american beginnings

bought a new book today: American Beginnings.
i know you're excited.
you'll get to hear all about it.

this one's about the first people coming over to America.
so basically its a little background reading for when i go to Alaska.
woot.
i get to apply on Monday!

extinction

the on-going dispute of reasons for extinction.
some say climate change, as the ice age waned, others like diamond say it was overpredation.

we know for a fact that the maori people who found New Zealand in roughly 1000 - 1500 AD, did kill the giant moa birds of the islands within a few hundred years. but these are two small islands!
could this be possible on 2 much larger continents?

diamond, who might be quoting martin's work says that it could be possible if humans predated on mammoth every two months, given that at least 100 hunter-gatherers came through the ice-free corridor from alaska to edmonton.

but i still don't know which way to sway.
but i'm starting to think that a little bit of human intervention can effect the flora and fauna through direct and indirect ways.

yeah. you can kill a mammoth, and with their long gestation period, its harder for them their population to bounce back from a few hard hits.
but then if you also start modifying the environment by taking down trees and adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, your climate is also going to change. so maybe if you come into a stable environment that's been running its course for at least a few thousand years, if not a million or so years, and fuck with its homeostasis, a landslide of events may result.
that initial disruption has a snowball effect until something traumatic happens and stasis is once again regained.

diamond states that since 1600 AD, that only 5 - 6 species of birds have gone extinct in North America, and only 1 in Europe. once things were under control in the US, life proceeded as usual.
somehow, amazingly even the industrial revolution didn't kill off more bird species. i guess it pays off to fly. and that's why so few flightless birds are left on the earth in only remote places like African deserts, South American highlands, and island continents of Australia and New Zealand.

i wonder if people will ever figure out, or if its true, that human activity can affect climate.
then all our climate vs. predation disagreements would be null and void.

i'm thinking of easter island. large amounts of clearcutting on the island followed by dry weather that didn't allow for forest regrowth.
but islands always seem to be an exception because of their small land area.
...nowhere for fauna to hide, from nowhere for flora to be replenished...

safe!

ok. so additional searching on that last linked website of the previous post shows that lea and leanora are safe.
the site gives a map with his properties highlighted.
i guess karl was exaggerating a little bit. he probably didn't know...

anyway,
the baseball field and big building next to it is roosevelt high school.
that major intersection in the bottom right is 65th and 15th.
the bottom left is roosevelt square with whole foods.
and i'm thinking that that large parking lot in the upper left corner is QFC,
meaning that the building in the very upper left corner is where lea and leanora live.

safe!

sisley

i was talking to this guy karl, who comes to the pool.
i had never really talked to him before.
then a week or so ago i ran into him at a kirkland bar called Lucky 7.

we were talking about, john, the owner of the pool i work at.
about how he owns, 1 million dollars worth of property in just that half a block area.

but karl said that was nothing.
his family owns a large portion of ravenna.

i knew his dad owns that fruit stand and the hardware store there on 65th and 15th. in addition to that his the family owns that barber shop right there and all the other run-down buildings in that general area.

then, come to find out, hugh sisley, john's brother owns roughly 170 homes in the ravenna area. that one recent gun bust that i posted on the forums a while ago was owned by that guy.

i always wondered why the pool was so shitty, but i guess there is a mentality that runs in the family.
here's an excerpt from this article:

"Sisley started out decades ago buying up properties by working three jobs at a time, Vogel said. "He's land-rich, cash-poor. And the way he's been able to pay for it is to rent them out without having to make improvements to the properties."

i had heard rumors that ravenna wasn't much of a good place to live, but i never thought so, just below that quote above is this:

"Vogel [the attorney] said Sisley typically rents the houses at "well below the market" rate to a single individual who then sublets rooms or apartments to poor people who are often sick or disabled.
The Roosevelt Neighborhood Association, Vogel said, 'doesn't like the fact that there are people of lower income in the neighborhood.'"

but if that weren't enough. it seems like this guy is somewhat of a slumlord.

"Agents removed about 100 firearms from his home, one of many dilapidated homes that Gilbert managed for Seattle landlord Hugh Sisley. Some have accused Gilbert of managing them through fear, intimidation and frivolous lawsuits.
'He was a thug, hired ... to keep the neighborhood and the tenants and everybody else under control,' said Susan Baker, former president of the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association.
Baker and the neighborhood association were frequently at odds with Sisley and Gilbert over the condition of his dozens of properties around Northeast 65th Street, roughly bounded by Roosevelt Way Northeast and Brooklyn Avenue Northeast.
'He's a bully,' Baker said of Gilbert. 'Very scary. Conducting surveillance throughout the neighborhood. Watching what everybody does. Dogs that are there to strike fear into the hearts of people.' (Seattle Animal Control took Gilbert's German shepherd Blondie away Tuesday.)
'If you complained about the condition of a house,' there were consequences, Baker said. 'And he (Gilbert) had his henchmen, too.'"

i guess where we lived, we were just outside the range of his shitty houses.
but geez. i never knew that my boss had so much pull.
what's even more crazy is when you see this.

i wonder if lea and leanora's place is owned by him ;)

dixie's

man, oh man.
i went to this place in bellevue for lunch today with irene (my coworker) and my grandpa.
it's called Dixie's BBQ.
you take the first 520 exit past 405 heading toward redmond. you take a right and just before you'd drive under the 405 underpass, you'll see it.
we'll actually you might miss it because the buildings back actually touches the freeway bridge. you'll probably see Pioneer tiling instead. its just after that.

anyway. this place was damn tasty.
we go in and irene warns us.
before we go into the area that we order, you must know what you want.
there's this woman that's rather large (actually imagine a person that could add no more fat to their body and still be able to walk) who will take no crap.
she has a very short fuse.
you place your order and side-step to the left.
much like seinfeld's soup nazi.
but just as in the show, it's damn worth it.

i got BBQ pork on a hot link.
hot link being a good hot dog. (usually i'm not that fond of hot dogs.)
but this shit was mighty tasty.
it was all about the BBQ sauce. they must be decendants of Stubb's or something.

so you get your meal, and then the owner comes around to greet everyone.
he's a very friendly black guy probably in his late 60's who goes around asking if you've "met the Man".

he's very pushy about meeting the man, but somehow his southern demeanor doesn't make it seem so agressive at all.
he kinda reminds me of that dad from the movie "Friday"...
"don't go in there for another 35, 45 minute,"
but with more of a southern talk.

he kept calling irene "baby girl" and grandpa "daddio".
irene's been there before, so she was safe when it came to "meeting the Man".
but grandpa (who despises anything spicy) and i weren't so lucky.

the owner comes out with his tiny skillet of deep-red BBQ sauce.
he goes, "how much you want?"
i say i'll take one.
so he gets his spoon that's in the skillet and dabs just the smallest amount on my hotdog bun.
he goes to g-pa, "you know him? well, take your fork and touch it on there."
so grandpa does it, and at first acts like its nothing.
THEN you see the shock, "JESUS CHRIST," he lets out.
so i think it's my turn then.

i take my fork and do the same, dab it.
i got some seeds in there with that dab. shit.
i take it to my tongue.
it tastes like that burnt chipotle taste, and then after a couple seconds it kicks in.
JESUS CHRIST is right!

i guess the secret ingredient are the habaneros.
awesome.
at the time i was about half way through my BBQ pork.
i had to quit there for about 10 minutes because every subsequent bite would only perturb the heat on my tongue.
neither water nor salty peanuts helped.
my eyes and nose started to water, and i think some got on the napkin that made my right eye sting.
even better.

once we had settled down a bit, he had us get up and put a pin into a map of the world from where we were born. he's got half a dozen maps up there with needles covering almost every damn inch of a lot of them.

next came the fun part, where you got to see other people come in and be subjected to the same treatment that we received.
g-pa was a good sport about it.
i guess he took it as something that spiced up his life a bit that wasn't tv.

on the ride home, my tongue had won the battle but my lips were still slightly burning.

i recommend this place to everyone.
it's a large helping of tasty meat, and you definitely get your money's worth.
check it out sometime.
go meet the man.

tony

there's this buff cambodian who lifts weights every day at the pool.
he comes in and puts 45's on either side of the bench press bar, making a total of 135 lbs.
on a good day he'll press 40 times in a row, on a bad only 30.
i've tried to match him before, but i could only make 27.

anyway. he asked me if i ever got robbed at fred's.
i tell him no, and he starts talking about how good people have it here in the U.S.
usually he doesn't talk like this, but i went along with it.
he said how people in cambodia flaunt their money, but they really don't have the safety that people here with money do. over there you'll get shanked at night in your home.

so. i then asked him about the Khmer Rouge, you know, the whole coup thing that took contol of the government headed by Pol Pot in the late 70's, and how he ended up killling about 2 million of his country men...

so tony goes, yeah. the government sent out people to your door.
they would ask you your name and profession.
if you said anything that was an educated job, like a teacher, doctor or lawyer, they come back to your door at a later time and ask you to step outside.
once you did that, they'd handcuff you and take you away to kill you.
good stuff.

but i guess tony was only 15 at the time so he didn't have any such profession.
he said they had him dig and dig ditches.
at first i thought these were like for mass graves or something, but he said that they were just irrigation systems and built up land to keep the water in for rice paddies. he said that cambodians usually did one rice crop a year, but the cambodian government was nice enough to demand that they do it 3 times a year.
if you had any complaints about the matter they'd take you away behind some bushes and beat you in the back of the head with a metal bar until you died.
this was because they didn't want to waste any bullets on you.

so i go, "jesus, this sounds like a jewish concentration camp!"

to which tony responds, "yeah, have you seen pictures of the prisioners from those camps, how skinny they were?"

nod.

"that was me."

holy shit...

he said that they were only fed a cup of rice a day, and that the cup was mostly water so it really wasn't that much rice.

so that led to the question of how he made it here, to the US.
he told me that he really wanted out of his country, but was only planning on going to thailand, one of their neighboring countries.
and around 1978 when the cambodians pleaded with vietnam to help them out, and they did for a monetary exchange, and Pol Pot fled to south america, that tony finally fled to the thailand border where there were some international red cross people. he hooked him and his friends/family up in a safe haven area for just over a year.
in that year he wrote to a fellow cambodian who had made it to the united states in 1978. he eventually helped him and his friends and family get flights over to the US by 1981.
tony's never been back.
he says in a few years he might go back, but he hasn't yet.

the only question that remained that i didn't get to ask. this was because other people came into the weight room and i'm sure he didn't want to share his life story with all of them.
but all i wanted to ask was, "why do you think the government was doing this to you?"
i don't think this is really a question that i can randomly just ask after the fact unless we get into it again.

last night was kinda weird because i talking to that guy who dug up the incan mummy and he unprovoked started talking about genocide with me. although he didn't mention cambodia, he talked about how the europeans just raped and spanked the rest of the world during their exploration days.
and he's right.
in diamond's book, of the list of 20 genocides around the world from 1492 - 1950, all the killers were from europe except a scurmish in india that had muslims and hindus killing each other.
it wasn't til the 1950's that any asian groups were commiting genocide, and all these incidents were politically influenced acts of violence.

last night was also kinda weird because i got two requests that i should see "The Killing Fields".
one by tony, because he was saying that that movie does a pretty good job of depicting what happened, and the other guy that said i should watch it is this guy that recently got himself a thai girlfriend and is going over to thailand for 10 days here pretty soon. he said i should watch "Swimming to Cambodia", and also "The Killing Fields" cuz it was written by the same guy.

i'm starting to realize how interesting cultural anthropology can be.
it always seemed like a fluke of a job cuz you just ask interesting questions to people who seem interesting because of their exotic culture.

i would be scared shitless to go to southeast asia, but this makes me again want to go to mexico or south america to see what kind of idiosyncracies are out there.

genocide

more diamond:
reading about genocide...
a simple mindset such as "us" and "them" makes a world of difference.
if we don't identify with "them" we could easily diassociate ourselves.

he's saying that this is how genocide is possible. if it's not "us" we don't care too much.
and if you're in no way involved, then you really don't give a shit.
diamond points out the irony of a media frenzy around apartheid in africa while differing, black ethnic groups in burundi were slaughtering each other and going unnoticed at the same time.

it seems that genocide is sometimes accepted because of principle differences that people can accept. (the reading makes genocide and war almost seem one in the same. i guess the only difference is that true genocide involves complete desmiation of an ethnic/religious identity.)
so something like religious differences and cultural clashes have sparked many-an attempted suicide from the crusades to native americans and aboriginies to the damned jews.

in the past these xenophobic differences were enough to spark a killfest in the name what is sane and right.
but later in history, and i guess sometimes even in the past, retaliation of some initial audacity was the best excuse to slaughter a given group.
things like the 200 dead at the alamo helped out the mexican war, and everyone knows what pearl harbor did for our involvement in WWII.
even Hitler used a fake attack by Polish soldiers on a German border post as an excuse to go buck on the jews. it seems that some grave attack is necessary to get public support. makes you wonder about the twin towers...
diamond (having written the book before the incident) says nothing of this, but could easily fit it into that given chapter.

but all in all what it all comes down to is land and resources. Britain and the Iberian peninsula was getting a mite too small for those Europeans and their high birth rate, so killing native americans and aboriginies let them expand and was justified by the fact that those people weren't using the land to its full potential.

it seems like some people just get picked on. maybe because jews are so steadfast, but they were killed by Christians as scapegoats for the 14th century bubonic plague, in the early 20th by Russians for political reasons, by Ukrainians after WWI as scapegoats for the Bolshevist threat, by Nazis in WWII for holding the blame of Germany's defeat in WWI.
again religious beliefs give an underlying reasons for attempted genocide.
is that maybe because the jews can't be completely controlled? therefore they must be extreminated.

where was i going with this? oh. i guess that a christian president who wholly supports the morals of that religion can easily use its being to protect his nation from those of rival religions with the use of war. its an easy way to promote the right-wing mentality of increased resource aquisition and unchecked use.

it would seem that this over-played tactic would be easily visible to the public, but alas, too many are uneducated or brain-washed by whatever religion got ahold of them.
cuz really, what does religion do for you?
it allows you to turn off your brain and have somebody else tell you how you should live and what you should believe in.
the funny thing is that they're all probably fundamentally the same but just with some additional traditions and ceremonies that are apparently worth dying for.
just because somebody prays to your same god 5 times a day religiously doesn't mean they're plotting your country's demise.
yeah, maybe some fanatic group is out there, but not to the extent that an army needs to invade that land to search it out.
what ever happened to regan's star wars?
couldn't we focus a bit more on home before we go out and fuck with everyone else?
i could go on, but i'm starting to get the feeling that its either something you already know or incoherent babbling.

jewnied

got denied from texas A&M today.
some bullshit about not having an appropriate advisor.

just two more 'NOs' til i have to really figure out plan B.
i just know that i don't want two shitty jobs forever.

i'll try to find something around here in my field or fly my ass to somewhere spanish-speaking for a while and bum.

i guess i could always apply again for next, next year.
good times.

gold!

i talked to a guy at the pool today who runs this company.
it was rather interesting.
many people are running illegal mines that introduce shitloads of mercury into the environment to extract gold flakes from riverbeds of the last epic.
the mercury amalgamates the gold making it easier to extract, but leaves the land polluted and results in birth defects in the native peoples.

dan, the guy i was talking to, says that there are 5 groups involved. 4 are native americans, and the 5th is a group that was once a bunch of slaves that revolted and started their own colony in the 17th century.

suriname was once called dutch guiana, therefore, the people speak a version of dutch that dan is trying to learn. he's also working on the creole that was created by the slaves. i guess its their native language mixed with a bit of dutch.
Maroon, i guess these people are called.

so his job is to get necessary equipment to these people so they can test their waters and soil for high levels of pollutants, and then manners in which they can resolve the problem.
his wife is into sociology and talks to the natives on their whole perspective on the pollution and the westernized world going on around them.
i wish they needed help, but i'm sure a company run by just the two of them wouldn't have funding for a tag-along.

however, i did tell the guy about my interests.
he told me about a friend of his doing archaeology on St. Kitts.
apparently this used to be a large harbor for most every ship coming into the caribbean. they'd all pit-stop here before heading off to their final destination.
that guy is working on the original settlement on the island.
sounds interesting.
i bet there'd be a shitload of shipwrecks around that island.
another something to look into in case school doesn't exactly work out...

genocide

further reading in my chimp book gives an account of diamond's take on genocide.
apparently in the mid-1600s, tasmania was found by europeans.
by the mid-1800s, all native inhabitants were dead.
200 years to kill 50,000 years of however-many generations of people isolated from the rest of the world.

i guess the same can be said about soon-to-be-extinct animal species.
it just sux to realize that a culture that formed for that long could be lost that quickly without study or any written record of its idiosyncrasies.

diamond also made a genocide list of before the european expansion, from that point in time until 1900, then 1900-1950, and finally 1950-1990.
color and religion seem to spawn a lot of conflict, but i guess it still all comes down to control of land or control of people on your land.
native americans, africans, and aboriginies got their asses kicked for centuries.
jews too, were always getting raped.
it seems that temperate environments keep having more and more lighter-skinned people killing those with dark skins who inhabit that environment.
the russians seemed to have a lot of genocidal tendencies.
but it seemed to be more to control the people than for racial hatred.
well... sometimes.

its also funny how in one decade, the Tutsi are getting killed by the Hutu of Rwanda, and in the next decade, the 1970s, the Burundian Tutsis are now doing the killing on the Hutu.
the same goes for the Croatians and Serbs.

a little bit of power shift and the killed has no remorse in killing the killer.
but i guess that's retaliation for ya.
when there's only so much land in the world, and political boundaries to make matters worse, something's gotta go....

incredible

connie update:
i got a new ball from fred's yesterday and brought it to the pool today.
connie found it and asked who's ball it was.
i told her i bought it and she can play with it.
then she goes, "Harry Potter," thinking that was what was on the ball.
i go, "no," and take the ball from her to show her the words on the ball.
"the Incredibles"

"what does that say?" i ask.
she gives an akward giggle and walks away.
i can't tell what's up with this girl.

but she did pick the new ball to play with today.
usually of the 5 balls, she only likes the red one with 3 bears driving a car, even though there's a similar one with a green dragon.
i think she just likes red.

but picking the new ball, maybe she likes the red again, or she knows that the turgid one flies further.
she was getting all excited on the distance she got today.

so yeah, i can't tell what her deal is.
is she slow? or does she just need some english lessons?

paid full

just got an email from FSU saying that they're retards and did actually get the $30 they were pressing me for last week.

shit. i'll for sure hear from U of O in a week.
not sure about those other two, but probably fairly soon =/

kickbol

i've got this little 7 year-old taiwanese girl that comes to the pool almost everyday. her name is Connie.
and everyday she runs up to me and yells, "KICKBOL!"

so i play kickball with her.
i do mostly all the pitching, but whenever i catch her kick i get a few at-bats.

however, if she gets tired of my kicking, she'll just randomly yell "THREE OUTS!" after one of my kicks, and i'll go back to pitching.

so usually i try to get in one or two good kicks, then the rest i try to lob to her so she can catch them and she can be up again.

the couple times i do get up, i kick hard.
she's got this cute laugh that she does everytime i kick it hard.
so i get my jollies from seeing connie's excitement.

but yesterday after a pitch from her, i smack the crap out of this ball and it did a B-line for her face.
*SMACK*
she got beaned hardcore.

but it was the funniest fucking shit.
she didn't even flinch. this ball bounced right off her nose and she didn't even bat an eye.
i was all concerned, running over to her to see if she was ok.
but she just nonchalantly goes, "i'm alright."

maybe this doesn't sound as funny as it is to me, so maybe you should know the background on this kid.

when i first started working there, before kickball days, she'd look up at me and go, "how many close?"

how many close.... what the fuck does that mean?
i took it to mean how many hours/much time until closing.
so i'd always answer with the appropriate amount of time.

the other thing she would ask was, "where's Brad?"
i asked around. he was an old lifeguard that used to make her swim laps.
so i would tell Connie, "Brad doesn't work here anymore."
to which she'd reply, "Brad is at home?"
"yeah, sure Connie, Brad's at home."

so i asked around about this girl, and i once heard that she was autistic.
i thought this for a long while, until about a month or two ago (i've worked there a year now) when connie started acting coherent and appropriately answering questions instead of asking for Brad or "how many close".

so, for being 7, she doesn't seem to be all there, but as time goes on, she seems to have more and more of a brain.
so maybe now you can see why the ball ricocheting off her head without a response is so funny to me: i can't figure this girl out.
is there something wrong with her, is/was she just shy, or is she just better at speaking taiwanese than she is speaking english?
cuz the other kids her age, you can level with them, tell them what they can and can't do. Connie didn't have this comprehension for the longest time, but i think i'm finally starting to get through to her.

before i would tell her we couldn't play kickball because there were too many people on the pooldeck that could get hit. she'd just stare up at me and present the ball like she had no idea what i was saying. but now she'll just grab a ball and run upstairs to play with herself until the people leave.

i'm still just really curious as to why this major step forward in comprehension skills has only presented themselves within the last couple of months.
maybe before she was playing dumb to get her way?

maybe i'll never know...

one-armed

when i get bored, i run into the weight room, jump and fly at the bar hanging from the ceiling and do some pull-ups.

i was doing some today where my grip was on either side of the bar (so my knuckles were facing in opposite directions).
clement, my coworker asked if i was doing one-armed pull-ups.

i told him i wasn't. but he got me curious, so i tried.
no luck the first time, but the second time i grabbed my right wrist with my left hand, and up i went.

it's something i've wanted to do since i watched david morrison do it in high school.
the weird part is that it seemed like most of the power came from the arm gripping the wrist rather than the one grabbing the metal bar.

jobs

i need to figure out whether the fuck i'm going to school or not.
then i can get off my ass and find a single job that i like.

i mean, i have a fucking degree. yeah its only a piece of paper, but it should at least enable me to do better than i'm doing right now.

less than two weeks to go...

tards

god-fucking-dammit.
why am i so retarded?
it's my one day off and both of my bosses called asking me to work.
i said no to the fred's but was too weak when it came to the pool.
i'd said no the last two weekends she'd wanted me to work.

so now this week i work 48 hrs. with no day off.
fucking retarded!

speaking of retarded.
arturo gave that retarded girl my phone # (you know, the one who wrote me that note i linked to).
so i got a couple calls from her.
great. just another hassle in life i don't want to deal with.
thank you arturo.
if you didn't live in your van i'd give her YOUR phone number.

bitter.
fucking tards.

geography

an interesting point that diamond made was about geographic placement of people that resulted in technological advances.
he argues it wasn't really any brilliant people that pushed agriculture and technology, but just the luck of the inhabitants' environment.

wild grains of the middle east were much more easy to domesticate because of the plant's original structure which could be easily harvested.

corn, domesticated in the americas, needed a few mutations from its wild predecessor until it was viable for mass production.

diffusion of the domesticates was easier in the Old World becuase fo the larger land area in the latitudes of the plant's origin, rather than the north/south attempt to spread corn into different climate zones, traversing tropical forests and deserts.

domesticated animals were also highly important to obtaining power.
apparently animals that are herd animals and not prone to the "flight" response make the best domesticate.

animals like deer have too much of a flight response to have been domesticated.
oddly, North America lacks too many of these possible domesticates.
the only domesticate really created in the New World was the guinea pig, used for food.

therefore use of horses, mules, and oxen were obvious advances for the use of transporting, beasts of burden, and for agricultural purposes.
horses are good as a warring animal and was probably the major factor in Europe's conquering of the New World.

Ironically, the horse's antecessors were originally from the New World. not until during one of them glacial times did they spread to the old world. then around 12 - 10 thousand years ago they were killed or died off.
diamond gives the idea of an entirely different outcome of the conquistador's infiltration into the New World, if these animals hadn't gone extinct.

luck of the draw in geography and biota gave power over others in use of that environment and technology to come out of its use.

quality of life

its crazy to think that some of the same pressures have been plaguing man for thousands of years.
maybe not on the same level, but nonetheless similar pressures on the decision of how to live life.

it seems that it always comes down to two choices:
resource and population maintenance or a push for increased population and unchecked use of resources.

hunter-gatherers used to live where resources were used, left to replenish, and once again returned to in due time. to keep populations that can't be supported in check, infanticide was inacted.

then came agriculture that allowed for more densely packed populations. many more people may be able to survive, but at the cost of nutrition. a single staple crop can't deliver the necessary ingredients for a healthy diet.

so populations boomed as agriculture spread, but quality of life became low.

this mentality of a larger population used to mean power. maybe, to an extent, it still can. if you have 500 healthy men, living off the land, they can still be easily overpowered by 5000 men with a meager food/nutrient allotment.

so with higher populations of people with mediocre lifestyles, the smaller populations with a higher quality of life who were living off the land succumbed, or were forced to, or were killed by those who were able to support the most life.

more resources are consumed and more quickly depleted, and you're left with very unhappy people. agriculture also allows for someone to control surplus and land. few happy people, more unhappy people.

i could go so many ways with this, but i can't decide.
it's just weird to realize that in a dumbed-down form, politics of today still wrestle with the same problems of millenia past:

should we control the population?
should and how could we control resource use?
how will quality of life fare for the majority of the population?

drunk

drunk.
what the fuck did you say?
for some reason i can't understand you...

photos

damn. i need to remember to carry my camera around with me.
the last couple of days i coulda had some good pictures.

there could have been nice shots of a sunny day at the lake at st. ed's.
then i went to snoqualmie falls yesterday. it was a bit rainy, but still beautiful.
surprisingly there was a lot of water gushing out of it, but i'm afraid for the summer.
then today i went to bothell, down by the slough area at downtown.
there's a bunch of chickens, ducks, canada geese, and even guinea fowl.

maybe if i got one of them phone camera thingys i'd always have it on hand...

drugs are bad

see, i was ready to be blown away, or at least put deeper in thought from diamond's chapter on "Why Do We Smoke, Drink, and Use Dangerous Drugs," but i was actually kinda dissappointed.
i'll get to that in a second, but i think i will first throw out a couple of funny tidbits from the language section.

diamond did some fieldstudy in Papua New Guinea, where he met with some natives. damn near each tribe (if not all) have their own language that varies from the next tribe. so when the europeans came in their conquest of the world, a common language, lingua franca, was needed to help people communicate when plantations were built and whiteys wanted to throw out some orders.
so this pidgin was formed, that later became a creole and helped all native tribes communicate (maybe that's why it became a creole rather than remaining just pidgin, it was useful in more than just on the job, but with interactions between other peoples).

* Neo-Melanesian is the new language created in the 1800s by european and native interactions. if i remember correctly its roughly 80% english mixed with a few words from the natives and other outlying languages that got brought in to the interaction around Southeast Asia.

here was an advertisement that diamond saw while in New Guinea using Neo-Melanesian:

"Kam insait long stua bilong milpela--stua bilong salim olgeta samting--mipela i-ken helpim yu long kisim wanem samting yu laikim bikpela na liklik long gutpela prais. I-gat gutpela kain kago long baiim na i-gat stap long helpim yu na lukautim yu long taim yu kam insait long dispela stua."

here's the hints diamond gave.
F's are hard for Papuans to say, so they changed them to P's. so stap is staff and pela is fellow. pela is added to monosyllabic adjectives so, gutpela is actually just good, and bikpela is simply big.

here's the translation, you can see that some of it you may have actually caught:

"Come into our store--a store for selling everything--we can help you get whatever you want, big and small, at a good price. There are good types of goods for sale, and staff to help you and look after you when you visit the store."

now the silly part.
diamond explains how ages of women are denoted in this language.

banis bilong susu means bra in Neo-melanesian.
banis is fence, since Papuans do do F's well, and have troubles with double consonants like nc, it got a little modified.
Susu is Maylay for milk, or breast.
so the term above means a fence to keep the breast in.

for denoting women's age, it goes something like this:
i no gat susu bilong em -- prepubertal girl
susu i sanap [stand up] --adolescent girl
susu i pundaun pinis [fall down finish] -- aging woman

ha! diamond also talks about primates and monkeys having some sort of communication skills. chimps and gorillas with their sign-language or pointing to objects on a screen that will talk for them.
he also mentions vervet monkeys who have different "calls" to distinguish between approaching predators. one for an eagle/hawk where all the monkeys will then hide under a bush or in a tree and look upward, one for a lion/leopard where they will climb up a tree and survey the scene from there, and finally one for a snake where the monkeys will stand up to look around or be cautious of what is around them if they are near tall vegetation.

from this he ventures to say that our "Great Leap Forward" as he dubs it, where human cultural development around 40 thousand years ago began to flourish was from the aquisition of language, where neandertals did not have this ability and kept their universal tool kit that didn't change much over their existence and probably led to their eventual demise (diamond thinks there was no hybridization between neandertals and modern humans, which is the current dominant theory).

OH!
so with that aside we can move onto drinking and drugs!
actually, you might be kinda dissappointed, like i told you i was.
this too needs a backstory.

diamond starts out by giving examples of animals with odd features: birds of paradise with 3 foot-long tail feathers that have helped their adaptability in no way other than to allure females (a study was done where some dude cut the tail feathers off birds with those 3 foot-longers and glued them to other stubby birds of the same species. the stubbys then got the ladies, whereas the once-hung birds were no longer choice material).

diamond also comments on gazelle who exhibit "stotting". which means they prance and jump as high as they can when in sight and possible reach of their predators, namely lions.

diamond concludes that in order to attract women, to let them know that their genes are of superior quality, they need to flaunt the fact that they have a handicap. so birds with their unruly, longass feathers are saying that they're still pimps even though they gotta drag around this weight that may inhibit their maneuverability.
with the gazelles, their jumping is to prove that they aren't just full of shit. diamond's example was that fast gazelles could show they're quick by stamping at the ground like a bull, but then other slower gazelles could easily pick this up and ward off lions, who may or may not eventually figure out the bluff. stotting says that they are the true shit.

what does this have to do with us? and drugs and alcohol nonetheless?
well diamond believes that we consume and inhale to impress the ladies.
he takes adds for hard A, with a romantic setting and a man drinking his martini looking like he's about to get his.

diamond says that from the outside world, that would seem like a retarded way to get people to buy the alcohol. something that impairs your abilities and might make you temporarily impotent...
he thinks that this backward-ass thinking is just what is the allure.
that women want to see the fact that men can intake all these drugs and alcohol and still be able to function. kinda a macho thing.

as far as i can gather, this was his reasoning. personally, i don't drink for the ladies, i drink for me. it inhibits my restraint. it allows me to get more personal.
something i may have never said or done when sober now might 'slip' out.

because seriously. who ever wanted a drunkard or crackhead? only other drunkards and crackhead or people with low self esteem.
i enjoy his theory on the handicapped idea: where being able to have a handicap and still be able to survive with the best of them will draw the ladies.
but i just don't see how this works with drugs and liquor.

drive

decided to do something with my days off.
i have two in a row! first time since xmas, i believe.
so i got up this morning, thanks to sarah, our cat.

i grabbed some blimpie's and went on out to kenmore park.
i'd never been there before. its right at the top of the lake where it seems like one of its major water sources are.
so i romped around near the water's edge and almost immediately came upon private property.
small-ass park. fuck that.
i bolted.
headed on over to st. edward's park.

here, they now expect you to pay for parking, since it's a state park and all...
i refused and luckily got away unscathed. i parked in the spot where there used to be squash courts. i guess they figured the sport would never catch on enough for those things to be useful. so they turned it into that parking lot.
there was also a new playground area which wasn't there since the last time i had been there in high school.

anyway. so i made my way down to the lake, which means you have to cut down through a deep ravine. instead of finding a trailhead, i decided to bushwhack my way down.
yeah. i know, bad eagle scout. but sometimes you just gotta trailblaze.
but wearing shorts and bushwhacking wasn't the best idea.
when getting down into the bottom of the ravine where there a bit more water, there's a crapload of stinging nettles.
so now, even 5 hours later, my shins are still stinging.

but i think i remember reading a while ago a way to alleviate the stinging.
the secret was to rub the spores from the underside of a fern frond on the irritated area and, voila, cured!
which is kinda ironic, cuz really, there were as many, if not more ferns down in that ravine as the nettles.
this irritation could have been easily remedied.
whatever.

so i came back, took a shower and took g-pa out for a ride. well. actually he drove and i just helped navigate if he got lost.
we ended up doing a fat loop. we started from our house, hit up 100th to downtown kirkland, cut over to overlake, went up through bridle trails, up more through redmond and woodinville, cut back over at bothell and kenmore, and ended up back on 100th and back to our house.
a fatty loop.

next on the agenda for the "weekend" is laundry. then homemade dinner compliments of mom!
after that i have nothing.
which means tomorrow is free.

maybe when i get bored i'll post about my book.
diamond got off the sexual topic and is now focusing more on language and art and how it differs from other animals who show some signs of it.

he also talks of drugs and alcohol and why people choose to use them.
i'm not quite sure i agree with his theory.
i'll go over it later.
then you can decide if you agree with me or not.

scuba

oh.
i tried out my scuba gear today at my pool after hours.
everything seems to be working fine.
there were some quirks, but i think i can easily fix them.
so now that i've done the trial run, i need to get my ass out in some real water.

sucks that i don't have a partner, but i think i can find one if i look around.
they do buddy lists at both the dive shops that i've been to.
they also have group dives.
one has tuesday and wednesday nights, and the other is open to change.
my ass needs to dive.

adam

worked both jobs today.
no big deal...
just under 9 hrs of work.
nothing too bad, although it was the first time in about 2 weeks where i did nothing but cashier at fred's.
for a while there i was pushing carts a lot, which i'd rather be doing.

but anyway. while cashiering today, i had a customer that looked vaguely familiar.
he seemed rather chatty and friendly. on my second glance i figured out who he was.
anyone remember adam? jason's friend?
well, it was him, but about 30 lbs heavier than i remembered him, hence the lapse in immediate recognition.

you don't remember adam?
well maybe this will help...

we were having a party at our old finn hill house.
this guy comes up behind me and starts giving me a shoulder massage.
um. NO THANK YOU!
it freaked the fuck outta me.
i'd never been hit on by a guy before.
i was running around to everyone asking them to hide me from him.
they all told me to put on a sweatshirt so he would no longer recognize me.
it may not have fooled him, but it gave my drunk ass the confidence to walk around amongst people again.
i don't really remember what happened to adam after that incident,
but i do remember passing out on aaron's bed ass up.
then when he went to pass out he rolled me onto the floor.
i woke up with an assortment of things under me.
i vividly remember a wooden hanger and a roll of paper towels.

since then i had seen adam once when i worked at blimpies, and a second time when i worked at that fred meyer the first time.
he came through my line with his mom.
there were balloons at the checkstands to catch the children's eyes.
adam sees one and goes, "oh mommy! can i get a tweety!?" all girly-like.
(he's older than me, and i was 19ish at the time)

i forgot about that ass pirate til today.
irene knew exactly who he was, said he was a creep and has been trying to get a job at our fred meyer for sometime.
i remember he used to work at safeway, i guess he's staying in the business.

i don't hate gay guys. i just hate it when they hit on me.
that was the first time i recognized it, and it hasn't been the last.
motherfuckers. (dadhumpers, whatever.)

wandering eye

oh! which reminds me.
my faith in those of the faith who proclaim monogamy to be the virtuous and unwavering way to live has been crushed just tonight.

the guy who gave me a jesus pamphlet over xmas and is always spouting jesus-ness today told me about his trip to hawaii.

the main goal of the trip was to spread god's word, but of course they also had some free time.
he was explaining what a hard time he was having there since he's lost a lot of weight.
ya know, with all the ladies looking his way...
although i know he wouldn't ever do anything to disrupt his 40+ years of marriage,
it just goes to show that even the most pious man i know has a wandering eye...

EMS

my sister blogged about adulterous husbands, and unruly brats.
i'll field the easier one first.
i always say there's nothing that a good kick to the head can't cure, but in all sincerity, a little firm discipline in a child's life can go a long way.

now i'm still toiling with the question whether good kids are inherently that way or made, the whole nature vs. nurture concept. i think it may be both, but moreso the latter.
my job allows me to deal with people and their wonderful offspring almost on a daily basis. and you see the spectrum. kids that cry over denied candy, kids that cry over denied candy until that candy is given to them, and kids that ask for candy and are either denied or rewarded.

i think how the parent reacts to the child is very important. too many parents get walked on because they either choose to spoil the child or they're tired of having to deal with a brat that they created.

i think the worst example is when a parent asks a child not to do something (i.e. pick up candy from the checkstand) the parent will, in a calm voice tell the child that it's wrong. two seconds later, the kid is back with the candy. the mom tells the kid, 'no', in that sheepish voice. the kid goes back for round three, and the mom's tired of dealing with the kid, so it gets some candy.

at least be firm with the kid. don't let it get away with whatever it wants. you're just creating a person that won't interact well when it gets out into the real world. if parents weren't such dipshits, there wouldn't be so many assholes out there.
although i do have to say that there are a number of well-mannered children that will go through a line and cause no harm. its just the evil ones that stand out. beat the fuck outta that kid once and they'll remember what's up...
or at least that's what i feel like doing.
but the thing is if you start off well from the beginning, you won't have to lay a hand on the kid.

as for infidelity, diamond argues that it's human nature.
i may have already blogged about it, but he argues that the slight size difference between males and females hints at a species that are fairly monogamous but are somewhat also into extramarital activities.
primates like gibbons who show no sexual dimorphism are wholly monogamous.
but its also something they do because of their social lifestyle. to optimally gather resources to live, gibbons live only in pairs and ward off any other gibbons coming into their territory.

again, i think i've mentioned how gorrillas and orangutans males are much larger than their counterparts and they practice a harem-like lifestyle.
there's enough resources for the male and a couple females to survive together.

chimpanzees are slightly sexually dimorphic and are a social species, so they compulsively have sex with anyone in their troop.
but for some reason, humans have developed this need (except if doing it for sport) to have sex in private rather than out in the open and socially like chimps. females seem to be more paranoid about this than males. maybe its to keep some sort of anonymity of the father if a baby is to come along.

human females require the male to be around for resources (we're talking in evolutionary stages) so marriage is necessary to rear a child. but as humans are social animals, males encounter other females, and since they have no real necessary ties to the female, if she can't keep him around 24/7, then the male will get out and get it on with other women who hopefully have someone to care for the child at home.
its just a sneaky game to get your DNA out there without any of the responsibility.

i think i mentioned before how certain seabirds practice these same activities.
they have their 'monogamous' partner, but while she's away from the nest feeding, he goes out and fertilizes other females who are still at their nest.
altruism is nowhere to be found.
its all about passing on of one's own genes.

however, i am kinda confused by the number of women who declare that they aren't going to have children. maybe its just because they haven't yet reached the point of stability that they were hoping for when they would want to have a child.
or they're just selfish and don't want to go through 9 months of burden and some hours of pain.
gay people kinda defy my logic too. but i'm sure someone out there has an acceptable theory.

sorry. i'm bored. nothing better to do at night but blog.
i guess i could read more...

kung fu

sorry. your comments got erased.
the double post gave me some trouble and ended up having me erase both of them.

but just to clarify, as my sister inquired, i do kung fu.
i just finished my second set tonight.
arturo learned under this guy: sifu lam.
he's down in sunnyvale, CA. near san fransisco/san jose.

looking at the videos he sells, the two forms i just learned are those two at the top: arrow hand and lau gar.
the next one, kung gee fook fu kuen, is 300 moves.
i don't know if i'm looking forward to that one.
i kinda want to learn monkey staff or tiger and crane.

i've read his book, but it was before i knew what i was doing.
so another go through my be good.
if any of you went to lea's cabin when i was reading it, you should remember about the guy who was attacked by a dog.
when the dog leapt for the guy, he kicked it in nuts, so hard that the shot killed it.
kung fu is rad.

sex

can i first say that it was so nice to have a day off where i didn't even have to go to kung fu.
i did whatever i wanted, it was awesome!
first time since valentines, i think.

anyway.leanora saw the title of one of my chapters and wanted a report on it.
its titled: "How We Pick Our Mates and Sex Partners"
(remember how he's all about extramarital sex, that's why he includes both).

so i'll try to keep this short so that more people actually read it.
however, i think that what leanora was expecting to get out of it isn't exactly what she had in mind...
diamond goes to say that people tend to choose 90% of the time, people who share their own religious beliefs, ethnicity, social/financial status, etc.
probably just due to the fact that those are the people you fraternize with the most.
when it comes to looks/physical appearance, diamond came to the conclusion that people look for a mate who resembles the people that you grew up with, be it mom, dad, sister, brother, foster family, whatever.
just people that you knew and associated with on a fairly regular basis before the age of seven.
BUT!
this doesn't mean that you want to shack up with your mom or dad like oedipus or electra.
there is some sort of inherent incest-phobia that dwells inside most of us.(sorry ozarks).
its something that puts you off from the people you grew up with, that 6 year span previously mentioned.
in something called a kibbutzim, which seemed to be explained to be something like an jewish orphanage or boarding school, someone tracked 2,769 marriages from the co-ed kids that came from that place.
with all that interaction, where these kids grow from birth til young adulthood, only 13 marriages were with kids within that kibbutzim, and of those thirteen, all were from kids who arrived there after the age of 6.

so what about this incest thing?
it seems that when studies were done on quails, who knew none of their relatives, when placed with their 1st cousin and sister, the male quail picked the cousin. when placed with their 1st and third cousin, the quail again picked the 1st cousin. seems people pick those who look like them.
but if you're wondering about inter racial marriages, it seems that like that kibbutzim, who you grow up with affects who you find attractive, so if an asian child is reared in a predominantly white neighborhood, they'll be more likely to go for white guys.

but overall i think physical similarities is the drawing factor.
those random things you probably don't even think about...
diamond kept mentioning earlobe length, middle finger length, and spacing of the eyes.
i guess, he says that you're looking for is something like mom or dad, but just in a different person.
kinda weird. but think about your "type".
does it resemble anyone you grew up with?
(as gruesome as it may be to try)

dive shop

i went out to the 5th dimension shop in issaquah today.
they seem to be more specialized than the lighthouse shop i frequent.
5th dimension has a crapload of dry suits, and other gear that like line and double tanks and rebreathers.

they seem to have more cash.
i talked to one of the guys for a bit who is a rep of SCRET. he gave me some flyers and said i could join up with them after i go through two classes.
the flyer didn't have the price. i'm sure they're probably as much as lighthouse (around $125 - $150 each).

i talked to another guy who worked there who said to just keep an eye out on the emails that i'm already getting from them.
they do sport dives that newbs can go on.
now i just have to wait...

he says they go to alki a lot.
also edmonds, the san juans, and hood canal.
i need a job that'll give me weekends off so i can join them on all their trips!
april is coming soon...

balls

as you may know, i'm reading Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee. so the shitty pictures that i show to you are from his book, just so you know
(his pictures aren't shitty, the quality of me taking them is).

before i mentioned that i knew or recognized everything Diamond was telling me.
now he's getting sexual, and it's something my professor lightly touched, mostly becuase he went over physical facts (other than apparent sexual dimorphism in bone structure, you can't conclude much of ancient man's organs/extremities that are bone-less).

so diamond goes to compare penis sizes of man's closely-related primate cousins. and i thought you might be interested.
he gives this picture (which i apologize for again, but i'll explain it).
it compares penis and ball size of chimps, man, orangutans, and gorilla (in that order). and at the top you can see the size of the woman that it's getting compared to.

without further ado.
we'll start with general body size.
male chimps are roughly the same as the female, male men are slightly larger, orangutans and gorillas dwarf their female counterparts.

but that's about all they got going for them.
check out the pecker size.
erect gorillas are 1.25", orangutans are 1.5", chimps are 3", and men lord over all other primates with an average of 5".
this selection for a gynormous unit baffles scientists since it's not really necessary, as gorillas get the job done with their nub.
and as the sight of the penis isn't really what turns a woman on, one explanation is just that it's just a display of dominance and status over other men, and it's not huge-being isn't really directed toward women.
who knows...

balls, nuts, berries.
just like their peters, gorillas and orangutans hold their head in shame.
their ball weight is just under 1.5 ounces, at their 450 lbs, that's kinda weak.
men's nuts weigh 1.5 ounces at half that body weight.
but here comes the big-swinger. chimps ball up at a hefty 4 ounces for a 100 lb. body.
damn their fat sack!

reasons:
gorillas and orangutans live in harems. males have something like 4 women living with them (poor bastards), so they have it easy when it comes to sex, they just poke em when they're ready. now and then they have to scare away the competition. but even with all the women, the male only gets his a few times a year.

man nuts are medium sized cuz, well, hopefully we do it more than a few times a year.

these big-ballin' chimps need the lead weights to gain reproductive success because they're so promiscuous. it's almost literally a constant orgy for these guys. they hop around from female to female as they present themselves in heat.
so with these guys, more sperm means more potency in assuring that one of the male's baby swimmers would fertilize the egg.

so how much fun do we primates have?
well. the average male coitus lasts 4 minutes.
gorillas and their sorry malehood last about as long as they are long, 1 minute.
chimps, who are constantly bumping uglies need to do so often to get their moment of zen that only lasts 7 seconds.
somehow the orangutan comes out on top (or bottom, or sideways). these guys seem to have snuck a peek at the kama sutra and have been known to do all the positions listed above as well as doing it while swinging in the trees.
their happy time last a quarter of an hour, 15 minutes. maybe its just to much work and distraction with all that swinging.
or maybe a 1.5 inch dong just takes a while to warm up to...

being fair, and moving on to females and their sexual peculiarities, we gots another picture.
this time female body size compared to males. of course it's the inverse as previously written.
but what we got for these females is the breast size.
as you can even see in this shitty picture, women funbags are an impressive feature compared to any other primate.
what the deal here may be that evolution in women has brought women to the point where they seem to be in constant estrus (availability to be fertilized).

so this confuses the fuck out of men, making them want to do it all the time.
the other primates show their availability with colors or puffiness, so sex is usually confined to this period of time.
the possible advantage for women to conseal their fertile period may be to keep the male around for extended periods of time.
men can't wander off and do their own thing and come back at the point where their woman goes into heat and have sex and fend off other possible competeing males for that short period.
this ambiguity also keeps the man around to insure his paternity. who would want to care for a kid that your rival fathered? fuck that!
i'm gunna look after my own genes.

so since a man was necessary in the rearing of human babies for food and other such commodities, this hidden ovulation kept men around much more.
clever girls...
so where other primates have almost a sure thing when it comes to fertilization of a female, men only have a 28% chance of conception, so they have to keep an eye out.
that makes for more fidelity in men, but a better chance for women to be promiscuous.
a test done in the 1940's where blood tests of babies, their mothers and fathers showed that 5 - 30% of the children born were "adulterously conceived".
sucks to be you, dad.
(this stat says nothing of male infidelity, other than the fact that some of that 5 - 30% may have been also married. male infidelity is probably more common than female infidelity just from the fact that males have the ability to be totally detached from the whole pregnancy process, leaving the seed and moving on.

this simple fact let one moroccan man sire 888 kids, while the record for one woman with the most kids passing through her vagina was a measly 69 kids.
(it was some russian woman who had 23 sets of triplets.

so this reading really puts a spin on my thoughts. diamond believes that extramarital sex is something that we homo sapiens have evolved to use behaviorally. whereas gibbons (another primate) are wholly monogamous, humans seem to yearn for what you have at home and a little more.
he says we are most closely related behaviorally to certain storks, where the males tend the nest while the female is out feeding. but while she's gone, he also runs around to nearby nests and inseminates the female before she's done laying all her eggs.

so how can i not get in trouble here with what i want to say?
humans have come up with this concept of morality... be monogamous.
but evolutionarily we're prone to spread the love in more than one place.
so is morality just a way of keeping life simplistic?
having more than one mate would really make for a crazy soap opera with people of such advanced cognitive abilities.
i don't know how the mormons did it, but it seems to have worked (in the sense of evolutionarily passing on one's genes). well. actually it seems like a bell curve.
a man with one spouse would have an average of 7 kids.
a man with two spice (spouses?) would have roughly 16 kids.
a man with three women would have 20 kids.
maybe the reason the amount of children falls from two to three mates is simply because a man can only have so much money, so he can't afford to have more than 20 or so kids.

well. that's my rant for this book so far.
any questions?

black box

my dad worked for the flight department in cingular wireless (formerly AT&T wireless). they're getting dismantled cuz the CEO thinks too much wasted money goes into that sector even though his ass flies to Atlanta and back all the time.
so it's a free-for-all over there. anything that's not bolted down is up-for-grabs.
we now have this 6'x10' AT&T wireless rug that sits downstairs in the workout room. just tonight he acquired a crapload of those little party-sized alcohols.
skyy vodka and jose cuervo. other random kitchen shit: a knife set, toaster oven. many movies, clothes hangers, storage bins. food, toiletries, and other little shit.
but this was the weird thing.
i come home and this is sitting infront of the entrance to my room.
the flight recorder to one of the jets. as you can see, its not black, like they always say. maybe to find it easier after a crash? but its also probably equipped with GPS.
hopefully it's turned off.
here's the top view, in case you were interested.

who the hell knows what i'm going to do with it.
i always needed an insanely large paper weight.
maybe i can attempt to take it apart,
even though it says not to....
it probably weighs about 50 lbs.
i wonder what's inside.

5th

yeah. i think i need to get in with this 5th dimension diving shop.
i get emails from them and it seems that they're in cahoots with SCRET.
the diving group that surveys and protects different shipwrecks and other cultural sites.
on march 26th they're going out and laying some line for some reason or another.
it would be good to get in on something like that.
then i might actually know what they do it for!

poor emma

got this note at the pool today from a girl who has a crush on me.
she's a little underage. tell me what you think.
the girl's 15. underage, so i gots to deny.
breaking hearts aint easy.

dna

oh yeah. and the biggest thing about diamond that bugged was that he tells people without hesitation that the mutation rate for DNA is like a set clock, that it consistently changed at a set pace over time.
whereas this is helpful in theory, it doesn't seem to be the case.
mutation is random, and although mutations when DNA is transcribed are bound to happen now and then, there is no set pattern to it.
beside regular crossing over and all that shit, environment seems to have a lot to do with mutation. if environmental conditions are stagnant, mutations may occur, but they may not really affect the animal, and if it does in any inhibitory manner, natural selection will most likely weed it out.

but maybe he's just talking about DNA fuck-ups. like i mentioned before. transcribing accidents. i wonder if there is a set pattern for that.
with something at work you don't seem to fuck up on it 3 times a day everyday, do you? doubtful. maybe one here, five there. does it average out to something though? but with something so random its hard to gauge. that's kind why it seems like there is no 'mutation clock'.

sorry. i tried to keep that short.

book

my book is good.
diamond (the author) sometimes throws shit out as true fact when its actually still controversial issues. i guess that's my beef with him.
archaeology isn't a precise science, you need a lot of evidence to state a claim.
when a claim can't be fully supported, you can publish it, but you need to infuse it with doubt. especially with books read by laymen who will easily take what they've read as fact (because that's the only way the info has been presented to them) then you're doing harm. you're trying to mold the public's opinion to support your own theories.
Peking Man may have not had controlled fires, neandertals may not have been tards who were outcompeted by its more gracile cousins, and i've heard nothing of a "third man" in between the australopithecine and homo split.
that last one he really didn't explain well, maybe for time/space constraints, but that claim seemed wholly unsupported.

but either way, even if most of the stuff i already knew or was acquainted with (so far) i'm enjoying the book 100. no 1000 times more than that dickens book.
it's time to dropkick that one to the curb even though i only got through half of it.

the other intriguing part of my day was talking with renee (the deaf woman).
i said hello and she commented on how its the first time today she's had a chance to talk. i thought that just meant that she was busy all day (which she was), but she actually meant it literally. she had some convention that she went to downtown for ASL. so everyone there never talked and only communicated with sign language. it was kinda weird, cuz she was in the pool talking to me but using sign language. she was in the pool hanging on one side with one arm still being able to use both arms to sign. she seemed to manage well. i guess she was still in ASL mode, cuz before she had only done random words every now and then, actually very rarely. but today she was balls-out ASLing.
i kinda enjoyed it. just seeing the nuances in how ASL works is intriging. like when signing "Bothell" from bothell high school. it seemed like she skipped the vowels, like yiddish or egyptian heiroglyphs.

it was just an awesome thing to watch. if you sat in a classroom for an hour a day and just had someone talk to you while signing, i think you could probably start to pick it up a bit. however you might confuse words. she was talking about her "stupid brother", but i picked up the sign for stupid as the word for brother (two finger in peace sign-like fashion against the forehead with the palm facing outward).
we got to talking about new words that are forming in ASL as time progresses. "Computer": make a 'C' with one hand and swipe your other hand through the C like you were motioning someone to "cut it out" or "quit it".
email's the same sort of thing. you make an ASL "X" with one hand and run the other flat hand over it with the palm facing down.
who knows why they picked "X" instead of "E". i didn't ask her. maybe its for eXpress, even though Email is Electronic. whatever.

i asked her about her opinion on cochlear implants. i did a research project on it in one of my classes last year. she said she's against them. she said she thinks people should be bilingual. and that people don't really know what they're missing out on if anything.
i told her how opinions of parents who are hearing vs. nonhearing children vary radically over the topic. she said she'd run into an incident with hearing parents but 3 deaf brothers, and she sided with the deaf brothers.
i kinda think it's up to the parents, so their choice, i have no reason to pressure anyone's decision.
she also mentioned that she wouldn't want the implant because it would mean you couldn't swim. cuz its got all that electrical shit, and well, its drilled into your head. but i'm sure that'll heal up nicely.

the deaf culture is so interesting. whereas blind people are just fucked unless they can find a stick to wave infront of them, deaf people have developed a whole system of communication to get beyond what some might see as their handicap or disability.

i guess i could kinda be a cultural anthropologist. i kept coming up with shit to ask her. but when i think of the profession in the stereotypical sense, it makes me think of becoming a hippie that i might not even want to become. although living with exotic, foreign cultures is somewhat alluring. to see how life can be lived through the eyes of someone who's religion/culture evolved independently from the one we've all been engulfed by.
sorry, jesus.

leaving on a jet plane

i bought my plane tickets to alaska just a bit ago.
last time i checked they were $248. now they dropped 14 dollars to $234.
not knowing what the price will be like in a few months, i thought that was a decent enough drop to pounce on.
so i'm going to alaska in july whether i'm digging shit up or not.
i get to apply for going up there in 1 month and 1 day.
should be good times.

i got my shit back from the scuba shop yesterday. however, i think they're just out to screw me over.
when i first took my stuff in, i just took the regulator (the hose/breathing part). they ask me, 'where's your BC?' (the vest part that controls bouyancy and keeps the tank attached to your back).
'oh, i left it at home.'
'we need to check stuff out on that too.'
ok, fine, so i brought it in the next day.
the month goes by and i pick it up.
i get the regulator and they charge me $65 for labor plus parts.
cool.
then i'm like, 'oh, i also had a BC.'
so she digs that out and throws on another $65 for labor on that.
fine. getting spendy, but its better to be safe than dead.
but i get to looking at the receipt and it seems that other than look at the BC when i first brought it in, they didn't do jackshit to it the whole month it was there.
it's like they just charged me for storage while they worked on my regulator.
that's just ass, cuz i wasn't going to bring it in in the first place, then they push me to do it just so they can throw another $65 on my bill!?!
when i first dropped it off too, she quoted me at about $95.
what the hell, you do this all the time and you can't even quote me right?
it's a damn good thing they're so friendly. (she remembers my name everytime i come in, even from that time from when i got certified to when i came back in 9 months later).
but i may try a different store that isn't struggling to keep afloat (which may be their problem). it's called 5th dimension, and it's over in issaquah.
i might check it out one of these days when i get a day off.
that didn't happen this week, so maybe i'll have to wait til next week.

oh. i also got my book today that i ordered online!
The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond.
i think when i'm done my sister and i are going to trade for his other book, Collapse.
good times.

the fu

oh. btw,
kung fu was rad today.
my kicking skills are vastly improving.
watch your balls.

sinus

for those of you who are following, i guess i should tell you what's up.
that headache comes and goes. i didn't have it for a day, then it came back the next (don't worry, i'm almost done bitching about this).
but i saw that deaf lady at the pool on tuesday who had the same damn headache as me.
she (with her medical insurance) went to the doctor and found out it's a sinus infection. the guy knew right off from the syptoms (i bet goldman wouldn't. i'd probably end up with another toenail).
so yeah. the doc gave her some pills for that.
she still had the headache after the weekend but she said it had subsided a lot.

she also starting talking health issues in the rest of her family. her son is going to Brown over in Rhode Island. i guess he had some massive chest pains, he called his dad who told him to go to the emergency room. he could hardly breathe, he said, 'felt like a heart attack'. at first the deaf mom just thought it was asthma, but come to find out, he has a viral infection of the pericardium, which is the sack lining the heart.
that's fucked up shit. i guess all you can do is wait it out.
good luck with that.

the other random thing i had on my mind is really random.
i watched the jimmy kimmel show the other night. i don't think i've ever seen a full one since he first came on. but i'm watching it and he's doing this bit about the oscars, which had happened the night before. he goes to talk to people and some of them are waving a flag. so he goes, all serious, 'is that your cult?'
everyone's like.. uh, no that's brazil's flag.
now beside the american, mexican, and the better known european countries, isn't brazil's flag pretty well known? maybe not....
but then he goes on interview someone, i forget who, but he can't keep up with the guy. and it's not like its robin williams (who was actually in the previous sketch and knew the flag) or any learn-ed person.
i think jimmy's just kinda a dumbass.
but then you listen to adam corrolla on love line, and this guy may have some far-fetched ideas and views on life, but at least he's got something upstairs.
so i wonder if jimmy kimmel just rode on adam's coattails when then did that whole 'man show' thing which bumped them both into stardom.
i dunno. it's just irritating to see morons that become succesul and you wonder how it happens. sometimes simply drive can get you a long way, but damn is that annoying. i dunno. it seems like you just might get something for nothing.
but if your motivation gets you there, then maybe that's all good.
but maybe i'm just jealous of that. i lack that zesty spirit/drive in damn near everything i do. sometimes the noggin can't get you to everything you want.
you gotta sell yourself.
maybe that's why jimmy's retarded ass makes me bitter.

damn. i only meant to mention that, but it turned into the majority of the post.

school

just now hitting me that it's march.
oregon told me that they'd let me know my status by april 1st.
that's just a month!
when i first got my shit in after applying, it felt so far away,
and now it's right around the corner!
although i'm not too optimistic.
on the one hand, i figure people would like the out-of-state tuition,
but i'm thinking that those better schools could find people that had more to exhibit and are still out of state.
everyone else is optimistic for me, but they didn't see the mediocre crap that i turned in. i really didn't put my whole heart into it all, which is kinda sad.
at the time i had so much time to focus on it.
but oh well. i'm hoping to at least get into oregon.
it would be amazing to get into florida and crazy improbable to get into texas.
one more month.
makes me feel the need to buy tickets to alaska

in other news, parceling is rad.
i get to go outside and enjoy the sun. i don't have to deal with half the people, and when i do encounter people they're usually happy, cuz they're no longer dealing with money.
i've also lost two pounds since i've started pushing them carts.
it works the upper thigh hard.
i also get to talk to other parcels.
yeah. they're young, but some of them are entertaining.
lastly parceling's cool cuz if you bust your ass, you can get all the carts in then BS for 20 minutes or so til getting carts again.
so you can talk to more people around the store.
makes me sound like a lazy ass.
but really, i just don't like dealing with people.
i'll push the crap outta those carts all day long.
dealing with pissy people is such a drag.