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