While North Face is better known for their winterwear, jackets and such, they make apparel for other seasons as well. In fact, my favorite (i.e. only) pair of sandals are a mediocre pair from North Face. They do their job, they're pretty comfortable, so I wear them I fair amount. Therefore, they get a fair bit of wear on them. Their slogan - "Never Stop Exploring" - has worn off a bit where the balls of my feet rub against the sole, so now one reads "Stop Exploring" and the other reads "Never Stop Explod", the capitol R wore off to just the round bit on there. So I have quite demotivational flip-flops.
In other news, my back is like tree bark currently. I got the nastiest sunburn when I was down in Myrtle Beach with my girlfriend last week. That night was actually quite terrible, I think I had a touch of dehydration sickness as well, so I was in a half-awake state of pain and delirium all night, collapsing in fits of hysteric laughter every couple of minutes. It was definately an experience. But in any case, it's better now. But it's peeling like heck. And I went to a party last night, and wouldn't you know it, a Truth or Dare dare required me to take off my shirt and hop like a bunny. In my case, a shaved bunny with a bad case of shingles. It wasn't pleasant for all involved, I'm sure.
Started listening to the Scott Mills Daily this week, I appreciate their Britishness. And just about everything else about them. Anyone who's brilliant enough to combine the Jason Bourne trilogy and the music of ABBA in a one-man show is worth listening to, in my book.
My iPod is annoying when I want to listen to music on shuffle and something that my middle school band played years ago comes up. Or vise versa. But usually the former.
Song of the Day: Melectric - Ramona Falls
Word of the Day: Collective
Webcomic of the Day: Natalie Dee analyzes the itsy bitsy spider.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
6 lists
6 observations from Europe:
1. German and Austrian waitresses are all too willing to serve teenagers large amounts of alchohol.
2. Switzerland looks like Eastern Kentucky, but with more castles.
3. England is like Seattle, but with more castles.
4. Paris is the geographical equivolent of the butt of the most expensive cigar ever made.
5. Nick Jonas is well appreciated in Great Britain too, never fear.
6. String guys are intimidating.
5 favorite albums:
1. Let Live and Let Ghosts - Jukebox the Ghost
2. Origin of Symmetry - Muse
3. Parachutes - Coldplay
4. Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum - Tally Hall
5. The Bull Moose After Party - Speechwriters LLC
4 favorite musicals:
1. Les Miserables
2. Phantom of the Opera
3. Peter Pan
4. Chicago
3 pretty words:
1. Serendipity
2. Horchata
3. Precisely
2 instruments that bug the heck out of me when played badly:
1. Euphonium
2. Violin, paticularly 2nd violins.
1 is the lonliest number that you'll ever do:
Yeah.
1. German and Austrian waitresses are all too willing to serve teenagers large amounts of alchohol.
2. Switzerland looks like Eastern Kentucky, but with more castles.
3. England is like Seattle, but with more castles.
4. Paris is the geographical equivolent of the butt of the most expensive cigar ever made.
5. Nick Jonas is well appreciated in Great Britain too, never fear.
6. String guys are intimidating.
5 favorite albums:
1. Let Live and Let Ghosts - Jukebox the Ghost
2. Origin of Symmetry - Muse
3. Parachutes - Coldplay
4. Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum - Tally Hall
5. The Bull Moose After Party - Speechwriters LLC
4 favorite musicals:
1. Les Miserables
2. Phantom of the Opera
3. Peter Pan
4. Chicago
3 pretty words:
1. Serendipity
2. Horchata
3. Precisely
2 instruments that bug the heck out of me when played badly:
1. Euphonium
2. Violin, paticularly 2nd violins.
1 is the lonliest number that you'll ever do:
Yeah.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Of Fatigue, Pitchers, and Jackwagons
So I'm blogging. Because my girlfriend was all like "Guess who hasn't blogged for a while?" and I was like "aaaack". My face was falling off today, I played an hour-and-a-half concert in preparation pour my trip to Europe for which I leave on Thursday. And my orthodontist had screwed over my braces with a powerchain across the front, which wouldn't have been an issue if I had gotten to do some lip slurs, which I didn't, which meant that I was screwed over, which yeah I'm being a nerd currently. But this blog is TROMBONES and Diet Coke, I guess.
I'm watching the All-Star Game. Kuo (who?) just single-handedly gave up the first run to the American League, with a walk, an error, and a sac fly. Just putting it out there, wouldn't everyone prefer to see Stephen Strasburg give up the losing run instead of a no-name injury replacement middle reliever? Or Mat Latos? Or Roy Halladay, for that matter? I'm not sayin', I'm just saying. (that charliemanuelisaclown) What?
I desperately want to see Inception. Ellen Paige + psychological thriller = total weirdness in my brain.
Speaking of movies, The Last Airbender was horrible. M. Night Shamallama obviously takes himself way too seriously. And the altered pronounciations? I don't understand it. The effects, the much-lauded mega-millions effects, were actually pretty terrible in places, at the most satisfactory in others. Terrible acting. Especially from Noah Ringer, just awful. He looks the part, but that's about as far as he gets.
On an unrelated note, this one Geico commercial is absolutely brilliant.
"Could switching to Geico save you up to fifteen percent on car insurance?
...
Do former drill sargents make terrible therapists?"
"And that's why yellow makes me sad, I think."
"That's interesting. You know what makes me sad? YOU do! Maybe we should chug on over to namby-pamby land where MAYBE we can find some self-confidence for you, yah JACKWAGON!"
Cracks me up every time.
Link of the day! Click on the red text to move on.
Song of the Day: Bluish by Sondre Lerche, covering Animal Collective.
I'm watching the All-Star Game. Kuo (who?) just single-handedly gave up the first run to the American League, with a walk, an error, and a sac fly. Just putting it out there, wouldn't everyone prefer to see Stephen Strasburg give up the losing run instead of a no-name injury replacement middle reliever? Or Mat Latos? Or Roy Halladay, for that matter? I'm not sayin', I'm just saying. (that charliemanuelisaclown) What?
I desperately want to see Inception. Ellen Paige + psychological thriller = total weirdness in my brain.
Speaking of movies, The Last Airbender was horrible. M. Night Shamallama obviously takes himself way too seriously. And the altered pronounciations? I don't understand it. The effects, the much-lauded mega-millions effects, were actually pretty terrible in places, at the most satisfactory in others. Terrible acting. Especially from Noah Ringer, just awful. He looks the part, but that's about as far as he gets.
On an unrelated note, this one Geico commercial is absolutely brilliant.
"Could switching to Geico save you up to fifteen percent on car insurance?
...
Do former drill sargents make terrible therapists?"
"And that's why yellow makes me sad, I think."
"That's interesting. You know what makes me sad? YOU do! Maybe we should chug on over to namby-pamby land where MAYBE we can find some self-confidence for you, yah JACKWAGON!"
Cracks me up every time.
Link of the day! Click on the red text to move on.
Song of the Day: Bluish by Sondre Lerche, covering Animal Collective.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Entanglement
So I've been listening to Apparatjik - the side project of Coldplay bassist Guy Berryman, including memebers from a-ha and Mew - and their new album, We Are Here (on iTunes). They're pretty darned weird, pretty darned experimental, and pretty darned good. Try to imagine a fusion of a techno Mika, early-Coldplay (especially some of the guitar riffs), and the trippyness of Animal Collective. And also something techno and cerebral and different. My personal favorites on the album are "Datascroller", "Look Kids", and "Deadbeat", although the most accessable song on the album might be "Snow Crystals".
One thing I'll touch on is a central theme of the album - on the tracks "Arrow & Bow" and "Electric Eye", a strange term is used - "Sub-Particle Entanglement Theory". It sounds like something that they just made up, to give a cerebral effect on the album. However, entanglement is a real thing - a certain theory not quite understood by anyone. Albert Einstein himself refused to deal with it, dismissing it as "spooky action at a distance", even though his theory of relativity suggested it.
I won't, of course, get into any of the real math or physics about it - I don't understand any of that. But the theory goes a bit like this, in common terms: if you take two very small particles, and "spin" them a certain way (I would explain what this means, but it makes my head hurt), they become practically one and the same, while still being seperate particles. Anything that you do to one particle, "spin" it, blow it up, dress it in a tux, will happen identically to the other particle - instantaneously, no matter how far apart. The two particles are "entangled".
Now, this might not seem like anything groundbreaking on the surface. But the real idea here is that everything in the universe seems to follow one common speed limit - the speed of light. Einstein's famous equation E=mc^2 dictates that when objects get close to the speed of light, they gain mass, and therefore take more energy to move. In theory, when a object is moving at the speed of light, it would take an infinite amount of energy to move, which is impossible. This applies to not only physical objects, but things like radio waves and light - information. They all cannot pass the speed of light .
But now, with engtanglement, the two particles act on each other instantaneously - meaning that information about one is passed to the other, bypassing the speed of light. If we could make these entangled particles act as, say, a television, you could get TV on the Sun instantaneously as it was being broadcast, while radio waves would take a whole 8 minutes to reach the sun. This might not seem signifigant, but if you're talking about interstellar distances, it could provide the communication needed to reach the astronauts orbiting a sun on the other side of the galaxy - instantaneously.
Hope I didn't loose anybody there.
Anyway, I just thought it was cool that they referenced that and all. I totally recommend Apparatjik, if you're willing to listen to something less than normal. Also, if you want to read more into entanglement and other stuff like that, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking is a comprehensible and relatively (no pun intended) simple insight into the universe.
Song of the Day: Snow Crystals - Apparatjik
Word of the Day: Entanglement
One thing I'll touch on is a central theme of the album - on the tracks "Arrow & Bow" and "Electric Eye", a strange term is used - "Sub-Particle Entanglement Theory". It sounds like something that they just made up, to give a cerebral effect on the album. However, entanglement is a real thing - a certain theory not quite understood by anyone. Albert Einstein himself refused to deal with it, dismissing it as "spooky action at a distance", even though his theory of relativity suggested it.
I won't, of course, get into any of the real math or physics about it - I don't understand any of that. But the theory goes a bit like this, in common terms: if you take two very small particles, and "spin" them a certain way (I would explain what this means, but it makes my head hurt), they become practically one and the same, while still being seperate particles. Anything that you do to one particle, "spin" it, blow it up, dress it in a tux, will happen identically to the other particle - instantaneously, no matter how far apart. The two particles are "entangled".
Now, this might not seem like anything groundbreaking on the surface. But the real idea here is that everything in the universe seems to follow one common speed limit - the speed of light. Einstein's famous equation E=mc^2 dictates that when objects get close to the speed of light, they gain mass, and therefore take more energy to move. In theory, when a object is moving at the speed of light, it would take an infinite amount of energy to move, which is impossible. This applies to not only physical objects, but things like radio waves and light - information. They all cannot pass the speed of light .
But now, with engtanglement, the two particles act on each other instantaneously - meaning that information about one is passed to the other, bypassing the speed of light. If we could make these entangled particles act as, say, a television, you could get TV on the Sun instantaneously as it was being broadcast, while radio waves would take a whole 8 minutes to reach the sun. This might not seem signifigant, but if you're talking about interstellar distances, it could provide the communication needed to reach the astronauts orbiting a sun on the other side of the galaxy - instantaneously.
Hope I didn't loose anybody there.
Anyway, I just thought it was cool that they referenced that and all. I totally recommend Apparatjik, if you're willing to listen to something less than normal. Also, if you want to read more into entanglement and other stuff like that, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking is a comprehensible and relatively (no pun intended) simple insight into the universe.
Song of the Day: Snow Crystals - Apparatjik
Word of the Day: Entanglement
Monday, June 21, 2010
This blog is a BLOG
So this is a blog. Chyeah. All kinds of wonderful things are discussed here - music, sports, teenagerhood, love, hipsters, sarcasm, life. From yours truly, a teenage guy trying to get his act together.
So I'm pretty much at a loss on what to cover here. World Cup, maybe? The only opinion I have on the wonderful vuvuzelas (vuvuzela? vuvuzelae?) is that it sounds way to much like vulva to be taken seriously. Which is why I laugh at people who get angry at them.
Also, I watched part of the Portugal-North Korea match today in French, in which the Koreans' goal was hardly a demilitarized zone - Portugal won 7-0, six of those goals coming in the second half, one of which coming between the legs of the Korean goalie, another of which coming off of a sweet (lucky) neck juggle by Christiano Ronaldo. I'm not going to make any of the obligatory Kim Jong Il-shoots-the-goalie jokes, but I'll be curious to see the reaction that the native North Korean fans give to the team returning to the country, since it'll be televised by -- oh, wait. Nevermind.
I'll leave it at that for today. Summer in four days. Going to a John Green book event on Thursday.
Word of the Day: Hourglass
Song of the Day: Resistance St. - What Made Milwaukee Famous (link goes here)
So I'm pretty much at a loss on what to cover here. World Cup, maybe? The only opinion I have on the wonderful vuvuzelas (vuvuzela? vuvuzelae?) is that it sounds way to much like vulva to be taken seriously. Which is why I laugh at people who get angry at them.
Also, I watched part of the Portugal-North Korea match today in French, in which the Koreans' goal was hardly a demilitarized zone - Portugal won 7-0, six of those goals coming in the second half, one of which coming between the legs of the Korean goalie, another of which coming off of a sweet (lucky) neck juggle by Christiano Ronaldo. I'm not going to make any of the obligatory Kim Jong Il-shoots-the-goalie jokes, but I'll be curious to see the reaction that the native North Korean fans give to the team returning to the country, since it'll be televised by -- oh, wait. Nevermind.
I'll leave it at that for today. Summer in four days. Going to a John Green book event on Thursday.
Word of the Day: Hourglass
Song of the Day: Resistance St. - What Made Milwaukee Famous (link goes here)
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