I can't express how busy I've been lately in words. I'm going to attempt to make the point very soon through some interperetive sleeping, but I thought I should make sure it is clear that I am still alive. I've just been a bit burdened helping out with KURE's Kaleidoquiz. It's incredible how much it's come together in the last two weeks...
Oh, one announcement: I've discovered that I'm starting to go bald. Not too severe yet, but the hairline has moved back a bit. It's not like I wasn't expecting it; none of the adult males on either side of my family has managed to retain their hair. His hair? Whatever. Still, I had hoped to turn at least nineteen before having to look into Rogaine...
If you don't understand the significance of hair loss, you are either a very kind person or just not male. Possibly both; it's not like they're mutually exclusive. But as usual, Andre Torrez addresses the topic much better than I possibly could.
Fun stuff: God Socks Guy. Kaleidoquiz is moving beyond tradition to legend status at Iowa State; God Sock Guy has already done so. For those who are too lazy or bandwidth impaired to click the link, apparently the Guy goes out in front of the library come rain or snow and tries to bring people to God. Or something. The Socks part comes from the enormous socks he wears with his not-so-enormous shorts. T-shirts have been made featuring him somewhere or other. It's insane, and frightening. It also puts him on my Ames must-photograph list, right up there with the medieval dueling club and those snow geese on Lake Laverne. Expect to hear more about God Sock Guy in the future...

"Next, solvency. ... They can't solve! Here's twenty reasons why!"
--lead-in to the "infamous Brian Bear 2NC solvency dump"

To be honest, Bear only gave eighteen, but that's probably because he only allocated four minutes to the solvency block (right), unless you count the three subpoints off of his number two. I managed to flow all of them, too, except for his fifteen, which I missed because I thought eleven through sixteen were subpoints of number ten...

So I'm back from the Ray-Pec Speech and Forensics tournament in Raymore, Missouri. I haven't had that much fun at a tournament in a long time. There was a lot of down time, however, so I did some typing on my Visor between rounds. A couple of highlights, one from my crappy hotel room and one after a novice policy round:

10:57 pm
No Gideon bible in the room
and someone nailed the phone book shut

4:41 pm
The second round I debated this morning was pretty one-sided. Well, more like half-sided, because one kid in the round was tearing it up, and the other three were just sort of wandering in circles across my flow. Halfway through the kid's constructive, she had already hit everything on the flow and was re-iterating her points one by one to waste time. I had more or less stopped flowing, and I was stared glazed-eyed at the kid as she talked when suddenly I noticed something--the girl looked like a hobbit! She might not have been a hobbit; I could see dwarf or maybe a half-elf, I don't really know. But she had the most curious long, angular ears that held stuck out in before this impossibly straight black hair as each ear bore one big hoop earring. An unworldly air hung about her, enhanced by the round glasses and big round eyes that sat above a pair of round cheeks and a strange, triangular pendant that hung from he neck over a sweater of a curious shade of blue. Add a tailored black petticoat thing and light brown skin, and the result was a hobbit girl, pontificating at a hundred fifty words a minute about a new strategic arms limitation treaty for a globalized nation at peace, America.
Jessica Guerrero, Hobbit girl!

That hotel room sucked. Besides staying there, the only other regret I have is not taking a picture of Guerrerro after the round. I had my camera, too. Oh well. There was a lot more, including one girl who had me convinced she was completely schizophrenic during a reading of Daddy and Lady Lazarus in the poetic interp finals. She actually had red hair, which made the ending a great deal creepier, which is saying a lot; by the line "dying is like an art," I was terrified of the kid. The other two judges and I would have given her first place if it weren't for an even better performance of something called The Wussy Boy Manifesto.

Debate aside, the most bizarre junk mail landed on my mail server while I was in Missouri. Google seemed to think that it was an address probe (great...) but also referred me to yet another gallery of humorous spam. Most entertaining.

Out of time now, but I will leave you with one more reading: the Daily editorial board reports that Inglis, Florida has banished Satan, and invites him to come to Ames. More on the story is available from The St. Petersburg Times. I'm not sure if the woman involved is daft, crazy, or just overzealous, but I'm sure that she can't be quite right in the head. That, or the town charter of Inglis, Florida doesn't allow the mayor too much power; I'm not really sure.

Postscript for personal reference: a Darius image gallery and a related Greek-to-Japanese conversion chart, should I ever need either. Darius is an odd series of games that can only be described as "the fish shooters." The artwork was a major factor in choosing rapidfish.org over two-by-four.net or something like that. I've since used it a couple of places on the site. Fun, eh?

"Everyone's afraid of their own life. If you could be anything you wanted, I bet you'd be disappointed, am I right?" --Isaac Brock/Modest Mouse

What? It's been four days already? How time flies...
Well, I'm off to Missouri. No content still, but Joan could use an ear or two. Meanwhile, I'll be at Raymond-Peculiar High School listening to teenagers blowing up the world. You probably think I'm kidding. I wondered for a while why they would put Raymond first in the name of the school, seeing as how it's actually in Peculiar, MO. Then I tried it the other way around and became enlightened.
Fun fact: the two towns, six miles apart, share one hotel. If a pool is started on whether I sleep on a park bench in Peculiar or in a hotel I can't afford in Kansas City, I want ten bucks on the park bench.
Oh, I don't suppose...

Another boring weekend come and gone. Though I may have a lead on judging debate in Missouri. Missouri. Missorah! We be forensicatin' in Missorah, sah!
No, I'm kidding. The Missouri dialect isn't that much different from the Iowa dialect or the SoDak dialect. It's just fun to say "forensicatin' in Missorah"... like doing a tango with your tongue. Forensicatin' in Missorah!

Earthquakes: I discovered that the USGS keeps an online record of earthquakes from around the globe... very cool. Apparently this data has been incorporated into open-source media program xearth, which displays a spinning Earth as a desktop background. Even better, the University of Alaska Fairbanks's seismology department has derived an automated mapper from the program that can be accessed over the web. Watch the earth turn, watch the earth shake!

This is almost all. It's been a busy, but fruitless, weekend, and the computer screen is getting pretty old. However, I do have one inside joke for Rapid City crew: Screech is coming to Ames...

And before I forget, I downloaded and installed a bulletin board for the site, because it seemed like a good idea. What shall be done with it eventually, I'm not sure, but that's okay. The driving paradigm behind the Rapid Fish Concern since its inception last July has been "Now What?", and I think setting up a board for something or other is in perfect keeping with this spirit. So if you like, head over to the Boards of Omaha, sign up, and hang out. I'll come up with a good use for it soon, or Joan will, or something... but until then, you can at least meet some of the others who use the site.
Community!

Happy Lupercalia! Ladies, remember: if a band of half-naked kids hits you with a strip of goat-skin, don't panic; they're just trying to help you have children some day.

Valentine's Day came and went, just as two horrible exams came and went, a frivolous analysis paper came and went, and so on and so forth. As I walked around the campus last night I realized that this was the second February 15th I hadn't spent in eastern South Dakota in five years, which sounds trivial unless placed in context: Rapid City is 300 miles away from anywhere that matters on the other side of the state. As a result, I had little experience with this holiday, and, not knowing what to do, I did nothing. I wasn't alone in this, however, as most Iowa State students have shown an unerring propensity to be both cheap and alone. Cheap, because we're poor; and alone, because ISU is a technical school, and we're geeks.
(Well, except for the business majors, but they don't really count, because they have money, and hence significant others.)

More tales of corruption and greed come out of Iowa; this time infomercials are the topic of discussion. Have you seen the one about making lots of money through real estate with the rich couple by a pool? Ever wonder how an ordinary-looking pair made so much money? Well, apparently they did it by screwing the little guy over and over. And over again. It's pretty sad. So is the tale of the small-town mayor who allegedly misappropriated city funds to run a meth lab out of her home. It is possible the misappropriation and the meth lab were completely unrelated, but I have my doubts...
Back on campus, the room of a kid from Wallace Hall, one of the off-campus dorms, was raided as part of an investigation of fake ID manufacturing a while ago. The suspect is back in the news in a story in the DSM register that not only explains the fruits of the investigation, but also drops the names of a few of the forger's clients, who the police tracked down and cited. Ouch. The most amusing part of the article, which didn't make it into the online version: the fake IDs (Illinois driver's licenses) were laid out in Microsoft Word.
I won't detail the on-campus business in the news lately... it's a bit too crazy. First attempted murder case in at least twelve years...

There is more, but I will save it for another day so I have something to share the next time I sit down in front of the text editor.

Is Mormon-bashing the real new Olympic event?
Also, the anchor of this MSNBC show interviews the anchor of another MSNBC show about allegations of media bias.
What? Media bias? I dunno... Chris, are we biased?

((That link probably won't be good after tonight, so use the mirror.))

A few entries ago, I mentioned Andre Torrez, and how his website used to be pretty great. Well, he restored the archives, and not only is all the 'great' back again, there is a steady stream of new goodness coming from the man himself! Hooray, hooray.
Oh, on a related note for the one called Google: it's called The Lost Friends of Andy Baio, my scripted friend. Please index it, so that he may find happiness. Additionally, Critical IP sucks, and the best picture ever has been scientifically determined.

That's most of the backlog, I think... there's so much of it because after I finished my homework Sunday, but before I started in on this post in earnest, I decided to attempt an install of BeOS on my computer. Why BeOS? Because. In the end, it was a long and arduous process, involving four partition shuffles with Parted, one voided boot loader, six destroyed floppies ("Virtually all 1.44 drives support 1.722 just fine, but it is possible for an extended format to break a floppy drive. Use tomsrtbt at your own risk."), and five or six hours of time down the drain, all because after I managed to secure proper hard drive partitioning, the installation disc wouldn't load because my CD-ROM drive is too flaky. The ironic bit here is that the installer loaded a message off of its CD telling me it couldn't find the installation CD. So now I have an eight gigabyte blank BFS slice on my second hard drive, and also it's now Monday. Funny, that.

I don't know, some final news to tide you over until the next post: First, Jesse and Matt put up a new site. Free music! Go. And secondly, view this picture. Take careful notice of the three people in the picture, and of their names. Now compare to this story. This is why I watch hockey (see [February 4]) instead of taking journalism classes. Thank you. Good night.

"The difference between me and a diplomat is the difference between a sledgehammer and a razor blade. I really shouldn't be in the diplomatic corps." -- Bill Janklow

The mighty pile of homework is acquiesced. In peer review in my english class, one of the people who read an essay I wrote complained about how she had a hard time understanding what I wrote. Maybe it's because I keep using words like 'acquiesced' where 'done' or 'ok' would do. (Among other things.) She gave me some good feedback about the outline, though, so I was constructive with her criticism in the end.

Mostly filler this time, filler mostly about some lectures here at chilly Iowa State. Chuck D came to our little hamlet and spoke about interracial relations and their impact on music last night, and was incredibly insightful. He wasn't eloquent, as he explained during the speech, but he wasn't eloquent on purpose, because he thought he could connect with his audience better that way. He was right, and as he sat on his stool and explained his issues with the perpetuation of a racist society and the US's foreign policy ("It's f***ed up!"), he spent a lot of time being right and winning over the crowd. Fantastic speech, really.
Tonight came a bit by Carla DeSantis, a businesswoman and journalist fighting for gender equity in music. This speech was slightly less engaging, largely, I think, because she was attempting to describe a social problem (stigma on women in music) from a business perspective (placing more Jewels and Ani DiFrancos and fewer Britney Spearses and Christina Aguileras on MTV and Clear Channel radio). DiFrancos made some insightful points about how horrible the music industry has been for the past twenty years or so, but she seemed to have neither a clear vision for the future or even of the present situation.
Chuck D, though. Wow. Hopefully when Chuck D retires from the music business he will go into teaching music history at some university somewhere. He's very passionate about music history, and serves as an excellent lecturer on the subject.

Battle Royale!

...Joan has this tendency to be unerringly correct about this sort of thing.

Finally, closure department: First, I changed classes a while back, and it looks like I made the right call. Professor Wu's English may not be the best, but his love for Calculus is plain to see despite that, and as a consequence following him through the lectures is a simple task. Thanks StrangeTalk!
...Secondly, Rapid City is no longer on fire, 500 jobs or so have officially disappeared, and South Dakota governor Bill Janklow made a rare display of compassion in meeting with the victims, demonstrating understanding and empathy for those dealing with the economic aftermath of the fire. Hooray for Wild Bill!
I'm going to bed, because I'm a bit sleepy. G'night!

"Last night I had a dream that all the babies prevented by the pill showed up. They were mad... angry babies everywhere." -- Stephen Wright

Sweet Betsy, the homework!
Yet somehow, it's not enough...

Still, I'm more than busy enough to not update. But I can spare observations on the world, I think, starting with American Football Day yesterday. ...right. I was still pretty steamed with my the sports media by the time The Game rolled around for showing a terrible, one-sided basketball game that had no business on network television instead of the blooming NHL All-Star Game, which will probably be Dominik Hasek's final and Nikolai Khabibulin's finest, to say nothing of the performance of guys like Alexei Zhamnov, Eric Daze, Vincent Damphousse, and Espen Knutsen (!). It was a crazy, crazy game, and I had to miss it because of a few rabid alumni. Bastards, all of them. Grr, my friends. Grr.
I thought I might watch the Celebrity All-Star game on E! (don't click that) instead, and I did for a while. Then I realized that the NHL Celebrity All-Star game wasn't actually about hockey, so I went for a walk in the park instead. There were some intriguing aspects to the game, however... Cuba Gooding, Jr. lost a fight with Rachel Blanchard, David E Kelley led his team to a marginal defeat, Alex Trebek came away with an assist, and Bobby Farrelly, who apparently held down the pipes while attending a certain university I dream of nightly, did a stellar job in goal. Intriguing.
On a related note, John Vanbiesbrouck is coming out of retirement. (What?) So it looks like Jean-Francois Damphousse is out of a job. (Who?) Apparently Larry Robinson had problems with veteran goalies or something, so when he was fired, b*z*r was back in. (Why?) Cases like this reassure me about life, in a way, because I know that no matter how crazy the drama in my life and the circles I frequent becomes, hockey drama is always worse.

But I digress. Oh, how I digress. The point is that when the Super Bowl came on, I found something else to do. Namely, I got a sandwich and watched my roommate put a TV tuner in his computer. As he was fiddling around with it, I saw a very familiar face flash by for a moment. Upon restoring power to the "real" TV, I discovered that Ralph Nader was indeed on C-SPAN hawking his latest book. I hadn't seen any trace of Nader since the 2000 elections, though they were very fresh on his mind. Indeed, he still seemed very bitter in the interview about the elections, pulling no punches as he attacked both candidates and the very electoral system itself with renewed intensity. He was also firing almost entirely from the cuff; perhaps he has no speech-writer in the political off-seasons. Interesting fact from the session: Green Party candidates won 25% of the seats they ran for in local (excluding state) elections in 2000. That's one in four. True, not many ran, but they were well-rewarded for it if Nader's figures were correct.

Hockey and politics. Politics and hockey. Homework. Such is my life right now, so I will end my ranting. Before I go, however, the random media of the update: the best picture ever. And it's real...