Booyah

Well, I haven't posted in a while. And that's because I've been busy and because I haven't really done anything worth sharing. But, I have nothing to do for the next 30 minutes, and I didn't want to play Solitaire, so here I am. I guess I'll just tell you about cool stuff other people have done.
My brother Mark sent in a puzzle he invented to Games magazine, and now they're actually going to publish it! And he's getting paid for it! Crazy. Unfortunately, this might mean the end of his academic career, as he will only invent stupid puzzles from now on.
I got my permanent cap for my tooth on Wednesday, which is nice, because now I don't have to eat with the side of my mouth like some weird chipmunk anymore. Also, I got bored with my beard dye, and so I died my goatee black to match my moustache. It looks awesome, in fact.
Recently I was on wired.com, and as always, they had some sweet stuff. It got me really excited about treehouses, because they had an article about all these really fancy 6,000 foot treehouses with plumbing running up the trunk and other crazy stuff. They also had a cool thing about how plants might actually have a social life, growing less aggressively around "family" members to share the nutrients.
My mom told me when I was home that there have been meta-analyses published recently that say there is actually no benefit to stretching before playing a sport, and that in fact it could hurt you. Now I'm just confused, because I had been feeling a lot better recently after sports when I stretched beforehand. Although that might have been more from stretching out afterwards. In any case, I'm going to keep doing it, and will rely on the Placebo effect. By the way, my team won the soccer championship, thanks to a goal that I scored singlehandly. That was pretty cool. Then we celebrated like this:Just for fun, here's this sweet video, also:

Finally, a pop quiz. Do you know what the oldest game in the world is? No cheating by using the Internet, and no "funny" answers.

busy, busy, busy

i am still going strong with my novel. after today's writing, i'll be at 15,000 words, all of them good. other things that are cool...i got a new phone, after my old one finally succumbed to water damage. i played croquet on sunday and got to wear my new white pants. there are only 4 more weeks of school until christmas. oh, and there was the king's singers concert on friday, which was totally awesome, as expected. actually, annie laughed through the entire concert, which made it awful. she kept trying to run through the aisles and telling people to move or she would run them down, the gays. that was weird. they did this song, it was really good, annie laughed a lot. i've watched it probably 25 times in the past few days.

this is the king's singers version.

i had other important things to say, but i forget them now. basically, all of the things i talked about in last post are still going on. no noticeable gain on my vertical yet, but it's only been a week, so i have faith. also, i may have an idea for my sophomore essay, which is about sacrifice in religion.

Running Man

i am pretty busy these days, as it turns out. i've been keeping up with my 1,500 words a day for the novel, but the writing and brainstorming are pretty time consuming. although i am having fun with it, which is key. i also just finished this book that a kid on the hall lent me, called Born to Run, about these ultramarathoners and this tribe in Mexico that lives in caves and run for days without stopping. it was amazingly good, and definitely is trying to alter my lifestyle, with success so far. i'm not going to become a vegetarian, but i did go for a barefoot run with the kid on my hall who gave me the book yesterday, it was a lot of fun. basically the book is about how shoes have ruined running, because they give too much cushioning and allow us to run improperly. it also has lengthy excerpts explaining why it wouldn't make sense for humans to be bad at running, and running therefore bad for us, which was the current school of thought 10 years ago. he goes so far as to argue that before tools, running was our main means of hunting, where we would just run an animal to death, thanks to our ability to heat-control with sweat and take multiple breaths per step, both of which other animals can't do. pretty cool. all in all, by the end of the summer, i will be running 5 and 6 hours at a time, barefoot. sweet! i'll probably run from annapolis to home and back. so that's my book review/endorsement of barefoot running.
the jump program has also been going well, we just finished the first week and i was never too sore. i'm not sure if that's good, though, that might mean i'll have to wait longer to see results. but speaking of working out and seeing results, i can now do 8 pullups, proper form and everything. 3 weeks ago i could do 2. the goal is 10 by thanksgiving, 15 by christmas. upper body strength, here i come. i'm not sure if the treasure chest will be done by thanksgiving, unless i go in more than once a week. but there's not really any hurry on that.
in other activities, i might start doing madrigals on mondays and st. john's chorus on wednesdays. i haven't been doing enough singing lately, and the basses i hated from mads are gone, and the chorus is doing these faure pieces that i really like. so that could be fun, but i'll have to give them a trial period and see if it wouldn't be stretching my schedule to thin.
finally, we're reading the new testament now in seminar. at the end of it last night, i had a brilliant idea about the different types of sacrifice in religion, and what sort of role it was supposed to play. specifically human sacrifice, with the examples of Agamemmnon killing his daughter for wind, Abraham for all intents and purposes sacrificing his son Isaac, and then God sacrificing his son Jesus. I had a whole list of consequences of each of these, and I shared the idea with Liz, about how human sacrifice seemed to evolve, and then she told me that that was basically what Kierkegaard wrote, which was a pretty cool experience. It's rarely happened, but it's pretty incredible that I was thinking on somewhat the same level as him. More importantly, it reinstills that there is at least an approximation of truth available, if two people can arrive at the same idea entirely independently.
anyway, this has been a lot of my talking, with no entertaining links or videos, so here are some goodies for you.

Awesome

I was talking with my roommate last night, and I realized that my life is super awesome right now. Here's why: Saturday was Halloween. I went as a bee. I ate pounds of candy, and dyed my moustache jet black. It looks really good, from near OR far away. Although to my chagrin, my roommate shaved, and so I am the last person on the hall whose moustache from S+C still remains. Oh well. Sunday was the first day of November, I won both my fantasy football games, and I started the novel I'm writing for National Novel Writing Month. It's 15-1600 words a day every day for the month. It was harder than I expected, but I got it done, yesterday as well, which I'm even more proud of. Also on Sunday, Liz called and made my entire day better. She told me that she and her roommate were about to have a tea party, and actually use their teapot for the first time, and when they opened it up, they found one of the beer cans that we had hid around their house while they were out of town 3 or 4 weeks ago. They thought they had found all 50 of them. Fools. And yesterday the Jump Program finally actually started, and so I am really excited about that. I will dunk by the end of the basketball season this year. More importantly, I made a bet with my 6-4 friend who's running it that I will dunk over him at some point this year. So I'm going to have an extra two hundred dollars at some point. And on the side, I have my woodshop project that is sort of nearing completion. And I've started going to badminton on Monday's and Thursday's, and that's a lot of fun. I also might do a learning Chinese study group on Saturday afternoons, but that's still up in the air, for weird reasons. I was pretty happy with myself when I looked back at the list of things I said
I was going to do at the beginning of the year and saw that the only one that I had dropped out on was sailing, which I am planning on doing in the spring. Plus, I've added a couple new ones. Finally, I'm super psyched about the King's Singers concert coming up on Friday, it is going to be crazy.
The only problem with the writing is that it will take up a large chunk of what had been my free time, and so now I have even less time to do reading than I did, and I just keep adding to the stack of books I want to read. Last night I just started one that promises to be really good, about these superathlete runners in Mexico, who run for hundreds of miles at a time and live in secret caves. Oh yeah, it's a true account, too. I leave you with this:

Pictures and Sentences

So I finally imported all the pictures on my camera to the computer. But first things first, I need to explain my new experiment. You're going to have to earn looking at these pictures. A week or two ago I put up my thing about thinking and how you already know what you're going to think, do you actually need to think in complete sentences, etc. Now I want to try applying that to my speaking. Because for the most part, I feel like the second halves of sentences can be extraneous, their content being obvious from what was said at the start. Obviously in some cases, like if you're going to say, "but", and then add a thought in a different direction, then you would need to finish it yourself. But I feel like other than that, people could hold entire conversations that were still coherent without ever using complete sentences. Is this a perverse idea? It seems different in nature to me from IM-speak or abbreviations or things like that, but maybe it's only more extreme. In any case, it will probably entertain me if I actually do it properly because I'll be forced to always actually think about what I'm saying so that I can make sense and will stop talking when the rest of the sentence becomes obvious. Although I'll probably need to explain what I'm trying to do to people, otherwise they might get really frustrated. It could be interesting to discover how few people, notice, however, because I think there's a natural inclination to be predicting what other people are going to say before they say it, so they might just start talking as soon as I pause for long enough. One last thing, is that I'll be curious to see, especially if I don't tell people about what I'm doing, is if they're able to just start saying their own thought after I pause, or if they'll have to finish my thought for me. That would cool to find, if it really bothered people to leave the thought hanging, even if the ending were obvious. So that's that.Oh, that's just my mom, filtering her brain. Don't mind her.Here's my fish tank. It's hard to photograph well. But here's a close-up of some of the fish, anyway.The bigger ones are Green Cobra Guppies, and the small orange one is an Endler's Livebearer.

That's the freakish, horrifying lump on my chin. Thankfully, most of it turned out to be dried pus! So it's much smaller now.

To end on a nicer note, here's that picture of my moustache I've been promising for so long. I know the suspense was deadly.Also some things I'm excited about: my treasure chest is actually starting to look like a chest and not lumps of wood. Maybe I'll take the camera to the woodshop tonight and take some photos of it only half-done, plus some action photos. Maybe. Also, there's a new Terry Pratchett, which I will read soon. And finally, I just ordered some books by Stephen Potter, called Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, Oneupmanship, and Supermanship (in a collection), that are his satires on people's competitiveness, and what they're about seems pretty evident from the titles. But the basic premise is that if you're not one-up on someone, you're one-down. I think they should be pretty funny. And if they're not, that's okay, they'll still be my new guides for how I will live my life.

Self-Repair

So I am currently back at home, awaiting my dentist appointment tomorrow. Scarlet took a tumble on Friday, and so i had to get stitches in my chin and i chipped a tooth. For a while, I looked truly gnarly. Fortunately, I didn't actually take any photos, so few will know just how much like a hobo i looked. Especially when I still had a fat lip. All in all, quite a surreal experience.

In math today, we talked about how much of a revolution to conversion from a geocentric to a heliocentric solar system was. I argued that it wasn't that extreme, considering that the idea had already been floating around for thousands of years, all of the observations remained the same, and the math was pretty much the same as well, between Copernicus and Ptolemy, including diagrams. People in my class were pretty salty about this, because they wanted to make a big deal about the religious aspect and humans no longer being the center of the universe. But I stand by it. It seems like it was more of a revision than a revolution. A revolution would be something like Lavoisier or Harvey or Lobachevsky, that would remain significant even when taken out of context, whereas it seems like Copernicus wouldn't have been shocking if it hadn't occured during Christian-dominated times. I'd say this is because those other examples relied on fundamentally different methods, observations, and hypotheses, whereas Copernicus only changed the last bit. Hypotheses are always changing, but the other parts seem like they generally stay more consistent.
I was also reminded how difficult it is to truly have an original thought. Copernicus is generally known as the inventor of the heliocentric system, but it had in fact been thought of thousands of years prior to that. I feel like that's probably true for a lot of different "discoveries", where either I personally am unaware of the true originator, or the world as a whole has forgotten them. And while on the subject of discoveries, I was again fascinated by how frequently several people discover the same revolutionary idea at the same time. Like Newton and Leibniz with calculus to give a more famous example, or Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who I would be really surprised to find most people know about. I suppose that happens because it's the natural next step in the thoughts process, so why wouldn't two people both take that step, and it would be a reinforcement of the idea that they had taken the logical next step. It's still pretty cool, though.
In final science news, some physicists are actually claiming that the reason the particle accelerator in Switzerland isn't working is because the collisions are causing particles in the future to come back in time that interfere with the machine. I'm not sure if that would be a good thing or not, but mainly, I don't believe it. Let's pop a quick intervention on those scientists for being so crazy. And once again I recommend people check out wired.com, it's got some really cool articles up about spiders, day-dreaming, and Earth-twins.

Fish

So, I finally got my fish, and they are all really awesome. Except for the two that have died already. But I'm pretty sure I didn't kill them. They were both happy and swimming around, and then I woke up two mornings ago and one of them was stuck in the filter intake (which most research I did said meant that it was sick to begin with). And then this morning one of them was just belly up at the bottom of the tank. So I'm not really sure what's wrong, but the rest of them still look happy and awesome, so I'm not too worried about it. Unfortunately, fish tanks don't photograph too well, especially when your camera is running out of batteries. But when I get new ones, I will definitely put up pictures of the tank and my moustache, which is definitely still going strong. The end of the competition was last week, and I think it's hilarious that still no one has shaved, because they're all too happy with their 'staches. Also, props to Mark, who tells me his whole house is bullish in facial hair.
In other shopping news, I had an awesome Long Weekend, I got lots of sweet clothes and room decorations from Unique Thrift. I also found out about miracle fruit, which is this berry that makes things taste sweet, so now my roommate and I are going to buy a miracle fruit plant. It's pretty much perfect, because it goes well with pickles, which are the only thing in my fridge; grapefruit, which I eat every morning at breakfast, and limes, which I just bought a bag of. I'll send out invitations to my miracle fruit tasting party soon.Also, last night was the seminar on Caesar and Cato the Younger, during which I was struck once again, as with Federer and Nadal, by the two types of greatness. Butch and Sundance are also a good example. The basic premise is the same as the Shakespeare quote, "some are born great, some achieve greatness..." Caesar was born to due great things, and Cato had to work his ass off his entire life to do anything. That's why we want to be Caesar/Federer/Sundance. We wish we were entitled to greatness like them, that it was our inevitable destiny and that it would come easy to us. We have mad respect for the Catos/Nadals of the world, but it's rare that someone has the willpower like them to hoist themselves up to greatness. Granted, Caesar did have to work hard, and Cato had a natural determination, but the distinction is what is interesting. I might write my sophomore essay on this idea, but I'm not sure if there's enough there, or if I would want to use Cato and Caesar as my basis. Just an idea, at the moment. In other updates, I have started a woodshop project, I'm about a third of the way through making a miniature treasure chest. Additionally, I made bread over Long Weekend and my roommate's sister is here visiting and she brought his bread-making stuff with her, so we'll be making bread like crazy. Plus I want to make borscht sometime. Also, check out these amazing microscope pictures from Wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/photomicrography/all/1
And this quite hilarious video. Guaranteed it will make your day better:

Tarzan

"Tarzan had become an omnivorous reader, and the world of possibilities that were opened to him in this seat of culture and learning fairly appalled him when he contemplated the very infinitesimal crumb of the sum total of human knowledge that a single individual might hope to acquire even after a lifetime of study and research."

So I've been re-reading Tarzan of the Apes and the Return of Tarzan, and they are still really good books. Additionally, I put in that quote from Tarzan because it's basically word for word what I said at one point in my Freshman Essay, as an argument for immortality. A whole lifetime could be devoted to one single field, who wouldn't want to repeat that over and over again with new fields? Or I guess you could just Wikipedia it and die happy, you fat loser.
I've realized that I don't like paintings or statues when they're of people. They just kind of creep me out. Especially when they're really ancient. I think part of it is that they never really look like people, but they're close enough that it's disturbing. Also I think old things have just started boggling my mind. Like that Euclid had written his Elements 2500 years ago, and yet we still learn the same geometry today. It's hard for me to wrap my brain around the idea that some 18 year old 2000 years ago looked at this manuscript and learned the same thing that I did. It's the same as when I walk around campus and think about how old the buildings actually are, and how people were walking through them 200 years ago. It doesn't make me feel insignificant, rather I'm sort of proud of how I'm in the same place as all these other people were, it's just hard to fully understand how something as stupid as the building is still around when everything that makes it interesting, like all the people who were in it are all gone. I was talking to my mom about this and she shared the sentiment, saying that it's weird for her to have all of her mom's old clothes. She doesn't want the stupid clothes, she'd much rather just have her mom around. So in that sense I don't think it really is that comforting to know that we can make an impression on people even after we die with what we leave behind, like buildings or writings or photos or anything like that. I'd infinitely rather just be around myself.
Anyway, it's Long Weekend tomorrow, which is crazy, I can't believe we're this far into school already. More importantly, it means the moustache-growing contest is over. I'll have pictures up tomorrow of how it looked at the end. I'm not sure if I'm going to shave it, I might let it ride, or let me beard grow out to accompany it, we'll just have to wait and see. Oh and by the way, the final dye count was 3 times. The roots kept growing out blonde again...

Thinking

Charlie looks really pissed that this guy distracted him while he was thinking.

So I realized today while I was zoning out instead of reading Lucretius that most of the time when I'm thinking, I'm really just waiting for the words to form in my brain, when I already know what they're going to be. It's like when you're having a conversation with someone who talks really slowly, and you can predict where they're going, so you just have to wait for them to finish their sentence. That's really weird for me to understand, though. It only happens when I'm thinking in words, but that's pretty much all the time, except for maybe when I'm thinking about to do when I'm playing sports, or something like that. What's extra weird about it is that I realized I can skip ahead to the end of the though when I'm only at the beginning of the sentence, because obviously I know what I'm going to say already. I guess it'd be stranger if I didn't know what I was going to say.
But the whole concept of knowing what I'm thinking before I think about it (in coherent phrases anyway) just raises a whole lot of questions for me, especially when I realize that I can skip the coherent phrases part. It's seems as though when I'm thinking, it's basically like I'm talking to myself, just not out loud. So the biggest question for me is, am I wasting a lot of time thinking sentences all the way through when I already know where they are going? Obviously it's worthwhile if I'm having a conversation or something, but could I train myself to think in shorthand? And then the question that that leads me to is: would I even have enough to think about, if I were constantly abbreviating my thought process to the essentials? Or would my head just be empty more often. (Go ahead, make your jokes about how it's always empty) It seems like it'd be a hard experiment to do.
Now here's what's really weird, is that I just wanted to talk about how I wonder whether or not my thought process is affected by carrying through the words to the end, because that's what leads me to new thoughts, is the phrasing/word choice or whatever of the old thought. And then I got distracted by my roommate and had writer's block/forgot what I wanted to say or whatever, and I couldn't figure out how to put it into words. In my head the phrase "I wonder if" just kept repeating. So I'm not sure if that invalidates what I've been saying this whole time, or not. Because on the one hand, I did know where I wanted to go with the sentence, whether I could put it into words or not, but maybe that's the value of actually talking to yourself in your head, so to speak, as it forces you to actually think it all the way through. I feel like that helps you remember the thought, for one thing, like writing it down.In conclusion, I'd like to point out that Aristotle says all the gods can do is think about thinking. You might think I'm about to say that makes me a god, but I don't want no part of that shit. It hurts my brain. Also, this might have been really boring to other people, so here's something everyone should find cool: hyperthymesia. 4 people in the world have this condition, it's having a super memory, so they remember every detail from every day, and it usually activates at around age 12. http://blogs.static.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/34971.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia.

What is laughter?

so today i rediscovered the joy of inventing new types of laughter. the highlights: the noise you make when you're about to sneeze, repeated over and over again, or wheezing like mary poppins when you lie down on her. the other fun new game that we came up with is pretending that people are laughing when they make random other noises. like if they sneeze, just get really angry and say, "what are you laughing at?", or if they yawn, then act really nervous, and ask them "what's so funny...why don't you share with the rest of us". or if they start coughing, tell them to calm down, it wasn't that funny, they're acting hysterical. the possibilities are endless, really. and hilarious because they're confusing.
also, i'm approaching critical mass with the things stored in my cell phone. i have filled up my note to self voice memo function, and so i've had to switch to typing things into the notes section. i've decided to start carrying around a small notebook and pen, so that i can remember everything. other cool things i've found out recently...they can take fMRIs of your brain, and use a program to create a picture of whatever you were just looking at. crazy. also, some other crazy people have made a cloth entirely from golden orb spider silk. it took them four years, but it is really gorgeous. i couldn't find any pictures of it, but you can find them in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/arts/design/23spiders.html.

PayDay

I just got my first paycheck...and it is awesome. I'm not sure why I got it on a Thursday, but I won't complain. Now the test will be if I can manage to actually cash it and not then just spend it all. The problem is that I'm never counting on getting the money, so I view it as net positive, and then I see no reason not to go back to even. So I end up spending huge wads. But, I don't really have anything I want to buy right now, so I think I'm safe. Also I'm pumped that my roommate got certified to take out sailboats by himself, so now we can cruise around the Bay whenver we want and he can teach me how to sail.
We had first acapella practice on tuesday, that was also pretty cool. I think certain voicings could be upgraded, but I won't name any names. Let's just say one person was laughing through the entire thing, so their part wasn't as good as it could have been. I also have actually managed to get the tennis tournament started, so I feel really productive. I haven't decided on what to make in the woodshop yet, and my friends aren't really helpful, all they've said so far is "wooden pants".
I've decided to call shenanigans on depression. I don't understand how that's a thing. I don't mean like, chemical imbalance clinical depression. Just general depression. It seems like at the root of it, it has to be self-pity, and that just doesn't fly. I finally finished rereading Scaramouche, and it was still awesome, of course. I think I just can't resist characters like him, or Cyrano, or Popeye, or Captain Blood. That can't be unique, though, who wouldn't like to be someone who's good at everything they do/a total badass?
I don't really have anything else to say, except that it definitely doesn't feel like it has been a month at school already. But that's a good thing.
Oh, also that I've gotten a decent number of compliments on my mustache. By which I mean only that people have asked me if I'm growing a mustache, but that's still a step up from before. I don't have any pictures of it

General Updates

Let's see...I dyed my moustache last night, and that's looking pretty awesome. I'll put up pictures when I'm feeling more ambitious. My roommate took about 30, most of them are weird and just show people crowding around me in the bathroom, and then close-ups of my upper lip where it looks like I just smeared it with feces. I'll do some editing. Anyway, I also ordered some acapella music....Monday, Monday by the Mamas and the Papas, that should be here in the next couple days. I stole an aquarium filter from the lab supplies and promptly returned because I couldn't handle my guilty conscience. I literally put all the pieces together in the lab, walked to my room with it, and then turned around and walked back.
Other random notes: 1) Babies still fascinate me. Liz was making fun of me about it, but it is pretty weird that they have tongues like they do. Augustine kept just letting it hang out of his mouth, and it looked really weird. It's also weird how fat all of their body is. They don't even just have fat joints or something like that, they even have fat feet. Speaking from experience, I'll say that fat feet are really weird to touch. Plus, they all look like the Michelin man. 2) Mark, could you ask John (physical trainer John) about that partner stretching routine? I remember some of the steps, but was wondering if he had any set pattern. I talked to the yoga girl about it and she said she'd be down for leading some partner stretching, so I'm trying to get that started. 3) I'm definitely trying to use the wood room a lot this year. I didn't even know we had one, really. I'm not sure what I'm going to make, though, which is probably the starting point for a project. I just really want to get better at using tools. Or even knowing what they do.
Finally, if you haven't seen this shot yet, you need to get on it:

Just for some context...that was to set up match point. Also, this is not a new thing for Federer. At the 2005 Australian Open, he did that same shot on an actual match point, missed it, and went on to lose the match. That's really just 3:15-3:20 in this clip. What a badass.

am i the king?

i think i might be the king. check this out...1) i went down to the hardware store, got them to order me some CPVC pipe, and i now am the proud owner of one working goaltimate kit, that the school paid for. 2) my other toenail has come off, and i officially have the coolest toes on campus (especially when you combine the no-toenail look with my sweet roman toes.) 3) i've found an acapella song for the fleming family trio to do. 4) i've started working out with my strength shoes, and i'm also going to do a 12-week jump program starting monday, which the other people at st. john's who did it in past years said added 6 inches to their vertical. all in all, this will be me:

lastly, i am the king because i figured out time travel in greek class the other day. what i came up with was that time machines will never exist, because if they ever were invented at some point in the future, the first thing people would do would be to come back in time and show earlier people how to make it, right? so since time machines don't exist now, that means they never will. secondly, disregarding that stunning truth, i realized that if time machines were to be invented, we shouldn't worry about whether or not that would mess up the flow of history, or whatever. like say the outcome of a war in 1710 was changed. it's not like we would know the difference, everything leading up to 2009 would have changed right along with the war. even if it ended human existence, it's kind of like, oh well. what can you do?
closing remarks: mark, good work on the mustache, bad work with your rude comments. annie, you should check this video out, i think you would like this comedian.

whew

well, it has been a while. but it's mainly because school is so awesome and busy, so that's a good thing, i suppose. i have a lot of different things going on, but i'm excited about all of them. i want my roommate to teach me how to sail, we'll just do that random days. and we're trying to learn how to play bagpipes, because he also has a chanter. i'm doing yoga on saturday mornings, i might write an article for the gadfly with my friend, i'm a freshman lab assistant, and liz and i have not yet given up on getting an acapella things together. i've started doing morning workouts (crossfit, it's been painful so far, plus i don't know how to lift weights, but i'm sticking with it for now). and then there's the ever-present need to play croquet in the afternoons, and do tennis on free weekend days. pretty sweet. it's important that i record all these things here so that it all becomes more concrete and more likely that i'll actually do it.
in other news, one of my toenails has fallen off and the other is not far behind. here's a little montage (from my sweet new camera that we got from the bank for free).
pre-removal:

post-removal:i'm not really sure what to do with the leftover nails yet, although my current favorite suggestion is to turn them into earrings as a christmas present for mom.
other cool news...let's see. i managed to get all the guys on the hall to do hall bonding in the form of a moustache-off. starting last saturday, none of us can shave anything above our upper lip, but everything below it has to go, and it lasts until long weekend, or until someone shaves. the person who shaves has to get some 30 racks and then there's a hall party. what bonds people like shared embarrassment? we will all look like this. although, honestly, i'm still convinced that all girls secretly love facial hair. they just do. get over it. also, i might dye mine because otherwise it might not even be noticeable until just when the 6 weeks or so is ending. cool stuff.
one final thing i've noticed this past week when eating in the dining hall with people not my family...how is it that so few people know how to use a knife and fork? a lot of people just grip them with their whole fist and stab into whatever their eating like the fork is a skewer and end up moving the whole plate back and forth. it's really weird, i hadn't realized it was such a poorly taught skill. i think proof of this is the fact that when looking for a funny picture of people using knife and fork, nothing came up. and "how to cut food" only brought up chefs. maybe that's how i'll become rich and famous, by modernizing emily post.

school

well, i am back at school and it's pretty definite that this year is going to be awesome. i already have pounds and pounds of candy stored away, my mini-fridge has pickles and olives in at, my roommate is the bomb, and so far my classes all seem really strong. my most current amusement is in trying out different types of laugh. i've always really liked literary descriptions about people having deep, powerful belly laughs that build up and roll out in joyous fashion. (on a side note, i've always always really liked the phrases "a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth" and "a smile played across his face") but i realized that i've never actually watched or heard anyone smile or laugh anything like this. so my friends and i have been experimenting to see if we can make ourselves laugh like that. so far no success, but we have hit on some other good ones. my favorite so far is the idea of replacing repetitive laughing with just a single really loud "hhhHA!" it's really fun. one year margaret got a CD that was just 60 minutes of other people laughing. it sounded like a cool idea, but was actually really creepy, we didn't listen to more than 45 seconds before we had to turn it off.
speaking of laughing and CDs, i hear mitch hedberg has a new posthumously released CD that just came out, that i definitely want. i only recently discovered that he had basically crippling fear of public speaking, and it was totally confirmed when watching youtube videos of him. he closes his eyes a lot, and has his hair in his face so that he can pretend the audience isn't there, i guess. he also would do jokes with his back to the audience.what a weird profession to choose if you have that fear. maybe the jokes weren't for the audience as much as for himself. comedians seem to generally have a weird relationship with their audience, where they need them there for the performance to even be the performance, but then they often seem to resent them. anyway, practice your own laughs on this video.

lists, movie review, black comedians

it seems like people really like the concept of lists, rankings, numbered orderings, what have you. i can't support that. unless it's an objective list based on a fact, like, which food has the most calories, or something. but other than that, i never agree with them, and it's not fun to argue about. (yeah, that's probably the one time i'll say i don't enjoy arguing about something) here are my problems with them: they're usually too long. when you rank the 100 best or 100 most or whatever, i just don't care for that long, and by the end, it's all useless. there's no difference between 89 and 95. i end up looking at the top 10, maybe 15, and ignoring the rest. and i doubt i'm alone in that. then there's the fact that even within the top 10, there i might care about the order, but pretty much i just want to know who's at #1, and that's it. all lists should henceforth be condensed to #1 and others. if you're not first, you're last. for example, top 100 blogs on the internet. 1. don't worry, you're already there. (and that's not ego talking. i have this placement from high authority, who wishes to remain anonymous, let's call them "terling hagel" said this was the only blog worth reading...high praise) 2-100. "insert blogs of your preference here ". simple.
just saw 500 days of summer. did seeing it with another guy make me gay? i say no, we went in at seperate times, no one knew we were together. anyway, i mostly liked it, it was pretty funny, and just as romantic comedy sappy as i expected. thankfully it was offset by its sort of whimsical indy film nature. my problem with it was the male lead. i just didn't care if he was dumped or dating or not. he was a little unsympathetic, kind of douche. why did he have to wear vests and super thin pants all the time? boo to that. also, props to danny for pointing out that he was basically the movie version of ted mosby. a wannabe architect in love with a girl who wants to be friends who's a hopeless romantic. so where was barney to offset and be less douchey? also, zooey dechanel was better in elf.

so i just watched eddie murphy's delirious. it was very funny, although it was interesting to see how his most popular sketches from that show (ice cream, googoo gaga) were the least amusing and most tiresome to me. other black stand-up comedians i have experience with: dave chapelle, bill cosby, richard pryor, and chris rock are the ones i can think of. what i noticed, and wonder if anyone else has found is that all black comedians have a "white guy" voice. and it's the same for all of them. it sounds like a stuck-up, nerdy guy talking all nasely and with a scrunched up face. is that actually what white people sound like? obviously it's a stereotypical charicature, but i wonder if it's based in reality. and it's totally unfair because i think it would be viewed as horribly non-PC if a white comedian did a black guy impression. oh well. also it's interesting that these guys mostly have "black guy" voices too, that are like, hyper black, i guess. here's a good clip that has both.

back to school tomorrow. we'll see if my blog takes a philisophical turn.

wee wee

annie, i see your pee pee car and raise you one wee wee obama.

what does that even mean? obama does not do well when he improvises. or he needs to fire his speech writers.

forearms

forearms are underrated in re their sex appeal. am i biased from my love of popeye and my one developed muscle being my forearm from tennis? irrelevant. big forearms look so badass. without them your arm just tapers down. plus they're actually easier to show off then most other things people work out like biceps or pecs. which reminds me, it is really horrible how many unathletic people there are whose only "good" body feature is that they have these weirdly hyper-developed upper bodies. i was unfortunately made aware of this by all the shirtless guys at the beach with arms so big they couldn't put their arms parallel to their body, but also fake pec man boobs that rested nicely on their keg bellies. it's obvious that they only do it for the image, because they have these stick legs and anything taxing like throwing a football around they can't do for more than 2 minutes before they all have to sit down. when do you even get to show that off except going to the beach, unless you're comfortable being a douche and wearing shirts that are way too tight. but with forearms, no one is going to judge you for a short-sleeve shirt. also, they have a more subtle appeal. i've heard lots of complaints about huge bodybuilders being gross because they're too lumpy, but big forearms aren't deforming like that. they can still get hell of big, though. (yes mark, i've been reading achewood lately) finally, i don't think that they would have the same flabbiness and wrinkling when you get old, i've never seen anyone with droopy forearm skin. and don't worry, squinky eye is optional. but corncob pipe IS NOT.

Lunchtime. This is what's on my mind. i need to watch this movie again before i go back to school....in 4 days. rad and crazy.

would you rather

here's the deal: i'm pretty sure that all girls actually wish they were guys. or, granting some variation, they might like being girls but they wouldn't mind being guys. and except for people who actually get operations, i don't think there is any guy who would rather be a girl. i'm not even sure girls poop. it just doesn't even seem like something that happens in my mind. being a guy is really awesome, being a girl seems like it sucks in so many ways. 1) pregnancy....rough. 2) bitchiness/cliqueness/middle school in general 3) don't get to lead in dances 4) can't go shirtless in the summer. i had some other good ones but i forget them now.
also, just for fun, this one i guess would go under the category of how knowing the future would affect your life. would you rather have the best day ever, actually the best day anyone could possibly have, or the worst? this is assuming that you know going into it that it's the best/worst, and that you'd have a perfect memory of it. i say the worst. if you have the best day ever, it seems like every day after that would be kind of a let down. it'd be like, oh this was fun, but wait, not as good as that other day i had. whereas if you had the worst day ever, you'd might never complain again. you'd start to, and then realize that it was nothing near as bad as that one time. plus, if you chose worst day ever, then any really awesome day could be the best day ever, who's to say, instead of having to live with the concrete knowledge that you'd already had the best day ever and you would never experience that good of a day ever again. i can't predict whether most people would agree with me on this one or not, but my instinct is that they would choose best.
finally, have you ever noticed how in jerry maguire, cuba gooding jr. always says "you know" in a really weird voice? it's pretty fun to do. youu kNoEWW?

wow that took me a long time to figure out how to make it skip to the start of the clip. but i figured it out on my own, because i'm a crazy hacker. added bonus, this video mentions show me the money.

i was the coolest little kid ever

i was so happy when i found this in my portfolio. i laughed until i cried, and then showed it to margaret. she did the same thing, which made me start laughing all over again. who wouldn't want this valentine (i'm assuming that's what this was)? although some serious questions remain, like: did i do this on my own/who on earth would've helped me with this/why don't i remember being a serial killer?

chris cooley is awesome, and so is colt brennan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/15/AR2009081502524.html
haha, chris cooley is his "life coach" and the first person he called. awesome.

self-discovery

today was a good reminder of why its fun to live in a museum dedicated to yourself. mom got out the old school project bins and we looked through them, and they were of course hilarious. i was surprised to find out that apparently i had been a huge punk about doing homework in elementary school. one of the things i found was a project on soil and pollution, and the question was how can we fix the current soil problems like erosion and pollution? my answer was pretty good, i thought: buy a lot of dirt. i did not get credit for it. mom also told me some pretty funny whines that i would use instead of doing it. like, why do i have to read this book and do a report on it, are the teachers that lazy? why don't they read the book themselves if they're interested. but if anything, i'm just proud of myself, i sound like i was a pretty sweet little dude, although i may have been the worst artist in history.
so that was learning about 4-10 year old me. but last night i rewatched an eddie izzard stand-up video for the first time in a while. i probably got turned onto him in 8th grade? sometime around then. and i watched all the videos we had of him a lot. so it was interesting to see how all the stuff that was absolutely hilarious to me back then that i would go around the house repeating seems just bizarre now. of course, a lot of his stuff was still really good and had me crying with laughter. but some of the rambling tangents that he goes off on were not the nuggets of comedy that they had been. they seemed like he had just gone into his own little world and i didn't follow him there as readily as before.
this is a pretty good video that i discovered by myself the other day:

insane bolt

everyone needs to check out this video, before it gets taken down. i'm not sure that it will, but there are no videos of his olympics run on youtube, so better not take any chances. 9.58 is just absurd.

triumphant return

back from a week at the beach. good vacation, i didn't even get burned except for the first day which was my mom's fault anyway. also, i was elected king of the beach. i've realized that part of the problem with blogging is that i usually spend a long time discussing these things in person before i end up deciding to write about them. and so then i have to redo the whole thing, only it takes a lot longer because i type slower than i talk. but anyway, here's what's been on my mind lately.

1) i was looking up stuff on sam cooke and i saw that Rolling Stone had him as #4 on their "100 greatest singers" list. i thought that was pretty cool, only to then actually look at the list and realize it was all crap. they had aretha franklin at #1....that is so outrageous. first i should point out that i do not like aretha franklin, but no one should like her that much, volume does not equal quality. what was most ridiculous though, was that bob dylan was at #7. he should not even be on the list! it's crazy because the list was based on actual singing talent and quality, not influence. at least that was the impression i got from the blurb explaining his position.

2) i went to legg mason on friday, we had awesome baseline seats about 10 rows back from the court. i was both impressed and encouraged. we saw tommy haas and gonzo, and then sweet doubles, including the #2 team in the world, nestor and zimonjic. two funny moments from doubles...first, on a second serve, and seemingly without telling his partner, zimonjic did a dink underhand serve. everyone was kind of confused, but then gonzalez simply crushed it down the line for a winner. afterward, gonzalez and his partner robredo thought the serve was the funniest thing, to the point that robredo wasn't ready to return serve 45 seconds later because he was still laughing so hard, and then he fell down to his knees. secondly, at one point gonzalez uncorked an 85mph forehand that nailed nestor in the chest, and then bounced back over the net. gonzalez and robredo were confused about if nestor had got it with his racket, and when they looked over at him to find out, he simply raised up his shirt to show them the huge welt. doubles is much more relaxed, they clearly have a lot of fun.

3) in re the singles match. first of all, they are extremely consistent and have excellent control of the ball. but it was also interesting to see, for the first time thanks to our great seats, how often they don't hit the ball cleanly. the key is that they don't think about, and just keep on playing. but they definitely had just as many hits that weren't in the sweet spot as i typically do. so that was cool to find out.

4) espn has a thing up about what's the hardest high school sport. now i have been lobbying for years that tennis is one of the, if not the hardest sport, period. it involves incredible endurance as the matches can easily and without warning go 3-4 hours, sprinting ability for that whole time, incredible hand-eye coordination, footwork, good fast muscle twitch for volleys, arm, leg, wrist and core strength to get good power and spin on shots, and at no point are there substitutions or coaching. one example that i think is pretty good: a tennis enthusiast scientist recently showed that federer has 27 different forehand strokes that he uses (as in typical slice and topsin, and then also while on the run sideways, forward, off the back foot, heavy spin, lob, etc.). and that's just for one stroke! he probably has the same number for backhand, easily 5-10 for a serve, for an overhead, for a volley....and he's practiced all of those. what other sport requires the same versatility, on top of the extreme athletic prerequisites? i say none. but it was funny to see on the website how everyone would come up with the same litany of skills for the sport they had clearly done in high school, and how it is a fairly fiercly and emotionally charged debate. also funny to see how everyone was angry about how high up football was.

5) i just watched juno for the first time. i'd give it a b. it was pretty funny, especially michael cera, who i have come around on in a big way. used to not like how awkward he was in arrested development, but now he actually tells jokes (granted, they're awkward), but it's less painful. my main problem with it was juno's character. why was she such a weirdo, i guess "hipster", with her indy music and gore movies and counter-culture blah blah. that got old. also, no one talks like she does, it was like a weird midwest version of cockney rhyming slang. but overall, i liked it.

6) who do you think is the best known living person in the world? as in, the most number of people can identify their picture? and then the same thing for best known person, period, including the deceased? i'm really curious about this. i bet for living it's something like a position like the pope. and then i bet for dead it's something depressing like hitler. but how exposed are people in secluded places, like tribes in africa or rainforest pygmies? i was thinking about this because part of my reason for wanting to live forever is that i think immortality in the sense of being remembered forever is total crap. that's why i need to be alive 10,000 years from now. first of all, it's going to be so cool. but more importantly, there is no such thing as living on in memory. except for scrisbee, the namesake of this blog. i will carry him with me forever.

driving and hulu

i have started doing my in-car lessons for driver's ed. they are pretty surreal. my instructor is completely silent except for telling me when to turn. the first lesson, we stopped to drop off his mail and then got gas. this time, we were at the MVA doing parallel parking practice when he had me pull into a parking space so he could go to the bathroom...in the woods. but, only one left so that's nice. now if only the MVA would let me set up my driving test. every time i call, "all the lines are busy". how could they always be busy? such crap.

i've been watching a lot of shows on hulu lately, mainly hell's kitchen. it's kind of trashy, but definitely entertaining, and i now realize that i don't actually want to be a chef. although i do want to learn how to cook good food. anyway, i'm always confused at the start of the episode when they say "this show is brought to you with limited commercial interruption by ____". is that opposed to unlimited commercial interruption?

cooperstown

dad just back from going up to cooperstown again and he got the pictures from last time developed, which i was super psyched about. they totally captured me in all my carpy glory. the story behind them is that we were fishing all day and the damn carp kept eating our bait only then breaking the line and stealing the hooks, which was obviously annoying. finally i came down to check the line before dinner and found one still on the line, but it had gotten all tangled up in some seaweed, so i had to wade to the next dock to get it loose. then we fought it out for 10 minutes or so, and i totally reeled the suckah in. very fun. as an added bonus, it had been raining on and off all day, and then when i finally got the carp on the dock liz came down and pointed out the rainbow over sleeping lion. it must have been staged. anyway, here are the pictures, with some family ones too.
four-and-a-half boarder!

stupid thing wouldn't smile for the camera.

is it just me, or do i look weird and stumpy in this photo? still, this is my favorite.


this is a close second.

celebrity

at first this was going to be about how i hate oprah, but i realized that really i just hate the people that made oprah famous. "most influential woman in the world"? that's depressing. people are even saying that her endorsement won the election for obama. ridiculous. she is smart, i read that she did well in school, got scholarships to go good places, etc. but she was also "most popular" in high school. and now it's like she's just been voted "most popular" in the world.
i guess the idea of celebrity really weirds me out. i'm sure part of it would be awesome (like the money) but the actual constant attention part of being a celebrity would be awful. i think people often don't really realize their own celebrity status. do you think they're star-struck by each other? i bet a lot of celebrity relationships have only started because each of them were amazed that they were dating the other big celebrity. i saw funny people yesterday (movie review in a second), and they showed all these people wanting to take a picture with adam sandler. that is such a weird instinct. not the idea of commemorating a moment with a photo, per se. but that simply having seen the person counts as an important moment. the same goes for an autograph. it'd be one thing if you'd spent the whole day with them and had a great time so then you kept a picture from that, or if you were pen-pals so you saved their letters. but the other mementoes are bizarre. i think it's because the one set actually have their own significance, because they carry a whole set of memories with them, and the other have their significance entirely manufactured by you (thanks to the media).

funny people: C-, barely passing. just didn't like it that much. it was a movie about comedians and stand-up and it just was not very funny. that would have been it's saving grace, but unfortunately it wasn't there. granted there were funny parts, but not enough for how long it was. it was interesting to see when i laughed compared to the rest of the theater though. it's always fun, in a condescending sort of way, to see how you respond to the movie compared to the rest of the audience. the main problem was that i didn't really care about adam sandler and whether or not he died, and his relationship with seth rogan never struck the right tone for me. oh well. still mildly entertaining. plus, this is what i imagine it's like for mom and dad when they deal with charlie.

traveling plus myostatin

just got back from new orleans, 14 hours of travel overall...6.5 of them just sitting in the airport. here's what was gleaned...there are a LOT of fat people that travel. with their carts to go around in with all their fat luggage for their fat clothes. also, if you wear your new pilot's hat in the airport, you look awesome of course, but people still give you funny looks. also, bwi does not discriminate against pirates, they had a janitor with a sweet eyepatch. (i saw him three times in 2 hours, but we never managed to make eye contact)
and now for the blog i've been meaning to do for a couple days. mark showed me this myostatin blocking thing, and it is pretty crazy. some people (and animals) are born with a genetic mutation that blocks their myostatin production (myostatin is what in turn blocks muscle growth). this is what you get from that:highlight 1: this is completely "natural". as in the body naturally does this, because it is constantly sending out the muscle-building materials. this bull did not work out for this shape.

highlight 2: there are no negative health side effects. now that's absurd. plus it's not just for show. for these dogs in particular - whippets - those with a single mutation in the gene (the intermediate between the regular dog and the ones in the picture above with both genes mutated) have been found to be ridculously faster than the typical whippet racing dog. Hard to say about the full mutations, they're usually euthanized for not living up to the kennel club breed standard.
highlight 3: besides looking freaking awesome, and basically making superhero cartoons come to life, there's also much hope for medical developments that would use this mutation to combat diseases that cause muscle degeneration.

so anyway, that's myostatin blocking, or as much as i care to research it, anyway. but here's the further question i had about it, also conveniently somewhat related to the swimsuit debacle currently going on. assuming the mutation could be given to people, would it be a bad thing to allow it to be freely available? to make it a more manageable question, i'll look at it in terms of sports. why shouldn't athletes be allowed to have acces to this? my understanding of the ban on other performance-enhancing drugs, like steriods, HGH, PEDs, etc., is that they are dangerous to use, and that's why they've been taken away. and if it's wrong, and it's simply because they make the athletes better, then i think that's a ridiculous reason to ban them. wouldn't all pain-killers have to be banned then, because the athletes should have to deal with the natural conditions of having played too often?
here's how i'm connecting that to the swimsuit issue. the swimming organization is banning the newest line of polyurethane swimsuits....i guess because they make the swimmers too fast? isn't that the whole point, for them to go as fast as possible? michael phelps' coach recently came out and complained about them, after phelps lost a race in the old, half-polyurethane suit to some other guy in the new one. convenient timing. it seems that basically people are pissed about how all the world records are being broken so easily now, they don't mean anything, they aren't special anymore. also, it's also partly in response to phelps holding the swimming world hostage, saying he'll boycott if the suits are allowed. http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/swimming/news/story?id=4368338 .
i have a problem with that approach. the suits are available to everyone, and if they're not, then the swimmers should yell at their company that they'll void the contract if they don't start getting provided with the best possible suit. eventually the suit technology will reach it's peak, and the records will stabilize again. what's the problem with that? if everyone had raced doing doggy paddle and then some guy started doing the crawl, would they ban him? he's developed something new and is better than us....that's cheating! next thing you'll know they won't allow the monkeys to compete anymore...outrageous.
mainly i don't get the rigid enforcement of the status quo in sports. at least try out the new suits. it might end up making the sport seem absurd for a month, but it also might make it way more exciting. the three-point line. making a football more like an oval, less like a pound cake. these were equipment changes were have grown to love. also, i want to invent a sport at some point. calvinball always seemed like a really cool game, but i don't think i'd have the imagination for it. anyway, it turns out i don't hate swimming, although i am tired of michael phelps, beast that he is. this was pretty cool though, i admit.
the race starts at about 45 seconds in

greatness

what makes someone the "greatest" or the "best" at something? i've mainly been thinking about this recently in terms of tennis, as in who's the best: federer or nadal? but i noticed that a lot of the same basis for the debate between those two was repeated in the NBA debate about kobe and lebron. it seems like at the root of it, there's an acknowledgment that these guys dominate their sport, but in different fashions. federer (or kobe) is typically represented as developed talent, the result of hours of practice combined with their natural ability for the game, meanwhile nadal (or lebron) are seen as raw skill, their athleticism carrying them to the top and the actual sport-specific skills having only been developed as an afterthought. federer is the artist, nadal is the bashing brute. kobe has the mid-range spinning fadeaway, lebron drives to the hoop with the ball cradled under his arm like a football player.
first of all, i want to point out how unfair these stereotypes are to both sides, as they typically get locked into them without consideration for the overlap that occurs. sure, federer might be the best improviser and nadal the best retriever. but people rant about that so much that they completely ignore the fact that nadal is the second best strategist out there and that federer goes from defense to offense just as easily. federer even went so far as to point this out at the french open, when his matches lasted longer than they had in the past and he seemed to struggle more. he didn't see this as a bad sign; he even was happy about it because of how it forced people to acknowledge his ability to scrap like nadal. he said that finally people got to see how much time he devotes to building endurance, both mental and physical, and he liked that he got to show off his ability to play for hours without wearing down.
ultimately, both men are achieving tennis feats that i will never be capable of. and in my mind, they are really on an equal footing in terms of quantity of greatness. but, despite my address above pleading for people to look at the players as individual wholes, instead of simply seeing where they differ from each other the most, the difference in their styles and abilities does exist. and it is there that the difference in the type of greatness that each man has is seen. if i were to try to simplify the difference as much as possible, i would say that when they hit their respective mind-boggling and awe-inspiring shots, what gives rise to those adjectives is the exact opposite for each of them. federer makes it look so damn easy, and nadal makes it look so damn hard. federer never seems in trouble, and nadal wins points even when stuck between the sideline and a hard place.
in terms of general perception of who is better, federer is already at a disadvantage. he undermines his own case, for by making the tennis look easy, he also makes it easy to forget how hard it is to replicate what he does. meanwhile when watching nadal, it's impossible to ever forget how hard he's working. a 100 mph forehand hit from his shoestrings while on a dead sprint is at first glance, especially to the uninformed, much more impressive than a federer touch volley. (mid-rant side-note: as i said above, don't forget that their positions in that sequence could easily be switched. federer has power and nadal has soft hands. they simply make use of each with different frequency). in the end the question remains, who is more impressive? the man who does the impossible while making it look like you could do it? or the man who does the impossible despite its obvious impossibility?
it's tempting to simply label federer the better tennis player and nadal the better athlete. but that's bullshit, and is a not so clever way of avoiding the question. and, because i do what i want, i'm going to brazenly ignore their head-to-head record and anoint federer the best. and by the way, that goes for kobe over lebron, as well (although bear with me for another mid-rant side-rant here. tennis clearly has two dominant stars, and they are the only ones worth considering in the debate. with basketball? not so much. it helps that tennis is an individual sport, while basketball players also have to deal with the constraints of their team or position. but there are at least 5 worthy candidates for basketball's best) anyway, here's my reasoning behind choosing federer. assuming that federer and nadal each do things that nobody else could do as consistently as them, and also assuming that they could do what the other does (which i think is fair, they've demonstrated the ability at any rate, the rest is just strategy), i have to choose the guy who does it without having to try hard. because that apparent lack of effort, represents a greater ability. it represents the footwork federer has to get into position well ahead of the ball, so that he doesn't have to hit on a dead run, even if he can. it represents the muscle memory federer has so that he can crank up his serve to 128 mph from 120 with no change in motion. and so on. anyway, at the end of it all, i thoroughly enjoy their rivalry (as long as federer is winning), and recommend that you watch them face off whenever possible. definitely try to check out their aussie open final, by the way, i've been outraged by how little attention that got, that match was amazing. here's some video from that:
here:

and here:

also, for further reading on the subject, i never get tired of reading david foster wallace's article on federer. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html.


p.s. federer's wife recently gave birth to twin girls. the bookies already have odds set at 100-1 that one of them wins wimbledon before age 25. that's totally worth a $10 bet, right?

(unless it was actually roger having nadal's babies...no homo)