Hung gar

I found the form that was taught to me.
However, a few things are different.
But you get the idea of taming the tiger with the way this guy does it.
Some of his moves are shallow and lacking power... at least that's how I see it.

I also learned Lau Gar. This clip, although not the whole set, is kinda cool cuz it shows applications.
The sequence I know is what the asian guy is doing. He's on the left in the beginning of the clip.

Grading

I'm grading tests.
A few things.

1)You can easily tell who didn't show up to class at all.
The simplest answers are skipped over for other more ridiculous ones.

2)Balderdash must have invented by a teacher who noticed students desperately trying to answer questions.
Example: Turkana Boy - A boy found in Turkey.
Actually he's found in Kenya.

3)If people look at the test as a whole they might be able to answer other questions.
Most people say dinosaur bones could be radiocarbon dated. Fine, it's bone.
But another question asked the range of radiocarbon dating.
The correct answer is 40 - 75 thousand years ago.
Some people who put this correct answer also put that dinosaur bones could be dated.
Is it just that I'm a nerd, or is it common knowledge that dinosaurs only existed MILLIONS of years ago...?

(Is this breaking some sort of teacher/student confidentiality? Oh well.)

Evowiki

Huh.
I found Evowiki when I was trying to find the definition of autapomorphic.
Apparently when wikipedia doesn't have a definition you can look to the more scientifically- oriented database genius that is evowiki.

Told

In the last couple of weeks, I've been having trouble in one class.
Since I'm a quite guy by nature, I don't really sit well with a class that's 3 hrs long and fully devoted to class discussioin.
The professor promotes involvement in the class discussions, and at times will randomly select someone to give an answer.

Now that we've had our 4th session, it seems that "random" doesn't really fit her aiming of questions to be answered.
Every session, I've been called on.
First time around (which was actually the second class because the first was devoted to getting to know people/syllabus time), I gave an answer, although my thunder was stolen right before I had a chance to speak from the guy two seats up. The shitty part about this was that the guy's answer was to the professor-sparked question "What was Travis' paper all about?"
He excellently picked out my arguments, and that's when she turned to me.
What the hell am I supposed to say?! I gave a brief synopsis of what the guy just said.
Everyone stared at me wondering how an idiot like me got into a graduate program.
However, after class, the teacher did congratulate my work and said it was one of the better papers. I think it also got the distinction of being the most talked about in class. (We all write papers and then we all read each other's papers.)
The following week, the third class, we didn't have a paper due.
So it was merely a discussion. I read all the readings so I thought I'd be ok.
The discussion was on science and it's validity and how people's preconceived notions may falsely lead their work or narrow their view of nature.

Each week we have about 200 pages of material to read. Personally, because I'm cheap, lazy, and somewhat environmentally-aware, I refuse to waste this much ink on paper.
This turned out to be a big mistake.

Taking a step back, and giving some background information: outside the class, I kept telling my classmates about my apprehension of speaking in class. They told me to just get anything out that you know as soon as it pertains to the subject being discussed.

So during class, the professor asks about a vocab word.
I seemingly was the only one to look it up, so I blurt out its definition.
"Right on." I think to myself. Other people haven't said anything yet, so I'll be good for a while.
Not so.
Down the road, my professor pulls out an article we read and pointed out a hefty excerpt from it. She reads it aloud. My attention span holds for a while, but slowly fades as I ponder other things.
Then I hear it. "Travis?" "Would you like to explain this to us?"
FUCK! I had no idea. I stare blankly, and after a while the professor offers the classmate next to me to let me look at the quote from her printed out portfolio.
I know what page it's on, but I still can't find the quote.
Awkward silence.
After probably two minutes, she asks if anyone else knows. Time somewhat faded away from me at that time. I don't know if the question was answered, but I could sure feel the redness of my face.

Because I failed her miserably, the professor asked me another question about an hour later, just to see what I could come up with. I had another feeble answer like last week. It's not looking good.
On the other hand, its looking good for the people who keep there mouth's shut and aren't forced an opinion or answer....

The next week, today, again we had no paper due to the professor's blunder in copy-and-pasting. She reused the basic outline of last week's instructions that still told us we didn't have a paper due and forgot to change it. Everyone was stoked.

So we discuss.

First off, she asks for definitions.
Evolution.
She hands it off to the girl from Czech Republic who is surprisingly always on the ball.
Second. Adaption.
ME!
Ironically, I seem to remember this happening the first week of discussion. Same order.

Anyway. Evolution is my bag, so I pull out an explanation for adaption that may have not fit what the readings said to a 'T', but got the job done.

First time called on.
Next, we move on to evolution further in detail to discuss how today there are two common theories of how evolution occurs.
One is the slow, gradual change over time, and the other is a fast change with long bouts of stasis, no change.

This time, I interject unprovoked.
What if both are possible. I took a human population genetics class at UW that told me that population and the inbreeding coefficient (% of genetic material able to flow into a population) greatly affects mutation rate.
My conclusion was that the quick-changing evolution was just a subset of the gradual evolution, where in times of stress and environmental change leading to a bottleneck (a group of people are isolated from the greater population) you can the quick changing evolution. Otherwise, with a large population, you'll only see the gradual evolution.
The class thought this was a resonable conclusion and pondered over it like they had with my first paper.

Finally I'm in the positive.
Score 1 for me.

Next comes people who were influential in setting up the advent of the evolution theory, i.e. where Darwin drew from. She did ask some people at random, but I know there were two people who didn't really say much of a word on any topic of the day.
I thought I was safe.
NO.
She asks me.
I went for the easy one that one of the people had mentioned earlier, but we skipped over becuase we went back to discuss just how another mentioned name affected the inception of the theory of evolution.

So I threw that answer at her and effectively enough to where she asked for nothing more of me on the subject.
2 points for me.

Then we move to another topic dealing with different ways to analyse evolutionary adaptations.
Before class I had put a lot of thought into these and did some extensive wikipedia researching to come up with the actual differences between the two mechanisms named.
She seemed to be struggling with the definitions when people were asking specifics, so I jumped in and told her what "I got from the readings."
3 points for me.

Something that I forgot to mention was that during the time between influential people involving the concept of evolution, the professor mentioned a name, Agassiz.
She said it was in the readings, but no one could find it.
Although as immediately as she had mentioned the name, "Geologist" went off in my head.
However, I couldn't rememeber what he had done.

After class I came up to her and asked her about the name again.
I asked if he was a geologist. She piked an eyebrow and confirmed it.
I asked if he had anything to do with plate techtonics.
No. Shot down.
I then told her that I had read about him somewhere, maybe in Darwin's The Origin of Species...?

I can't recall precisely, but I think the jist of her answer was, "No, although they were contemporaries."

So tonight I went home and looked up the e-version of Darwin's master work.
Lo' and behold, under Chapter 9 - "On the Imperfection of the Geological Record", there are exactly THREE references to Agassiz and his contributions (or actually impediments) to science.
It's been a few years since I've read it, but I still know my evolutionary Bible.
Chalk another one up for me.
This win, however, I think I will keep to myself.
If I point it out to my professor, I have a feeling the already biased 'random selection' for questioning will become even moreso.

One may wonder why I spent the time lamenting about my class struggles.
Well, I guess its basically the clashing of egos.
My professor CAN'T be wrong.
I don't enjoy being unfairly put on the spot in numerous occasions for someone's amusement.
So when I can prove someone to be wrong who lives life in this fashion, maybe I do take joy in it.
Is that so wrong? If it were a different professor, I don't think I would even think twice of it, but considering the personality at hand, I take great offense to the ego-bashing that's being dealt out in my direction.

Although, it's nothing like a challenge to spark my interests.
Next week I'm going to own my professor even harder.
Especially if they will be in the my equal state of mind: dominance.

Creationism?
C'mon! I've already written two papers on the topic just for fun!
Why is it so hard for some people to accept that other people may know more about a given topic than they do.
Nobody can know everything . . . except maybe Jesus. ;)

CSC

I don't even know where to begin.
I was reading an assigned article about Creationism vs. Evolution.
The article expressed how the clash between the two has led to an evolution of Creationist's tactics.
It started in the 20's by suing a school teacher in Kansas for teaching evolution.
By the 50's, evolution was entered into some textbooks.
In the late 60's, evolution was no longer banned from being taught.

In 1978, an article was written to the Yale Law Review in support of giving equal time to both creationism and evolution in the classroom.
To give additional clout to their theory, they now touted the name 'creation science' to sound as weighty as the theory of evolution.
By 1982, 'equal time' was ruled as unconstitutional in Arkansas under the first ammendment stating that religion was actually being pushed in public institutions.
This was found to be true again in Louisiana in 1987.

So since religion was no longer an option in fighting evolution as it is taught to our children, a new tactic in 1989 conceived to keep our children's minds clear of the concept that man evolved from earlier forms.
This came in the form of neocreationism. Their ideology was to eliminate the religious aspect of their agenda and only mention an intelligent designer.

In the mid 90's further development came when disclaimers were actually printed into textbooks or forcibly read by teachers to warn students that evolution is only a theory and it shouldn't confuse or clash with teachings of the Bible.

Lately, the new fad has been turning from elliciting alternative explanations (since they keep getting shot down) to simply trying to refute evolution as a theory.
In 2000, a private institution based in Seattle called the Center for Science and Culture (how non-religious and science-camoflagued can you get?) was founded.
I found an article on their website named Survival of the Fakest.

Its point is to tear apart evolution. It makes claims that embryos studied at the time of Darwin were fakes.
It claims that evolutionary theory is mere philosophy and circular reasoning is its only basis.
For instance, it states homologous structures (like the same bones in forelimbs/hands are found in relatively related species) are Darwin's evidence for evolution, but that Darwinists state that evolution is true through homologous structures.

He tears apart an analogy used by a scientist stating that Corvettes of different models like 53 to 54 to 55 can be compared like homologous structures from the same concept.
The author takes this analogy as literal and claims that the scientist "forgot to consider a crucial, and obvious point: Corvettes, so far as anyone has yet been able to determine, don't give birth to little Corvettes."
He brilliantly explains how people make these cars and thus this supports Intelligent Design becuase his simple analogy can be manipulated in that way.

My favorite is the peppered moth example that everyone hears in high school. This is the example of natural selection where pollution in England leads lighter colored moths to lessen in numbers as becoming an easier prey to the birds where the darker-colored moths survive because of the darkening of tree bark from pollution leads to their camoflague. Although the author may have a point where he claim situations of the experiment weren't natural; both moths were introduced in the daytime where the lighter moths usually hide during the day.
But he claims the moths were glued to the tree therefore the testing is falsifiable.

He attacks Darwin's finches and mentions Piltdown Man.
All he seems to do is find its weaknesses.
I guess that's a healthy tactic to negate a theory.
However, in the whole article, when using quotes, no references are mentioned.
And at the end of the article, his only references are a list of 10 science textbooks which he grades, giving none higher than a D+.
His grading scale dealt with how well the authors dealt with the subjects I previously mentioned that he attacks and attempts to debase.

So now that that's taken care of.
Evolution has apparently been debunked, what alternatives does the Center for Science and Culture bring forth?
I sure can't find it on their website.
I find letters of dissent from Darwinism, but beyond that nay-saying is all I seem to find.

Is it getting to the point where religion has convoluted the public so much that it's taking its worst enemy and entegrating with it solely to be "right"?

Will the Center of Science and Culture, or something like it, ultimately form a new religion based on an even further ambiguous deity who created vital parts of life (like humans), and left the rest to the laws of nature?
Are people so entrenched in the idea of God or the notion that they need some guidance in life that they will fall for something that seems most "true" or "right" simply because it is tied to science. It seems odd that in all other shapes and form, antievolutionists accept science except for its notion in evolution?
Because evolution conflicts with deeply-seeded notions of human uniqueness, they will create whatever lifestyle necessary to continue accomodate a self-aggrandizing sense of being.
As other religions seem less logical, unless they too evolve to fit science's ever-changing scope, people will always be duped by the evolution of religion to give their lives meaning and follow blindly.
Science is too hard. It makes you think.

Poll

"According to a 1996 poll of adult Americans conducted by the National Science Board, only 44% agreed with the statement. 'Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals'. Forty percent disagreed, and 16% answered 'don't know.' The same survey showed that 52% of American adults either agreed or didn't know that '[t]he earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs' (32% agreed, 20% didn't know)."

We're dealing with a fine breed....

Sign up! Get your PFD!
Be a permanent Alaskan resident!
Kids of any age can get it too!
Only catch: you had to have been in the state at some time last year for at least 3 days straight.

quote

I like this:

"Debate is an art from. It is about the winning of arguments. It is not about the discovery of truth. There are certain rules and procedures to debate that really have nothing to do with establishing fact--which [creationists] are very good at. Some of those rules are: never say anything positive about your own position because it can be attacked, but chip away at what appear to be the weaknesses in your opponent's position. They are good at that. I don't think I could beat the creationists at debate. I can tie them. But in courtrooms you cannot give speeches. In a courtroom you have to answer direct questions about the positive status of your belief. We destroyed them in Arkansas. On the second day of the two-week trial, we had our victory party!"

--Stephen Jay Gould

$Oil

The estimate for Alaksa's population is 663,661 in 2005.
Multiply that by the PFD of $1,106.96.
And Alaska is getting $734,646,180.56.

Now granted a lot of that may be uneligable/underaged people who won't be receiving the check,
but even cutting that in half, that's still $370 million of oil money going to Alaskans.

Oddly, that larger figure above is almost exactly 10% of BP's 2006 2nd-quarter profit of $7.3 billion.

Bass

Giant Sea Bass off the coast of California!
Largest is around 150 lbs.
(If the link still even works, you have to get through the commerical first.)

PFD

PFD, is the acronym for the oil money that people of Alaska receive every year for just living here.
Unfortunately for me, even though I put up with the same shit and the same weather, I won't see any of it.
I have to be here for at least a year.
This time around, each Alaskan resident will recieve $1,106.96.
That's not that bad of a chunk of change.
No wonder they can afford to pay more money for more expensive goods.

Spawn

I guess a lot of my old dive buddies had end-of-the-summer trips to the Caribbean.
Kathryn went down to the Grand Caymans.
There she saw a lot of coral spawning.

So I knew coral spawned and that the juveniles are the mobile form, but I didn't realize it was so obvious.
They are like giant pollen flakes floating through the ocean.

University of Tokyo

I got tired of reading so I started talking to a friend from UW.
She's originally from Osaka, Japan and is now going to school as a grad student in physical anthropology at the University of Tokyo.

Manuel just re-introduced me to Google Earth, so after she told me where she was, I was determined to find her. It was a bit more difficult that things I've looked for before, simply because I could read them. In Google Earth, everything in Japan is in kanji, and I don't know the first thing about it.
Fortunately all the districts(?) are in Roman lettering.
So she told me she was in Bunkyo-ku.
After a few times, I found her.

Kyoko's physical anthropolgy building is on the left in the wooded area and is the closer, larger figure-8 looking building.
I could look at this stuff forever.

She also told me about a good Japanese restaurant she found in Anchorage while attending a conference called Kumagoro.
It's downtown, I'll have to try it out.
(I could have showed you the zoomed in image, but it would have meant nothing to you. I thought the zoomed-out view looked cooler. That big chunk of land sticking out from below Anchorage is called the Kenai Peninsula. That's where Aaron and I kicked it for a while before I could move into my dorm. The yellow road actually ends at Homer. That's where we spent most of our time. You can see the spit sticking out into the bay.)

Day Wall & Bonaire

Bob Bailey posted more pictures. These are from Day Island Wall which is down by Point Defiance and Tacoma.
He's got some awesome shots of wolf eels, GPOs (Great Pacific Octopus), and a warbonnet(?) that looks a bit retarded.

Bob also just recently got back from Bonaire which is just north of Venezuela.
There's some exciting, foreign, and brilliantly colored things captured in those photos.

Enjoy. Thanks Bob.

Not Read

Fuckin-A.
I spent the last two hours typing out this thing rather than reading for my class on Tuesday.
Can't I just turn that in as something to chew on?

Dying Religion

It started out with Pope John Paul II saying that evolution is ""more than a hypothesis."
Now that he's gone and we got the new guy, Benedict in, he's trying to take that idea and run with it.

I'll say the Pope's a smart guy, but the hard part here is taking the notion of evolution and melding it with the concept of God. The world is getting smarter, more facts are more blatant, so the Pope has to do something.

So the other day, September 10th, to be exact, he says to his people, "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God." Taken out of context, I think this looks rather bad, but reading more in depth to the preceeding events, I think this is just the Pope's first try and some sort of cohesion between religion and science.

It is becoming widely known that "Intelligent Design" isn't making many friends. People are adimantly for it or against it. I think this spawns from its intentions. Firstly, it tries to not include god, the basis for the Christian religion that supports it, and it also tries to compete with science, which it surely can't. Science is based off testable data. If you can't have anything to test, like, say "the will of God/Intelligent Designer" then how can you prove to be a science?

That's why the intelligent design spoof, the Flying Spaghetti Monster has equal merit in the search for our beginnings. Any basis is untestable and rooted in writing that can only lead to circular debate. So recently, the Pope and a bunch of his former students are meeting to discuss evolution. I believe there's no doubt in their minds that evolution is a process that's been affecting the earth for the past few billion years. Even one of his student states, "Because like it or not," he added, "evolution happened." They're knowledgable, but now the hard part.

During their meeting they must come up with a way to bridge both science and religion. This whole intelligent design is creating a gap that's leaving many to have to choose between the two.

And herein lies the problem. Christianity basically spawned science. Christianity had an iron grip on science since that advent. Christianity has been able to tell people what to believe even when science has said otherwise (i.e. Galileo). But now science has graduated and no longer needs Christianty. But now, here's a religion that basically acts as a supergovernment, spanning borders and seas, that is losing its grip. Catholicism in the past has been able to reform and keep up with the times, but right now it's slipping. Back in the 1960's it was revitalized through more cultural clashes. It told people they were not defying God if they ate something other than fish on Fridays. But that was an era based on a cultural revolution. Women's liberation, civil rights activism, people advocating free love.

Now we've ocsillated back to a scientific focus and it's much harder to tell people to not believe what has been believed since the advent of the religion. People aren't really all that special. They're just some process along the span of life. Whatever life may be. This is a much more touchy subject then just telling people "how" to live. This rocks their core, their being. It tells them that they may not have a real purpose other than to survive. Period. You're not special. No one cares if you live or die, or even how you lived your life.

And even though I am not a believer in religion, I still think that it is necessary. It's necessary for those who want to be told how to live. It's also necessary for those who need to be told how to live. Morality wouldn't exist without religion, and unless we had a supreme enforcer, all would be in chaos. But that's the beauty. This creates the figment of a supreme enforcer. Something to be feared. You'll be cast to hell if you're bad, you'll be rewarded if you're good. So along with morality, it also gives a sense of a purpose. A goal to live for.

So without religion, then you'd just be left with government. And the government definitely can't do that. It can't give you a goal. The closest anyone has come is the communist block. They were successful because they controlled science much like the early Catholics. They only allowed knowledge to leak to the public that would promote the "perfect communist". Science was even controlled to the point of lying to the public. The people under the iron fist were told that acquired traits picked up during one's lifetime can be inherited in your offspring. This brainwashing gives a goal. The harder you work at doing what you're doing, your progeny will also be a better honed individual (although that wasn't a very admired word among the communist leaders), and thus the ultimate goal of a perfect nation can be reached.

Unfortunately, we know how heredity works, and again it brings about a sob story. Nothing you do in life will be passed down to your children (barring radiation or other exposure to toxins). As hard as you work, it's pure circumstance what gets handed to your offspring. You have no say. The point of life is to survive. To enhance the chances of survival, one can give to their offspring knowledge of the past. This can be any kind of knowledge--how to survive a harsh winter, what kind of flora and fauna surround you in your environment, how to more easily solve a given puzzle. But then you can look at it on the grand scale. One can actually be somewhat altruistic and hand off knowledge to more than just family and friends. It may be a circumstance of pride in one's own knowledge, but depending on the audience, the knowledge might actually be well received and passed on to a new generation. Computers, cars, carpentry (any given trade), or even an addition to a data base are all examples. But that is the beauty of communication; it strengthens chances of survival for anyone willing to accept it.

Now I may have gotten a bit off track there, but herewithin lies the ultimate goal. And the problem with it is that it's drastically different than the religious ultimate goal. Religion focuses on the self. I must be good, I want to be treated well indefinitely. I want to go to heaven.
The ultimate goal for "life", for lack of a better term, can be just as selfish, but can, as a side-product, be somewhat altruistic. It's a want for a comfortable lifestyle. However, comfortable can be seen in a few different ways, all which pertain to the goal. Comfortable can be a lavish lifestyle--living well, having prestige goods, enjoying life in whatever way fits you best. As one can clearly see, this is also something you want to pass on to your children and theirs and so forth.
But there's a second side to comfort that involves a broader view. This is technology. Through communication, be it oral or written, people have managed to take themselves out of the elements and make a situable lifestyle complete with less stress (although we can create that elsewhere in our lives but it still pales in comparison to fighting for our lives). The continuation of this process, which largely uses if not entirely science, has made our lives easier.
So with the contiuation of science, our cumulative goal of comfort will be met. Through helping others in the accumulation of knowledge (which may seem altruistic) you are also helping your future lineage (and the continuation of the species as a whole) in the long run.

If people would only accept this as a goal in life. Maybe we won't need religion. Yet regulation of actions, still might be a factor. However with the growing secularism, government use of people as enforcers have instilled enough of an actual fear into people that usually only leaves those most desperate, courageous, or willing to break with what could be seen as religious moral standards.

So now I guess I've convinced myself that religion isn't necessary. But since something like Catholicism has had such an effect on Western Civilization, it would leave me upset to see it go. Maybe it could just be like the royalty of the UK. It's more rich than hardly anyone in the world could boast and it could attract tourists from around the world to gawk at its traditional ways and silly outfits.
Maybe however, it's already reached that status and its just on its last legs, being one step above British royalty. They are loaded and the Pope speaks a funny language and wears a funny hat. I guess all that's left is the unleashing of all that ungodly power. A pope speaks, and one billion people follow. And not only that, but probably a billion more, at least, listen.

So maybe come this meeting of the papal minds, the brightest of the divine can devise a plan to create its own evolutionary path to fit into a niche that once again gives cohesion to religion and science and saves its ruling, comfortable lifestyle.

Good luck, Mr. Pope and Pals.

PS I have this urge to reference my quotes and thought sources.
Stupid school.
Here:

Pope Benedict and his ex-students holding seminar on evolution.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/01/news/vatican.php
viewed last: September 16, 2006.

Spencer, Frank. 1988. Prologue to a Scientific Forgery. In: Stocking, George W, editor. Bones, Bodies and Behavior. History of Anth 5: 85-116. University of Wisconsin Press: 1988.

Greece

I put up pictures of Greece last night.
Athens and the island of Santorini.

Last night was a boring, but chill night... mostly.
Hence the pictures...

Next stop on the adventure is Italy.
This includes Rome, Florence, and Venice.
Can't remember if I included Pisa until later in the album.
We'll see.

teach me

I had my first pseudo-teacher-like interaction today.
The professor that I TA for told one of the students who had a question in the previous sessions that I had an answer for her.
I her and the whole class my answer.
(the prof knew this because I had brought it up after the last class.)

anyway. class proceeded.
then after class while I was putting away cast skulls of the predecessors of our human lineage,
the same woman approached me.
older, maybe 40, she's one of those who might actually put a bit more effort into the undergrad- required class.

the question was basically this:
orrorin tugenensis, which is a 6 million-year-old find, was thought to be bipedal.
however, the issue with the femur found was that the bone had the cortex (outer hard portion of the bone) resembling that of a gorilla.

my professor didn't exactly know what this meant. i did.
i explained to her that cortical differences vary, because where the gorilla doesn't need to support all its weight on two legs, it doesn't require any specialization in the femur bone,
therefore the cortex is symetrical all up and down the femur bone.
but what human evolution has done, is taken the femur and angled it inward so the majority of our weight and supported it at a point more directly below the pelvis. this allows for more balance.
but what it also does is put further stress on the femur that now isn't columnar like a gorilla's femur.
so over time, the femur in humans has built a thicker cortex in the proximal (upper) regions of the bone on the main part of the shaft to absorb shock.

"my" student takes this knowlegde and returns to me the story of how she went to europe for two and a half weeks. before and after her trip she got a cortical thickness test.
apparently results showed that her bone density increased after all the rigorous activity she'd received while on vacation.

i look at her and don't really know what to say.
i appreciate your interest, but what you've given me really has no correlation to what i've told you.
yes, bone density increases with use, just as the number of muscle fibers increase with use.
but what you are telling me is about an individual event, whereas what i'm giving you is an evolutionary example. a change that can't happen in one person's lifetime.

granted, this is pretty much a 101 class, and i was once that dumb about the science.
but what the hell am i supposed to do?!
you give me no correlation to work with so i just stare back at you.
i'm glad you have had a life experience, but please try to make it relevant to what i'm trying to inform you with. i'm not telling you how i got buff legs from wandering around europe for 2 and a half month.
what the hell would you say in response to that? "good"?
exactly...

thanks for thinking, but if you wanted a discussion (which is what i was looking for), try again.
(is this what teaching all college students would be like?!)

autumn

I was walking home today on my usual route through the hospital, then down a muddy road to the dorms.
While on the road, I noticed some freshly-fallen yellow leaves lying atop the mud.
I look up and notice that a lot of the broad-leaved trees' leaves are now also yellow.
It wasn't like this before the weekend...

Ya know. I've always enjoyed the snow.
But maybe that's cuz I've never had to live in it for more than a day or two.
I'm not sure how this winter will treat me. I'm almost dreading it.

Winter is fast approaching.
I met a girl who has the same bday as me.
She said when she was little the snow would always come before it.
Now that the globe is a bit more heated, she says she has to wait for snow until after our bday.
It still varies, but the chances are less for early snow.
Everyone else I talk to keeps saying that the snow comes in mid October.
But unlike this girl, they don't have a definite day in their heads to mark the annual arrival of winter snow.

Either way it's going to come. But for me, the later the better.
I hate jackets.
(Why am I here?)

MOOSE

I ate moose yesterday. It's like cow, just slightly more juicy.
If I wasn't told, I wouldn't have known.

I feel bad though. I got it while attending at party at one of my professor's houses.
She looks at me, slaps the moose hunk on my bun and asks,
"Did you call for this earlier? Cuz there's only 8."

I didn't call for it, but what the hell was I supposed to do?
The meat was already on the bun!
Like I can just throw it back on the barbie...
So I ate it up, and it was delicious! Thank you.

WAnk

Hey WAnk.
If you read this: I have an email waiting for you. Email me first so I know where to send it.

AK bars

what should have been an uneventful Thursday night actually turned into an adventure.
Last night i got a call from Shane, a buddy of mine i met through the Broken Mammoth project last year, to help celebrate the last night of his 20's.

I don't know downtown that well, so we met up at Darwin's Theory. My second time being there.
Just before I had got there, i noticed the bartender throw out a specific person, and then the rest of that person's group with them. They were a rowdy bunch and hung outside the bar for a while before they decided to move on. As they passed me, the guy who originally got kicked out walks up behind me as he cross paths. He gives me a flat-footed kick to the ass and immediately turns around to run away but finds a large, metal (possibly electrical) box in his way and eats a face-full of metal. This fully knocks him down. Although earlier, the fighting he was doing with his friends didn't seem to have him look so sure-footed.
The crowd crossed the street, almost egging on cars to run them over. They went over to a nearby park and decided yelling at traffic was the best way to spend their night for the timebeing. Cars stop, profanities were exchanged, but no one really bothered to call out the bunch of retards.
Eventually after kicking one of their own into a cement planter and breaking a few bottles, they decided to move on.
Shane showed up and i started my night.

We had a few beers at Darwin. The last one we downed in about 2 minutes in preperation to keep us going for our travels to the next bar.
We went to pay and Shane told the bartender it was his birthday. so she took one beer off our tab and gave us each a business-card-looking piece of paper that gives us a free drink the next time we come in. Gotta love the local dive bars. If it had a pool table, this one would have really looked like the beloved Rav Tav back in Seattle.

next on our stops, Shane decided that to fully be integrated into the Anchorage bar scene, I'd have to see a 'native' bar. This is a bar that is Native American owned and 95% of the patrons are also native. The bar had a different feel to it. kinda run down, but the drinks were stiff, so i couldn't complain. Shane mandated that we were only to have one drink there, then we could move on.

From there we wandered around town til we came to a house that was converted into a bar with a few extensions to fulfill its growing needs. This place was pretty swanky inside and actually had beer on tap (the other two bars didn't). Shane said there used to be croquet in the yard, but that had recently been cemented over so outdoor seating could be arranged. They also had many outdoor pool tables and a fountain with a giant metal fish statue.
They had covered areas with heat lamps. Maybe the pool tables are kept out there year round.
I guess we'll see.

Shane wanted to continue on our journey across town to a bar on Spenard where it's said that you'll most likely end up in a fight if you go. I wasn't really in the fighting mood (since i'd already literally gotten my ass kicked) so we just went back to his place and listened to some music. His house was built in the 40s and has the appliances that fill you in on this fact. It was a cool place, however, with a bit of character. On the floor by the tv was half a stuffed bear. His name was Harry and was stuffed in a position where his claws are rearing up toward you. Seemed weird for him to be on the floor like that, but I'm sure it would have been even more weird with him on the wall.

Eventually I had to call it a night and came home to talk with Jemma some. She too had an equally exciting night.
We both passed out talking to each other on the phone.
Good times.

holy crap

Holy crap. Steve Irwin killed by a sting ray.

Egypt

Another day has gone by of nothing but scanning, uploading, captioning, labeling, and tagging. This time around it was of Egypt.
Today most of the work wasn't really the scanning (as it was a learning process yesterday), but the captioning.
There was a bit that I had forgotten, mostly placenames, so I had to root around to find them.
In the end, I thing I spent so much time on the captioning, that it's actually a fucking history lesson!
So if you have some time, start from the beginning and roll right through it.

I probably won't do another day of this tomorrow, as I'm fully burned out by it today.
But just so the curious can know, Greece is up next for the photolog journey.

UK

Ok. This one was a doozy, folks, so I thought I'd plaster the word about it everywhere I could.
I just spent all-damn-day scanning and uploading and captioning and tagging and naming pictures
of my Europe trip that me and my girlfriend, at the time, took in the Spring of 2002.

Two-and-a-half months worth of photos are coming your way.
But so far I've only been able to bring you my photos from the UK.
But don't fret! The rest will be coming shortly.
I seem to have been blessed with a 5-day weekend and the ill-want to use it for reading.
So the pictures are a-coming!

Egypt is next in the lineup.
Be ready!