The Holidays

As soon as Halloween is over, there is already talk about the holidays. On November 1st I started seeing different commercials about Christmas decorations and gifts. This time of the year is always the most memorable to me. I don't know if its a coincidence but there always seems to be something exciting that happens to me during Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. It feels like the time in between is so short and it's all a blur to me.
There are many great things about the holidays. First of all, I get a break from school and have time to spend with family and friends. Most importantly, especially for Thanksgiving, the food is plentiful and delicious. I love Christmas for the all the gifts and by this time winter is in full swing which means skiing. I always think about skiing when I have memories of Christmas and New Years. This time of year is amazing and I try to appreciate fully by getting outside and doing activities that I can only do on snow. After a long day of skiing I can just come home and relax enjoying a new gift I got or eaten all the leftover food. Truly the Holidays are a fun time

You know you're a Senior when...

Becoming a senior is an ongoing process. First, you have to complete your junior year and survive the summer. Then you are classified as a "Senior" when you step in to the doors of school on the first day back. Though one can don the title of "Senior" right away, it takes a while to get accustomed to the role. If you were ever wondering if you're getting closer to becoming a real Senior and having an actual case of the legendary Senioritis, here are some tell-tale signs:

-->Homework: this word no longer has significance to you
-or, if you still do care about homework, you probably are really behind, but not really feeling like there'll be consequences for it. (or you just don't care)
-you applied early decision to your favorite school, and can't imagine getting rejected, so there's really no need to do more work. after all, how could a strapping young hanover lad or lass like yourself ever get rejected from Harvard?
•In extreme cases of "future-rejection-paranoia," 12th graders may do even more homework than they are assigned, out of fear that their college will reject them later in the year.

-->Weekends= you think you're going to be completely caught up by monday, but you actually do maybe half an hour of math when you're nine assignments behind, but you still consider it great progress

-->You set up a tent in the Pit because there's really no need to leave, it's not like you have class.

-->You ask sophomores to make Coop runs for you because you have to get one more footstall behind the Pit playing hackeysack before 4th period

More to come!

I Watch Better Television Than You

I often blow off homework for the sake of watching television. But, that's okay, because I watch good television. There is clearly a divide between this:

and this:

That's stating the obvious though. Mad Men is the definition of sophistication, and one look at me, it's obvious that I watch it. But Mad Men is also a dark show, and one could argue that the reason to watch a show like The Hills, which I, of course, have NEVER watched, is to get something light-hearted in, to lighten your moods. Why only watch sophisticated television if its never funny?

Well, it can be.

VS

I'll be honest, the point if this blogpost is equal parts me bragging about my sophistication, me shitting on peoples general lack of sophistication, and the fact that I need to justify the fact that tonight, instead of working on Physics, Prob/Stat, and, yes, this paper that I'm supposed to be editing, I will probably just be watching The League and Hell on Wheels. But its not detracting from my education. It's just making me more... sophisticated.

Telling Writing: A Study In How Not To Write A Book

I was going to write about music but that takes way too long and I am in a ranting mood. My topic of choice today will be Ken Macrorie, author of Telling Writing. Let me preface this by saying that I think this book is a worthwhile read for our APW class; my frustrations lies not with the content, but the delivery.

The vast majority of this book is spent on fake passages written by the author, who is deviously pretending he didn't write them. After each passage, he either tears the passage apart or lauds its literary merit. I wouldn't mind this so much if it weren't so blatantly obvious that he writes everything himself. To prove this point, I opened up to a random page of the book (page 76) and sure enough, here, in all its glory, is a page-long passage that is supposedly written by a member of a writing class. Let me give you a sample of this passage:

"Now don't forget: I want you home by midnight," my father barked.
"Have a good time, but be good," my mother chirped.

Apparently, Mr. Macrorie has never actually read anyone else's writing before because nobody actually writes like that. It wouldn't bother me so much if he would just admit his passages were hypothetical. But no, every single one of them is prefaced by "here is a passage written by a high school girl" or "a woman used the following dialogue in her journal entry." Oh Ken, you are so sneaky.

The Best Show Ever

I have seen many shows over the course of my life. A lot of them are similar to one another and those get quite boring after a while. However, there is one show that, no matter how many times I watch it, it never gets boring. This show is in a class all of its own; there is nothing to compare it to. One might compare it to Friends, a good show yes, but not quite in the same league as the one I'm currently writing about. Its a show about a man trying to find "the one". The girl he is going to marry and live with for the rest of his life. It goes through all his happy times and all his sad times. Along with his best friends. One, a womanizing "bro" that believes if he isn't getting at least two girls numbers per night, he isn't living life to the fullest. Two, the main characters college roommate and his college girlfriend, who are happily married and are always talking about couple stuff. And a fourth who is his dream girl, however, they are not compatible to one another in the slightest. I hope that you can guess the name of this show because it truly is one of a kind. 

Time Machine With Words

            Let’s face it.  At some point, at some point you’ve dreamed about what epic technology we will have in the future and if you haven’t, you clearly don’t have a life.  I’m going to help everybody out by attempting to construct a time machine with words.  Using words as a building block, I can create a machine that will hopefully create an accurate image of the future.

            One cool technology that will be commonplace will be three dimensional printing.  Believe or not, we already have a three dimensional printer at Hanover High School, which I have used for CAAPS class.  It works by melting plastic and shooting it on to a surface, where it hardens.  By adding layer after layer, it can create a three dimensional figure.  Even a recent comic strip, Dilbert, had an interesting joke about three-dimensional printing.  That said, this technology is still limited.  It only prints three-dimensional objects with plastic, and it is amazingly slow.  It is also expensive, but we can expect the price to come down soon.  According to an article I read, we will all have one of these in our houses by 2015.

            But perhaps one of the most exciting experiences you will have while you vacation in the future would be spending your vacation the way we do in the present: at a museum.  Apparently, a Japanese scientist is attempting to bring a woolly mammoth to life, and believe it or not, he has a realistic chance of success.  Using the same method we have used with sheep, he can take the mammoth DNA and implant it into a cell.  He then needs to find a parent that is similar to the mammoth (he has chosen an elephant), and place the fertilized egg in the parent.  People are saying that this could happen within the next four years.

            We can also expect to see hand held devices that can sequence DNA within the next seven or so years.  These devices will have obvious uses for doctors, but what will be even more interesting is that we will be able to look at our own DNA.  Thanks to this handheld devices, people will be introduced to themselves for the first time in the history of the human race.

            If you consider these crazy claims to be unrealistic, you are only half right.  My claims are certainly crazy, but they are far from unrealistic, they just appear that way to your narrow mind.  To prove my point, I will use my time machine’s spare words to take you to another location: the past.  Let’s imagine we are in the 1500s.  You walk up to a peasant, and he immediately starts yelling something you can’t understand at you.  Unfortunately, my time machine lacks a universal translator, but I can already guess what he is saying.  He thinks you’re a wizard, because of what you’re wearing.  Then you show him your technology.  Let’s use a walkie talkie as an example.  To a man in this time period, it appears as if a voice magically escapes from the device.  But how could this be?  Were could we have found a person small enough to fit inside of the walkie talkie?  Then another person who is walking by suddenly drops dead from a heart attack.  But since we are from the future, we wield wizard like power.  Using the emergency kit in the back of this time machine, we deliver an electrical pulse to the heart and it starts beating again.  We may consider this normal, but our medieval friend is stunned by the fact that we have, quite literally, brought a dead man back to life.  But both of these devices are trumped by an incredible device that can generate a glowing, silvery substance.  This device illuminates what can not be seen.  Before meeting us, our medieval friend called this impossible, but we call it a flashlight.

            Let me use the last reserves of words in my time machine to remind you of a famous quote.  “Any piece of moderately advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  This quote proves…  that…… because…….so………

            Help!!!........machine…………..words…………none left……………….stuck……………..1500s