Yep, They’re Losin’ It

It feels excruciating to be the bearer of bad news; please don’t shoot the messenger (or the messenjah, to those who get the reference).  The bottom line is, P.O.D. (Payable on Death), one of the best bands in history, is finally losing their edge.  After inventing their super-awesome genre of rapcore/metal and using it in their first six albums, they seem to be cooling down.  Their newest album, “When Angels and Serpents Dance,” tries to but just can’t compare with their old stuff.  Does this please me at all?  NO.

Above is the artwork for their 5th album, “Satellite.”  This, in my opinion, stands in the top 5 albums of all time, and is the height of P.O.D.’s awesomeness.  There are songs on here that are played on xtreme sports video games across the country.  And yes, P.O.D. is still one of my favorite bands, and I’d recommend them heartily to anyone who liked to rock hard.  This CD is their best, though “Testify” and “The Fundamental Elements Of Southtown” follow in a close second and third.  Yeah, they’re awesome.

Here’s a new-ish band who also invented their own genre.  Their first album, “Business Up Front/Party In The Back,” pretty much rocked, and they are one of the first bands to use crunk, a smash-up of crunchy guitars, fast rapping, and screaming.  There’s nobody else like them.

Ladies and gentlemen, they’re FAMILY FORCE FIVE! 

But for some reason, now they’re switching genres, from crunk to dance music.  It’s just… not them.  I wish they’d stop trying to be like everyone else instead of using their patented genre.  Their next album comes out in the Fall, but they have just released their “Dance or Die”-EP album with some of their new stuff on it…

…but I’ll always be wearin’ out “‘Party in the Back.”

                

Day Five of the Thailand Expedition (Part II)

We made it to the Compassion Country Office!  This is the “main base” for everything Compassion does in Thailand.  They invited us here to give us a tour of all the offices and what the people who work there do.  We were shown the whole process of a letter coming to a sponsored child from their sponsor or vice versa, including the sorting and translating of the letters, and finally how the letters would be driven hundreds of miles from the office to whatever project the sponsored child lived in, or flown to the sponsor.

What was so amazing about most of these staff was that they were compassion children themselves once!  They remember the names of their sponsors and the letters they got from them, and how their sponsorship pulled them out of their poverty-stricken lives, allowed them to live happily and go to school and learn about God.  This picture at the top is of all of the staff who had been sponsored as children, and now they’re going to Chiang Mai U and getting Ph. D’s.

At the end of the day we got the news:  our goal of 350 Thai kids had gotten a sponsor, plus an extra one-hundred children all over the world got sponsored just because South Florida was so inspired by what was happening in Thailand.  This was nothing short of awesome.

The kids that don’t exist in the eyes of the Thai king or government, or the culture of the world for that matter; they are the kings and queens in God’s Kingdom, in His economy of mercy.  We can glam up the wealthy, the superstars, the “righteous” ones who have it all together, but the little ”nobodies” on the other side of the globe, they matter to Him.  They are the kings and queens.

And I, for one, love this about God.

We’re leaving early tomorrow for the airport.  At least it means no more riding in the van after this. 

What we need right now is a refreshing 37-hour airplane journey.  I’m sure we can find one somewhere.

Day Five of the Thailand Expedition (Part l)

This morning we piled into the van at 8:30, brimming with liquid sleep which our doses of increased exponentially every day.  Possible algebraic formula for the trip:  c=d³-h, if c equals the number of cups of coffee drunk daily, d equals the number of the day, and h equals the number of hours of sleep we’ve had the night before.  Yeah, we’re tired.

We headed for the Maetaman elephant/bamboo raft/ox cart camp, nestled in a river valley (hence the bamboo rafts).  It was a hard day of elephant and ox cart riding for us.  Sequentially, not at the same time, of course.

Before our riding they put on an elephant show with some insane acts.  Man, these elephants could PAINT.  Better than I could.  Before our eyes sprang forth masterpieces of flowers, trees, other elephants, even all three.  Every detail was perfect, every stroke in the exact right place, and they understood their own anatomy better than we did.  Here’s one below.

They paraded around for a while with harmonicas and banners, built some walls, played soccer and basketball, sat cross-legged, gave massages, but the painting was definitely the highlight.  Afterwards all the paintings were put up for sale (2000 baht each, something like $75.  Worth it if we’d had the money).

After one last little parade the elephants accepted tips from the audience and handed them to their trainers.  I wondered if they could get tricked by an ordinary slip of paper, but then again, maybe not.  The trainers probably sat with them for hours teaching them about money:  “Hey!  No!  That’s a twenty.  No peanut for you!  Find the five-hundred…”

Well, ten minutes later my dad and I clambered into a wooden contraption atop one elephant’s back, while our fellow Americans boarded theirs, and readied for a ride across the river and through the jungle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Here we are looking bored:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the elephants came the ox cart ride, a mercifully short trip.  I think I got several bruises from this…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yeah, it’s been quite a day so far.  Next we’re heading to the Compassion Country Office; I’ll put this in the next post.

Day Four of the Thailand Expedition

Our last day at the projects.

We abandoned our van in favor of a few four-wheel drives, due to the elephant roads they would be managing as they climbed up the mountains.  Rain from the night before had eroded these dirt paths until they were nothing but mudpits, and as it turned out, the trucks were a good idea.  A van wouldn’t have survived even ten minutes up this way.

After more than four hours we reached our destination, high atop a remote mountain in a small village of wood houses.  The community was mostly Buddhist, as usual, and these families just sat, flabbergasted, as Christian Caucasians played with their kids like they were their own children.  We messed around on the “basketball court” for a while, playing our traditional game of keepaway with our soccerball and a hundred kids, followed by their traditional smoking of us.

The little girl at the front of this picture is Apaun.  We went to her house after lunch to visit with her family in their tiny kitchen area with their one pot and their emaciated grey kitten named “Kitten.”  She was shy in her house with us there, but when it was time for her to return to the school she rocketed to her friends and immediately took charge. 

We spent a good two hours there until we had to start our grueling five-hour trip back to Chiang Mai.

Elephant riding tomorrow…                                                                                                                                                                                      

Day Three of the Thailand Expedition (Sorry I didn’t get this to you sooner)

For dinner last night we ate at the Chinese restaurant in our hotel; everything looked pretty cheap until I flipped to the shark fin page:  30,000 baht each (or $1000).  This country knows how to make money off of westerners.  Helpful hint:  decimate a species and sell its fins to attract Americans, who are convinced that since what they’re eating is outlawed in their own country it’s exotic and wonderful, and even if it doesn’t taste great, it was a good experience anyway.  

I ordered the fried rice.

Today, after winding through the mountains for three hours, we came to the home of Mirran, an alcoholic Buddhist whose wife left him with his children, now involved in the Compassion project.  He was stunned to see aliens from across the world loving his kids and making it possible for them to go to school and have a much better life.

Later we arrived at the local school area, much nicer than the last one.  It became apparent how much these children loved being here with their friends, their musical instruments, and their school in which they could learn so much, as opposed to what they came home to:  a muddy house on a flood-susceptible foundation teeming with flies and mosquitoes.  The kids sang a bit, and afterward we played keep-away with them.  Guess who got smoked.

The photos mixed in here are from today (if they’re not here yet, they will be… soon).  That fruit you see is called a lychi, with the texture of a plum/grape and the taste of a grape/lemon.  This noodle dish, which has a name I can’t remember, has many a mystery food inside.

After we returned to the hotel we shopped some more at the night bazaar.  I bought a giant samurai katana for 700 baht.    

Day Two of the Thailand Expedition

Monday.

Last night we visited the night bazaar in front of our hotel:  a line of stalls selling most everything imaginable, from watches to katanas to counterfeit DVD’s (including the newest “Indiana Jones” movie, which hasn’t even been released yet).  What I liked about shopping there was that bartering was expected, meaning that the price that the sellers announced for their merchandise was rarely the one paid, and that shopping suddenly turned into a game.  One of the hundred ways America could improve.

 

Breakfast was good today.  Well, more than good, really.  It was, by a long shot, the best breakfast ever served by a hotel.  There was bacon, toast, French toast, curry chicken, pork, beef steak, custom-order omelets, pastries, pankakes, croissants, salad, fruit, fried rice, regular rice, and a few mysteries.  All served with incredibly good coffee and tea, two specialties of southeast Asia.  

 

 

We left at 8:30 this morning with our five guides and translators and drove south through the mountains for almost four hours to our first project area.  Families had constructed their houses similarly to each other, each house having one bedroom and a kitchen, built with raised bamboo rods supporting bamboo mats, sometimes covered with a rug, with walls and roof made of bamboo or wood, and maybe a piece of a car in one corner serving as another bedroom.

 

These people never had a birth certificate or anything that proved that they were alive, and according to the government, they didn’t exist.  They couldn’t expect any help from the king or prime minister, as they were not Thai citizens and couldn’t become them.  In this particular village the average income was ninety baht a month (there are thirty-two baht to a dollar), a fairly large one compared to the other villages we will visit.

 

                                                                                                                     

In one house lived a single, seriously ill mother whose only hope, her fiancee, left her with her four children when she became sick.  She wanted us to pray with her so that she could become well, so we sat around the kitchen in a big circle and prayed out loud all at once for her and her kids.  She was thrilled with what Compassion was doing for them, and the hope which was brought to their future.

 

 

 

When the home visits were over we drove to a nearby school, where we played keep-away with about a hundred kids (vs. three of us:  my dad, our friend Kurt Wallis, and me).  We were on the verge of getting our clock cleaned, when the whole thing wound up as a gigantic dog-pile somehow.  Those deemed the “winners” (everyone except us) were awarded with candy.  This fascinated them.  Their mouths had never been so blue.  After that they stood, entranced, as we blew bubbles.  Yes, BUBBLES.  The simplest toy available at any Wal-Mart in America had become an amazing wonder for the kids, and we realized that we took too much for granted in our Florida palace.

 

Even a town-house is a royal palace compared to these houses.

 

 

 

     

Day One of the Thailand Expedition (or, more acurately, Day Three)

For those of you who don’t know, my dad, a few friends and I have left for Thailand, a trip with Compassion International to encourage people in the U.S. to sponsor Thai children.  He will report in to WAY FM on some details of the kids and the country itself, while I update this blog daily on what happens to me.  There will be pictures, I promise, and though our digital camera isn’t able to be hooked to this computer I’m typing on (at the Bangkok Airport, later to be one I get in the Royal Princess Hotel) I will post the pics by the time I get home.  If you have read all my posts of the week, wait another couple of days and I will have the pics plus some extra writing.

So on Friday, May 30th, we (me, my dad, our leader Jocelyn Clarambeau, Randy and Paige Pierce, and Kurt Wallace) left from West Palm Beach to Atlanta (not a bad flight:  about an hour or so).  We almost missed our plane.  After this came the lengthy journey to Los Angeles, a flight of about five hours (by far the longest domestic flight both my dad and I have taken), followed by a four-hour wait for the next flight to Taipei, Taiwan on a giant Boeing 747.

And yes, the monstrosity of the plane denoted the length of the flight.

It took an incredible sixteen hours to arc over the Pacific by flying northwest along the west coast of the U.S. and Canada, west through southern Alaska into the Bering Strait, south along the coast of the Russian Kamchatka Peninsula and through the center of Japan, and finally to the capital of Taiwan.  Long before that my mind had lost all sense of time, convincing my exhausted body that it wasn’t time to be tired.  We arrived in Taipei at six-thirty a.m. their time, while in Florida it was seven p.m.  Talk about confusing.

And through all this, we skipped from Friday to Sunday.

If we had been flying east we would have had to live Friday over again.  The same exact day twice.  So there really wasn’t a Second Day to write about, and even if there was, I wouldn’t have been able to use a computer until now in Bangkok, Sunday evening.  Which in Florida was midnight Saturday, my watch and iPod told me.

  The plane to L. A. had a nice feature:  an in-flight multiplayer trivia game on each person’s personal screen, which everyone could sign in to.  And… drumroll please… I placed second out of twenty people multiple times!  I’m obviously the only one that cares.  On the trip to Taiwan there was a camera attached to the front of the plane, which everyone could gain access to on their personal screen (which lacked the trivia game).  Somewhere up by Russia, bored out of our minds, we decided to watch “I am Legend,” which turned out to be a good choice.  What a movie.

Well, two more flights have or will have commenced since the Long One.  From Taipei we flew to Bangkok, and during this we stopped at Hong Kong.  We’re at Bangkok now and hope to fly to Chiang Mai in a few minutes.  I’m thinking this will most likely be quite uneventful, and if anything happens today to prove me wrong, I will edit this post until I get it right.  I survived today, and if I do so tomorrow, so long until then.

…there’s quite a variety of ferocious predators in Thailand, I’ve heard… 

 

 

Some Other Cool Blogs I Read To Take My Mind off The Genius of Sir William

Look at my blogroll to the top-right.  There are some good blogs there.  Go to one.

Trivia (20 questions about pretty much anything) -episode I

Ok, here’s how this works.  I will ask you twenty questions about stuff like geography, history, science… and you give your answers in the comments section of this post.  There might be other comments in this box as well, but do notlook at them!  They are other people’s answers.  You will receive 2 points for getting a normal question right, 1 point for getting a multiple-choice question right, and for a multiple-answer question you will get a point for each answer you get right.  Some questions are tough, others are simple.  This is just episode I, so you should expect more trivia in the future.  After you finish the quiz I will delete your answers and post your score.  Just make sure you identify who you are.  This quiz will continue indefinitely so if you have a high score you could reign as champion for a while, until someone else becomes king of the hill.  Good luck. 

The Quiz

1.  Between which two countries is the country Andorra squeezed?

2.  Name a country with two capital cities and give the name of at least one capital.

3.  The War of 1812 was fought by which two countries?

4.  Name one of Christopher Columbus’ ships.

5.  In what ancient civilization could you find a phalanx of pikemen?

6.  Which one of these battles did France not participate in?

a.)  Agincourt

b.)  Trafalgar

c.)  Waterloo

d.)  The Somme

e.)  Crécy

7.  Romance languages are languages that have sprung from Latin.  Is English one?

8.  When ancient Persia invaded Greece, what type of soldier did the Persians have that the Greeks had little or none of?

9.  In the middle ages, many people tried to get the Church to ban crossbows.  What was wrong with crossbows?

10.  How much is the Mona Lisa worth?  Round to the thousands.

11.  What does the prefix “nano” do to the noun which it is fixed to?

12.  Which state of America does not have a rectangular flag?

13.  Which one of these American Presidents did not get shot?

a.)  Theodore Roosevelt

b.)  William McKinley

c.)  John Kennedy

d.)  Ronald Reagan

e.)  Calvin Coolidge

14.  Below are past titles of kings from various countries or empires.  For each king, name his country/empire.

a.)  Czar

b.)  Sultan

c.)  Tsar

d.)  Caesar

e.)  Pharaoh

15.  What is the driest desert in the world?

16.  What is the closest star to earth?

17.  What is the action that allows a ship (one with sails) to sail in a zig-zag motion into the wind?

18.  Squid meat and octopus meat share the same name.  What is it?

19.  Below are studies of different things.  In what study would the word “nucleus” be used most often?

a.)  taxonomy

b.)  cytology

c.)  paleontology

d.)  marine biology

20.  Out of all these weapons,  name those that Roman legionaries did not use.

a.)  gladius

b.)  mace

c.)  javelin

d.) spear

e.)  bow

f.)  pike

g.)  halberd

h.)  buckler shield

i.)  sica     

Scrunched Up in an Obscure Corner of My Evil Scientific Lab

I got bored today, so I decided to mess around with some genetics.  I actually extracted some deoxyribonucleic acid from half a cup of split peas and wrapped some around a skewer (not shown here).  What is the purpose of this?  Well, it’s kinda awesome, if you think about it.

First I had to get to the DNA inside the peas.  This involved dissolving the cell walls of the peas’ cells with salt water.  Then I destroyed the phospholipids (a lipid is a fat, a phospholipid is a lipid with a third fatty acid replaced with a phosphate group) in the plasma membrane with soap.  The cells had been laid bare; their contents were now spilled out into the solution.  But there was one more step.  Proteins surrounding the nucleus of the cell had to be eliminated.  I did this with meat tenderizer, which is designed to destroy proteins anyway.  

The cell wall broken, the plasma membrane destroyed, and the proteins down for the count, the DNA was now exposed.  It wasn’t packaged into chromosomes anymore, so the full length of the strands was visible.  If you dye some water green and throw in some ripped-up cotton balls, that’s essentially what the solution and DNA resembled.  Here’s some pics.

My Desert Island Poll

There will be a cool poll here sometime.

A Post On The Wisdom Of Adding Correctly

I have crossed into a new dimension, one where no human has set foot before, into the realm of the unknown.  Cortez thought he would find El Dorado, Columbus the end of the earth, alchemists the Philosopher’s Stone.  Ha.  I have outdone them all.  Not that any of them found what they were looking for, but I…

I have seen the sixth dimension.

Don’t ask me what it’s like.  All I’ll say is, through my own personal cunning and genius I have devised a gadget far beyond anything we have today:  3D glasses.  Don’t gasp.  Breathe slowly, inhale deeply, you might be in shock now.  Take a pill.  I should have warned you not to read this post; don’t forget, you can back out now, and don’t blame me later if you read this and pass out.  You have insurance right?  Good.  Read on if possible.

Looking through these marvelous glasses I focused on a zero-dimensional imaginary point in space, which before my eyes was transformed into a sphere.  This makes sense, right, because 0 plus 3 equals 3.  Then I walked to Muvico, to see a U2 Imax concert, and I wore my 3D glasses.  Suffice to say, Adam smashed me in the head with his guitar once or twice, and thankfully the Edge refrained from this.  I learned a valuable lesson, although I forgot what it was.

These glasses will be my downfall yet.  As I walked out of the theater, I put them on again and looked down a hallway, at the end of which stood a few ushers.  And there it was.  The sixth dimension.  There were awesome green codes scrolling down the walls and crossing the ceiling, going through the air, twirling around me, choking me… I had to take the glasses off then.  I did a few quick figures in my head, and it turned out that 3 plus 3 equaled 6.  Oh, and I put on the glasses again in my holding cell that night (don’t ask me how I got there… but those ushers probably know) and the bars on the windows looked really neat.

Ah, well, I guess we shouldn’t mess around in other people’s dimensions.  We really should clean up our own first.     

More Demotivaters

The last one was made by me.  Find even more at www.despair.com.

Toast Recon: The ELITES of the Elites.

The year is 2009.  The United States has unleashed a new and powerful weapon:  the Ghosts.  A squadron of elites whose job it is to go frontline, infiltrating enemy bases and forging the way for the big boys.  These are the most revered, admired, and esteemed (by friend and foe alike) marines of their kind, whom no one can hope to outmaneuver on the field of battle.  The Ghosts, truly, are the best of the best.

But a mission awaits two inexperienced young Ghosts, Mustice and Grant, which entails flying to Cuba, trooping behind the enemy lines, sabotaging many a Cuban tank, gunning down hundreds of surprisingly tactless Cubans, shutting down an unjust election enforced by the above surprisingly tactless Cubans, kidnapping the new Cuban dictator, and taking over the Cuban government;  all by themselves.

With a cocky, overconfident manner, they swaggered into Cuba unprepared except for a gun they could barely work and a night vision system that they didn’t try to turn on until they were pinned down in the middle of a field in broad daylight.  This is cool, they thought, turning on the blinding greenish light while getting raked by dozens of Cuban automatics.

 They just didn’t take it seriously.  The two Ghosts then proceeded to botch things up all over the island; commiting accidental suicides with their own grenade launchers, failing crucial sieges of inland strongholds, and creating a live comedy show in front of the Cuban soldiers’ eyes.  Eventually the enemy was so caught up in their own laughter that the Ghosts slipped past them and killed their dictator.  So rose a new generation of marines, and a new meaning of elite.

Oh, and these two Ghosts have their own video game now; a franchise called Ghost Recon.       

Posters for Losers

When you’re on the last leg of the race… when you can hear the wild cheers of the crowd… your legs are about to give out… then you see the finish line, stretched out before you…  but at the last moment, everyone passes you and you lose the race.  Who can sympathize with you?  Somehow, all your motivational posters haven’t helped a bit.

But try demotivational posters.  They’re there with you every step of the way, mocking, discouraging, and taking you down several notches, as if you can go down even further.  Perfect for losers like you.  With witty put-downs, qualities only a true loser can possess, and laughable quotes, these posters are guaranteed to have you lagging behind every competition with a fiery unconfident spirit.  Here’s one below.  Hope it ruins your day.

 Speaking of motivational posters, here’s a pretty neat web site where you can make your own.  Go to http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/motivator.php.  Buy your customized poster if you wish (for about $40) or put it on your blog (like I’m about to do).  Here’s mine.

I was so inspired by my own poster, I sued Tiki Barber after Illinois got slaughtered by USC.  I think it will drive you to do the same.  Have fun.

Why Should You be Allowed to Suppose the Contrary?

I don’t care what you say.  You might as well just know that my team can beat your team anytime.  It should be common knowledge, and it’s a shame there aren’t enough people of this knowledge to proclaim it. 

What team, you ask, as you wave your USC banner?

I don’t think you deserve to have me tell you.  Let someone else, someone with the aforesaid knoledge, tell you, you loser.

  

Officially, This is the First Post!

I hope you like it, ’cause I sure do.  Please post a comment so I know you’ve been here.  More to follow.