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: