Of English grammar and common trends.

The ancient greek language is so totally awesome. It just rocks.

Not because it sounds sophisticated for me to say that I know it, not because some lame lazy butt philosopher who sat around while they thought up ideas spoke it, not (totally) because Greeks are the awesomest people on the planet, not because The Odyssey was written by a guy named after a character on The Simpsons. Nay I say, for although these are all valid and sufficient reasons, they striketh not the prime reason on the nose.

It is because English stinks. It has to be the most bloated and uncoordinated language on this planet. Everything about it is filled with exceptions, ambiguities, misuses of terms, awkward spellings, and forms that don't make any sense. If I had a nickel for every stupid idiom and phrase and group of words that don't make any sense together but are used anyway, I would have a butt load of nickels.

English has had hundreds of years to skew, corrupt, and wreak havoc on itself. Centuries upon centuries of stupid people to contort something logical into something short handed, regional centric, and context oriented. Years and years of immigrants misusing pronouns and slaying standards. People mashing many good words into one generic "catch all" word that has no specifics to it at all. No uniqueness. No definitiveness. You need tons of context in order to have any idea of what I am saying.

When I say, "bow", you have now idea of what I am talking about. It could be a noun, or a verb, or maybe even an adjective, or essentially anything you want it to be, if you are so inclined. Talk about ambiguous.

I could say, "DUDE!, that dude is totally a dude, eh dude?"

"Dude" in that sentence was used as a reflexive exclamatory remark (on the same level as the "Ouch!"), a noun, a pronoun, and an adjective. There were nine words in that sentence, and four of them were the word "dude". Case in point.

Unfortunately the above sentence, or variants thereof, are a frequently manifested sentences in common English.

I feel bad for all those little Indian and Chinese kids who have to learn English so that they can work their phone tech support jobs for major companies based in the United States.

Greek is superior also in the area of word order. Yes, there are some standard placements for certain constructions, but, for the most part, things can be placed where ever you want to place them for reasons of emphasis. It allows, what I like to call, "Yoda talk".
You think something is important? Put it at the beginning of the sentence! Simple as that! And effective too! And, not only that, but it sounds really cool! Something that, if you do it in English, gets you strange looks and automatically pegs you as a Starwars freak, whether or not you actually are.


Or


maybe I am approaching this from the wrong direction. I am a fair guy, and I give everything its fair chance, until I decide that it is stupid and deserves to die a slow and painful death.

Maybe the "dude" movement has something going for it: a whole language that is so developed and so sophisticated in its makeup that any possible thought or meaning can be expressed by one single word and its accompanying inflection. "Dude".

eg. "Dude dude, dude dude dude dude dude, dude dude dude".

Translation, "Pardon me sir, but I believe that your presupposition is falsified by the morphosyntactical use of the minor premise of the enthymeme that you chose to employ"

Of course, this is hard to understand over the internet without proper inflection being made to the statement. But, if this usage of the language would abound in the public, a common knowledge of inflection would occur so that one would be able to read it over the internet.

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A bit of my Greek homework. There should not be too many heresies in there. I don't think that I had many in the first place, and whatever was left, I corrected out this morning (pen in blue). I enjoyed doing this passage.

1 John 5:1-6 and the flip side,
1 John 5:7-12.

Note:
I don't claim to be a grammer expert, as is evidance by my above writing. Don't look at me though. It is the stupid English language that forbids me from any professional attempt at writing mastery.

On guns.

This is one of the best websites, in my opinion, commited to answering questions concerning gun control and the like.

Since I know all yall are my buddies, I think I know which selection you would click on in the opening page. Just for kicks, click on the "wrong" answer for an interesting survey that has lots of deflating questions to burn libs with.

It also has tons of little picture things with catchy phrases that would make good avatars or signatures.

Some of the Hi-Res versions of the little pictures.

In a world where everyone was just like me:

Jeans, pocket Ts, and mullets would be an acceptible form of formal dress. And computer girl friends would be a reasonable alternative to the real thing.

And everyone would rock, because they would be just like me.



In a recent survey, 391,437 people secretely wished that they could wear a mullet around in public.

"Hey, Andrew. You fix computers right? Here, build us a website. Thanks."


Hey, PW, You're a pastor, right? Here is a hammer, construct a church building from the ground up for me, would ya? Thanks.

Old dogs can't learn new tricks.

But they can roll over and die.

What is it with these old computer systems and OSes still being alive and thriving? They are a pain to use, they are inefficient, and they make old computer sounds. They have more dust caked on their insides than there is makeup on a bus load of Hillary Duff teeni-bopper wannabies. They are filled to the hilt with 2.5Gb 2400RPM Harddrives and quad speed CD drives, so that when I need to format a drive and reinstall the OS, it takes an extra hour longer. Just to tick me off.

Those stupid floppy disks. I hate floppy disks. They are so wretchedly slow. It takes forty-five seconds to fill a 1.44Mb floppy with information. And the darn things go corrupt. I have a stack of about thirty of them, just in case I need to interface with an old crummy computer. I think about 4 of them still work. And that is if I prop the drive into just right position with the full moon shining on it through the window.

And, what is the deal with Windows 95 still being used? I can understand Windows 98, possibly. I can see that. But, 1995 was 10 years ago. The Internet was a baby, by public masses standards. Companies were fighting towards the 600MHz CPU mark. Memory was bought in sticks of 64Mb. Not to mention the fact that Windows 95 STINKS. It is barely an upgrade from Win3.1.
Steve Balmer offers sacrifices daily in order that people would lose their '95 CDs. Microsoft ninjas are dispatched every night to swipe them out of homes. And STILL it manages to survive. And get sent to me for repair.

I don't mind helping people out with their computers. Just like I wouldn't mind if someone helped me fix my car, or repair my plumbing. I don't do what they do, so I wouldn't know how to repair it. But I am working with antiques here. I should be regarded in the same ranks as those people who restore Egyptian mummies to their original looking condition. This is tedious work that requires hours of dedicated and focused concentration. A single slip up could result in losing a subject. It is no longer a science to revive these ancient boxes. It is a dying art.

Hey, I like the retro look of the old computers. I like the old style Windows interface (No Fisher Price style Windows XP for me). I dig the look of the old horizontal cases that you could place your monitor on. I like my DOS command line than any of the aforementioned. But that is all I like about it: The look. NOT the functionality. To make it clear, Windows 95 no longer HAS any functionality. When it takes 5 minutes to download your startup webpage over a dialup connection on a Pentium (1) 133MHz system, it is time to upgrade.

At the moment, I have on the list a Win95 box with a virus. I didn't even know that they still had viruses that could infect Win95.

And now, fireworks are going off in the next door neighbors yard, and it is 1:00AM. Oh well. Maybe I will get rich off of it someday, or something. I should start a museum....

P.S. And now my blog is getting a 404 error, and telling me to wait 10 minutes to publish my blog for "maintenance". sigh.

Since we are talking about food...

mmm Hmm, so that is how they make seedless watermelons.

Food for Thought (ha. ha. Bad pun)

You ever wonder what the lyrics to "Bye Bye Miss American Pie" mean, if anything?

I wanted to hear the song a few times in a row the other day, for no apparent reason, then realized how much I didn't understand them. And I don't like not understanding things.

So, here you go. Expand your knowledge.

The end of Ages

Yea, verily, after many long years it has been completed. I think that it was in 1997 that the world of Myst was placed before me on our 486 computer. And now in 2005, having completed Myst before, I have ventured through the sequel to Myst, Riven, and finished it. After many stints of gathering information and failing miserably, I sat down and connected the dots in order to unravel the hidden trails of betrayal and to wrap up the tail ends that both Myst and Riven had looming over them.

I feel all tingly inside.

Yet, I could not help but feel empty inside, also. Like a large thing on my ToDo list was removed. Since it wrapped up so nicely and mysteriously, it felt like the end of it all. Then I remembered that I had to also finish Myst III: Exile, Myst IV: Revelation, URU: Ages Beyond Myst, Uru expansions: To D'ni and The Path of the Shell, and Myst V: End of Ages, which is to come out on September 25(?) and wrap up the whole series.

At the current rate, I should be done with them all in 24 years. My mind is a little stronger than it was when I was ten, so I am hoping that it will not taking that long.

But, wahoo, that felt good. After spending 3 days puzzling over a gigantic waffle iron and the multi-colored raisins that you have to put in to make the perfect waffle, It felt good to finally bake that waffle and use the excess steam to power the linking books and get out of there.

I was sparked to complete my journey by the sad news that Cyan was closing due to financial reasons. People just aren't into adventure games anymore. They would rather play one of the hundreds of no name FPSes on the shelves of Walmart. Stupid n00bs playing their games. Pandas.
And thus, the ending of an age. I doubt that a rival to the Myst series, with all of its diversity and the elegance and simpleness, will come to be in the near future, if ever. Especially with the current trends of low tolerance for actual art and passion for games.


"And now I am at rest, understanding that in books, and ages, and life, the ending can never truely be written."

Drivers Ed: The Final Chapter

Drivers Ed is done with, completely. Period. No more. I finished my last road lesson on Wednesday. Admittedly, I was taking a long time, but still, it is done now. All I have to do is wait for my identity to get processed by The Man, and then go for my road test.

While the first two road lessons were a bit of a bore, they were not that bad, and were also informative. I mean, for the first lesson, the guy had me pull into a lot near the U Mass campus so that he could run in and talk to his adviser for a few minutes. He is majoring in Bass Guitar. He has a band and goes on sporadic tours. Go Jo ;). All I had to do was listen to some beats for 10 minutes on 106.3, Frank FM, then cruise around Lowell. Can't complain about that.
Plus, driving in a Ford Focus is a lot different than driving our Jeep Grand Cherokee that is as old as I am, to the month. The steering is nice and tight. You don't have to swing the wheel 10" to either side before it turns. And it feels like a light car, as oppose to the Jeep, that behemoth of a vehicle. Unfortunately, we no longer own the jeep, as it was sold for $100 to an enthusiast of the Jeep hobby. May you rest in peace. I hardly knew thee.

The last two lessons were interesting because I had the owner of the driving school as my instructor. He use to play in a wedding band, renovate houses, went to school for chemical engineering and computer science, and was a sales rep for a big time software company. You could defiantly see how he became such a good sales rep. He was grand and loud, deep low voice, always trying to be entertaining, and explained everything in a really long drawn out way, while talking really fast. And he liked to talk the whole time, which was good.
He took a smoke break when we made a drop off, and then had me pull into an ice cream stand so that he could have another smoke. Then he said, "I'll tell ya what, you can pick up whatever you want if you'll go over there and get me a chocolate frappuccino. As long as you don't get any in the car".
Free chocolate ice cream is the best tasting kind.
After passing another car from the driving school in which his brother was instructing in, he had me pull over. He took another smoke break while having a chat with his brother.
I found him very interesting, and he was a very nice guy. Anyone who offers me free chocolate ice cream is good in my book.

Oh, and since he owned the company and was a driver also, he decided to purchase an '05 red Mustang to use for instructing and to have the students drive around in.

Yeah, that felt good.

Probably the only time that I will ever drive one of those ever again, too. You get stares from all of the older adults on their front lawns, "A Mustang! Where were you guys 20 years ago!". Everyone, including the parents, drivers, students and onlookers get a kick out of it. It was definitely fun to drive.

The newest family addition

While, generally, I would never even think of setting foot inside a craft store, Mark had an art assignment that he had to start work on and had to pick up some supplies. I was a bit in need of a washroom at that point, so while Markus was picking out his 18x24 50% recycled material medium weight drawing paper and pencile sharpener, I was pacing around a bit. It was in my wanderings that I came about this wonderful creature for an amazing bargain of only $3.99. I liberated him, of course.

Mark used his exceptional naming skills to come up with a name for him. "Hmm, name the wicker turkey,,,,,,Werkey!". And thus, his name is Werkey.

Please make Werkey feel welcome. He is the first of his kind in this house, not being paper or plastic or digital.


Epilogue:
We went to Gamestop and Guitar Center (plus CompUSA Midnight Madness the night before [in which I got a wireless-B internal PCI adapter for $5 ATR {After the rebate}]) in order to cleanse myself for being in an arts & crafts store.

As an aside....

It looks like Massachusetts has done something right, for once.

There is nothing like a good ol' Teaparty like ceremony involving chucking the Big Man, along with his oppression, into the ocean. That's New England pride right there.

"The switch to open formats such as these was needed to ensure that the state could guarantee that citizens could open and read electronic documents in the future

*cough* And so that we don't have to pay a fortune to Micro$oft for licensing fees *cough*