Blowin' In the Wind

It’s weeks like this that I wish that I had never gone to college and just danced for tips at some bar in Tijuana. I complain about the weather in Boulder often, mainly because it sucks a lot of the time. People up here are always like “We have great weather 3oo days of the year.” That’s great and everything, except there are 365 days in a year. Now, I’m no rocket scientist, but let’s do the math. Let’s see, subtract that… carry the one… divide by pi… and that means the weather in Boulder is miserable for almost three months of the year (or if you want specific numbers, 3.75 liters per acre squared).

Normally the weather phenomenon I’m complaining about is snow. But this week, it’s the wind that I’m bothered by. To say it has been a little windy this week would be like saying that Lindsay Lohan might have had a few drinks in her lifetime. The winds were clocked at 69 miles an hour the other day. 69 mph. It’s not even legal to drive that fast in the entire state of Hawaii. There are squirrels dropping out of the sky as far away as Saudi Arabia (by the way, the “Skydiving Squirrels” is the new name of my fictional band). I was trying to walk from my car to my workplace ten feet away, and I struggled, and I am by no means a small guy.

Boulder has bad winds every now and then, but this was crazy. I half expected to see Dorothy chasing Toto while being followed by a pack of stoners listening to Pink Floyd. As any well trained journalist with an insatiable desire for the truth and a need to investigate the unknown would do, I locked myself in my bedroom and hid under the blankets. I eventually deemed it safe to emerge, and I picked up the newspaper on my front doorstep. This itself showed how bad the wind was, because I don’t have a newspaper subscription. Also, the newspaper was the “Albuquerque Tribune.”

Anyway, the cause of these strong winds is something called La Nina, which is further proof that everything bad in the world can somehow be traced back to women. That was as far as I got in reading before my paper blew away, so I’m assuming that La Nina is some sort of mystical, magical entity that somehow affects the weather, like the Bermuda Triangle or Newt Gingrich. Regardless, this thing is going to be around for a while, so we can expect lots of wind over the winter.

This just depressed me. The only thing I hate more than snow falling is snow falling sideways. Now, to be honest, I would probably be able to deal with adverse weather much more effectively if I didn’t stubbornly insist on wearing shorts and slippers everywhere I went. But that is not the point. Just for once, I wish that this whole global warming thing would hurry up. Frankly, I was always confused by the X-Men character Storm, who could change the weater. She always made the weather depressing; like she would kill people with lightning bolts or summon fog. If I had that power, all you would ever see was me walking shirtless in my own little circle of sunshine. Also, it would be constantly hailing in China. Or I could just move back to Hawaii.

Not that I haven’t had my fair share of windy days in Hawaii. There is a place on the southern point of the Big Island creatively named (brace yourself): South Point. Anyway, when I say that Hawaii is beautiful, I generally am not including South Point in that statement. It is always windy and sandy and dirty, so you get all sorts of sand and dust and dirt in your eyes and hair. I remember I went down there on a camping trip once in the scouts, and one of the campers tried to move a cot and made the mistake of turning it on its side. The wind proceeded to pick him and the cot off the ground and fly him ten feet straight into the side of a car. Of course, being Boy Scouts and trained in first aid and medical response, we sat there laughing for the better part of an hour.

So if nobody sees me for awhile, it is because I am taking shelter from this vicious wind. Also, if any of you live in Iowa, be on the lookout for my editing textbook. It should be dropping out of the sky soon.

Back in the Day

Today I was driving home from class when I was forced to pass through Boulder High School just after school ended for them that day. Now as I’m sure all of you know, you have about as much luck navigating roads near a high school as starting a wildfire in Antarctica. For some reason, high schoolers have a magical ability to completely ignore oncoming traffic. And this isn’t just in Boulder, where pedestrians tend to think even busy highways are yellow brick roads they are supposed to skip along. This applies to high schools all over America. I know it was that way at my high school on the Big Island.

These kids will bravely walk right out into traffic completely unaware of the fact that a two-ton piece of metal (my car) is speeding down the highway (at two mph), driven by an unstable person (me) who happens to have a very influential friend in the justice department (we’ll call her “Helga). Why do they walk recklessly into the streets? It could be the sense of invincibility that comes with youth and stupidity; it could be the pressure from peers to appear immune to fear; it could be severe mental retardation.

More likely it is because they have iPods in their ears while texting on their cell phones with their right hand while trying to hold up their saggy pants with their left. With all those distractions it’s no wonder these kids don’t realize there is a car coming at them; they probably wouldn’t notice if the Hindenburg crashed next to them. I remember things were different when I went to high school. Now it’s not like I went to high school in the Stone Age; I was there less than four years ago. But things have changed a lot since then. I remember as a freshman, I didn’t have a cell phone, a laptop, or an iPod. Whereas now elementary school kids bring these things to school with them.

And yet as I looked on at these kids gathering in their awkward little circles outside the school, no doubt discussing the things that seemed so important back then (acne, crushes, grades, acne, rumors, prom, figuring out how to look cool at prom with your parents chaperoning, etc), I realized that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This of course caused me to go into a fit of nostalgic reminiscence, which then of course meant I had to go look up the words “nostalgic” and “reminiscence.”

I was talking to some friends the other day that apparently had an awkward high school careers and say the words “high school” with the same tone and facial expression someone might make when they were discussing genital warts. On the other hand, I was talking to a former high school quarterback who dated the head cheerleader and is still convinced that the high point of his life came in high school (his words: “to be more specific, in the back seat of a Volvo”).

Anyway, I guess my high school career fell in between. I was never the most popular guy, but I was still well-liked enough to be elected class president (due mainly to voter apathy). If you had to put me into a group, I was probably a nerd, which is funny in itself since there may have been no student in the school that enraged more teachers and put as little effort into their schoolwork as I did.

That is not to say that I did not have some awkward moments. The main objective in high school was being cool. But as I was sitting in traffic watching those kids trying to look as badass as possible while loitering outside a 7-11 waiting for their mom to pick them up, I remembered just how few high schoolers managed to pull that off. I mean, it’s pretty hard to be cool when you still rely on your parents to go anywhere, have no money, can’t buy alcohol, have no idea what your hormones are doing on any given day, and have no idea what the opposite sex is thinking (although men tend to have this problem for their entire lives).

I had my fair share of those moments, which I am going to discuss despite the fact that many of the people involved in those moments are reading this. I can do this because I am confident enough to own up to the embarrassing things I have done in my life. Also, it is now legal for me to purchase and consume large quantities of alcohol, so I have a coping mechanism.

When it came to the other gender (women, in case you were wondering), I was as smooth as sandpaper. Normally when women would approach me and talk to me, I would have a mature and intelligent conversation - with my feet. Then I would try to fall back on my humor, but of course the joke would come out way worse than it went over in my head, at which point I would laugh and then run off in the other direction. I’m confident that there are girls who went to high school with me who till this day are convinced I am retarded. The low-light came when I asked some girl to the prom in my junior year. But we were in a computer class, and I mumbled “wanna go to prom?” so badly that I’m pretty sure she heard “can I have a CD-ROM," because she never answered me. She just sort of nodded and then started looking in the computer drawer. Or at least that is the story I am sticking with.

Anyway, I’ve gotten a lot better. Now, I confidently stride up to women, say one or two very inappropriate lines, get slapped, and watch them run away, which frankly I think is an improvement. I have the restraining orders to prove it. Anyway, feel free to share your embarrassing stories in the comments section for our amusement, under an anonymous name of course. But if you’re most embarrassing moment was that time some weirdo asked you to the prom in 2006, I might know who you are.

"I'm On a High Horse"

I consider myself a man of the people, which is pretty ironic since anybody who is just another guy never refers to the general population as “the people.” Anyway, my false modesty notwithstanding, I decided to just write story about you: all five of you who read this.

Just recently, I asked you to follow the blog to help get me extra credit for a class so I could continue to not ever show up. Many of you did sign up, so I thank you for that and just want to know that you are all enablers (and the tally will come at the end of the semester, so you are more than welcome to still sign up if you haven’t already). So as my way of thanking you, I’m going to address the suggestions that were made in the suggestion box that I was actually planning on completely ignoring. Think of it as my way of thanking you. Also, I got really bored and I have nothing to write about.

Now normally the world is filled with enough stupid people that I never run out of things to talk about, but I do like getting ideas. From now on I promise to write about whatever you suggest in there, unless your suggestion is “smoke weed in the bushes.” I’m asking for suggestions about what to write, not how to spend my Friday night. I also am not going to respond to “how awesome your sister is : )” because emoticons make me angry and I don’t think my sister can read anyway. Also, the “terd sandwich vs. douchebag” has already been covered by South Park. If you haven’t seen the episode, you should definitely watch it because a whole lot of PETA people die horrible deaths.

So that leaves us with “Chuck Norris vs. The Old Spice Guy.” Now I’m assuming this is a question of who is cooler as opposed to who would win in a fight. Because the Old Spice Guy is a lover not a fighter, not unlike me. Whereas Chuck Norris loves fighting, at least when he isn’t toning his ridiculous abs on a Total Gym. So I’m going to be honest, I don’t know who would win in a fight, especially since Chuck would have to catch up to the horse, and the one thing I have always been taught is that you should never approach them from behind. (Okay, all of you who just said “that’s what she said,” go take a lap. Now. I’ll wait.)

Now I don’t know who came up with this line of Old Spice commercials, but they need to hang on to him (and yes, I guarantee it is a him). Then on the other hand, we have Chuck Norris. Now, as much as I want to wave the “Fear the Beard” flag as much as the next guy, I have no idea when Chuck Norris became a cult icon. He used to just be the star of a really cheesy show. I mean Walker Texas Ranger was just some guy who smoked a little too much weed and apparently watched Clint Eastwood and Bruce Lee right next to each other and tried to mate them.

Then all of a sudden, the Chuck Norris jokes started appearing. I don’t really remember when it started, but one day I turned around in my junior year of high school and everyone was making them. I swear that is all the other guys on the swim team ever said, and to be honest it irritated the hell out of me. And since swimming involved walking around in tight shorts, I was very irritated to begin with. So to be honest, I don’t like Chuck Norris. He’s another one of those people who is cool because of how uncool they are, like David Hasselhoff. So in the battle between the Old Spice Guy and Chuck Norris, the Old Spice Guy wins in the third round via sultry staring. So keep the suggestions coming, and I will try to answer them via stupid rambling as soon as I can.

Now I need a favor from all of you who have somehow managed to make it this far. I am currently having a debate with some friends over what color the cheese in a grilled cheese sandwich is: orange or yellow (we’re talking American cheese here). So in the comments, please leave your vote. You don’t need to leave your name if you don’t want to, but at least include your gender. Thank you; your work will save lives.

War of the Words

I have grammar on my mind. Mainly because for some reason it seems that is all I’ve been doing lately. I edit at my job, I have an editing class, I’ve been taking editing tests in another class, editing essays in another class and reading Shakespeare in another (if you don’t see how this is related, then you have never seen a journalism major trying to read the retarded babble that is ye olde english).

Then last night I edited admission essays for students trying to get into CU’s journalism school. I still have no idea why they asked me to do this; I never actually wrote an admission essay. Due probably to a clerical error, they let me straight in so I had no idea what I was doing in this workshop. This of course was not what the students wanted to hear; most of them picked up their essays and ran to somebody else. But the point is I still showed up.

Believe it or not I showed up mainly because I actually enjoy editing. Of course, this is mainly because writing is one of the few things I don’t regularly mess up. I’m sure many of you find this highly amusing. “Mitchell,” you are probably saying, “I see more spelling, grammatical, factual and ethical errors on your site than on an episode of Jersey Shore.” To witch I reply its nun of you’re business or there business.

I’m going to be honest, I don’t really bother to look over these rants for errors; that would upset the very strict deadlines I work with. My strict schedule is as follows: 20 minutes brainstorming ideas (and by that I mean sleeping on the couch). 40 minutes of research (as in watching Golden Girls reruns). 10 minutes writing the actual thing (as in spewing verbal sewage all over computer screen). 25 minutes confirming facts (by eating a sandwich). So as you can see, this leaves little time for any actual proofreading. Besides, that sounds like a lot of work for a stupid blog that nobody pays me to write.

But I honestly do like editing good writing. Notice how I say good writing. Editing good writing is fun and easy. Editing essays written by people with the IQ’s of gerbils who were dropped on their heads at birth is not as fun. In those cases it’s easier to crumple up their essay and throw it in the trash (oh wait, sorry we are in Boulder, so you have to throw it in the recycle bin). Do you want to figure out if you have good grammar or have gerbil poop for brains? Here’s a quick and easy little test. What is wrong with the following passage:

Justin Bieber, the teen age singer who’s prepubescent, angle-like voice has captured the hearts of girls worldwide, was arrested for cocaine possession yesterday after cops found five kilograms in Biebers bedroom.

A. Teenage is one word; it’s whose not who’s; it’s angel, not angle; and there is an apostrophe in Bieber’s.

B. Ain’t none nothing wrong with this their sentence. ‘Cept prepubescent ain’t a real word. Might be sum sorta fish.

C. Justin Bieber is my favorite singer in the world and he would never do cocaine.

D. Justin Bieber is not a singer; he is a whining abomination. And we don’t use kilograms. We’re Americans dammit, not Canadians.

If you said A, congratulations! You are correct and you have what it takes to work in writing (By the way, you may think the angle-angel is a pretty obvious mistake, but I know at least one person who doesn’t know the difference, and she knows exactly who she is). If you said B, you should just go back to whatever part of Alabama you came from and never touch a pen or pencil again in your life. If you said C, I hate you and isn’t it past your bedtime? If you said D, you may not be grammatically correct but I like you, so I’ll give you a pass.

The one thing I admit I still have no clue about is active versus passive sentence structure. My editors always tell me about this. So I’m assuming active structure goes something like “Bob ran around a lot,” while passive would be “Bob went to sleep.” Speaking of sleeping, I’m going to go brainstorm my next article.

Frankenfish

Coming from Hawaii, I obviously like seafood. Because of that, I try to keep up with all of the trendy seafood news more than I would keep up with other not so important things, like politics or what drug test(s) Lindsay Lohan is failing now. So you can imagine what I was thinking (hint: it was “huh?”) when I read this story.

Now genetically modified organisms have been a subject of debate for awhile. On one hand, you could get more out of the animals and feed everybody in the world. On the other hand, you could start sprouting tentacles from your back.

Now as a person who was asleep for a large portion (99%) of the only genetics-related class I ever took, I’m a little foggy as to how this whole genetically-modified stuff actually works. I mean when you read the story it sounds like they just put three different species of fish in the water, turned on some Marvin Gaye, lit some candles, turned out the lights and waited for things to get freaky. A friend told me they use DNA splicing or something, but that doesn’t sound nearly as fun. Unless maybe the scientists are listening to Marvin Gaye and saying “Oh yeeaah” in really deep voices while they are splicing.

Regardless of how it happens, we do know what we end up with. The “frankenfish” is twice as big as a normal salmon but takes half as long to mature. Personally, salmon is my least favorite fish, but if this whole experiment means that when I order a salmon filet I get a huge chunk of meat the size of Snooki’s poof then I’m all for it.

In fact, I say they start making other genetic changes to animals. Like they should make fish that have legs and can walk around on land so that the darn state of Colorado can actually have fresh seafood. Not chunks of tuna that have been frozen so long that you could use them as dry ice. And don’t try to tell me that Colorado has fresh fish. Catfish and tilapia are not fish. They eat dirt or something because that is the texture that they have when you eat them. I don’t trust fish that swim in rivers. People pee in rivers and throw rocks in there. I much prefer the ocean, which is much cleaner, at least when BP isn’t dumping oil into it.

They should also breed fish without bones. I mean, I’ve watched fish in aquariums and I still don’t see what they need bones for. Jellyfish live in the ocean don’t need bones, and frankly if all I had to do all day was float around in the ocean (which actually describes me on my breaks in Hawaii) I think even I wouldn’t need them. This way, I would not have to work around bones when I try to eat fish. As an official lazy person, I don’t like food that requires more calories to eat than you get from actually eating it. This is why I rarely eat crabs or pistachios.

While genetically modifying animals opens up a world of genius possibilities such as the ones I have proposed, it also opens up a can of worms. (Haha get it? Worms? Because you catch fish with worms? Oh never mind. You people have no sense of humor). Every sci-fi killer animal movie I have ever watched has begun with scientists experimenting on some sort of animal, and trust me, I have watched a ton of these movies. It’s normally all I do on weekends.

Because of these movies I have a natural distrust of scientists. For one thing they never experiment on cute, cuddly, non-threatening animals like koalas. No, they experiment on sharks and crocodiles and generally things with large teeth. The next thing you know, large killer animals are eating women running around in bikinis that are somehow bulletproof (the animals, not the bikinis). I always yell at the screen “You idiots of course the killer animal is going to escape its small cage! Now it’s going to go and terrorize a group of students on spring break and eat the minorities first but somehow make the two main characters fall in love!”

These scientists are saying that all this genetics mumbo jumbo is safe, since these fish are apparently engineered to be sterile. I guess this should mean that the possibility of large killer salmon terrorizing the South is low (and praise the Lord, there is already a movie about that very scenario). But I don’t care if they are supposedly sterile. Marvin Gaye can get anyone in the mood…

Hawaiian Home Field

So I’m a little upset right now, because the University of Hawaii lost to the University of Colorado this weekend. I had been looking forward to this game for a while, because it meant that I got to stand in the middle of the CU student section wearing nothing but UH green and a stupid grin on my face. Then of course, UH decided to suddenly start choking like octogenarians at a care home steak buffet.

Now throughout the week I got a lot of criticism for rooting for Hawaii instead of Colorado. Apparently they thought that I was not being very loyal. This confused me, since I thought that rooting for Colorado, a school I have been associated with for less than four years, over Hawaii, a place I have lived for 18 years, was the exact opposite of being loyal. Besides, I pay the University of Colorado tons of money. If anything, they should be loyal to me. The board of regents should be showing up to my exams and holding up signs and doing the wave in the back of the room.

Besides it’s not like I chose to come to CU because I grew up watching all the great CU teams (if there were any). In fact, I was unaware there was a state called Colorado up until about six years ago, and I only found out then because I did a Wikipedia search on Coors. If the University of Hawaii had a journalism school, I would be there.

Of course I don’t really expect everybody to understand. Growing up in Hawaii with no pro sports teams, most sports fans there have very wide and varied tastes when it comes to the pro teams the root for. Some people have good taste, while some people root for the Denver Broncos. I mean, my dad roots for the San Francisco 49ers while I root for the Jacksonville Jaguars. Now, even I know that it is pretty hard to have two teams farther apart without somehow involving Alaska.

But UH is the one thing that all people in Hawaii have in common. And it’s not just football. I’ve watched (and genuinely cared about) everything from volleyball to water polo. I remember a few months ago, UH’s women’s softball team went to the World Series tournament while my parents were up here visiting me. This of course meant that instead of actually doing anything, we sat inside and watched the game. Well my dad and I watched. My mother actually affected the game by screaming at the television. At one point, we were all ready to leave for sushi but she would not leave until one UH girl finished her at-bat. Did I mention that it was a 19-pitch at-bat?

But it’s not just UH. We tend to root for any team with Hawaii ties. The most recent example was a Hawaii Little League team that went all the way to the final before losing to a group of robots from Japan designed to look like children. I never watch Little League, but I watched every single game Hawaii was in.

I also like watching national TV coverage of Hawaii teams. For some reason, they always feel the need to play generic Hawaiian music while showing cutaway scenes of beaches and people surfing. I’m not sure why; it’s not like we are a foreign country or something. You never see them playing country music while showing people drinking on lawn chairs in the dirt when Alabama plays do you? That and they can never pronounce the names of anybody on our teams.

Anyway, despite losing to Colorado, which is a truly humiliating thing, I am, and always will be a UH fan through and through. So I may take a bit of heat this week. A lot of people have been teasing me about how UH used to be the rainbows, and how gay that apparently is. I invite them to say that to these guys.

Fire Burning

As many of you probably know, I’m a very skeptical guy. But I am now confident that the apocalypse is upon us. And I am not saying this just because Heidi and Spencer might be getting divorced (although I’m still not exactly sure who Heidi and Spencer are). I’m convinced the apocalypse is coming because there have been a lot of strange things going on recently.

As most of you probably know by now, there is a raging wildfire right now in northwest Boulder, Colorado. Seeing as I am currently sitting on a couch in south Boulder, you can see why this concerns me. This fire has been going on since Labor Day, and is still going strong. Or at least I think it started on Labor Day. I spent my three-day weekend like I do all of my extended breaks (sleeping), so for all I know this fire could have been burning since Friday.

All I know is that I finally awoke from my slumber on Monday evening and smelled smoke. I assumed my neighbors were having a BBQ, and quite frankly I got a little upset I wasn’t invited. Sure, I have no idea who my neighbors are (or if I actually have neighbors), but is that any excuse not to invite me over? Anyway, I went outside and I instantly noticed it looked like I had just walked into a gas chamber (or Los Angeles on a good day). Within a minute, my brain was able to connect the dots (okay, so maybe it was more like ten minutes, but give me a break; it was the weekend) and produce the following thought: “Fire?” After another few minutes, my brain produced a second thought: “Uh oh?”

So I rushed into my apartment and tried to figure out where the fire was and finally learned that it was located at Four Mile Canyon. Of course, this didn’t help me at all since I had no idea where Four Mile Canyon was. For all I knew, Four Mile Canyon was right across the street. As it turns out, I’m not in any immediate danger, so all of you out there can breathe a sigh of relief (or a sigh of disappointment, depending on whether or not I irritate you).

Unfortunately, not everyone was so lucky. Almost 8,000 acres and 100 homes have been destroyed the last time I checked. One of those houses actually belonged to my professor, who is homeless yet still felt it necessary to come to class and was still more prepared than me. And it does not look like this fire is going out any time soon. The governor has claimed the state has “no more resources” and firefighters reported that as of Wednesday they had “0 percent of the fire contained.” It looks like we’re just going to have to sit here and wait for the feds to come and help us, which the people in Louisiana find very funny for some reason. The only way this news could get bleaker is if it somehow involved Justin Bieber.

On the bright side, none of this matters because we are all going to die anyway! That’s right; we’re going to get hit by an asteroid. Apparently, we barely dodged two just the other day. Now, I’ve made fun of NASA, mainly because like all government departments they spend too much money on stupid projects, waste time with bureaucratic bulls**t and in general are about as useful as a lead life preserver. I got some criticism for this, but I think that this article justifies my view.

NASA didn’t know about this thing until very recently. Apparently it snuck up on them, which is unacceptable. I mean, it’s a giant rock hurtling through space, not a goddam ninja. NASA needs to get their priorities straight and stop taking pictures of pretty nebulas and start looking out for killer space spheres. If you just yelled at your computer screen, “Hey, the plural of nebula is nebulae, not nebulas,” then you also need to get your priorities straight and focus on the grave matter at hand. Also, “Killer Space Ninjas” would be an awesome name for a band.

So as we can see, the apocalypse is coming, and only the fit will survive. Not to brag, but I think I will be one of the survivors. For one thing, I have the ability to just go to sleep and ignore everything. And I think I’m going to start now.