12 of 12 June 2007

Okay, I'm going to try this without having to split it up into a bunch of different posts. I realize that I'm a few days late...and that I didn't have a 12 of 12 last month, but my camera was broken in May (I fixed it), and I have been helping my brother and sister these past couple of days. I suppose I'll get back into an actual posting routine once I get back to Annapolis instead of the fluffy "written-by-someone-else" posting I have been doing this month. So, here we go with a 12 of 12 from home in good 'ol Austin:

I like to start the day with a little breakfast and reading the paper. Sometimes, during the summer, Regis is even on the television at the time. Ahh, the joys of daytime television.






Since I was holding Coleyfest XX (Part deux) today, I had to sweep off the deck of all the leaves that had accumulated over the past few weeks. This broom is one that we've had for a long time from the contractor who remodeled our house six or seven years ago.




Because several of my friends really like playing basketball, I figured it would be a good idea to pump-up a bunch of the balls.

p.s. I was right.





Midday brought a load of laundry to put up in my closet (I came out afterward, don't worry) while listening to a couple podcasts on my computer. You'll notice the infamous green pants at the lower end of the picture (and the new ones).





As you might expect, a day is not complete without some trivia. Fortunately, when I'm at home, I get to watch a game of Jeopardy! pretty much every day. If you're a bigger nerd than I am (I didn't notice this until just now), you'll be able to tell something about the game just from this shot.




I realize this picture is sideways...perhaps it's appropriate to describe my cooking abilities. Anyway, I succeeded in making what I thought was a pretty good potato salad for my party (though I did have to get my sister's help in boiling the eggs and potatoes).




My sister and I have taken to playing an almost daily game of chess in the afternoons. I'm horrible at it, and she's pretty good, but I've been managing to hold my own so far. I'm a checkers man, myself.





Now is the time to don the traditional Coleyfest garb. I actually used a different t-shirt this year, and my hat was pinless, but I think the same effect was there.






Another key element of Coleyfest prep is to blow up the pool toys. This ball holds way more air than it looks like...and it pops a lot easier than you would think, too.






Although it's sideways, I think this picture demonstrates elegance and grace as Robin flips through the air, trying to kick Clara's volleyball. Shortly after this photo, Robin was hit very painfully by that same ball.





A good anchorman shot of four of the guys dangerously jumping from four different angles and heights with four different poses. I thought it was pretty cool.






Now, I've been thugged out by Master B and Sirobino and I'm ready to blow out the candles. I even got to light them myself this year--I think I'm growing up.

*edit* That awesome hat I'm wearing in the picture was on the television tonight. It was part of a cool outfit on "So You Think You Can Dance".

What is Redefinition?

"Most of my other fourth-grade pipe dreams never came true--the X-ray vision, the helicopter that could go into outer space, Mr. T at my birthday party..."

-Some dreams are a little more improbable than others, but I really do believe in following your dreams and the fact that anything is possible. Indeed, I think that there are varying degrees of improbability, and through work and a little luck (blessings?) and being in the right place at the right time (Holy Spirit?) we can do anything we want or are called to do.

"[Dylan's] a healthy, normal kid, who just happens to be an obsessive information sponge. And there's nothing wrong with that. After all, we're currently living in a Bizarro society where teenagers are technology-obsessed, where the biggest sellers in every bookstore are fantasy novels about a boy wizard, and the blockbuster hit movies are all full of hobbits and elves or 1960s spandex superheroes. You don't have to go to a Star Trek convention to find geeks anymore. Today almost everyone is an obsessive, well-informed aficionado of something."

-TLF, I think you had something to say along those lines. Perhaps we just need to help people realize their inner nerd. Find that special something inside of them that makes them unlike everybody else. That thing inside of each one of us that makes us special and makes us able to contribute in our own way to our growing world of knowledge

What is Demolition?

"Human beings are amazingly adaptable. The first time we sit down behind the wheel of a car, for example, we are overwhelmed by everything...But after a few months of driver's ed, even the most neurotic teens can cruise blankly along, navigating without a second though, at speeds that would have shocked any pre-1900 human, totally unaware of their surroundings unless something goes wrong."

-My brother is learning how to drive right now. Texas law says that an under-18 year old has to hold a learner's permit for six months before they can get their license, so he won't actually be able to drive until October since he got his permit late. But right now, he's sometimes driving us around town and it's an interesting experience. I don't mean to say that he's a bad driver (I think most people have trouble when they first learn), but it's serving to show another difference between him and me. I'm sure I'm biased, and I probably don't remember everything, but I think I took to driving pretty quickly. I think I was a lot less nervous about everything going on around me than my brother is, and that's what helps me when I'm on the highway or in traffic downtown or something. I try very hard in my life to not get stressed, and I think that it carries over to help with driving.

"The first astronauts to walk on the moon reveled in the almost religious experience, composing grandiose paeans to the diaphanous clockwork perfection of creation as seen from space. But just three moon missions later, astronauts were trudging around up there sniping crankily at each other about the endless rock samples NASA was forcing them to collect, and hoping they could knock off early and play a little golf. Even the most alien and demanding situations quickly become routine."

-I really hope that I never lose my found appreciation for life. I remember what it was like to just go through the motions of life and not ever have real feeling or love for the world around me. It's not a good state. Even though there is sometimes sadness and other bad feelings in this world, at least we have good feelings and the other happy things to make up for it. It's far better than having nothing at all.

"Back on my very first day of Jeopardy!, I had the spur-of-the-moment idea to write my name on my podium in a different style every game. Now that I've had to come up with over seventy ways to write the three letters in my name, I deeply regret this little whim."

-I'm not that creative, but I thought it was really cool when he did it.

"The Double Jeopardy round is better, with Nancy [Zerg, The Anti-Ken] answering only four questions during the entire round, but, as I should have learned from Anne Boyd's final game, Jeopardy! players who live by the Daily Doubles die by the Daily Doubles."

-Two things. First, I argued from Ken's downfall--after seeing the show--that Nancy didn't beat Ken, rather, he lost the match. This, from his own mouth, validates my theory. Also, I'm pretty sure I'm not the Daily Double wagering Jeopardy! strategist. My only chance is to really get the buzzer timing down.

"Now, at long last, I know the end of the story and can go home to my family. Maybe now I can stop being Ken Jennings, nerd folk icon, and just be Ken Jennings, nerd, like I was before. I have finally, as they say in drama classes and twelve-step programs, achieved closure."

-I know it's kind of weird for me to be so into Ken, but it's also a weird feeling for me to have a hero who's...well, alive.

"Even Alex wanders back onstage, with his tie loosened and in his shirtsleeves. I've been watching Alex Trebek since I was ten years old, and in two decades, I've never seen him out of a suit jacket. The effect is disconcerting and uncomfortable, a little like seeing your parents naked."

-I can't imagine that. I guess it would be similar if Bob Barker were in anything but a suit (though I think I have seen a photo of him playing golf before in a polo and khakis).

What is Recognition?

"...I fulfill a childhood dream when I'm asked to appear on Sesame Street--Grover and I dutifully extol the virtues of eating fresh fruit. I'm the punchline of a Mad 'fold-in.' The novelty of Googling my own name, initially a new favorite pastime, wears off when the hit count passes fifty thousand (also when my wife discovers how many Ken Jennings fan sites seem to be run by giggly teenage girls)."

-Awesome. I really like Sesame Street and MAD. And, of course, Google. Yes, I'm one of those immature twenty-year-olds who still gets a subscription to a gross-out joke, cartoon satire magazine.

"The kids are more fun, gazing shyly upward while some boastful mom assures me that her little genius wants to study harder in school now, so that he/she too can be a big strong Jeopardy! champ someday. I'm genuinely touched to see that my own juvenile Jeopardy! obsession is alive and well among the tube-sock-wearing, non-gym-rope-climbing mathletes of the rising generation. The future of trivia is in good hands."

-My brother criticized my fashion the other day, and one of the several things he commented on was my like for tube socks versus cut off ones. Apparently, all my clothes are the same and either make my look like an old man or a six-year old nerd. Also, I never was good at the gym rope event.

"Thom [McKee] was a contestant coordinator's dream: a handsome navy pilot with thick blond hair and piercing blue eyes, newly married to a pretty young wife. He was also an insanely good trivia player..."

-So...does that mean I should dye my hair blond? I did have a fruity little blond streak in my hair from one of my trips to Mexico a few years ago. I don't think it really went well with my whole persona.

What is Tradition?

"There's one thing wrong with a contest where the players are sitting at home with seven minutes to come up with each answer, and you've probably spotted it already.
Google."

-That's true for any at home trivia these days, but Google and Wikipedia allow us to learn more and more things whenever we want.

"We may not own every TV Guide back to 1974, but at least we're both computer programmers, professional nerds. The least we can do is offer our backseat Googling abilities."

-People of the new generations do have certain skills or natural instincts to turn to the Internet for answers that older generations do not.

What Cancer Cannot Do...

Cancer is so Limited...

It cannot cripple love,
It cannot shatter hope,
It cannot corrode faith,
It cannot destroy peace,
It cannot kill friendship,
It cannot suppress memories,
It cannot silence courage,
it cannot invade the soul,
It cannot steal eternal life,
It cannot conquer the spirit.
-Author unknown

My Great-uncle John just died in May. He is the first of my Granddad's (mom's dad) four brothers and two sisters to pass away, and my Granddad is taking it pretty hard because he's the only one that doesn't live up in the Platte City/Kansas City area and he couldn't make it up there for the funeral because of his health. This poem was on the back of the funeral program and I read it this morning and liked it.

What is Repetition?

"It's a strange feeling to watch an old screwball comedy [Champagne for Caesar] and realize that the zany goings-on, written decades before I was even born, have somehow predicted the current state of my life. I've never prowled through a Connecticut estate by night...like Cary Grand does in Bringing Up Baby, but I know exactly how it feels to be, suddenly, improbably, in Ronald Colman's wingtip shoes. I know how it feels to change an entire TV game show paradigm by simply refusing to go away for weeks on end."

-I really, really want some wingtip shoes. Or really, any shoes like the ones Ryan Stiles wears on Who's Line is it Anyway?

"As with the ill-planned cash-doubling on Masquerade for Money, my ever-lengthening streak seems mostly due to a miscalculation by the Jeopardy! producers. When they removed the five-day limit, they underestimated the advantages that a long-running champion would have: well-honed buzzer timing, comfort behind the podium, intimidation of the two challengers. by the law of averages, I'm sure that over the last few months I've defeated quite a few players who knew more answers than I did, but just lacked game-day experience."

-That's why I do some of the obsessive, weird things that I do (like watch standing behind a chair or buzzing in with my hand, trying to get the timing right).

"Likewise, the mini-interview segment in the middle of the show was certainly not designed with the fifty-game champion in mind. I've run out of witty, charming things to say about myself after three shows, much less forty-three of them...My stories dwindle away until they're not really stories at all. A few times, desperate for material, I even make something up. Lying to Alex Trebek feels a little like lying to a priest, but I soon get over it. It gets to where Alex and I just shoot the breeze a little."

-I seriously need help coming up with something to say. Some (more than one) clever and interesting stories that I can share and that may actually get me on the show. I'm not really an interesting, charming person.


"Despite all the quality time Alex and I have been spending together lately, he still seems a little chilly, as if he's rooting against me. Is this just part of his constant saltine-dry impartiality? Does he think I'm bad for the show? Does he dislike sharing the spotlight with a sidekick? Or is he just plain sick of me? I feel like passing a junior-high mash note up to his podium. 'Dear Alex. Do you like me? Check one. Yes/No.'"

-But Alex Trebek seems so nice...

"It's a lot easier to identify the kind of antibiotic drugs replaced by penicillin during World War II {Sulfa drugs} when I'd lost $4,200 botching that same question on a Daily Double a few weeks back. (I don't know if you've ever blown a couple house payments on a single trivia question, but it tends to indelibly engrave the right answer in your mind.)"

-It's interesting the way that people gamble with money on television shows. There is no way that most people would go to Vegas and plop down a couple hundred thousand on the roulette wheel, but when they're on Deal or No Deal or a similar show, they don't hesitate to do that exact thing--with worse odds. Amazing what the concept of 'found money' will do to a person's common sense.

"Lying to everyone I know for months on end is taking a psychological toll as well. The secret starts to make me feel a little schizophrenic. A couple days a month, I'm the Ken Jennings who's shattered game show records...But nobody knows about him yet. I still have to come home and be Ken Jennings the boring suburban dad, in his same old mundane treadmill of an office job, pretending nothing has happened."

-One of my favorite things about Ken is how central his family and being a dad is to him. He seems to really take joy in it, and his family is what's most important to him, I think. He's also openly religious, but doesn't necessarily wear it on his sleeve. It's a good balance.

"I've been a trivia buff since infancy, seemingly, but there didn't seem to be a way to make a living at it, and it sure wasn't a plus with girls to know the northernmost world capital, Cap'n Crunch's first name, or the only publicly owned team in U.S. sports, so I forgot about it. Trivia just didn't seem like a practical adult vocation...Jeopardy! is the first time in my life I ever dreamed an improbable dream and did something about it. It's out of character for me. And yet somehow, the fourth-down gamble paid off. Here I stand, doing something I'm good at for a change--and the rewards have been hundreds of times greater than those for any of the safe, practical, responsible choices I'd spent the rest of life making."

-Two of my big philosophies before Plebe year (two that I'm still trying to come back to and really get into) were 'Let no opportunity be wasted' (N.O.W.), and 'Jump In (even if you don't know how to swim)'. Those are both autobiography titles, but they're philosophies that really spoke to me when I heard about them. I've gotten pretty good at jumping in--I'm getting myself into situations and jobs where I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing all the time--but I still let a lot of opportunities to do things or be productive slip by. I need to work on that, especially with the kind of semester I have coming up.

What is Juxtaposition?

"By Christmas of 1984, there were over fifty copycat trivia board games on toy store shelves. The crossword collections in bookstore Puzzles and Games sections had to grumpily scoot aside for dozens of quickie trivia books in 1985, just as they had for backgammon in 1975, just as they would for headache-inducing 'Magic Eye' pictures of 3-D dolphins in 1995 and for poker and sudoku in 2005."

-I cannot do Magic Eye puzzles. I never have been able to, and it's incredibly frustrating. I've seriously spent 30 minutes, several times, trying to figure them out, and I can't. I think it's a disability or something.

What is Cognition?

"My typical Daily double wager is only a couple thousand or so. I believe the technical Jeopardy! term for that kind of wager is 'wussy bet.' Some of that is strategic--why risk a lead when you don't need to?--but much of it is just cowardice."

-Funny, because Ken tended to have the betting strategy that I most agreed with. He almost always took advantage of the Daily Doubles (betting more than he could make on the board), but he didn't bet too much for the risk involved.

"Often I'll bet an amount that will give me a nice, round score if I answer correctly. This too is partially strategic--it tends to make the math easier--but it's mostly anal-retentiveness and superstition. I do the same thing at restaurants, making sure the tip neatly 'evens out' the total tab."

-See! I'm not the only one. I'll bet he folds his shirts department-store-style, too!

I don't want to copy down the entire quote about how he comes to the eventual correct answer to this clue in 'Literary Pairs':
"The film title Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes from a poem about these ill-fated medieval lovers."
but I think he does an excellent job of describing the thought process to get to the answer of a really, really hard clue.

Incidentally, the correct question is: "Who are Heloise and Abelard?"

"If the solving of trivia feels a lot like the solving of an intelligence test (and this coming from someone who's weird enough to sort of enjoy both), does that mean that I was wrong all this time? Could trivia acumen actually be related to, well, intelligence?"

"But trivia can provide an easy, intriguing introduction to any topic you feared might bore you silly. Let's take someone like me, who strongly suspects that ballet is boring, despite Mr. Rogers's many attempts, during my childhood, to convince me that ballet was cool because football players like Lynn Swann took lessons. If you corner me at a party even today and try to give me a speech on the beauty and wonder of ballet, you're wasting your time. My eyes will glaze before you even get to second position. But give me a good trivia fact about ballet...and you've got my attention...Similarly, baseball bores Mindy silly, but I nursed her through the 2004 World Series on a steady diet of Red Sox lore and 'Curse of the Bambino' trivia. Maybe she was faking it, but she almost managed to seem interested at times. Trivia, in other words, is bait on the fishing rod of education."

-I got this for some obvious reasons (though not the ones that are going to make you yell at me).

"Not all trivia facts are trivial, and even the trivial ones might come in handy someday...Even trivia like 'Opossums have thirteen nipples' might mean something to somebody. If nothing else, it's a matter of life and death to the thirteenth baby opossum."

-I think that information is valuable and that it is the purpose of language to share what we know with others so that we can help each other live better, more fulfilling lives. That's why I never lie and why I think lying is so detrimental to society. It's hard to even conceive of lying as a use of language because it really contradicts the purpose of its own medium. It must be a trick of the Devil. Only he could make such a contradiction in our world.

What is Transition?

"Bechuanaland became Botswana. Bob Dylan went electric. Cape Canaveral became Cape Kennedy (and then, quickly, Cape Canaveral again). A young Maria Martinez Molina Baeza became "Charo." Dick Sargent replaced Dick York on Bewitched. Yes, the 1960s were a portentous time of upheaval and change. And trivia was in for a sea of change as well."

-One of the first things I ever remember specifically watching on television (besides my beloved children's programming) is a marathon on Nick-at-Nite pitting Bewitched against I Dream of Genie. I liked Bewitched better. So, understandably (or perhaps not), I was distressed to find out that there were two Darrin Stephens. This--the two actors who played Darrin--I think, was the first trivia fact I ever knew that I could readily identify as a trivia fact.

"Trying to talk wine with a Mormon is usually a conversational dead end. We're not much better on 'women' and 'song,' for that matter. And my 'Potent Potables' flash cards only covered mixed drinks."

This is at the end of a long passage along of the lines of what I was talking about earlier with specialization and my anachronistic position in the world:
"We live in an age of specialization, in which our educational and career choices force us into increasingly narrow niches. People ask me what I do in my day job as a software engineer, but their eyes glaze over if I actually try to answer. It's not just that it's a terribly nerdy, abstruse profession (though it is) or that I'm doing an especially boring job of explaining to them (though perhaps I am). It's just that they would need to take a handful of introductory college-level computer courses to grasp even the basic mechanics of what a programmer does all day. The same would be true if I tried to learn their jobs."

"It sounds Coke-jingle naive, but maybe if we shared more of the same general knowledge, the way we used to, then we wouldn't have so many of the communication breakdowns we see today--between individuals, between nations, between races or religions. If more of us enjoyed 'trivia'--that is, knowing a little bit about everything--we would know more about one another, and therefore might all get along better. That's one thing I'm starting to see about trivia. It's rewarding to know a lot of great facts, but that knowledge is almost pointless if those facts don't help you get to know a lot of great people as well."

-Awesome.

What is Fruition?

"Thirty short hours ago, my Jeopardy! goal had been to finish a game in the black, so i wouldn't be one of those hapless players who gets yanked unceremoniously from Final Jeopardy for having a negative score. This wasn't exactly pessimism--more like waving the torch of lowered expectations into the darkness, trying to dispel the specter of future disappointment."

-I just really like that simile.

"Dylan [Ken's son], by the way, is a trivia nerd in embryo. I know he's only a year and a half old...but the signs are all there. A year earlier than most kids, he's started following every sentence he hears with a genuinely curious 'How come?'"

-If only we could all view the world with the amazing curiosity and wonder of a child's eyes. Children really are just small philosophers.

"Few I talk to would agree with that contention, that men are somehow just better biologically wired for trivia knowledge. Emily Pike, Carleton's former quiz bowl captain, thinks girls tune out of trivia in high school for social reasons. 'Girls at that age are more aware of the social ramifications of the activities they choose than boys are. They understand there will be a stigma if they participate in the same activities the geeks do. Like quiz bowl.' Other women have said that it was instances of poor hygiene, sexual crudeness, or awkward propositioning that soured them on quiz bowl."

-Comments? I'm not a quiz-bowler or a girl (some might say I'm a geek, but I've heard that that's debatable). I think this is an interesting observation. He goes on to talk about the possibility that the high wagering, buzzer speed, quick competition, show-offyness and other traditionally masculine concepts may contribute to the gender gap in Jeopardy! and other quiz games.

"Despite what studies show, I guess I haven't been gifted with the traditionally male advantage of better spatial perception. I've just won another $150,000 or so on America's toughest quiz show, and yet here I am wandering through the Sony parking garage, schlepping five heavy suits of clothes over my shoulder, unable to find my rental car. I'm not a smart person, I just play one of TV."

-See, Seinfeld, pretty much had it all right. I'm honestly surprised at how many situations I run into that were Seinfeld episodes or something else that I can relate to movies or television. Of course, there are also my share of situations strange enough to be made into movies or television.

"In fairness to me, the Sony garage is some kind of impossible topological oddity, like a Mobius strip or a Klein bottle. Depending on where you start, you can follow a path all the way through it and somehow miss every other floor. finally I decide to start from the roof down instead of from the basement up, and five minutes later, I find my Dodge Neon. I must have passed through a dimensional wormhole or something."

-So much for my summer without physics. Oh, who am I kidding? That was never going to happen anyway.

What is Composition?

"Somebody writes trivia. It doesn't just come forth, ex nihilo, fully formed, from a Parker Brothers printing press, from the lips of Alex Trebek, or from a flashing, whirring supercomputer of the kind that Captain Kirk could handily overload with illogical contradictions. Somebody has to sit down and physically write the questions."

-I'm not a huge Star Trek fan, but I definitely appreciate these little references.

"[Martin Brown's] career took an odd left turn while he was doing some work for John Gray, the author who, in 1993, shocked astronomers and anthropologists when he discovered that men and women, instead of being from Earth as long believed, were in fact from Mars and Venus, respectively."

"He loves trivia. We met only minutes ago, and he's already told me that 'Calcium ions are what make lobster antennae oscillate.' I normally save that kind of thing for the second or third date."

-I don't. I'm very free with my trivia--something of a trivia-floosy, if you will.

"[Martin] answers his own question. 'To me, the benefit is knowing that the sky that I look up and see and the stars that I see are not the stars that the dinosaurs saw. And the stars that people living on this planet three million years from now, that they see, will not be the stars that I saw...it matters because you understand that the universe is not a constant. It only seems like a constant, my friend because your life is a'--he snaps his fingers--'in time. So when you realize that, you connect to it something bigger. It's the same thing that spirituality gets people. It connects them to something bigger.' The spiritual power of trivia. Somehow, as we stand silently considering the ageless coast redwoods, it almost makes sense."

"Millionaire wasn't Ben [Gruber]'s first game show experience--he started out as a production assistant on the kids' geographic quiz Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, so you might recognize him from his on-air appearances as a space alien, a chicken, a shark (recurring), and a giant piece of cake."


"I took apart trivia questions and interviewed trivia writers hoping to find the 'quintessence,' the life-giving force, that makes trivia tick. I wanted to hold in my hand the mysterious Element X that differentiates a humdrum run-of-the-mill fact from the kind of sparkling, brilliant, memorable fact that spawns trivia questions, the hidden factor that separates trivia from minutiae.
Well, defining 'good trivia' turned out to be elusive, but the more trivia I look at, the more I realize that, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about porn, I know it when I see it. And at least you don't need to hide trivia under your mattress so your mom doesn't find out."

-Unfortunately, some smart people these days do have to hide it so their parents/peers don't find out. A lot of folks seem to be threatened by others' intelligence and creativity and so they try to stifle it rather than encourage it. Each of us has our own special gifts to give and we should encourage each other to use what we have (whatever it is) for the betterment of the world.

What is Ignition?

"My first semester at college, a time when most new students do nothing dumber than sign up for a series of early-morning classes they will never actually attend, I decided to push the dumbness envelope a little, and jumped out of an airplane. It was mostly my roommate's fault...I can't remember what they said at the [campus skydiving club] meeting, but it must have been 24-karat golden oratory, since it got my roommate to sign his name on the I-want-to-jump-out-of-a-plane list. This still doesn't explain why I signed up too. It must have been a testosterone thing. Nobody wants a scrawny diabetic guy from Yakima to be the alpha male in his dorm room."

-I've done some really dumb things in my life. I can't wait to go skydiving some day.

"My first dive was a tandem jump, in which you're strapped in a vaguely homoerotic position beneath a seasoned skydiver, who has to pull the cord and land and do all the hard stuff. Good thing, as I spent the whole dive, from wing-strut to crash landing, in a dazed state of severe sensory overload. It's an indescribable feeling. The brain, overwhelmed by all the new things rapidly hurtling at it (chief among them the ground), says, 'Well, that'll about do it for me,' and checks out. For many divers, this lasts a few seconds before they snap out of it. But in my case, the fugue must have continued for the full jump. I had momentary flashes of lucidity...during those brief intervals when my brain poked back in for a second, said, 'Ah, you're still falling out of an airplane, then,' and abruptly left again."

-I really liked this passage because it sounds a lot like something Douglas Adams would write. I suppose this was the point in the book where I started to type quotes on to this blog. Douglas Adams is one of my favorite authors--I've probably read the Hitchhiker's Guide series close to twenty times, probably more.

"I mention this now not to show what badasses trivia buffs are, but because it was the only thing I've ever done that could have prepared me for my first Jeopardy! taping."

-Great...

In the Jeopardy! green room: "'How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?' one woman asks no one in particular. No takers. 'Three! One to hold the giraffe and one to fill the bathtub with clocks!' Some polite laughter ensues. 'Oh, you don't know how great it is to finally be in a room where people are actually smart enough to get my jokes!' I give us about ten minutes before the Monty Python sketch-quoting begins."

-Then again, there are some pretty interesting aspects to being around exceptionally smart people.

"Stage manager John Lauderdale walks us around the set. It seems slightly smaller in person. The camera must add ten pounds to things like plywood and blue polyethylene plastic as well. As I gape at the complex array of lights and cameras, it hits me for the first time that my big chance to look like an idiot on national TV is only hours away."

-Fortunately for me, I've started looking like an idiot in public from a young age. When my dad owned his dealership, my siblings and I had to be in the 'No More Bull' commercials he ran all over the Austin area. When I moved schools, a lot of people recognized me first as that 'No More Bull' kid. They apparently liked the commercials, as it took people a long time to forget them. From there, it wasn't very hard to lose my sense of what might be embarassing in a large public forum. That and Ms. Fletcher's drama class had me all sorts of made-up and running around the stage being silly throughout middle school, and I supposed it carried over to high school and college. Truly, all the world's a stage.

"The stage cleared, John Lauderdale counts down the seconds. I wish I knew some secret Zen technique to slow my racing heartbeat and breathing. Why, oh, why didn't I spend my twenties studying martial arts in Tibet like Bruce Wayne did in Batman comics?"

-Ehh...Tibet, Naval Academy...pretty much the same thing.


"We applaud Alex Trebek as he enters. This is the first time I've seen him up close. I was sort of hoping he'd show up backstage, give us all a fist bump and a hearty 'Sup, playaz?' but, in reality, contestants are kept far away from anyone who might know the game material ahead of time, the host included."

-You know, I hugged the principal, superintendent, and high-fived the valedictorian at my high-school graduation. I think people may have looked at me a little weird, and I don't think Dr. Veach was really expecting it, but I was just so happy to have earned that diploma...and I like giving hugs.

"The familiar plink-plunk of the Jeopardy! 'think music' begins playing aloud in the studio. A mixed blessing: on the one hand, it's the only way for contestants to measure the elapsing thirty seconds. On the other hand, when concentrating with thousands of dollars at stake, this tune is incredibly annoying. I feel like there's a gang of elves with pick-axes hammering away on a glockenspiel inside my brain."

"We three contestants are brought downstage to stand with Alex and pretend to chitchat while the credits roll. This is each show's most awkward moment. All four of you are pretending to be at a jovial cocktail party when, in actuality, two of you are kicking yourselves for muffing your chance at Jeopardy! stardom and lamenting what might have been, one of you is gradually realizing you're going to have to go through the whole stressful ordeal again in about ten minutes, and one of you is wondering how much of the Lakers game you're going to miss...It just feels good to have achieved something that I've been dreaming about since I was ten. Back then, I was so trivia-crazy that the people I watched behind the Jeopardy! podium were superheroes to me...I never really knew what to say when chin-chucking aunts and backslapping uncles asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, but deep down, I realize, this is it. Just this."

What is Competition?

"Literary editor and Information Please host Clifton Fadiman believed that--even sixty-odd years ago!--his show was helping reverse the dumbing-down of America. 'Suddenly, intelligent men and women were looked up to and emulated,' he boasted about the rise of Information Please. So much for those who date the decline of Western civilization to that fateful Tuesday night in 1977 when Three's Company debuted."

-It's interesting, having been mostly removed from the normal pop-culture world for two years (and partially removed from normal teenage culture for most of the time before that), to see just how bad most of the stuff on television and in the media is. I don't mean to insult anybody, but I have trouble watching a lot of what's on t.v. these days. It just doesn't do it for me. I can't explain it without specifics and without getting a lot longer, but it's kind of weird to see the difference in the old and the new.

"The appeal is obvious. Game shows, unlike real life, are a tightly ordered universe where every rule is well established and explained to the contestants in advance. Every sound effect, every music cue, every tile turning over on the game board is impeccably choreographed, identically timed on every show, and the host's mastery over these elements is absolute. Players are either right or they're not, as the hidden answers on the game board will infallibly prove. Reassuring feedback, in the form of a giddy ping or a growling buzz, follows their every move. Questions always have answers. Puzzles always get solved...
Game shows, like trivia, also offer a tidier alternative to life in that they reward nothing but skill and talent. In a world where the wrong people are forever getting ahead because of robber-baron ruthlessness, or accidents of birth, or coincidences of class or color or creed, quiz games offer a beguiling alternate reality where no one cares whether or not you went to Exeter or who married the boss's niece. It all comes down to who can solve the puzzle, or can match the stars, or knows the actual retail price of the floor wax. Nothing else matters. Could trivia be America's last meritocracy left standing?"

-Life doesn't come with an instruction book. The best we can do is rely on the advice of people who have been there (our parents) and those people who seem to have a great deal of insight and foresight (some of our friends). It's scary much of the time (I know I've been worried a good deal about the future, recently), but I suppose we can just do our best and try to live without regret for the things that we do.

What is Ammunition?

"The phone on my desk at work rings, an unwelcome interruption. I'm a highly paid software engineer! How am I supposed to surf the Web and write e-mail all day if the phone keeps ringing?"

-This is unfortunately all too common an attitude with people's jobs. I think that if we are not in some job that challenges or excites us, then we do end up just trying to get through the day, occupying ourselves in other ways, not really throwing ourselves headlong into whatever it is we do. That's one of the reasons I have to avoid a cubicle job. I don't want to waste my life because I know that I have a great capacity to waste time even though there is so much to do.

"The earliest roots of trivia, in the sense of miscellaneous-and-not-entirely-useful-facts, date back to the 'commonplace book' of ye olde England. In Shakespeare's time, a commonplace book was a rather dull thing, a personal journal of instructive moral quotes culled from one's reading. But at the dawn of the Victorian age, a commonplace book was becoming something a little less commonplace: a miscellany of random facts the writer happened to find interesting."

-Apparently, Ms. Darrow wasn't crazy. I know I still keep my commonplace book from Senior year, and it's full of quotes I find and Final Jeopardy! questions that I see on television.

"Is there something about trivia that attracts the dabbler, the perpetual student, because it offers the illusion of real intellectual mastery?"

-I know I sometimes feel that way. I feel often that if I could forever be a student, I would. But accompanying that feeling is the idea that I know that I will probably never be a master of or completely devoted to one subject. I am a kind of jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none person. I'm comfortable with myself that way (I would probably be a general studies major if I could because I feel very limited just studying one thing), but our world is becoming more and more specialized, and I'm not so sure that someone with my kind of knowledge, preferences, and skills will be valued in this new, flat world where anyone can use the Internet to find what they want. I don't know if I'm the type of person that is needed anymore--old fashioned, obsolete, and maybe just plain old (in the head, at any rate).

About the 20s: "It was an age of fads--Charleston marathons, raccoon coats, flagpole-sitting--but, for a little while, trivia was king of them all."

"I don't want to look back and say, 'If I'd just been a little more prepared, I could have won,' I try to explain to Mindy. 'I'm just neurotic enough for that to bug me for the rest of my life.' It's true. Jeopardy!, by its own contestant rules, is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. If you get a cramp in the last mile of a marathon or don't quite make it up Everest, there's always next year. But you only get one shot at Jeopardy!, and odds are you're going to lose that very first game. Jeopardy! is a shark, mowing through America's self-declared intelligentsia with its huge, shiny teeth, claiming victims at the implacable rate of two a night (check local listings). You have to be in pretty good shape to escape the teeth for a night or two, but they get everyone eventually."

-Ken is making me paranoid. I know I probably won't get on, and I don't even really have a plan for getting on the show. But I also know that I have so many other things I want to do that I won't ever be able to completely dedicate myself to getting good at Jeopardy!. Can I do this? Is it even a reasonable goal? This summer already, I want to decorate my car, train for a marathon, train to validate my 40-year swim, read a lot, catch up on e-mails, clean out my school e-mail box, plan some parties, plan a trip, go on said trip, watch some classic movies, watch some modern movies, start developing show ideas, help write a serial...and that's just off the top of my head. All of that takes time (as does blogging, I realize, but it's also important to me to keep track of all this). Summertime should be relaxing, but I have trouble sitting by idle, even if what I am doing could be considered by some to be idle.

What is Erudition?

(About college quiz-bowl players):"Call it what you will--nervous reflex, anticipation, precognition, Spidey-sense--but the best players can somehow buzz with their thumbs before their brains have quite caught up. Knowing the right answer isn't nearly enough, just as it's not enough for a football player to memorize the drawn-up plays. You also have to be in the zone and execute."

-I find this very true. I noticed one of the things that Ken was really good at on the show was that he would buzz in without knowing the answer. He had that ability to know that he was going to know the answer, and that if he could buzz in, he could figure it out in those few seconds given to say the answer. Not to build myself up, but that's a lot like how I play the game. I definitely don't know all those facts, but there are little connections that form in my brain to figure them out.

"Quiz bowl players are no different: they want you to know how much they know. Gentle, witty self-deprecation is about as rare at these tournaments as a steady girlfriend...If a quiz bowl player volunteers to tell you the story of his 'best buzz' ever, it's not going to involve a few bottles of Smirnoff Ice and a band that was, like, really jammin'."

-Has anyone heard of The Power and the Glory?

"Even before we get to the hotel, I can tell I'm in the right place. Sitting behind me on the shuttle bus from O'Hare are four gangly teenagers, three with thin caterpillars of fuzz on their upper lips. 'It seems like all the good fantasy authors are Australian nowadays,' one is saying to his compatriots. A quiz bowl team, all right...The hotel, as it turns out, is wall-to-wall with quiz bowl...As it happens, the hotel is also hosting some kind of national church conference the same weekend. Everyone who isn't a teenage geek in a 'Gryffindor' T-shirt is a sweet old African American church lady in an elaborate hat."

"For many players, [quiz bowl] is their safest haven in a world that always picked them last in softball and doesn't get their clever jokes about Linus Pauling or Piet Mondrian. Here their strange mutant power for trivia is not only accepted but valued. 'It was nice knowing, especially early on, that this was a place that I could go and be smart and not have people look down on me for it or get annoyed with me for it,' says Craig Barker. It's a sentiment I've heard from many top quiz players in the past. I've often felt that way myself."

-I've been very fortunate in my life to be surrounded by people who, if they don't completely understand me (I certainly don't all the time), at least are supportive of my weird little (and big) quirks (and sometimes quarks). I thank you, folks, for dealing with me, and allowing me to be my random, forward, curious, questioning, loud, quiet, nonsensical self.

What is Audition?

"In some perverse way, I've always enjoyed being tested. The sawdusty smell of a sharpened number 2 pencil, the chance to spell your name with the little bubbles on the computer answer sheet, the series of tricky, colon-heavy puzzles waiting to be solved. It's not the kind of thing you can say at school without getting beaten up a lot, but deep down I always thought standardized tests were fun. The Jeopardy! test brings back the same feelings, except that--even better!--this time it's all about trivia."

"The form also asks us to volunteer five 'fun' facts about ourselves. If the fifty-question written test was the SAT of the Jeopardy! admissions process, these are the college essays...I can only imagine how daunting this request must seem to a contestant coming in cold. 'List the five cleverest, most charming things about yourself! Do it in one sentence! Be funny! And get them all down in a few minutes while we come around and take Polaroids of you!'"

This is important!! Does anyone have any ideas for my five fun facts? I don't know and I'm not good at brainstorming this sort of thing. I don't think I'm all that interesting a person to someone who doesn't really know me (i.e., someone who's watched me on t.v. failing to answer questions for ten minutes).

What is Ambition?

"Like the Terminator, Halley's comet, or genital herpes, trivia just keeps coming back."

"I've always felt it was a shame that the 'trivia' moniker stuck to trivia so firmly. Referring to your hobby with a word that quite literally means 'petty' or 'insignificant' doesn't strike me as the best way to popularize it. Would football ever have caught on if gridiron fans had insisted on calling it 'that stupid sport with the weird-shaped ball'? Do philatelists call postage stamps 'little gummed squares that we pointlessly collect and pore over when we really should be out meeting girls'? And yet trivia fans happily adopt the language of the oppressor, tacitly but cheerfully agreeing that, yes, their tendency toward learning and knowing lots of weird stuff is completely valueless. Completely 'trivial'."

"I can think of habits I've had since birth that, in hindsight, seem more like OCD symptoms than charmingly precocious childhood pastimes. I would sit in movie theaters long after the lights came up, carefully studying every name in the credits roll. I memorized all the patterns on the Sesame Street matching game in my closet, so I could beat my parents ever time we played. I once spent an eleven-hour plane flight timing myself to see how fast I could name every country in the world in alphabetical order...I remember, at four years old, being distraught that the surprise my parents gave us to celebrate my dad's graduation from law school was a mere trip to Disneyland (Disneyland! I ask you!) and not the item I'd had my eye on for months: the word game Boggle...I was overjoyed in 1979 when my sister Gwyn was born: we were now a family of five--the exact perfect size for a Family Feud team! That could be us someday, being smooched by Richard Dawson wearing an atrocious light gray three-piece suit."

-I'm glad to see that I am not alone. I remember sitting in my room practicing the pop-up-puzzle game Perfection. I would practice putting in one piece at a time, until I figured out the most efficient order to do it in so I could get the best time possible. I memorized the books my mom read to me as a kid before I could even read, and I would correct her if she tried to skip pages or words. I read little puzzle and especially lateral thinking puzzle books on all our family trips. And I've watched and wanted to be on a game show for almost as long as I can remember.

"With only one English-language TV channel to watch in South Korea--thank you, AFKN, the Armed Forces Korea Network--everyone in my American school watched exactly the same shows at exactly the same times every day. AFKN showed Jeopardy! every afternoon around the time we all got home from school, and so, as weird as it sounds, the previous day's Jeopardy! was a big fifth-grade playground topic each day...Some accident of U.S. Army television programming and typical elementary school obsessiveness had turned us into the Seoul Foreign School for Prepubescent Quiz Show Freaks. I was, in short, a pretty nerdy kid."

-I think that television programming times has a lot to do with it. I wouldn't have watched so much Jeopardy! in high school if it hadn't come on shortly after I got home from school in the beginning of high school. By the end, I had figured out how to record it, so I could watch it whenever I did eventually get home from work or whatever.

"I've worked as a computer programmer for a local health-care staffing company for the last few years, ever since my previous employer fell victim to the popping of the Internet bubble and stopped doing the little things that matter for its employees, like paying them...though I try not to dwell on it, it's incredibly dull work, made worse by the increasingly obvious fact that I'm a pretty mediocre computer programmer. The short attention span and encyclopedic memory that served me well in trivia are apparently a different set of mental muscles from the ones you need to write software eight hours a day. This bothers me, since i suspect that writing good computer code is probably a more accurate measure of real intelligence that knowing who hit the first home run in All-Star Game history or which 1960s TV character was named Roy Hinkley."

-One of my biggest goals in life is to avoid working in a cubicle job. That's a big reason that I'm in the military, because I can't see myself doing anything else from my college learning experience. Sure, there are other things that I want to do, but right now, the Navy is the big way for me to avoid that boring, middle-class fate that terrifies me so much.

Braniac

This recent Jeopardy! obsession and paranoia has mostly been inspired by my current reading of Ken Jennings's Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs (but also influenced heavily by my recent surprise birthday party awesome trivia experience). Of course, I am a huge nerd, and Ken is one of my heroes. He's also a pretty good (at least funny) writer. There are a bunch of quotes in his book that I would like to have in my commonplace book, but I really don't want write all of the out right now as I read them. So, I think I'll write them down here under the chapter titles. It's humorous and fun, and I just thought it might be something neat to share. So, all the quotes and chapter titles that seem trivia and Jeopardy! related are all from Ken Jennings, they are not my own invention.

"A book about trivia has, potentially, the same problem that rock criticism or a sex manual does: it's never as much fun as the real thing."
-Ken Jennings

This Is Jeopardy!

• Shakespeare-characters, plays, plots, famous quotes
• U.S. Presidents-VP's, First Ladies, Cabinet Members, term dates
• World Capitals
• State Capitals
• Geography-mountain ranges, peninsulas, islands (Canary, etc.), Latin & South American countries/capitals, Mexican states
  
• Potent Potables-especially important to learn because I don't drink, ingredients, nicknames
  
• Major League Baseball-stadiums, home run records, pitching records, the old guys
• Colleges-mascots, march madness (winners & MVPs & dynasties), college towns
• Civil War-battles, generals
• Classical Music-composers & their work
• Ballet
• Opera
• Academy Award Winners-best film, actor, actress, director, movie quotes
• Pop Music
• Poets/Poetry-Byron, Keats, Yeats, Dickenson
• Great Lakes-and other U.S. Lakes, world waterfalls
• Art-famous painters and their paintings, art history
• Sports-Triple Crown winners, Heavyweight boxers (especially '20s Dempsy, Johnson, etc.)
  

Quiz-show determination

I've been watching Jeopardy! these last couple of days at home, and it has occurred to me again how much my quiz-show skill has been diminished by my time at the Academy. I don't know if I'll ever get on the show (I probably won't end up getting on the College Championship to represent the Academy), but having that skill is something important to me. Back when I was on top of my game (2004, the end of Junior and beginning of Senior year of high school), I felt good about myself because I could answer meaningless trivia questions on a twenty-year-old quiz-show. It wasn't just that I knew the answers, though, it was that I felt proud that I could figure out the ones I didn't necessarily know from the clues in the answers and from what they regularly asked. I miss that feeling. So, in case I ever get the chance to go on the show (and even if I'm forever relegated to playing along at home), I'm going to keep here a list of regular Jeopardy! topics that I need to know cold. These are things that I've noticed that they ask about frequently, and that I need help learning so that I can answer those questions almost without thinking. I'll update the list whenever I notice something new.

Total Joes!!!

One of next year's two training sergeants (two because our class is that motivated--the second is in our "partner" room...we hang out a lot) is one of my roommates, and the rest of us are commonly known throughout the company as people who are probably going to be tough on the Plebes. We...are...Joes. If you need proof, here's a short story:

Today, we had a bomb threat in T-court. They evacuated 1st through 4th wings (I'm in 3rd) and they did it very quickly. Our mate came down the hall making the announcement, with Senior right on his heels telling people to get out quick. However, I am such a Joe (though I blame it on good training), that without thinking, I managed to do a quick bravo of our room and prop the door on my way out. I grabbed my Rosary and ring and proceeded to run outside to sit for an hour and a half. I'm embarrassed for myself.

Hippos need breaks too

Well, it's been another week, and I find myself right in the middle of finals. I spent 8 1/2 hours testing today, 2 1/2 in the morning on Boats, and 6 hours this afternoon on Electricity and Magnetism...I didn't even finish all the way. Anyway, our trip to San Antonio was awesome, and I might post some about that when I have more time (I don't know that I'll ever have more time), but it was a very good time and I'm glad that every one got to come stay at my house. I really enjoy hosting people to stay for a little or long while, and it's nice to let my friends into a little bit of myself.

Here are my articles for the day:

I hadn't heard about this bill until reading the article about it. It'll be interesting to see how that might effect our education and how the public schools work, especially in the particularly diverse regions of Texas (i.e., Austin). I don't know much about the bill, and I don't quite know how I feel about it, but the article grabbed my attention.

I know that I probably won't be in the right time-frame or the right demographic for the first Mars trip. I don't really have the desire either, I would really rather go to the Moon (though, if I were offered a chance to go, I probably wouldn't hesitate long). However, these are some interesting considerations that a lot of people don't think about being associated with planning a space voyage. This kind of reminds me of the High School Aerospace program that I was involved in during my Senior summer. We spent a week at JSC in Houston, and I was assigned to the Mission Control team (fortunately because I probably wouldn't have liked the engineering teams as much...I'm not an engineer). We were in charge of planning the non-science aspects of our "mission" to the Moon, then on to Mars, and we had to consider a lot of things that I wouldn't have ever thought of (I was in charge of legality and environmentalism...go figure). It was an eye-opening experience (and made sure that I would not become an engineer).

I know that most people don't like NASCAR. I'm sorry, I'm a closet NASCAR fan. And I found this article comparing Jeff Gordon to Dale Earnhardt interesting and true. The NASCAR community, I think, is very interesting--both the fans, the driver interactions, and, of course (nerd that I am), the physics behind it all.

And finally...interesting.

"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
-Doctor Who

God speaks to me through iTunes

Another thing that I haven't fact-checked yet, but that I heard on a podcast and liked:

Pope Benedict said that people can't always be giving. We're not perfect like God, though we may try. When a person wants to give love, they must also receive love as a free gift. That idea has a lot of meaning to me right now, because I want to give so much, but sometimes I have to understand that I need to wait for others to grow and develop, too.

A frequent prayer of mine is for the Lord to place the weight of the world on my shoulders. I know that that is ridiculous--there's no way I could actually handle all the pain, suffering, and evil in the world--but I just think that sometimes, if I could be hurt instead of someone else, it would be better. God could help me with it, and I could take it. Someone could be saved if only I could somehow take on their pain and suffering. But I know that I can't. It's frustrating, but it must be something akin to the feeling parents get when their children are hurt. Sometimes, we can't protect them from everything, and we have to let them be hurt so that they can learn and grow to be more whole human beings.

I'm glad I heard that little clip so that I could think about some of these things. It's a good feeling now and then to think about things like this.

Patroness of Midshipmen

I found a stack of Elizabeth Ann Seton Saint Cards this morning in the Bancroft Rotunda Chapel. She was the first American saint, and two of her sons were in the Navy. One died as a Midshipman, and the other received a commission as a Lieutenant and continued in the Naval Service. She is the patroness of the United States Sea Services (Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine Corps), and patroness of Midshipmen in particular.

This verse was on the back of the card. It's one of the later verses of the Navy Hymn, and it really spoke to me (I love that hymn, it stirs me every time I hear it, especially when the choir sings it in another city and the veterans rise to their feet):

Midshipmen of our own Navy,
Saint Elizabeth Ann's sons served at sea;
She prayed for them both day and night,
That God would guide them with His light;
Oh, Mother Seton, hear my plea,
As you did for them,
now pray for me.
Amen.

-Tune: The Navy Hymn
-Verse: Capt. James W. Conte, CHC, USN (Ret.)

No good title

It was a good day today, I'll put up whatever pictures I have a little later. I'm very grateful for the chances I have to go out and learn and see and be with my friends.
I'm not terribly inspired to write right now, but I have a whole tray-full of websites and articles that I've been wanting to post on for a while, so here goes:

Spamarama is an important Austin tradition, right up there with Eeyore's Birthday Party and the Old Pecan Street festival. Fun things like that are just one more of the reasons that I like Austin so much (even if it's raining).

Letter and e-mail writing are very important to me, even though I don't get to do it very often. I'm scared of the art of the epistolary being lost in our modern culture; and though I am amazed at technology and its ability to link us together more quickly and more extensively than ever before, I worry that we are losing are ability to write well due to the new "Internet lingo" that prevails in e-mails and instant messages. I'm not saying that we should always write in the most formal style we can--we should surely find our own personal voices--but there are things that I think can make a letter better and more personable. Anyway, that's why I liked this article called, "Choosing the right e-mail send off can be tricky." It's right about it being tricky, I take a lot of time, relatively speaking, to come up with those seemingly inconsequential details like titles, greetings, and closings--even on an e-mail.

I think I'm going to update a few more times with another link to the AAS wildflower photos as more are added every few days. I really do enjoy looking at the wildflower pictures that readers take--heck, I really like photographs in general--and I'm glad that folks appreciate the beauty of the nature that God created.

An interesting concept from the USPS. I'm not at all happy about the stamp price increase last year, and I'm not looking forward to the rate-hike coming up in May. I will probably end up buying some of these 'forever' stamps so I don't have to keep placing a bunch of one-cent stamps all over my envelopes (of which I finally bought a sheet of fifty a couple weeks ago so I don't have to keep buying them a few at a time from the machine).

That's all for now. Here's a thought of the day relating to what I have been working on and what I need to work on more:

"He does not believe, that does not live according to his belief."
-Thomas Fuller

Fly Away Home

I heard on one of the Catholic Answers podcasts that these are the patron saints of aviators:
St. Joseph of Cupertino
St Therese of Lisieux
Our Lady of Loretto

I just wanted to actually put something on here today, and I've been wanting to post this small fact for a little while.

"Her ability to conserve momentum and do the basic physics in SP211 was about the size of a quantum gap in a semi-conductor...it was very small...but her enthusiasm was GREAT! and she survived the class based on that and her accumulation of galactic points."
-Professor Korman (my E&M teacher)

"Women and Men"

I wanted to post more today, but some other stuff came up. There will probably be a deluge in a couple days when I finally am done with pressing homework and the impending alpha inspection. I wish I had more time to independently strengthen my life separate from just doing my school-work. I want to study so much. I want to write. I want to read. I want to run and work-out and play sports. I want to give and play and sing and help others. There's just no time, and what little time I do have, I seem to waste. I'm sorry, I'm just having a weird week already.

In lieu of a quote tonight, I offer this clever little picture someone posted over on the Catholic Dads blog. It's funny in more than one sense:

Update

As you may have noticed, I just added a bunch of posts that were saved, but not 'published' yet. I had to find quotes for them and finish a couple up before I could post them all. Regardless, it's all there, so go back and read away. I'll try to do a little more now that life might not be as busy and hectic as it has been these past couple of weeks.

"Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."
-Anais Nan

quick comment: I really like this quote, because as tired as I get doing everything, I can't imagine not doing all of these activities and stuff. I guess I just can't avoid it, or, as my friend Phil puts it, I hate free time.

p.s. I should also mention that I finally fixed the timestamp thing to actually show the time that I post (instead of whatever it was on before...I'm really not sure). Anyway, I think it works now.

12 of 12 April 2007 (3)

I checked my mail after Mass (Zip Code 21412, hint, hint). I finally got in my crucifix order and my bag of thirty pre-cut pieces of different colored twine to make Rosaries. I had ordered them a few weeks ago, and have been waiting until now to get all that stuff in (now I have to find the time to make them, pray them, and find the people to give them away to). I also received a couple letters in the mail. It's always nice to find something in the ol' mailbox.

D&B practice this afternoon for our concert in Harrisburg, PA on Saturday. Here, a couple of my friends practice "Top Gun" from our fall show on the vibraphones.


This is the youngster male Bible study (one of the bigger ones we've had this year). We've been going through the Acts of the Apostles, discussing the early Church. Very interesting.


Here is my little Easter candle on my desk that I light whenever I'm going to be at my desk for a while. I bought a few white candles today at the Mid Store to burn through the Octave and on special feast days (I should probably buy a red one too, for the martyrs (color has a lot of meaning for me). It gives me comfort and reminds me that Christ will light my way through another night and into one more fine, Navy day.

"My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income."
-Errol Flynn

12 of 12 April 2007 (2)

Thursdays are inspection days at noon meal formations. That means, it's shining shoes time when I got out of my lab early. I haven't shined my shoes in a while, so I'm trying to get back on track with all that (especially with uniform changeover coming up, meaning I need to get those whites, white).


Noon meal formation and inspection go outside at T-court at 1205.






Today there were about a million announcements before noon meal (sometimes called lunch in parts of the world), so we were waiting outside for a long time after coming from putting away our instruments.





This is the beautiful Naval Academy Chapel where I get to go to Mass after lunch. Today was the only time this week that I got to go to lunchtime Mass because of NAFAC stuff, but I'm glad that I got to go at all and I'm glad this picture turned out.

12 of 12 April 2007 (1)

12 of 12 is an idea that I heard about from the Rosary Army podcast. That was the first podcast that I started listening to, and it's definitely one of my favorites. They're the folks I received my Rosary from, and they're who I learned how to make Rosaries from.
Anyway, the idea is to take twelve pictures of my life on the twelfth of each month (how appropraite that that is the date that someone else uses to reflect on their life) and comment on them. I'm not sure that I can get all of them on the same post, so I might post in three parts, but here we go:

My day started after midnight as I was still up studying. It's an atypical day when I go to bed before midnight. I'm not complaining, but I figured that this (papers spread out on my desk, headphones on listening to music or podcasts, look of concentration and frustration on my face) is a good look at a large part of my life.

Sleep! Finally! Rack time is one of the best times of the day. Notice the squishy "Razzles" pillow that my mom got me for Christmas. You can also see a slight little bit of my orange sleeping bag.

Today was the start of 3/c Registration for the fall semester. Everyone wakes up to be the first to get on the MIDS system so they can get the schedule they want. Registration used to start at 0530, but now starts at 0700. Much less hardcore, and it means we have to skip formation.

Thursdays are my E&M lab day. Today, we were doing another experiment with the magnetic field generated by current carrying wires. We also played with those cool digital oscilloscopes you can see to the right.

NAFAC-Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Craziness

I'm on the security/ops staff for the 2007 Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference taking place this week, and it has been an interesting experience. A few of the highlights:

• Breaking a door in Mahan so that it didn't stay closed. I was on usher watch, so I had to stand at this door the entire presentation, holding it shut. A Marine Colonel sat a couple of rows away looking angry at me the whole time.
• Running out of Internet in Rickover. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a very competent computer technician, so when setting up the round table rooms in Rickover, I was not adept at getting all the reporters' computers up and working...even though they were already set up from the day before.
• TP watch. Colonel P over in Sampson was worried about there being too many people using the heads in Mahan, so he put a Marine Major in charge of making sure there is enough toilet paper in them. That got delegated down to me, so I spent some time going around to all the bathrooms that NAFAC delegates were likely to use (including the women's rooms) checking that there was enough paper in all of them. Then, I reported back to said Major that, indeed, the toilet paper situation was under control. Another awkward situation that I never thought the Academy would throw me into.
• We had a Polish midshipman staying in our room. On Wednesday night (when we normally don't have liberty), he went out in town with some other European Union delegates and didn't come back until about 0300, very drunk. Our room was not pleasant smelling the next day.
• *addition* when cleaning up the Command Center the last day, we realized that we had about four boxes of fruit leftover. Therefore, I was ordered to take a box of assorted fruit (apples, bananas, and oranges) with me to my afternoon classes. I managed to give away most of it, but it was still weird carrying around and handing out a bunch of fruit.

Anyway, NAFAC was a fun and interesting time, but I'm not sure that I'll be doing it again next year. I guess I'll decide then.

"I would like to say that the quality of any man's life has got to be full measure of that man's personal commitment to excellence and to victory, regardless of what fields he may be in."
-Vince Lombardi