Reason #291 Why Sig School Might Rock: Good Food

So it's 12:43. The bell rings and your class pours out the door, racing to beat the rest of the school to the lunch lines. In your fervor, you race through the cafeteria line, grabbing some ketcup packets as you pay for you food, already searching for where your friends have sat down. Finally, you can relax, eat, and have some fun with your friends.

Then you wake up from your dream and realize: What the hell?! I would never look foward to eating cafeteria food.

This directly correlates to a possible reason why Sig School might rock next year: good food. For those who don't know what Sig School is, or how in the world we will get fresh, REAL food, here's and explaination: Signature School is a new charter school here in Evansville that I plan on attending this year. I already attended it half day last year, before it gained full-day, charter status. Currently on the 4th floor there are several vending machines and some couches (currently two, though last year there were three). "Heaven". Unfortunately, next year, even Heaven won't have enough food to sustain us. So instead of vending machine food we'll get food from nearby downtown restaurants. There's a Blimpie's Deli (excellent chicken wraps), Lic's Deli (good grilled cheese and ice cream), Milano's (Italian restaurant. Nuf said), and prolly more restaurants ending in 's.

What are the implications of good food? First, there would be a race to the lunch lines. This competition would reward the more disciplined students who knew the quickest ways out of the building (like me). Second, after eating the good food, students will feel more satisfied, enhancing their school work. Also, since most of these restaurants won't have deep-fried mystery meat like some schools, students will be more healthy.

Yay. So if you are wavering about whether or not to come to Sig School next year, "join the train." Heaven will also have room for you. Unless you take up two spots on the couch.

Published on Wednesday, June 12, 2002 in the lndependent/UK
Mr Bush's Titanic War on Terror Will Eventually Sink Beneath the Waves
Meantime, all the men who claim to be fighting terror are using this lunatic "war" simply for their own purposes
by Robert Fisk

First it was to be a crusade. Then it became the "War for Civilization". Then the "War without End". Then the "War
against Terror". And now – believe it or not – President Bush is promising us a "Titanic War on Terror". This gets weirder and weirder. What can come next? Given the latest Bush projections last week – "we know that thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us" – he must surely have an even more gargantuan cliché up his sleeve.

Ok, ignore the beginning of my last post, I've changed from a ServuStats tracker (booooo) to a GoStats.com tracker (yay).

Could you do me a favor? You see the ServuStats.com Button on the left? Oh wait, of course you wouldn't, cause they are dumb and crash a lot and most of the time they are offline, thus all you see on the left of my page below the "Powered by Blogger" button and above the "BuildTraffic.com" button is a little red x. Rahr! If anyone knows a better free site statistics tracker, leave me a message.

Speaking of crashing websites, what's up with the Recording Industry Artists of America shutting down AudioGalaxy? Of all the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file transfer applications, AudioGalaxy was by far the most legal. Personally, I hate AudioGalaxy's browser interface, and use KaZaA, but AudioGalaxy had its uses in finding those hard-to-find songs. Phuc Nguyen (pronounced "folk win" or "fook win"...what? you thought it was pronounced how? you have a dirty mind) used AG to dl Vietnamese songs. I used AG to dl quite a few Bond songs (not shaken, nor stirred, but the Bond String Quartet). Unlike other P2P applications, AG tried to accomodate the RIAA's initial demands. First, AG banned copyrighted songs by title and artist...but users quickly learned how to circumvent these filters by renaming the latest Backstreet Boys hit "badband- lamesong.mp3" AG then actually developed a filter that compared the first megabyte of each music file with copyrighted material. This filter was pretty effective at keeping most of the big popular songs out of the system.

But regardless of AudioGalaxy's filter's effectiveness, it's obvious its developers tried to emphisize AudioGalaxy as a place to share non-pirated songs. Small bands were featured on the front page of www.audiogalaxy.com with not only the artists' consent, but gratitude.

Moreover, the amount of pirated material going over AG pales in comparison to the KaZaA, Morpheus, and the Gnutella networks. Due to their decentralized nature, no filters have been implemented. Some argue that it is this decentralization that makes these P2Ps impossible to shut down. If the KaZaA company went bankrupt, their software would still run on millions of computers, pirating not only mp3s but also software and videos. But this past week alone, download.com reports 2,644,908 new downloads of KaZza, 523,436 of Morpheus, and 419,471 of iMesh. If the developers and distrubuters of these P2Ps were shut down and forced underground, eventually, all the currently used versions of P2P would be incompatible with the newer operating systems (ie KaZaa v1.7.2 would not work with Windows 2049. Assuming that Bill Gates didn't stomp the RIAA in court to bundle a Microsoft developed P2P application into Windows).

Don't misinterpret my message- I don't support the RIAA's cause....I just think that if they were to try to do their job, they ought to do it right, letting AudioGalaxy keep on operating. So this goes out to the RIAA: PHUC YOU.

Note to all copyright infringement agents: I'm only kidding. I don't use AudioGalaxy or KaZaA, and Phuc is a figment of my imagination.

Dunno how much I'm going to post today, as I just got my wisdom teeth pulled out and my mouth is bleeding uncontrollably and my mouth is entirely numb...

I'd just like to note that the oral surgeons should NEVER, EVER show their patients the big needles. Before the surgery I saw one...omg.....fucking humungous. I was feeling like shit on a shoe. Or as the Spanish would say, "me siento como caca por una zapata."

Hey, if you like some of my posts, please tell your buddies to visit here. If I get a larger audience I'll publish more often!

And from now on, the commenting service (there should be a link to add comments to any of my posts right after each of my posts) can be used to request future commentaries and to ccritique my analysis. Enjoy

Everyone's favorite humor columnist, Dave Barry, writes:

Why do men like to look at good-looking women?The answer, according to a study that I am not making up, conducted by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, is that looking at attractive women -- prepare for a shocking finding -- gives men pleasure.Yes. According to news reports, the researchers had a group of young men look at photos of people of various degrees of attractiveness.If the men wanted to keep looking at a photo of an attractive woman, they had to keep pressing a key; a researcher is quoted as saying that some men pressed the key 6,000 times in 40 minutes, which is ``as much as a rat presses for cocaine.''

Dave Barry is da man.

Flyers were left on vehicles during Sunday services at the St. Martin Catholic Church in Rome, Kentucky. The flyer states St. Martin's has a known pedophile priest. Reverend Len Arcilesi is the church's only priest, and he's taking the accusation very personally.

In a time when the Catholic Church is under fire, with numerous reports of pedophile priests, it was Reverend Arcilesi himself who contacted the media concerning allegations made against him. He's furious about the anonymous flyer and he has a message to those who wrote it: bring it on!

"I'll sue the Hell out of them, and I mean it." [http://www.14wfie.com/Global/story.asp?S=864213&nav=3w6oAE1h]

In local news, a priest threatens to "sue the Hell" out of some people. Not that I'm criticizing the Catholic Church...but many people, priests, pastors, imams, and rabbis included, don't follow their religion to their best ability. For instance, the cussing priest is setting a bad example for the his parishoners by threatening legal violence.

I also personally know a Hindu who bends his dietary restrictions to include eggs as part of his vegetarian program...he shall remain anonymous.

Thank God I don't have a God to obey. Well, at least not a Christian, Jewish, or Muslim God. Maybe I should say, "Thank the Creator" if I were to really follow my beliefs. Jesus, I'm so anal.

WASHINGTON, July 18 — Adding an extra version of a single gene makes mice grow big brains — brains so large they have to fold up, much as human brains do, to fit inside the skull, researchers said Thursday.

IT IS NOT yet clear whether the mice are smarter — they were all killed soon after birth — but the scientists said they were surprised that one gene had such a strong effect and said they would do further experiments. [http://www.msnbc.com/news/782312.asp]

The Pinky and the Brain, the Pinky and the Brain, one is a genius....

WASHINGTON (AP) - Some 200 Army personnel used government charge cards to get $38,000 in cash that they spent on "lap dancing and other forms of entertainment" at strip clubs near military bases, Sen. Charles Grassley said Wednesday.

So THAT'S where all our tax dollars go. Bush proposed a $379b defense budget for the 2003 fiscal year. An increase of $48b over the last year. In case you were wondering, yes that is a lot of money. It'd be like if the US defense budget swallowed Bill Gates whole. Well, with the stock market crash, maybe that would be two Bill Gates.

Cloning has so much potential.

But back to the point, the huge increase in the defense budget is unwise. Yahoo reports:

The new General Accounting Office report is the first to focus on the Army, which has more than 430,000 travel cardholders and more than 100,000 purchase cards in use. The Army's charge bill last year totaled more than $3 billion.

These are the known personal expenditures- the smarter Army people would have hidden their purchases better. Speaking of hiding costs, Bush has done a good job hiding the cost of National Missile Defense, another waste of money.

National Missile Defense sounds good on paper, but really has no application in this war on terror. Terrorists won't use ballistic missiles against us because the source of the launch could easily be tracked and a positive identification of the reponsible terrorist would be automatic, and retaliation would anhiliate the terrorist and those around him. Then there's also the issue of the complexities and costs of building a ballistic missile...Perhaps Bush is proposing missile defense to counter rogue states. The only rogue state that has the capability--or even anywhere close to the capability--of hitting the US is North Korea. Even if Saddam developed missiles, they wouldn't be advanced enough to reach the US. North Korea, is ruled by the canny Kim Jong-Il, who is in no way suicidal. Because the launch of a ballistic missile is virtual suicide, no rogue state has both the capability and motive to force us to use National Missile Defense. NMD is nothing but a pissing contest with Russia and China.

So who's the biggest dick? Developers of NMD, Army men that use our tax dollars to stuff down strippers' g-strings, or Dick Armey?

IN DELIVERING THE FED’S semiannual report to Congress on the economy, Greenspan said “the fundamentals are in place for a return to sustained healthy growth.” [http://www.msnbc.com/news/781051.asp]

At camp, the extemp lab made an awesome "I <3 Alan Greenspan" t-shirt. When my dad saw it, he asked me why I loved Alan Greenspan...I was kinda worried that he thought I was gay at first, but then he explained that Alan Greenspan cost him lots of money in the markets, and that he is really a evil man....riight. So what exactly is Alan Greenspan's role in all this economic tumult we've experienced recently?

My dad said that because he raised the interest rates too drastically, investment halted and the markets fell. The problem with my dad's analysis is that Alan Greenspan raised the interest rates at the beginning of this year- the drop in the markets more directly coincided with the fall of Enron and Arthur Anderson, and the most recent bout of investor jitters occurred when WorldCom, Xerox, and Bristol-Myers all reported accounting mistakes...

It would be unfair to blame the nation's economic woes on Alan Greenspan, as he has ruled over the American economy for our longest period of economic growth in the 90s. There is only so much he can do, and when the megacorporations such as Enron scare away investors, there's nothing the Fed can do to fix it.

Regardless of what others have to say, I still <3 Alan Greenspan. No, not that way.

Catching up on stuff while I was gone, I found the following excerpt from an article on Dave Barry's site (for those who don't know, Dave Barry is the funniest writer ever):

Why are there so many e-mail ads for these products? Does anybody buy them? Is there a town somewhere, called Spamville, where the men consume Viagra and pornography in bulk quantities, then lurch around in a lust-crazed frenzy, their huge artificially enhanced endowments knocking holes in their walls, so eventually their houses fall down, forcing them to purchase new ones, using low-interest mortgages?

Read the whole thing here.

Well, I got back from Texas two days ago, which explains my long absensce from updating this page.

I swear, mother nature must hate me. Prior to camping in Texas, there was an official drought. The first week I was down there for camp, there was an official flood. Go me. The torrential rains stopped once I bought an umbrella for $7.99. How uncool is that. Maybe I should do the community a service and move to California to drench the forest fires.

Camp was fun...all my fellow extempers made it so fun. I wish I could have stayed for the extension, but it cost $400, and there's no way I could have scringed any more money out of my dad. Ah well.