Category: General

Let me know if this is a good column writing style, with the You’ve Got to be Kidding Me and It’s About Time subheadings.

It’s About Time the NFL started to loosen up on a few rules it’s put in place. Now, I can understand fining players for excessive taunting like Joe Horn and the cell phone or Chad Johnson’s “Please don’t fine me” sign, but you fined Jon Kitna for wearing a baseball cap with a cross on it. As James Brown put it, “that’s just being asinine.” Not only this, but how about letting up on a few broadcasting rules. Like when a game is over, how about letting the networks show the game live? It makes the league more fun to watch the great come from behind wins of the game and it is silly for the viewer to have to miss the highlights as they happen, especially the play I address in the next topic.

You’ve Got to be Kidding Me-Talk about heartbreaking, as the New Orleans Saints needed a touchdown and an extra point to tie the game down in Jacksonville today, and with less than a minute to go, they needed a miracle one at that. Well with less than a minute, Aaron Brooks passed to Donte Stallworth who lateraled to Michael Lewis, who gave it Deuce McAllister, who then lateraled to Jerome Pathone for the touchdown to make the score 19-20, with what looked like a miracle play similar to The Play in the 1982 Cal-Stanford Big Game. All the Saints needed was an extra point which was supposed to be automatic, but instead it was missed by kicker John Carney and the score remained 19-20, as the Saints lost the game and their chance to make the playoffs. Now that’s just sad. Here’s the ESPN recap.

The year is coming to an end. There are some who like to use it as time to look back. Some like to look forward. There is nothing that says you can’t do both though. In this entry, I’m gonna talk about things I’d like to see happen in the next year, while looking back to last year as reasons/causes for these new events, trends, and ideas to come up. I probably shouldn’t have posted this so late, since nobody will read it now, but oh well.

–Enough with the sequels: Let’s see. We had 2 Fast 2 Furious, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, American Wedding, Bad Boys II, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde, Spy Kids 3D, The Jungle Book 2, Shanghai Knights, Scary Movie 3,, X2: Xmen United, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and two Matrix Sequels with the final Lord of the Rings movie on its way (though I wouldn’t necessarily call that a sequel, more like a chapter). That’s 16 sequels, far too many to come out in one year and for far too many movies that shouldn’t have had sequels (I mean did we really need 2 Fast 2 Furious). Oh and of course we had 1 prequel as well, Dumb and Dumberer. Now granted I saw a bunch of these sequels and liked them, but original ideas will get me to the theaters a lot faster. Now, I haven’t looked at the new releases for next year yet, but I do know Spiderman 2 will be out next year, along with the third Harry Potter movie, Barbershop 2, and The Whole Ten Yards. So, the trend continues on into 2004 and I’ll be grimacing at the prospect of more sequels.

–The Olympic Games: They are still the pinnacle of human athletic achievement and still full of great moments to remember. The real spotlight, though, will be on not the athletes, but on the site itself, Athens. For months, there have been several worries about the city’s readiness for the big event. Nevertheless, it will be great to see that NBC will have something in their summer TV lineup besides terrible reality shows like For Love or Money or For Love or Money 2. *shutters*

–Internet Community Features: Friendster.com has proven that people are looking to get connected to other people, whether it be old friends or just trying to find new ones. Soon enough, we’ll see more copycats spring up like tribe.net and others. It is not just these sites looking to connect people that will spring up, but old mainstays like AOL and Yahoo will attempt to connect people further, with there own personal services. I’d like to see some other mainstays take cracks at this and not just the portal sites. For example, more shopping sites should have a feature like Amazon friends, where you email discounts to your friends. Even Amazon could expand it’s Amazon friends lists with links to a messenger program or something. Just feeling the need to connect more people to each other.

–A Space Shuttle Flight: One year after the disaster that befell Columbia, it is time to put that behind and move onto to further space exploration. It’ll be an emotional victory for NASA to get the shuttle flying again so soon.

–The Lakers: Bill Walton said at the beginning of the season “it would be a disappointment if they lost one game.” Well, this Laker team with its four future hall of famers has already lost five games, but they look so good now that those might be the only loses they’ll have. In fact, many analysts say that the Lakers have only begun to play up to their full potential. Now that’s a scary thought for the rest of the league.

Well that’s all for now. There are plenty more cheers and jeers to relate, but for now this will do. Happy Holidays.

Two seconds of time isn’t even enough to type an entire word sometimes, but it is enough time to buy a can of food for the hungry, save a section of rainforest, and even time to help pay for a mammogram. Basically, some charitable people have decided to create Internet sites where all you have to do is click on a button and you can donate some money to helping out any of those causes. Take a look at these web sites, with charitable goals in the month of December.

The Hunger Site-This site is looking to donate 6 million cups of food to the hungry by January 1st and one click will give about 1.1 cups of food. According to their graphic, they’re at 3.5 million, so they’re at a decent pace. Help them go a little closer.

The Rainforest Site-An affiliate of The Hunger Site, they have the lofty goal of trying to save 75 million square feet of rainforest by New Year’s. So far, they have raised enough to save 45 million and every click saves 22.8 feet, so get clicking.

The Breast Cancer Site-Every click is worth double from now until New Years.

Also check out the affiliates, The Animal Rescue Site and The Child Health Site.

Finally there’s Campbell’s Tackling Hunger Site-Basically select your favorite NFL team, and Campbell’s will donate a can of food on their behalf. They are looking to gather 5 million cans and have so far collected 4 million. They are so close, so go now.

Cool Program–Simbrowser: Internet Explorer is a decent Internet browser, but it is a bit rudimentary and doesn’t have too many features. Slimbrowser is basically Internet Explorer with some new toys, including tabbed browsing (instead of opening up a bunch of windows), popup killer, form filler, auto logins, group surfing (bookmarks that open up multiple pages instead of one), and more. So if you want a more feature laden browser, try this out.

So livejournal has come out with a new layout and I thought it looked pretty good (though I wish I could use that Generator layout, but that’s a paid account feature) and decided to use it. I’m still tweaking with some settings here and there, but it’s not bad so far. By the way:

My life is rated PG-13.
What is your life rated?

It’s that time of year again. If you’re a little tense, calm down, relax, and read on (taken from Science Jokes collected by Joachim Verhagen).

THE STUDENT MIND DURING A FINAL EXAM-The last thoughts, and percentages of brain capacity

* 10% The prof. never covered this section!
* 10% Actual knowledge on the subject.
* 10% The T.A.’s kinda cute!
* 10% I knew I should have read the book!
* 10% Soon this will all be behind me!
* 10% I hope the curve is really low!
* 10% PANIC ZONE!
* 10% Prayers for a miracle flood, fire, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, etc…
* 10% Eeny, meeny, miny, moe…
* 10% Summer break!

Good luck with finals everybody.

Nothing really new to report. Thanksgiving was interesting. I spent it over at my aunt’s house in San Francisco; it’s a shame my family couldn’t make it up north, but oh well. My brother and sister are probably too busy trying to get the Lincoln High School Academic Decathlon to team to the State Championships for the first time and are looking to break all sorts of school records. Go team.

Last Saturday, we had the last party for the semester over at Alpha Delta Phi. It was smaller than the last, which was actually kind of a good thing since there was less crowding, and it was easier to talk to people since everyone was essentially a friend of a brother some how. I must say though that it was a little disappointing to see just about every cute girl there with some other guy, but that’s the way it goes in Berkeley I suppose. The big plus of the party though was getting our name out to a lot of people who never used to party with us and it gets our name out to the community that this is an active and partying frat. This is no longer just an obscure frat and I’m looking forward to getting the word across even further in the next few semesters, where we can hopefully get some good pledges from outside the house to participate in the frat events and further spread the word.

Now it is time for me to get some sleep and study hard for finals. Oh jeez.

Funny Quote–Patrick Gallagher: “Yeah we were talking about the perfect girl for Allen one time…”
Me: “You were?”
Patrick: “Well we were really drunk at the time.”

Happy Birthday minchy_cow. To celebrate, I thought I’d give you some tests that reveal a little more about yourself, for knowing yourself is the greatest gift of all (okay that was totally sappy).

The tests

So, Thanksgiving is right around the corner and it couldn’t have come any sooner. It’ll be good for me to catch up on some lost sleep (of course, if I really wanted to do that, then I wouldn’t be writing my journal this late at night now, would I?). Now, usually I put up some random stuff in between a long update and the next. Not this time. Sit back and read on about last week.

Last Tuesday, I went down to Ben and Jerry’s with Jacqueline and her Christian youth group. They were suppose to go to celebrate all the November birthdays, but surprisingly no one had one. Oh well, we went any way and enjoyed some good ice cream. Did I mention that I went there with a bunch of girls? It’s not a bad thing, sure. However, when they start talking like you aren’t there, then you have problems. I mean they started talking about all sorts of female matters from tampons to Disney heroines to fisting and by the time we got to that, I called it a night. Well, I’m here at Berkeley to learn something.

After exploring Christianity for a few weeks, I decided to check out Judaism for a week and went with Shoshana to Berkeley Hillel last Friday. I didn’t expect this much Hebrew and I had a really hard time following it until near the end of the service. Then, we walked over to her apartment and watched the movie Donnie Darko. It was an engaging movie, though I will say it left me hanging a bit at the end. So, I recommend watching it, but acknowledge it has a very glaring fault. By the time the movie was over, I was already sleepy and I had to crash on her roommate’s futon.

I was then woken up the next morning by Vicky who, because of my messed up hair, thought I was Joey. Anyways, I proceeded to watch TV with her for a few hours. It was funny; we ended up watching such a variety of shows such as Fresh Gear, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Beverly Hills, 90210, and Access Hollywood. It was also Big Game day as it was Cal vs. Stanford for the 106th time. And for a brief moment, I doubted the Golden Bears’ offense, but boy was I wrong. Final score 28-16, Cal. Looks like Insight.com bowl here we come. After a brief detour to Comics and Comix, me and few frat bros went down to Pinole for In and Out burger, when who do I run into again, but Vicky, who went there with some other Alpha Delts. After eating, we go on the freeway, when Jared has the bright idea to moon have Patrick change lanes and moon Nick’s car. That was hilarious.

After a slow Sunday, Jacqueline, Kyle, Nick, Vicky, and I treated Joey to a belated birthday dinner at Gypsy’s on Monday. It’s sad that we need big occasions to get us all together again, but oh well. I think we all had fun, putting aside school work for a chance to talk at the dinner table and catch up on all the little things.

And now here I am finishing this update. Hope you enjoyed it.

Funny Quote–Me: “So, I found this book on Amazon that says that Chinese people arrived in America before Columbus and set up colonies.”
Nick Gonzalez: “So you mean to tell me there were fobs here before Columbus?”
Me: *plants hand on face* “Uhhhhh”

So Jacqueline wanted me to write some new things. Well, there have been a lot of new things that I feel like writing about. I wonder if I can write everything I want to write. Let’s find out…

So last week, we had frat elections and after having no positions last semester, I now have 3: secretary, literary chair, and philanthropy . I hope I can do a good job and so far I have a bunch of ideas. I could use some help with literary events that would be good. There should be a Shakespeare Kegger (drinking and Shakespeare make a decent combination), Improv comedy night (’nuff said, this should be good), some kind of reading and discussion club (have to decide what to read though), and some other events like poetry slams and such. I hope to make this a fun semester and if you have any ideas for events, feel free to comment.

Speaking of literary events, the Shakespearean Kegger was at the house the week before elections. I honestly didn’t think it would be fun, but what do I know? Frat Bro Andy managed to get a bunch of people from the snowboarding team together and a bunch of others who were telling me afterwards how great a time they had. I also managed to pull out this weird British accent on the fly, and it certainly got me some praises. The one problem I had though, was that due to my unfamiliarity with Comedy of Errors (the play), I had no idea when to do be funny and when to be serious. But the weirdest part of the night was seeing somebody sitting in the audience doing their math homework. Gee, it sure is a smart move studying in a room with loud, drunk people isn’t it? Ah freshmen.

The night after I went done to some gathering called Interpraise for all the Christian fellowships. Nice little concert and an interesting sermon on fear was put on that night. I thought it appealed to a very wide audience of people. Then, I went home and surprise, surprise I saw Vicky and Jacqueline over at the frat house. I had forgotten that Air Force ROTC had their annual Crud night party at the house. That was interesting, as I got to see a bunch of the men and women in the armed forces party. Wow, it got so wild they had like 10 people dancing on the pool table.

Then, on Saturday, I went grappling with Joey, frat bro Jacob and David Marquardt. Dang, Jacob pulled my elbow a bit with an arm bar. Man that hurt. Then after letting my arm recover a bit, Joey and I met up with Vicky to go see Matrix Revolutions. I can’t believe Joey liked it and that he called me a conformist for agreeing with everyone else about how bad the movie was. The fact is the movie moves in no direction, no plot, no exposition, no explanation, and it’s missing a multitude of important scenes (not mentioned as to not spoil it for anyone who still hasn’t seen it). Whereas The Matrix was a movie with many unconventional ideas and exploration into human thought, Revolutions offers only mindless action. That would have been okay if it went along with the plot, but it didn’t, as the first movie was appuladed for making the action blend with the plot well. So instead, the movie falls flat on its face. Sorry.

Anyways, I just realized I just wrote an entry devoted to the week before this and talking very little about this last week. Well, there’s an event on Monday that I hope will be good to add. So wait for it.

Interesting Fact-I think many people know that there are two University of Miamis, one near Miami, Florida and one in Oxford, Ohio. However, I had no idea there was a school called California University, in Pennsylvania. Check them out at http://www.cup.edu (reading that out loud must be hilarious).

Campbells is donating a can of soup to the homeless every time someone goes to their website and clicks on their favorite NFL team. It will take two seconds…so do it and help some people out… http://www.chunky.com/click_for_cans.asp also forward this to everyone you know… [From Takehito Midori]

One of the main reasons I got this livejournal was the ability to share my personal opinions on the current issues. As it was so eloquently stated in a college joke, though, “Western Europe could be wiped out by a horrible plague and you wouldn’t know, but you can recite last week’s re-run of The Simpsons verbatim,” meaning that I haven’t been as good about keeping up with the news as I should be and have left the editorializing to columnists and journalist who most certainly know more about the issue than I do. But I felt the need to write a short entry giving out my two cents on an important issue, our judicial system.

One of the biggest news stories of the week has been the expulsion of Roy S. Moore from the Alabama State Supreme Court, because he wouldn’t remove his monument of the Ten Commandments from the state’s judicial building. This has set off this big debate over the separation of church and state, as Moore fights for the right to acknowledge God in a place of justice. Well after the sham of a verdict that allowed Robert Durst, a man who admitted he shot a man, cut up his body, and buried it, to be acquitted of murder, I don’t think God (if there was one) would want anything to do with the judicial system now. How could jurors find this man innocent after what he has confessed to? I mean it defies all common sense. Granted, the defense has stated that he killed him in self-defense and that chopped up the body after drinking, but come on, he cut up a body and buried it. That is grounds to think that he did commit some kind of murder, and yes as a legal analyst pointed out, the prosecution did bungle this case by not pursuing more charges on him beyond first-degree murder. Nevertheless, it is still a rather difficult task to acquit a man who admitted he killed another man and buried him. And now this can go down as another one the great let downs of the judicial system, along with the OJ Simpson verdict and every single one of those frivolous lawsuits that goes in our courts that waste so much taxpayer money and where justice is not served. Now there are several high profile legal cases going on at this time, such as the Kobe Bryant case, the Scott Peterson case, and let’s not forget, the Martha Stewart case, all of which are bound to start controversy no matter what the outcome. Whatever the verdicts maybe, let us hope that everyone who is part of the legal system learns from the Durst case and seeks justice. After all, isn’t that what God would want?

Extra, Extra, Read all about-Robert Durst’s acquittal-This article from the New York Times.