3/19/01
I wanted to add that counter to the bottom, and perhaps my e-mail address. If you really care, the e-mail is easy to find and you could always just count the number of times you’ve been here and then mail that to me. Maybe I’ll acknowledge your existence with some sort of tribute to your visit. Then again, probably not. I sort of assumed that I’d have random thoughts to write about when I made this page. Turns out I really don’t. Not at the moment at least, and the theme of the day is “ramble about nothing”. I have a feeling that will be the theme of a lot of days. Anyway, I’ll put myself out of my misery.
E1st
3/22/01
You know what i think about sometimes? What if we didn’t live on this planet? If our culture had evolved elsewhere. A solid majority of the stellar systems in the galaxy are made up or two or more stars. That means one planet(assuming planets can arise in such systems) would have two suns. The closest stars to us, Alpha and Beta Centauri are a double(actually triple but the third one is very dim) star system. If you put one star where the sun is, then other would be out near where Uranus is. If the earth was in the same place, think about how our concept of day or year would have evolved there. There would be times when the main sun would be up all day, and then once it set, the other sun would be up all night. It wouldn’t be as bright, but it would be like we had day and half day. There would be other times when both suns would be glaring down at the earth at the same time, drastically increasing the amount of heat recieved. It would be possible to have both a sun rise and a sun set at the same time. The concept of “year” might include the main year, the time it takes to go around the one sun, and a secondary year, the time it takes for the other sun to go around the one sun.
There’s more too. If we lived on the outside of a globular cluster, a densely packed cluster of up to a million stars, our night time would be the most awe inspiring and radiant sight i can imagine. There would probably be a few stars almost as bright as the moon(only pinpoints as opposed to an object with diameter). Then there would be a dozen stars brighter than any stars that we can see from here. That might be followed by thousands of stars which combine to dwarf the brightness of the Milky Way. But then, some times of year, when the sun is between the earth and the rest of the cluster the night sky will be almost blank. All the stars will be on the side that the sun is on, and since those clusters are far from the rest of the galaxy that part of the sky would be almost blank.
I think about that some times. Think about how much different our culture would be.
This bonus coverage is because my mind is working a little better than normal. So this is another thing that i’ve thought about before. I had a dream once. I was standing on Pluto i guess it was. Just some planet far away from the sun. And i had just gotten dropped off there, I couldn’t ever leave. And i looked up at the sky, and saw the sun. But since the sun was so far away it was barely brighter than the moon. It was silent, and i could still see the stars. All i could think was, “This is daytime.” It was what we would consider to be night. But the sun was up, and it never got any brighter than this. I thought of how small i was. Now when i think i understand things, all i have to do is think about what my life would be like without something like a sun. It was dark and cold and their was no future other than more dark and more cold. There was nothing that we consider to be normal. Empty was normal.
E1st
4/9/01
I’ve found that as inconvenient as having one of those lung shattering coughs is, it is very effective at toning one’s abdominal muscles. Its been a few days since i’ve done crunches(because of the meet), but as a result of my african whooping cough, i don’t think i’ve missed a beat. The way i see it, as long as i’m not coughing hard enough to dislocate my jaw(you’ll have to trust me that that is not fun), a cough is really a 24 hour involuntary ab workout. Who would ever think to do crunches at 3 in the morning? No one has a level of dedication that can match the involuntary spasmic contractions of my diaphram. I bet schwabe doesn’t do a 5 minute set of sit ups in the middle of class. Though i suppose they probably have a class devoted completely to doing crunches at Army. They’re useless like that after all. If only my lungs worked, this situation would be ideal. It’s kind of like the theory that i made up last year that the bass vibrations eminating from someone’s bigass stereo system at 1 AM were giving me something similair to an ultrasound session. They weren’t keeping me awake, oh no, they were slowly working out the kinks in my muscles. Anyway, drier time.
E1st
5/9/01
So my roommate had a rough night last night. Not normally a drinker, he came back plastered and smelling pretty awful of something. So he was puking with his head actually inside of the toilet(like an inch from the water, i kid you not). Now the funny thing(at least to me), occurred when he left the bathroom. You have to know him i guess, he’s kind of skatterbrained most of the time, and when drunk he’s just non-functional. So he walks out of the bathroom, and in tow is literally a 7 foot long piece of toilet paper. Now, as a fan of randomness, the sight of my roommate, a normally interesting sort of guy, towing 7 feet of toilet paper across the room was just hilarious to me. You had to be there i’m sure, or at least know him.
E1st
5/11/01
So i actually have been home for a few days. And tonight i’ve thought up a question. Are ambulances required to use blinkers? I guess no one is required, but shouldn’t ambulances who aren’t carrying people use that common courtesy? Well, they don’t in the town of Florida, New York. I was sitting there waiting for the one ambulance that had its lights on to pull out, and after it did, i figured the other one(which made no attempt to move and was empty in the cargo hold(if you will)) was waiting to pick up someone else. After all, i don’t see what two ambulances can do for one person, unless they were somehow dismembered. So then the inert ambulance all the sudden pulls out. Now, i was about 10 ft from hitting it mind you, there was no real danger of that. But he gave me this, “hey buddy, i’m driving an ambulance. That’s right, look at me, i’m driving an ambulance.” look. Well, a blinker would have been nice mr ambulance driver. All you were doing was following the other ambulance, you were pretty much useless. I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed that you were picking up somebody else. But no, just running point for the other one.
Then both ambulances started driving about 40 in the 55. Which is something, since i could have transported the guy to the hospital about 5 minutes faster, and i would have used blinkers. I would have considered putting my flashers on just to let other people know that i was transporting some guy, but then you probably wouldn’t see my blinker so i’d have to yell out the window or something. Luckily, i know back roads and also luckily the deer were kind to me tonight. Speaking of which, Steve pr’ed for the 3rd time in 7 days with a 4:34 mile. He’s a sophomore.
E1st
5/12/01
So you wonder what we do with our nights in Goshen. Well, first we BBQ’ed. I had 4 or 5 cheeseburgers and a good deal of sausage. Then we decided to throw bits of bread from hot dog rolls into this hole that’s about 8 feet up on Matt’s tree. I wasn’t the first to sink one, but i did have the record for most, with 3. I’m sure that no one else was counting like me however.
Then i pitched Richmond a little bit of BP with the tennis balls and his good old stickball bat. After a little while this became a full scale batting session, which i didn’t bat at, but played deep outfield. At one point this pudgy little tot came and talked to me, despite his parents entreaties that he not. So what do you do in a situation like that? Anyway, there’s 3 people in here talking and it’s really hurting my concentration. My style is being cramped. Shut up everybody!
So this went on until it was dark, then some people left leaving rich, matt, AJ and I. We decided it would be fun to try to get the manhole cover in the middle of the road up. This is normally fairly easy, but with the construction at the school, all those big trucks had really pounded the cover into the road. So we ended up needing to chisel away at the edges and then use a crow bar to get it up. We did however, and spit in the hole a few times then put it back down.
You can’t do that to just one manhole cover, so we went looking for more. We found one of those little water things in the middle of the four way intersection next to matt’s house and pried it open, then of course spit in it again. There was water in it, so i decided i wanted to see if it was sewage or clean water. It was clean, except for the spit that i dipped my hand in. That wasn’t terribly pleasant.
After a while we settled down at that corner. You see, there’s only a stop sign for two direction at that corner, and the other street has the right of way. Well people don’t know that apparently because they like to stop no matter what. We made it our mission to yell at them when they did. We did this for literally 2 hours, yelling at cars that stopped and complaining when cars didn’t stop for long enough. At one point, rich and matt strategically walked back and forth across the street just to prove a point to the cars that weren’t stopping properly. One time this lady did stop at the street you weren’t supposed to stop at. We heckled her a little bit and she rolled down her window and was like, “i was just checking to see if my son was one of you” He wasn’t, but think about how much it would such if you were her son. Anyway, we told her she was holding up traffic(of which there was none for 5 minutes at a time) and she moved along.
Eventually i went to bring richmond home, and of course we stopped at that intersection improperly, just for kicks. This led to AJ chasing us around the block a few times, until we stopped improperly at it again. It was mighty stupid.
Anyway, that’s what we do at Goshen. At Bucknell people think that stuff that i do is the most random around, but we do random strange things all the time at home and everybody loves it. Randomness is the spice of life.
E1st
5/23/01
Since all i did was drive today, i’m going to talk about driving. First and foremost, there is no such thing as the acceptable passing lane speed limit. You go in the passing lane to pass. Just because you’re going 74 doesn’t mean that you’re neccessarily justified to be in the passing lane. It’s not like, “Well, going 74 in the slow lane would be almost contradictory!” It’s nothing like that. If you’re not passing people, get your non-passing self in the right lane. Meanwhile, even if you are passing people, if there’s a line of cars that would like to pass people at a faster pace than you are, slide over every so often to let them by.
E1st
7/31/01
I’d like to share with you all a dream i had last night. I was at subway, and i ordered my normal roast beef with lettuce, onions, cucumbers and vinegar. This guy said they had like a half off promotion if you got exactly what you didn’t order on a sub instead. So they put on all the stuff that i didn’t order and none of the stuff that i did. The peppers gave me problems, but other than that it was good. So that was my dream.
E1st
8/18/01
So we’re getting ready to go to sleep up on the mountain under the stars, when my Dad announces, “Ok, i’m going to sleep now.” This was after a solid half hour of looking up at the stars, pointing out satellites and seeing shooting stars. My father’s specialties is finding satellites, and maybe 5 times this night (and countless other times) he said, “look boys, a satellite.” Well no more than 2 minutes after he decided to go to sleep through the sky comes the space station. Unlike other satellites, the space station shines brighter than Venus and is only visible when the solar panels hit the recently set sun just right. So we take notice and decide it’s interesting (I had never seen it before). We say, “Look Dad, the space station.” His reply is, “I can’t see it, my eyes are closed.”
E1st
9/23/01
I was thinking today when i was eating lunch. Do you think they have cows set aside for use in jello? I know they use cow parts in jello, which i think is the coolest thing ever, but are there things like jello cow farms?
If not, then i think that Indians are overrated. I’ve heard in the past about how they used to use all parts of the animals they killed. Well consider the cow in american society. We have numerous grades of steak, we have dog food, jello, leather, and we even inflate their 4 compartmented stomachs and use them as balls. At least i do.
E1st
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