I’m not really sure how to start out a post on such depressing a subject as this, but it needs to be said. As most of you probably know by now, two days ago, a massive earthquake struck the Indian Ocean, causing a tsunami that hit Sri Lanka, S. India and Thailand to name a few. The death toll has more than doubled every day, now reaching over 50,000 (or more than the entire population of Charlottesville). Of course, millions more have been affected by this, and many more will most likely die from increased body count and disease. At least maybe this will alert people to the fact that terrorists aren’t the only thing that can kill people.

Wow, this has been a full week. In these short few days we’ve had on break so far, I done a great deal of my science fair project, done most of the written stuff more my history project, written more English journals than I had ever done previously in my life, and helped make almost ten batches of cookies. It was actually about when I had covered my hands, most of my face and my eyebrows in a thick layer of left over melted chocolate chips that I realized I had done enough baking, and that it would be very hard to clean my face up (I would have taken a picture of myself, but, you know, I would have gotten chocolate over everything, so…).

Well, it’s Christmas Eve today, not that I’m getting that excited (see my first post about holidays). I’ll actually be getting up at about five tomorrow to drive to Richmond and get on a plane to Fargo. That’s right, the place where it snows in October, and supposedly feels like -6F right now according to weather.com. Don’t get me wrong, I love Fargo, I love the snow, I love cold weather, but I have become slightly habituated to the 50 degree weather we had today.

But now that I’m done with all of the homework I set aside for myself to do before I left (though I still have to pack), it’s time to settle down and get ready to watch A Christmas Story on TBS who always shows it 12 times in a row. Speaking of movies, I watched My Neighbor Totoro a few days ago (it’s an awesome movie by Miyazaki, who if you haven’t been able to tell by now I worship)! True, it was the weird one Fox released about ten years ago, not the new version that was supposed to come out next year but won’t thanks to stupid corporate legal things that I can’t think of any good analogies for at the moment! But it was still something.

Before I go, I would like to give you a little hint as to what my next post will be about, see if you can understand what it will be: “I think Jon Voight has a strange obsession with the all-seeing-eye”. So until I write again, remember that the holidays are about family, togetherness, and the only chance I will have in a long time to have to look no further than my lips for warm Hershey’s chocolate. Later,

#m

I feel that I must make a correction. Mara has reminded me that there were actually many movies based on The Wizard of Oz, but at least none of them tried to tell the same story - at least not without some incredibly strange twist. Return to Oz (1985) involves a young Dorothy, a mental institution, and shock therapy. I hope Doug Thomas does not sue me over a quote I’m pulling from his review:

Dorothy…is back in Kansas, where Aunt Em…is at the end of her rope: her niece is not sleeping and going on about a place called Oz. Therapy may be the answer, but luckily the scary clinic goes dark before Dorothy can be, er, cured

We’re all waiting anxiously to see if it will snow tonight and close school Monday (we only have Monday and Tuesday left!). Meanwhile, it’s 50 degrees outside, so I don’t know what the weather channel is thinking. What would be horrible though if for it not to snow, school to open, and have to eat lunch outside with tomorrows high of 29 degrees.

I was planning on writing a lot more, but I’m just too tired,

#m

Supposedly, “white” headlights on cars give you a better view of the road. It lights up the street more. It puts out enough light so that you can see that deer a full four seconds before you hit it instead of the usual two. This all comes from the mass of As Seen on TV items that polluted our department stores - owned, operated and manufactured right out the Philippines - a few years ago. But whenever I see a car on the highway with the unnatural glow of white lights, I can’t help but think of some rich 45 year old male sitting in his Mercedes that he bought with the money he got from the stock market “tips” his friend Jerry Smith from that online chat room gave him, just as long as he gave Jerry, say, 10% of his profits.

Some movies only get better with the remake. Take “Oceans Eleven”, or “The Italian Job”, to name a few. But, while the originals were good, they weren’t timeless classics, so you didn’t get mobs of angry film geeks charging at the doors of Miramax. Other movies should never, and I repeat, over my dead body, be remade. Movies like “The Wizard of Oz”, “Gone With the Wind”, or “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. Are you listening, Warner Bros.!? Don’t remake movies that shouldn’t be remade, geez.

I’m really not sure what decade this is from, but I’m glad I didn’t grow up in it. 

This, is Willy Wonka, played “ever so groovilly” by Johnny Depp annd his banndd of chocolatte obssessed childrenn. Another thing - if the new movie wasn’t based off the old one, is the music even going to be similar? You can see the trailer here. It’s not like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was the best movie I had ever seen, and could watch it on continuous loop, but it’s sacred landmark movie territory. You can’t take that movie and turn it into a psychedelic light wall at a nightclub in France.

#m

Google is taking over the world. They have the best search engine in existence, they own Blogger, AdWords, and I’m sure many other things that I can’t think of right now. And despite the fact that I know for certain that their stock will plummet on May 12, 2006, they now have made another purchase. Keyhole is basically a database of huge collections of satellite images, all put on a digital earth and there for you searching pleasure (It’s Google, of course you can search). By this I mean you can type in an address, city, country, or any combination, and it will zoom in to a satellite image of it. Given, some areas of the world are less detailed than others (big cities will be fairly clear, but Charlottesville on the other hand isn’t). I would also venture a guess that any military installations are mysteriously absent from the photos.

A little over a year ago I saw Keyhole used on some science program, and when they would move from talking about one part of the world to another, they would literally have the picture go from a zoom in on one part of the world, zoom out to see the Earth, then zoom in to the next part. But back then they didn’t have a free trial, and I was very disappointed. Now, my dreams have come true - and the best part is, although the images of Charlottesville are horrible, Chaska (where I lived in Minnesota) has really high detail images, and I could even see my old house! So anyway, download Keyhole, it has a 7 day free trial, and it’s only $30 if you want to buy it. I’ll post some coordinates so everyone can see my old neighborhood soon.

Something I forgot to mention about my trip was how my mom got invited to go teach somewhere for a few days. This isn’t an unusual thing - it’s what she does for work -but every one in a while she gets invited somewhere crazy. While in Paris, she got an email asking for her presence in Kuwait. Yes, I’m talking about the country that had the nasty little incident with Iraq during the Gulf War. She’s not going to go of course, but she had heard from some other people earlier that had visited Kuwait that they pay considerable amounts of money to people during what she does there. In cash. In large paper bags. I’ll let you think on that,

#m