Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.
My second paper for my ENG101 class. This was an in-class essay analyzing an editorial by George Will, “Ed Schools vs. Education“. We’d been given the article the week prior, so we’d be able to prepare and bring along anything we needed (short of an already-written essay) to prepare.
Final grade: 100% (plus a smiley face and the notation, “Couldn’t have said it better myself!”).
Neither Prairie nor I really know much about football, and we don’t really care to know much. However, that didn’t stop us from kicking back and having a fun time watching the game and doing our own form of silly armchair quarterbacking.
Favorite commentary moment: after a player got injured, the commentator was trying to figure out just what the injury was and said that, “I can’t tell if that’s an ankle or a head.” To which I responded, “good thing you’re not a doctor!”
Best commercials: the “Don’t Judge Too Quickly” series (for an insurance company…I think) were a close runner-up, as was the Bud Light “Streaker”, but my favorite (due to being completely bizarrely surreal) was the Burger King “Whopperettes” bit.
And, in the end, the Steelers took it. Still — at least the Seahawks were there.
And now, a few hours without TV before Grey’s Anatomy comes on. Code black!
Candice McGowan and Erik Moore were married today. Congratulations to you both!
I got my first paper back in my ENG101 class today. The only comment given by my teacher was, “superb,” and I got a 3.9/4.0, or 95/100 — it would have been perfect, except that I forgot to include a ‘memo of self-reflection’ wherein I “analyze and evaluate the effectiveness/growth of [my] own work.” Oops. Still, I think I can cope with the final grade.
The paper was an argument analysis; the article I chose to work with was A Blogger is Just a Writer with a Cooler Name.
Here’s the paper…
I never met anyone sillier than your dad…until you came along.
— Mom to me in a conversation today.
Following in the footsteps of jwz, Tim Bray, AKMA, and Paul, here’s the rating system I use in iTunes:
From there, the custom playlists I use (which have been updated and tweaked a bit since that post, but the basics are still good) work for daily listening.
“Work It! Dance = Life (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Work It! Dance = Life (full mix) (1996, 1:09:44).
After having some recurring problems with the Gallery software that we’d been using for the Hanscom Family Gallery, I decided to throw in the towel and talked dad into putting his Flickr account to use.
I’m so glad I did.
He’s been going through and scanning in a lot of old pictures that he and mom brought back from Florida after her parents died last year, and putting them up. Such great stuff in here!
Mom’s parents, my grandparents, Harold and Arline Ward.
My grandpa teaching swimming — probably at the YMCA, if I’m remembering correctly.
Mom in about 5th grade, dressed up as a clown for Halloween.
“La Vie Boheme B” by Original Broadway Cast from the album Rent (1996, 1:53).
One of the (few) downsides to my little Powershot A95 is that as a point-and-shoot style camera, it’s a touch limited as to what it can do — a standard 3x optical zoom, a fixed lens so no other lenses can be attached, no threads for filters…little things like that. Very normal for a point-and-shoot, of course, but at times, a wee bit limiting.
However, one of the nice things about the A95 is that it is possible to attach some accessories to it. Canon’s Powershot cameras include a detachable ring around the lens assembly that, when removed, reveals a mount point. Canon also supplies a few accessories that can attach to the mount: an adaptor tube, which can then have either a wide-angle or a telephoto lens attached to it. However, as the A95 is a couple years old, these items aren’t incredibly easy to come by anymore.
Last week sometime I stumbled across LensMate, a local company that makes aftermarket adapters for the A95’s mount in both 52mm and 37mm sizes. I went ahead and ordered the 37mm adapter (since I knew my work carried some 37mm filters and accessories), and it arrived in the mail yesterday.
I took the camera in to work so that I could make sure the adapter worked with the filters I wanted to pick up. It did (no surprise, but nice to have it confirmed), so I got three Quantaray filters: a UV Haze, a Neutral Density, and a Circular Polarizer.
Since 37mm is a standard size for camcorder lenses, our store carries a few accessory lenses originally designed for camcorders. Since they’re the same thread size as my new adaptor, I started experimenting with those, and as it turns out, we’ve got a set of a .5x Wide Angle Lens and a 2x Telephoto Lens that fit perfectly, so I started playing with those to see how well they worked. Verdict: not bad, and I may want to pick the set up after my next paycheck.
Then things started getting silly.
Y’know, I don’t care about football. Never have.
But even I can’t be a complete curmudgeon about the Seahawks’ win today. First time in thirty years…I guess it was about time.
So…yay. Go Seahawks.
I might just have to pay some small amount of attention to the Superbowl this year. Weird.
Heh — I can hear fireworks going off somewhere outside. Seattle’s going to be a pretty happy city tonight.
Three items caught my eye today:
Finally, after an extravagant introduction by Mr. Abernathy, who referred to Dr. King as “conceived by God” (“This personality cult is getting out of hand,” said a college student, and, to judge by the apathetic reception of Mr. Abernathy’s words, the crowd agreed), Dr. King himself spoke. There were some enthusiastic yells of “Speak! Speak!” and “Yessir! Yessir!” from the older members of the audience when Dr. King’s speech began, but at first the younger members were subdued. Gradually, the whole crowd began to be stirred. By the time he reached his refrains—“Let us march on the ballot boxes. . . . We’re on the move now. . . . How long? Not long”—and the final, ringing “Glory, glory, hallelujah!,” the crowd was with him all the way.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
On 4/4/67, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. We were appalled. Anyone familiar with this period knows there were many assasinations before and after this, from political leaders to civil rights workers. We had had enough.
That weekend, there was a protest rally in Kokomo IN, hardly a bastion of liberal thought. Kokomo was then, and may be now, primarily a factory town. Berta, my mother, and I marched in the rally.
There were not many white faces in the Kokomo rally, but we were among them. It is only an accident of history we made it to the church where the rally ended without incident, as the streets of Kokomo were lined with jeering people, mostly white.