you had just moved there, and I bet you wouldn’t have had much time or space for us anyway, given your whole moving situation and all. We cool?)

Back at the Jacksonville Greyhound station, Kate and I were hungry, and we didn’t have much time to go and eat before our next bus. We found an Italian-type restaurant a few blocks away from the station, and as we waited for our food, Kate used some place’s Wi-Fi to check for last-second acceptances of our last-minute couch requests. No dice.

After a little while, we got back to the station, taking our food in case we had time to finish it. (Surprisingly, we were allowed to eat in the station.) Unfortunately, in order to get back to Gainesville that same day, we would have to suffer a layover of several hours in Lake City. Wondering what there was to do there (“nothing,” our host had told us), we had decided just to walk around and see what there was to do.

The Lake City bus station was near the center of town, which didn’t seem too implausible, since probably everything was near the center of town. We had passed some important-looking buildings on the way to the station, so it was in their direction that I suggested we walk. The main building turned out to be the Columbia County Courthouse (or, according to the building itself, the COLVMBIA COVNTY COVRT HOVSE, which is hard to pronounce—trust me, I tried). Kate and I, the shutterbugs that we are, started snapping away.

In front of the building was an obelisk, a memorial to the Confederate veterans of a particular battle that had happened in the area. Elsewhere were tombstone-like memorials commemorating later wars. There were five of them, arranged chronologically from left to right in an unfinished semicircle. I said, not entirely jokingly, that they were saving space for future wars. I failed to notice that there wasn’t yet a memorial for the wars we were currently in.

The sun was hot, and we were tired and thirsty, so we looked for a place to relax and have something to drink. We found a cafe and went inside. There were some tables and an empty stage, but no one was there except for a fat kid plunking around on an organ in the corner of the room. In the back was a doorway with beads hanging from it. We went through, and there were a few patrons nestled among wall-length bookshelves, which were filled with books, and random things like a knight’s suit of armor. Behind the bar, a man with a rebellious haircut told us that the cafe had just reopened and that they didn’t have much food. Kate wanted juice, and since they didn’t have any of that either, we moved on.

Nearby was an old-time pharmacy and soda fountain, so I saw an opportunity to give Kate a taste of old-fashioned America. We went inside. On one side was the pharmacy, which was open, and on the other side was the soda fountain, which had already closed. We sat down at a table anyway, and since no one came to us, I went over to the pharmacy side and bought a Pepsi out of the fridge. Kate got a Sierra Mist. Sitting at our table, we used Kate’s computer and the soda fountain’s Wi-Fi to get online. Kate sent a message to her mother, and I signed up for an account at CouchSurfing.

At our quiet table, we had a view of the spare traffic going hither and thither along Marion Avenue. At one point, while Kate was using the facilities, a man came up to the window and stopped. He silently asked for the time. I showed him my cell phone, and he seemed satisfied. But then he held up a note saying that he was deaf and that he needed 75 cents. I knew that like most beggars he was probably just collecting money for drugs, but as a result of my Catholic upbringing I felt obliged to give him a little bit just in case he really needed it. We each went to the entrance of the building, where I opened the door and dropped some spare change into his hand. As I got back into my seat, I saw him give a gesture of success to a woman driving pick-up truck slowly alongside him.

The next time someone asks me for money, I guess I should really just tell them to get help at their local homeless shelter, but I feel bad saying no to people who are (apparently) in need. I would be glad to give a little extra to them, but how do you know who really needs the money and who doesn’t? Fortunately I don’t have to make that decision every day, but if I ever live in a big city, I’d probably grapple with it often.

We didn’t have much time before our bus came, so we walked a couple of blocks to see one of Lake City’s famous lakes. It wasn’t very big, and it had a fountain in the middle, but there seemed to be actual life in and around it, such as the Muscovy ducks (Kate thought they were chickens at first and was amused when I told her their name) that a couple of people were feeding en masse. It started drizzling sporadically, so we took that as our cue to get back to the bus station.

We arrived back in Gainesville and started our long trek from the Greyhound bus station to my apartment. We went through the University of Florida campus, where we stopped for a while to admire a double rainbow that had appeared in the sky. As Kate and I talked about the double rainbow video that had been making rounds on the Internet, I overheard some other passersby gawking at the rainbows and talking about the video as well.

After a bus ride from campus, we were back at the apartment at last.

Here’s an interesting analysis of Americans’ evolving views of homosexuality: “Gay? Whatever, Dude.”

The firestorm

Even though the Alligator has already published one of my letters to the editor this week, I felt compelled to write another one. As you’ve probably heard, the pastor of a small church here in Gainesville has been planning to burn the Koran on September 11. He’s been waffling a lot in the past day or so, so no one knows what will actually happen, but on Wednesday I sent in the following. They haven’t printed it, so they probably won’t now.

The Dove World Outreach Center has drawn an enormous amount of criticism from around the world for its plan to burn copies of the Koran on Sept. 11. I encourage everyone who has taken part in this debate to remember that at the heart of the controversy lies the freedom that we as Americans hold dearest: freedom of speech.

Speech is the only noble weapon in a democratic society, and it is one that all citizens have the right and responsibility to use. That’s why I applaud the groups in our community that are organizing peaceful protests instead of calling for violence. Though we may not agree with the message that Pastor Terry Jones is sending, we must acknowledge that freedom of speech necessarily extends to all opinions, even the most unpopular ones.

There’s going to be heightened security at tomorrow’s football game, but nothing is expected to happen there. I’m not worried for my safety; I’m just looking forward to having a good time at the game.

Till then, enjoy reading about the prop newspaper that appears everywhere in movies and TV shows. (Via waxy.org)

Making cents

Like most Americans (citation needed), I’m a vortex from which coins rarely escape. I’m in the habit of paying for everything with bills and then throwing any change I receive into a jar once I get home. The jar fills up until I swap out the coins for paper (less 8%).

That was all fine and good for a while, but I figured that that 8% could really add up over the course of a lifetime. Rather than paying a periodic fee to maintain my current habit, I could just change my habits by—dun dun dun—spending my change. So, I decided that I should carry coins around with me. But how many? And which coins?

Whenever I go out, I usually don’t make more than one transaction, so I’d only have to be able to produce 0-99 cents. Recall for that any amount of money, there’s a minimum number of coins you can use to make it. (I’m talking about US coins here, and I’m going to assume that people only use pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, which is generally true.)

To make change with the fewest number of coins, you use a greedy algorithm: use as many quarters as you can without going over, then dimes, then nickels, then pennies. To make 44 cents, you would use a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and 4 pennies, for a total of 7 coins. You could also use 4 dimes and 4 pennies, or 44 pennies, but with those combinations or any others, you can’t beat 7 coins.

So, I decided to carry around only the coins necessary to make any amount from 1 to 99 cents with as few coins as possible:

• 3 quarters
• 2 dimes
• 1 nickel
• 4 pennies

I’d never been one to carry change around, but since I started doing this, I’ve realized what I’ve been missing out on. When I go out for a drive with my friends, I can actually contribute to the parking meter. Recently someone asked me to pay for her bus fare, and I was able to give the exact amount. I no longer have to decide whether to tip a waiter $2 or $3. And, for those times when I’ve run out of singles or someone just needs change for a dollar: the quarters, dimes, and nickel add up to $1.

Coincidentally, today’s links also have to do with money, although in a roundabout way.

An article about the services that come with those fancy credit cards: How to Make Visa Obey Your Every Desire… with ridiculous real-life examples! (Via The Consumerist)

From Slate: Heartwarming long-lost wallet stories happen more often than you may think. (Via Josh of mcgees.org)

The great debate

My university brings a lot of notable speakers to campus every year, although lately it seems that they’ve been lacking in the star-power department. I don’t usually bother to see speakers I’ve never heard of, so I haven’t been to many speaking engagements in a while.

But on Monday, I found out from an Alligator opinion column that Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza would be participating in a debate called “The Great Religion Debate” on Tuesday night. As soon as I read about it, I knew I had to go.

Okay, I hadn’t heard of Dinesh D’Souza, but I had heard of Christopher Hitchens. Maybe you’ve heard of his book, God Is Not Great. Just by the title, you can tell which side he was on. And maybe by the fact that I had heard of him.

On Tuesday evening, my friend Mark and I went to the debate. We were a little late because we had come from Free Culture‘s last meeting of the semester, but fortunately, some of Mark’s friends were saving seats for us. Needless to say, we were able to get tickets just fine, even though the place was pretty packed.

The moderator was a UF professor who asked extremely long questions and then gave each speaker a little bit of time to answer. I was familiar with some of the arguments they made for and against religion and gods’ existence. D’Souza was a relatively engaging speaker, which made him sound fairly convincing in spite of all the untruths and logical fallacies he trotted out.

Hitchens offered plenty of witty remarks, though, and some of his comments inspired applause from the audience. In one such remark, he characterized Vatican City as a fiefdom, carved out by an agreement with a fascist dictator, that was being used to shelter child-rapists from justice. Incidentally, my mental applause-o-meter indicated that more people agreed with him than with D’Souza.

The most interesting part was the Q-and-A session at the end. Most of the audience’s questions were pretty simple, and the debaters provided short answers. One guy, however, literally referred to Hitchens as Satan, provoking shouting and jeers from the rest of the audience. Bad memories suddenly came back to me, but things calmed down after a minute.

Blake, the president of Gator Freethought, asked each debater what it would take for him to switch to the other side. I believe Hitchens’ answer was “Rabbit bones in the Precambrian layer,” and D’Souza seemed to dodge the question.

During the debate, Hitchens mentioned that he and D’Souza had been discussing a certain topic over dinner beforehand, and they also mentioned how they would be debating at Notre Dame (where, I assume, D’Souza would be the audience’s favorite) the next day. I thought it was pretty interesting that two people who disagree on so many things could be touring together and debating night after night while still being able have dinner together. That’s professionalism.

For more quotes and a pretty picture, see the Alligator‘s article about the debate.

In San Francisco: humorous signs from a counter-protest of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church.

News from Canada: Students Failing Because of Twitter, Texting. Speaking of which, you can now follow The World of Stuff on Twitter!!

Tired of your big, evil bank doing evil things with your hard-earned money? Then stop doing business with them. Duh! Move Your Money is a campaign urging people to switch to local banks and credit unions. (Via The Consumerist)

What to say, what not to say

Yeah, so I’ve been pretty busy. I know, I tend to start a lot of posts with that, but it is true. Sometimes I actually have (gasp) homework.

But in between homework sessions, there’s this little thing called life, and things do happen to me. Some of them are interesting or even blogworthy. Those things often end up here in the blog. Often, but not always.

As I get older and more people I know are aware of my blog, I feel that there are more things I can’t say.

“What?!” you ask. “You just wrote a five-part series detailing every waking hour you spent with your special friend Kate. You kissed and told. You even mentioned that you cried.”

Okay, first of all, crying is okay sometimes, especially if it’s one’s party and one wants to. Second of all, more things happened than I mentioned in my blog posts, either because I momentarily forgot about them (for example, Kate and I played some eight-ball at the student union one day—I forget which day it was, but I remember the TVs were all tuned to sports channels, which were announcing the news of Lane Kiffin‘s move to USC) or because they just aren’t things I want to share with the world. You know?

You’ve probably heard about bloggers who got fired from their jobs because of something they said on their blog. It’s kind of like that as well. I don’t want to say anything that will make me look bad to potential employers (although I think I kind of have already, though I won’t link to any examples for obvious reasons), and once I get a full-time job, I probably won’t mention it very much as a precaution. It might also be very boring as well.

Also, have a look at the archives for September 2003, won’t you? There are a lot of minutiae in there. I don’t bother too much with the little things about my day anymore. Maybe they no longer interest me, but I think it’s mainly because I just tend toward longer, less frequent blog posts. I guess I prefer them that way because I want each of them to have a lot of substance. I want them to really be good reading.

What brought this about? My friend Andy recently mentioned in his new blog that he admired my “ability to censor [my]self enough so that [my] blog is not just random thoughts” but also “to be open enough so that [my] blog is interesting.” My initial reaction was: He doesn’t know the half of it! Boy, do I ever censor myself. I probably censor myself more than not… whatever that means. Or something like that.

What really brought this about was that last night I had a dream that one of my female friends was smooching me. I wanted to talk about it with someone to try to see what it meant, but how best to go about that? I certainly wouldn’t mention it to the girl herself. (Creep-a-leepy.) And, of course, I ruled out the blog as well. (Sort of.) I ended up talking about it with Andy.

There are many reasons for me not to mention certain things here, but if they’re really interesting, I try to remove any sensitive details (see the previous paragraph for an example). A pretty good story is better than none at all, and you deserve a good story.

Here’s a handy chart showing How the Health Care Overhaul Could Affect You. (Via Lifehacker)

The Bouba/Kiki effect suggests that people might not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily. Interesting stuff.

Failure Magazine (yes, really) presents a three-part series: Quirkiest Basketball Failures, Parts One, Two, and Three. Related: quirky football injuries.

School’s out forever

Whenever I come home from college, I easily fall back into the social life I had before I left. It’s mostly based around St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church, which I attended from the ages of 4 to 16, and the associated St. Elizabeth-St. Joseph Catholic School, which I attended for much of that time. My parents still go to the church and are friends with some of the parishioners, many of whom they know as my classmates’ parents. I’ve been kept in the loop about what’s going on at the church and school.

On Tuesday night, I was at my friend’s house when his mom came with bad news. The pastor had just announced at a meeting that this year would be the last for St. Elizabeth-St. Joseph Catholic School. The school’s home page now has nothing but a link to a letter by the the pastor. He explains how the archdiocese can no longer afford to subsidize the school, and with enrollment down 70% since the 2003-04 year, the school will be about $1.3 million in debt when it closes its doors for the last time.

Even though I’m now a cranky atheist who complains about everything, I can’t help but get sentimental. I was a student at St. Elizabeth of Hungary (as the school was known until recently) from kindergarten through eighth grade—formative years indeed. Many of my friends, including most of the people I spend time with when I’m home and some others I see less often, were my classmates at St. E’s. I contributed to the school’s time capsule that was to be opened this year. I spoke at our graduation. And it wasn’t that long ago; I started this web site while I was a student there.

I’ve been trying to dig up some news articles to get some more insight about the closing. The archdiocese has an article that provides some context. A local news station’s article (with an unrelated stock photo) interviewed some students’ parents, including a Mr. Chaiken, who blamed the closing on the church’s previous pastor:

“The previous priest that was here got rid of a long-time, popular principal,” Chaiken said. “She was here 25 years or more, everything was running great.”

…except that she was using the school’s money for her own purposes.

This was a big controversy a few years ago. The then-pastor accused the then-principal of using the school’s money for her own purposes, but neither of them would show the public that they were right. Parishioners and parents were left to pick sides based on their own prejudices and suspicions. They tore each other apart. Basically, it was a massive farce all around that could have easily been prevented if everyone hadn’t been such an idiot.

Anyway, the pastor turned out to be right, and the principal (who had quit by then) apologized in writing. Apparently some people still have their heads up their asses and think she didn’t do anything wrong even though she admitted to it. I wonder how many other parishioners are still living in this fantasy world of Mr. Chaiken’s. I suspect that most of them have long since taken their worshiping elsewhere.

As you might imagine, the damage had been done. Over the next few years, more and more parents pulled their kids out of the school. Then the economy went kablooie, accelerating the trend until the school became a shadow of its former self. Now we have the end of St. Elizabeth’s. The school has coexisted with the church for 49 years; without it, the church will never be the same.

So, you see, my rosy memories have been tarnished a bit. I was saddened to find out that the financial scandal had become a nail in the school’s coffin, but I hope this teaches everyone a lesson: honesty is the best policy. Without openness, there is drama, which can only lead to bad things.

In slightly better news, an environmental project at my university is in the running to win $5,000, and you can help. They’re in second place right now. All you have to do is sign up and use your three votes to help put Neutral Gator ahead. Voting ends on Monday.

Pictures of old photos being held up in the locations where they were taken: Looking at the Past. (Via J-Walk Blog)

And finally, a list: 16 Anti-Theft Gadgets and Designs to Deter Thieves. Wait, Nick Cannon writes about this stuff? (Via Wise Bread)