Indecisively unaccurate

I now understand why people get obsessed over their stats and how many people view their blog and where they're from and which OS they're using and which browser they're using to view it. I had no idea they logged all that information, and now that I know it I've been ensnared in its evil jaws and I have to check it out to see what countries are checking me out. I really hope someone from Finland will look at it soon.

"I didn't know newspapers could do that!" If you want to know the rest of the story to that quote you'll have to ask my sister (the strange older one). Finland anyone?

I wanted to write about some amazing countries that I have never visited, and one I didn't even know existed until someone from that country looked at my blog (that or they've been trying to hack my blog. I'll make it easier, here's my password ***********). A friend of mine tried to make that his password once (all the little asterisks) and unfortunately he was using windows. Apparently this is one of the cardinal sins (ha! stupid birds born into a life of sin and doomed to eternal damnation), and Microsoft suddenly revoked not only his license but also the license of anyone in the building at that time, which was a lot of people. He had to call up billy gates himself and apologize. Apparently this is the master password for Microsoft's mainframe powerhouse computing center (they have forty duocore processors that can run all of Microsoft's office programs at the same time and make you an espresso, they've got engineers working on the pop-tart half of this problem-just don't try use any of the programs or the whole system will crash).

The Soviet block was a nice place. No one ever complained (publicly) so it cant have been that bad. In Moscow, or St. Pete's I forget which one, they actually have this park with a building for each country that was part of the CCCP, with the largest representing Russia. We found this girl with a donkey nearby that we took some picture of us sitting on it. It must have been Moscow. Don't take pictures of the cops if you're ever there. Slovenia used to be part of the CCCP but they are now gloriously on their own. Now they have to have just a passport to go visit lake Baikal instead of permission from people they've had to bribe to go see the deepest lake in the entire universe!! (it's so deep aliens make crop circles on it) Make sure to yell 'universe' when you read that last sentence, if you didn't, read it again making sure to yell 'universe' at the end, do it in public, or on a crowded subway. Slovenia is one of those highly underrated countries that deserves more credit for its major accomplishments and contributions to our wonderful world. Did you know they invented genocide, or was it gonorrhea? I always get those two mixed up. Einstein visited there once just before he came up with his magical theory of general relativity, Sic, he owes it to the Slovenians for this amazing theory that would have let us travel through time if it hadn't been for stephen hawking, who quashed that idea like a dirty roach made of fiber glass and used underwear.

Famous people from Slovenia: Alister Crowley (technically he's not from any one 'place'), George Washington (not the one you're thinking of, but the founding father), Hank Williams, Madame Bovary, Lord Dartmoth Kelvin Klein, Prince Chuck (not this chuck), Allison Q McDermot and the list goes on and on. Notice how they all have very Slovenianish sounding names. I'll bet that's something else you didn't know, many of our 'common' names actually come from Slovenia. It's also been posited that Slovenia is the actual cradle of creation, though it's not widely publicized for fear that the world will stop helping African nations and leave them alone to slaughter each other senselessly because some old dude doesn't like some other old dude's mother. Slovenia gave us cracker jacks and those nifty useless toys that come in them too! (yell 'too'; if you roll your Rs in japanese it makes you sound angry. I think the number six is roku in japanese, so if you say rrrrroku!!!! you'd be saying 'SSSSIIIIXXXXXX!!!!!' with a really angry look on your face, try it on a japanese person, it's fun, oh you so big crazy america) Cracker jacks would kill me if I ate them. Not that they don't like me or anything (I swear I've never been to Slovenia) I'm just allergic to peanuts. It's an annoying allergy. When I was a kid, all of my sisters and friends would be having tons of fun loaded up on sugar after halloween eating all their snickers, peanut m&m's, big hunk and reese's candies while I had to try and get a sugar buzz from candy corn. You have to eat your weight in candy corn to get even a slight sugar buzz. I wasn't complaining too much though, I like candy corn. Or maybe that's why I like candy corn. Pixie sticks are awesome too! Those were gone before we got home, usually. Halloween in Utah, where I grew up, was not a very fun experience as far as dressing up like an awesome zombie only to be faced with two equally enjoyableness choices 1) let everyone see your awesome costume and freeze to death, or 2) wear your coat over it and no one sees it, but you stay warm and then get beaten later by your parents for getting makeup on your coat...or was it for using your mom's good makeup? When you courageously chose option 1) you soon realized what it would be like to be a cow. You would keep moving just to get to more food which would help to keep you warm. Sugar is its own food group on the periodic table of the elements, brought to you by Slovenia, not the ATF. I like sugar and azucar. Slovenia probably gave us candy corn, and those nifty coffee mug holders that come installed in most modern computers.

Did you know Juan de Dios Ramirez Heredia was the first Romani (aka gypsy) Member of the European Parliament (he's from Spain, and a socialist). I think all of our foreign ministers should be Romani. People would think a little harder about messing with us then. Having a gypsy curse put on you is worse than being attacked by nuclear fish bombs (or nucular if you like) or even having a jihad put on you. How many scary movies are made with someone putting a jihad on you because you wouldn't help some old lady eviscerate a cute little bunny? Gypsy curses though? All over the place, and the thought of dead peoples hands coming out of the walls (walls are generally safe places to be, until the climatic music stops, then something is going to come out of it or smash through it and get you) and dragging me into an abyss of total nothing and terrorness makes me cry like a little girl in a corner where the walls are lined with tinfoil and super glue. The Slovenian scientists showed back in the 1915's that gypsy curses, the dead, undead and really anything that is evil cannot penetrate tinfoil (even if it is made out of aluminum), much like superman can't see through your lead undies. The government actually thought about making lead suits for people to wear that had to work with radiation. Then someone told them how much lead weighs and they weren't so enthusiastic.

"Your tongue won't stick to the pole if you lick it in winter time."

"I triple dog dare you!"

Aluminum used to be really rare, and Napoleon would bring out the fancy aluminum dinnerware when honored guests showed up. Later, because of tin, the Russians walloped his army. Maybe that's where tinfoil's name comes from? There's also another kind of coke that if you tried to sniff or drink you would be one of the most miserable people on the planet for at least 30 seconds until you died. The moral of the story, wear your lead undies and don't do drugs.

Thank you Slovenia! and tell your friends in Finland to come check me out, at least once.

Angry like a fire

I've been thinking of adding drawings to my stories (I like to think of this as story telling) on here, but then a couple of things occurred to me. One, I'm a horrible artist, which works nicely sometimes (see my christmas story if you don't mind, or if you're really desperate for bad art to pass off as your children's, neices', nephews' etc. just ask and I'll email you a pdf version of it), but most of the time I'm not sure it does; there are somethings I can't draw, even crappily. So for the time being I won't. That doesn't mean I can't try to describe it so you paint your own morbid mental pictures, which do far more damage than my drawings (or Darwin) ever could.

You ever ascribe human feelings to inanimate objects? This world would be so much funkier if inanimate objects weren't inanimate. You slam a door out of anger, and the next thing you know you've been thrown against the wall, which is now throwing you into another wall which in turn will throw you into another wall which in turn...it'd be like human pinball, except you can't tilt the machine to get everything to freeze. Your only real hope would be that the walls would throw you out of a window while it wasn't paying attention and it would throw you so hard that you would be plummeted into outer space. There you could live out your last few seconds of life in peace not being beaten up on by your surrounds, which only days before had been very cold and inhabitable. Though, accord to Total Recall, your eyes pop out of your head when exposed to the vacuum of outer space. That was one of those wonderfully horrible movies from the late eighties, early nineties.

Or if you were out camping, and you decided that you wanted to go to sleep and you knew that you couldn't trust the fire-too mischievous for its own good. So you do the normal thing (we'll pretend you're either a woman or women are with you) and pour your canteen of water on it and then a shovel full of dirt, mixing it all up nicely. Then knowing that you are now safe, you go to sleep. Little do you know (this one is going to be full of strange movie references, hahahaha) there under the wet dirt, aka mud, and doused ashes smolders a small and seemingly insignificant coal of fire. At first it lazily tries to open its eyes, completely disoriented and unaware of what has really happened. It just know that it was blazing away like there was no tomorrow, when all of the sudden its world was turned upside down. As awareness begins to creep into its bones this little, almost nothing of a coal begins to burn brighter and brighter until it is a flaming red hot ball of fiery goodness with evil on its mind. You, meanwhile are snuggled in deep to your sleeping bag (the deeper you snuggle into your sleeping bag, the less bears can smell or detect you, even by sight; it's almost as if burrowing is like those magic elf-capes super-frodo and his sidekick chef-boy-sam wear while on their way to defeat the evil ways of McDonalds in the fires of Mt. Doom) dreaming of your nice queen sized bed at home. The fire, which has now scared off the pack of ravenous wolves that were coming to eat you (snuggling does nothing to protect you from wolves, badgers and high school math teachers) , is coming.

The trees and bushes, sensing danger, begin to whisper and shake, their warning wafting through the air like the scent of lemon meringue pie in the summertime. The first notes of it dance their way down your ear canal and tickle your eary bones. You stir once. But your unconscious defenses kick-in, not wanting to let a bear know you're here, and you lay slumbering in peaceful bliss as your utter annihilation stalks outside your tent. Suddenly you wake up to the fire dousing you with lighter fluid (the fire doesn't care if women are present), laughing maniacally like you would expect a clown to laugh at you if you were tied to a spinning wheel and the clown was throwing knives at you. I hate clowns. It then jumps on you much like the Undertaken would have, except this time its for real. You're now covered in fire, both from the lighter fluid and from the one that's attacking you like a ferocious starving hinayana would attack a poor defenseless baby gazelle, lost and alone in the not so cold summer sun of the outback (not the steak house, though I can imagine many of the men that eat there being about as friendly, but probably smell worse). Then as you run screaming from your tent with the fire doing its best to tear out your entrails-lucky for you fire doesn't have finger nails or thumbs, ha! let's see you eat nachos, stupid fire-the surrounding trees trying to help start slapping you as you run by, covering you in sap, leaves, bugs and other assorted forest goodies. Now you're on fire, sticky and if you were to be fossilized at this moment it would confuse archeologists for centuries to come.

Finally you spot the lake, and you go barreling headlong toward its life saving waters. Just as you reach the edge a blood curdling scream emanates from all around you and if you weren't on fire it might give you pause to wonder where it came from and what sort of depraved torture is someone else enduring this night in the forest. As it is, you just want the fire put out. As you leap from the shore into the air, doing your best to imitate Greg Louganis (as a diver) though it comes out looking like you're receiving shock therapy mid-dive. As you look down to the life saving waters you suddenly realize what made the scream. The lake, upon seeing a fiery monster of death charging at it, became terrified and as you leaped into the air, it safely retreated to the other side of the valley, drowning and entire family of koala bears on vacation and send a family of people careening down the mountain side in fear for their lives (they too ended up covered in sap, though for different reasons). You didn't come out so lucky. You belly flopped onto the hard ground that used to be the muddy lake bottom. The fire merely laughs at you and mock your pain as it burns off all your clothes and body hair. The last thing you remember is it stalking off saying something about how it has your wallet, knows where you live and plans to make this a yearly occurrence. You then wake up to girl scouts taking pictures of the albino bear, and poking you with a stick. You later are turned into a local legend as you are too shamed to return to normal society and live out your days in the mountains.

See, I told you it's a good thing inanimate objects are just that. "If hate were people, I'D BE CHINA!" I love everyone.

Experiment while you're young

Lately, I've been hearing a lot of people half-complaining about being old (it's the time when people I went to high school with are turning 30-those who have passed this milestone are gasping in mock disbelief I am sure) and how they never thought they would live to see this day, etc. etc. etc. I had no idea so many people I went to school with were gang-bangers and drug runners, or that a significant portion of them owned bullet bikes. At least, that's the only explanation I can come up with for that kind of response to turning 30. I've been 30 for more than a few months now, and honestly, it feels like it did when I was 29, 28, 27, ... I haven't changed much since I was about 14, other than I have fewer pimples now, and a lot more bills to pay. I still do inappropriate things, laugh at things people say that can be twisted to have another meaning, and I'm definitely not above a good practical joke-I once hid in the corner of a closet for over an hour waiting for the guy to go to bed, and then when he turned the light out I snuck out and yelled "RAAAAAARRRRRRR!!!!!" as I leaped through the air landing on him in his bed, which then slid off its frame trapped him, flailing under his covers, and me against the wall (I was 25 at the time); he probably still checks his closet before going to bed each night. Having said that, there are areas where I have changed, namely I no longer dive headlong down the steep side of a tall mountain. You may say, but there are no mountains where you live, to which I respond, that's not the point. I also no longer try to leap over handrails in one fell swoop (teeth are expensive to replace), and while I no longer traipse about in public in tights, a cape and mask, in private is, well, private.

One thing I know Pam, my wife, wishes I would get over, but probably never will, is my love of terrible jokes. They're not terrible in the sense of it's not something that would make your mother or grandmother blush, but in the sense of...an example will serve my purpose best. Why should you never say the number four? (think about it for a second) What is four backwards? What animal makes that sounds? What is that animal's name backwards? I told that joke in my high school calculus class, and the teach who was a very serious, though kind man, almost fell over he was laughing so hard. I think that just cemented in my mind that the joke really is funny. Not that mathematicians are good people to gauge hilarity of jokes off of. Here's a bad math joke, what is non-orientable and lives in the ocean? Mobius Dick. That one's only mildly funny though. My love of terrible jokes can be blamed mostly on my father, from whom I have gathered a fair number that are in my arsenal. The next two will demonstrate:

What did Tarzan say when he saw the elephants come running? Here come the elephants.

What did Tarzan say when he saw the elephants, wearing sunglasses, come running? Nothing, he didn't recognize them.

The list goes on and on (just so you know I was laughing hysterically as I wrote those). Another interesting side note, hysteria and hysterectomy have the same root. They used to think that the women parts would make women go crazy, which can be argued the same for men but it's not hystorically correct, and so they would take them out. From this springs the word hysterectomy. Ah, those crazy Roman people. They also used to make people wrestle bears naked and all greased up. Tom Waits has a song called In The Colosseum, which is funny because we don't do that anymore. When I was in Russia someone told me a joke, which really is funny, trying to be offensive because they disagreed with my decision to not eat meat (gotta love 19 year olds from BYU-haha, I speak of it as if it were it's own country/island). What do you call a vegetarian with diarrhea? A salad shooter. It took be about a year and half to finally laugh at that one. I'm always amazed, especially at myself, for the stigmas attached to certain things based on the people who introduced us to them, or that we met when we were first introduced to the thing. I also really like the word thing, and all that that entrails.

I think people should experiment while still young. You may take that for whatever you would like it to be. I experimented while I was in college, and look at where I am now, still in college trying to get an advanced degree in chemistry. Maybe experimenting isn't such a good thing. I seriously thought about living out of my car for a semester just so I would know what it was like to be somewhat homeless. My friend, Adam, talked me out of it. It's still an idea that captures my attention from time to time, though now I would get in a lot of trouble for doing it. I would probably fair a little better now owing to the fact that I've a few more layers of fat than I did back then and it's actually warmer in Lansing, MI than northern Utah (my fingers tried to type Italy instead of Utah, and while this may or may not be true, I have no idea why they decided to try and type Italy. Odd fingers, and maybe the pope is secretly controlling my mind using his hat of pointy telepathy focusing awesomeness? I'm scared. Oooh, another joke. What do you call a sleep walking nun? A roamin' catholic).

I was having a familiar conversation with a friend yesterday about how musicians who use drugs make some of the most amazing music while using, and then when they clean up their music more or less sucks. This isn't to say they're not good musicians, they just can't write good music like they used to. I have a theory, which has no real basis other than I've never done drugs, though I received a contact high while at an indoor Primus concert (duh, you're saying-though I didn't know I was high at the time until almost 7 years later when someone described to me what it was like to smoke weed). Using drugs they are able to more easily access the portion of their brain where we go to make wonderful music, stories, etc. etc. etc. While they are able to create some of the most amazing music, art and other things (there was a mathematician that used speed to help him write his proofs, and he was amazing, who finally cleaned up, and in his words he couldn't "see the math anymore" so he went back to using speed) they actually end up cheating themselves in the end. When they come clean they have to learn how to access that area without the use of drugs, which is that much harder after having had such easy access to it before. But that's my non-drug-introduced opinion. That was boring too. I would make a terrible philosopher.

So the point I've been trying to make is that when you get older things happen that you really hate. I found out the other day that I have a condition that is characteristic of (older than 20) people who spend a lot of time sitting on their bums all day. This, while not life threatening, makes certain aspects of the day unsightly and worst of all, brings out the 14 year old who has to try ever so hard to restrain himself from laughing at things that grown-ups don't laugh at. See, just thinking about it right now makes me chuckle. If I ever get put in a nursing home they're going to hate me, because not only will I be laughing at all the bodily functions I do myself, but there will be an entire building of people doing the same things and more for me to laugh at. Growing up is awesome.