We won our trial today against Massachusetts Academy of Mathematics and Science. Semifinals are next Monday. We will be facing either Newton South, whom we lost to in finals last year, or the Maimonides School, depending on which of them beats the other.
I am considering getting a Facebook.
Ron Silver has died. I have seen only Reversal of Fortune, but he was fabulous in that.
Our new baby chicks arrived at the post office this morning. There are about twenty. We only ordered nine hens, but they have a certain amount they have to send in each box to keep them warm, so they just give you extra roosters, because no one wants roosters. So once they get old enough to crow we will get rid of them, but for now they are pretty cute.
Also, we have eggs arriving pretty soon that we will be hatching. We opted not to use an incubator and just to let some of the more broody hens sit on the eggs, which will be pretty awesome.
I picked up two more books for the honors project that I am doing with a friend for Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. The project is on eighteenth-century European finance and economic policy, and these two books look pretty interesting. Apparently there was something called the Dutch Tulip Mania, and there was an economic group called the Loco-Focos. Both sound pretty weird. The Dutch Tulip Mania involved bulb futures, a rather odd concept, and the Loco-Focos appear to be some kind of group that advocated a no-paper-money policy. We will see.
Our opponent for our next trial has been revealed: Massachusetts Academy of Mathematics and Science from Worcester, who beat Lowell Catholic High School. We will face them in Springfield on Monday.
Today was the first day of tryouts for the boys’ ultimate team. It was mega-cold. My hands were in excruciating pain by the end of the game. I CANNOT WAIT for the weather to be uncold again.
I realized that the most scary part about skydiving will definitely be the falling. I mean, that’s obvious, but think about it like this: In real life, when you jump off of something, or fall, you are never in free fall for more than about two seconds, usually probably less than one. When I go skydiving, I will be in free fall for between thirty seconds and one minute. Apparently you reach terminal velocity pretty quickly, after something like twenty seconds, and at that point, there is so much air resistance, that you feel as though you are standing on something, but that is still twenty seconds of free fall, far longer than I have ever experienced before. It is going to be awesome.
Someone I know who has gone skydiving says that once your chute opens, you feel as though gravity has reversed and you are falling up. I am SO PUMPED!
I am solidifying plans for my eighteenth birthday. Here is a list of things I am intending to do, in no particular order:
I called JumpTown in Orange this evening, and confirmed that part of the plan. It will cost me $205 to jump as a student, and I will require a twenty to thirty minute training session before going up tandem with an instructor. I suppose I am thus going to take the day off from school in order to get all of this stuff done. Also, 5-Alonehas our big show at the Iron Horsethat evening, so it will be a busy day.
I forgot something in the last post. I am also planning to get a credit card on my eighteenth birthday.
Jumptown offers a video and still photos of your jump for an extra $115. That is a lot of money. But they also have edited the footage, and put it to music, which is sort of silly. I watched a few demo videos, and they’re sort of cheesy. Perhaps I can get them to just give me the raw footage, which I would much prefer, and maybe take the price down a bit.
WE PLAYED A REAL GAME! ON A REAL FIELD! WITH GRASS!
It was awesome. I have not played a legitimate game since August. I am SO out of shape, and SO looking forward to this season.
My father is taking tomorrow off of school, so I am going in late. Sleeping until nine. WAHOO!
In the spirit of full disclosure, I am probably going to switch to a different web host sometime soon. Currently, I use GoDaddy to host this site, and the harpojaeger.com domain is also registered with them. renaissanceboy.org, my first domain, which now redirects here, is registered with DirectNic, the company I was using at the time.
The reasons I want to switch are complicated. For a while, I’ve been impressed by GoDaddy’s low prices but dismayed by their site’s operation in a technical sense; it is confusing and slow. In addition, I have never been fully supportive of their marketing techniques, which are frequently subtly, sometimes blatantly, sexist, base, and calculative. I have never really devoted much thought to it, but my father mentioned to me that there was a movement afoot to ditch GoDaddy because of these tactics, and he directed me to this article. It sums up the issues at play very well.
I was already aware of DreamHost, having worked for a client who used it, and the other hosting service the article linked to, LunarPages, looks excellent as well. I am going to spend some time in the near future researching different services, and will probably make the switch soon. I think I will also consolidate all of my domain names to the same registrar, ideally the same company that’s doing the hosting. This should make stuff a lot easier.
Tonight was Purim, a rather exciting Jewish holiday, which features strange costumes and pastries. Also, we won our first playoff trial today, advancing us to the next round on Monday.
I have been doing homework since returning home from synagogue. Tomorrow, my Rise and Fall of the Great Powers class will complete its trial of Napoleon Bonaparte for Crimes Against Humanity. I am playing Napoleon. I have prepared a ridiculous French accent, and hopefully will be acquitted. It is always interesting to see how these historical mock trials will play out. On the one hand, I somewhat believe that Napoleon is guilty of the charges, so I am playing devil’s advocate in that sense, something I often do and enjoy greatly. However, I am also speaking in line with what happened historically; Napoleon was not in fact ever tried, much less convicted. So regardless of which side one is on in such a trial (I had similar thoughts in our 10th grade trial of President Harry Truman for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity concerning the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), one is arguing against some sort of establishment.
Frisbee practice tomorrow! Hopefully the field will be clear enough that we can play an actual game.
I have been doing a bunch more research into investment options. It turns out that I have to fill out a bunch of forms to open an IRA as a minor, so I may just wait until this summer to do that to avoid the trouble.
There are a lot of different brokers online. I looked at ETrade</a>, TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, and Scottrade. Schwab has the highest transaction fees (close to $50 for funds!), but that is probably balanced by more services. I think that when I start investing I will probably go with ETrade. Not only were their fees pretty reasonable, but I liked their site design; it was simple and easy to use.
I think I will open a Roth IRA. Once I get a credit card this summer, I will have a certain percentage of each of my paychecks go into a savings account, which will in turn be accessed monthly by my IRA, withdrawing a fixed or percentage amount. I could also bypass the savings account a go directly to the IRA. This would have the advantage of placing more of my money in a position to be invested, but allowing me less spending flexibility.
Due to the fact that I got less than three hours of sleep last night, I am pretty exhausted. But it was worth it. Watchmen was fabulous. It is not perfect, but I am SO glad I went, and it is definitely a movie to see. The CGI was also really really good, especially in the scenes on Mars, for anyone who knows the plot.
I would have liked to see more of The Comedian, especially as a younger man; his acting was great. In general, I was most impressed with the historical development of the characters. Most of the credit for this goes to the original authors of the comic, but I credit the director with doing a good job preserving this most important aspect.
I did dislike the gratuitous and graphic violence. The comic book is violent, to be sure, but the movie took it over the top. There were subtle changes to scenes that were more conservative in the book, and just shots that didn’t have to be included, for the purpose of selling the violence.
Overall, though, the movie represents a concerted effort to work with the source material, and it is ultimately successful. It has been getting really bad reviews. I think this is because of the critics’ mentality that if a movie makes any concessions from their idealized view of “perfect art”, it is no longer worthy of attention. I.e., any movie that shows the slightest influence of “culture” or “industry” over a pure “vision” is junk. This is simply not true. Movies need inspiration and motive, to be sure, but they are products of the time; they cannot be isolated from the culture. Too much culutural influence can, and often does, interefere with a film, but this is not the case for Watchmen.
I recommend it to anyone who is not squeamish about violence and superhero sex.
Today was an odd day. My sister is fifteen. This is a rather advanced age. I am still grappling with its implications.
The day did not begin well, however. My sister (yes, the same one whose birthday it is) was very sick, and was up early in the morning. I was woken at about four, and was able to fall back asleep, but other members of my family were not so lucky. My sister did not go to school today. Then, when my youngest sister went out to let the chickens out of their coop this morning, she discovered that one had been locked out last night, and had been killed by a predator. This is the first time we have had a chicken killed in the almost two years we’ve been raising them, and it was rather shocking. My sister was rather traumatized, having just been presented face-to-face with the mangled carcass of a bird she thought she was letting out, and she came back inside sobbing. My father and I had to clean up, and as the poor thing had been out all night, it was frozen solid. It was quite a job, and I thus had a very sad start to the day.
School went well after that, except that I did not have enough food, and was thus rather headache-ish and grumpy all day. We had a rather cold ultimate practice outside, and I managed to go the entire day without eating the four cupcakes I was entrusted with by a classmate of my sister’s who had baked them for her birthday and asked me to transmit them to her. This was no mean, feat, but I got one after dinner, so I am happy.
Our plans for Watchmen are solidified. A few members of our extended group have been their since a bit before five PM, and I will be meeting them there within a few hours, along with some other friends arriving from elsewhere. I will be picking up one other on the way. The movie is two hours and forty-three minutes long, so it’s going to be a late night. But it will be worth it.
We won our trial today, and will thus be moving on to the first round of the playoffs on Monday. We will be playing the winner of Region #16, the Berkshires, which will be either Lennox or Longmeadow; they have a tiebreaker trial.
My plans for tomorrow night are almost completely formed. I am getting PUMPED! I am going to go to Ultimate practice before returning home, having dinner with my family, and going back out to the movie.
I am pretty tired from practice today. We are postponing tryouts until all of this DAMN SNOW has melted and we can actually get to the field. Until then, we are running outside, and doing workouts inside. Speaking of workouts, I came up with the most AWESOME workout today. To begin, I must explain my school’s building. There are three floors, and there are three staircases, one at each end, and one about 2/5 of the way down the hall. The workout is that you run up and down a single staircase about ten times to warm up, and then, when you reach the bottom, you open the door, and sprint down the hall to the next stairway. You run up and down that one, and then sprint to the next one. Then you run up and down that one, and work your way back and forth again. It is great because it combines light jogging (down stairs), heavy jogging (up stairs), and sprinting, which are all important in ultimate. Better still, it gets you used to changing which one you are doing and then going back to another; endurance and explosiveness. It is FABULOUSLY tiring. After, we joined up with the people who had been running outside, and had an excellent workout inside.
We have a trial tomorrow afternoon; a tiebreaker in our region. We are playing Tantasqua. We have never faced this school before, so we don’t know what to expect. Also, since we are up to the tiebreaker level now, this trial and all after it are coin flips. That is, we arrive, and the two teams flip a coin. The winner of the coin flip determines which side their team will present. We know which side we will call if we win, but we have to be ready to do either one. Thus, I will run my closing through a couple times tonight, and then get a lot of sleep.
Having trials on Wednesdays is great for me because it means I have no classes. Thus, I do not need to do any homework.
I am solidifying plans for Watchmen. We have an extra ticket because one friend backed out on us, so I will try to sell it to someone beforehand, or at the show, which I imagine will be pretty easy. The question I am dealing with now relates to the fact that I have discovered that another group of my friends is going to the theater right after school to get on line. I would go with them, but it is my sister’s birthday, so I will need to be at home. I am therefore debating the morality of having them save us spots on line. It would only be four people, so it is not as if we will be doing a huge disservice to the people behind them, but it could result in some pretty serious anger from the rest of the people on line. I have to consult with my friends tomorrow before making a decision.
I have finally found out how to do something I have been trying to do for a LONG time. Safari, the web browser that I use, has tabbed browsing capability (and I use it primarily), but does not, as, for instance, Firefox does, force any link set to open in a new window (target=”_blank”) to open instead in a new tab. It turns out there’s a hidden feature for it:
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true
This makes my life SO much better.
Is that a word? If it isn’t, it should be.
Anyway, we might have a snow day tomorrow. I have elected not to watch Murder by Death with the rest of my family and instead do my homework to prepare for potential school. That way, if we do not have a snow day, I can sleep late and not feel guilty.
I went to a Mock Trial meeting after work today. It was quite productive. We had a trial on Friday (which we won), and are now preparing for a tiebreaker trial to determine the winner of our region (against Tantasqua, a team we have not played before, but who are also 3-0 at this point) on Wednesday. We have a lot to do to be ready. I am confident in our ability to do so, but it will require some really hard work.
I am trying out a poll plugin for WordPress. If it works, I may start having a Poll of the Week or something like that. The current one (tonic water) comes from a discussion I had at school about how AWESOME tonic water is. My classmates were not so refined as I on this matter. I had a FABULOUS day on Friday because I began it by drinking a glass of tonic water, but my peers remain unconvinced.
Vote, vote, vote. Unless you are a felon. ‘Cause felons can’t vote.
It has been almost a week since I wrote a post that was an actual post, not a sonnet. It has been nice to have a break, because I am still gathering my thoughts about how I want to continue blogging, and what form I want this blog to take in the future. Once I go to college, I think it will probably start to focus more on the things I am working on there. I am also thinking of starting some kind of separate political blog, whether associated with Brown or not, or perhaps just starting to write more about politics on this blog.
In other news, I am going to see Watchmen at midnight on opening night. I am approximately as excited as I was for Quantum of Solace, and I have heard good things about this film.
I have just returned from seeing The Reader. It is a fabulous movie. I will not talk about the plot too much, as I am a firm believer in being able to see movies without knowing anything about them beforehand. This was not exactly the case for this particular film; I knew a bit, but the movie was so expansive and covered so many ideas that what I did know did not detract from the experience at all.
The movie made me think a lot. First of all, the acting was phenomenal. Kate Winslet continues to amaze me. As did Ralph Fiennes and David Kross, the other two leads. The film also made me think about something we’ve been talking about in my playwriting class; character versus plot. Which is the driving force in a dramatic piece such as a play or movie? My teacher argues that it is plot, because the plot is what creates a conflict, and allows the viewer to move with the story. This is very true, but movies such as The Reader reinforce my belief that characters are more important. The Reader is a picture of lives. Yes, those lives were conceived of and designed for the purpose of serving a plot (in this case one that was originally in book form), but it would be a mistake to say that because the plot necessitated the characters, the characters are supplemental to it. The reason this movie and others like it are so good is that the film is not about certain people or created to “tell” a story. The film is made as if you are a witness to the story. This sounds obvious, but it’s not; it seems that a lot of film is about taking the viewer through something or making them move in a certain way. The Reader presents us with fully developed characters in fully developed situations; an accurate depiction of real life. No matter how one-sided a situation may seem in real life, or how flat a character may seem, there is always something behind them. Simplicity is the result of logic. Simplicity is the result of a full personality, one that manifests itself in predictable ways according to its attributes. In real life, if you knew everything there was to know about someone, you would always know what they would do. We don’t know everything about everyone, so we clearly don’t always know what they will do, but in a film like this, you are put in the position that we find ourselves in often in real life; having to understand why someone does a certain thing. Puzzling out what it is about them that makes them act the way they do.
Anyway, I had a great evening, and am going to sleep well. Except that now I am thinking of a tragic scene in which the main character gets out of bed in the middle of the night and tells a lover that he has to sleep alone, and returns to his own room. It is hard to explain why this is so sad without explaining the rest of the movie, but believe me when I say that it was heartbreaking.