I’m going to run in a marathon, sometime. Should be fun, you know? If I can already run for an hour straight at 8 MPH, then 26 miles would take a little more than 3 hours… that shouldn’t be too hard. I could always run a little bit more slowly if I’m feeling tired. Although I think the body parts that start wearing out over such long distances aren’t the same ones that wear out with larger exertions for short distances or efforts, like lifting weights. Usually it’s the heart or lungs that get tired, or the muscles… but if I can go for at least an hour, then those things are self sustaining. I guess it’ll be other things, like my feet hurting from the repeated impact, or something chafing against something else. Things that don’t regenerate quickly with more energy or rest, but rather need a few days of rest and recuperation to heal. I guess I’ll find out. True runners have to be going at least 10 MPH on average for the entire race to finish in their 2.5 hour times, and I can’t keep up that speed for much more than a mile on a treadmill, but I think 3 hours would be a pretty respectable marathon time for an absolute beginner. Only I’m not wearing those silly short shorts they wear, I don’t care what.
http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en“>Google language tools’ rendition of http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/jabber/jabberwocky.html“>Jabberwocky in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish at the moment, but it’s amusing to read since all of the nonsense words in the poem get included verbatim, and what we end up with is mostly just a Spanish-ized grammatical structure of what’s still pretty recognizable as the original poem.
El brillig de Twas, y los toves slithy
Hizo el gyre y gimble en el wabe:
Todo mimsy eran los borogoves,
Y el outgrabe de los raths del mome.¡”guárdese del Jabberwock, mi hijo!
¡Las quijadas que muerden, las garras que cogen!
Guárdese del pájaro de Jubjub, y evítelo
El Bandersnatch frumious!”Él tomó su espada vorpal a disposición:
Tiempo largo el enemigo del manxome que él buscó –
Reclinado tan él por el árbol de Tumtum,
Y estado parado un rato en pensamiento.Y, como en uffish pensó que él estaba parado,
El Jabberwock, con los ojos de la llama,
Vino whiffling a través de la madera del tulgey,
¡Y burbled como ella vino!¡Uno, dos! ¡Uno, dos! Y a través y a través
¡La lámina vorpal fue snicker-bocado!
Él la dejó muerta, y con su cabeza
Él fue a galumphing detrás.¿”y, el thou ha matado el Jabberwock?
¡Venido a mis brazos, mi muchacho del beamish!
¡Día frabjous de O! ¡Callooh! Callay!’
Él chortled en su alegría.El brillig de Twas del, y los toves slithy
Hizo el gyre y gimble en el wabe;
Todo mimsy eran los borogoves,
Y el outgrabe de los raths del mome.
“I was born on February 22.”
“Oh, you are an Aquarium!”
There’s something to be said for no hours of sleep and partying all weekend!
There’s something to be said for nine hours of sleep, too.
I’m very tired today. There’s something to be said for eight hours of sleep. That’s all I have to say.
Here’s a poem I remember by Willard R. Espy, whom I http://www.mh-z.com/cgi-bin/coranto/viewnews.cgi?id=EEEpkZyFyAfcafPIoO“>mentioned a while back.
It’s just one of those random things that enter one’s mind. You know, the random poetry which pops into our heads now and then. Happens to everyone, you know? And this one is about the depression in the upper lip, just below the nose:
I have a little http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philtrum“>philtrum,
Wherein my spiltrum flows.
When I am feeling illtrum,
And runny at the nose.
Now you won’t forget what that thing is called. And did you know that the white area at the base of the fingernail is called a “lunula” or “lunule”? I had to look up the spelling of that, but I was close.
How often does it happen that I realize I’ve left my phone in the car and that that’s why nobody has called me all evening, though I hadn’t realized it had been so quiet until the immediately prior realization that this phone was not in my vicinity? Pretty often.
I’ll call the prior paragraph: “Adventures in English Grammar, Part the 763rd”.
The weather is hot, but I went to http://www.mh-z.com/photos/manhattan_beach/“>the beach!
It will be very hard indeed to change the world if you have a cynical attitude and are filled with bitterness. Rather, you will push people away and find yourself alone in your mission. The power to make the greatest change comes when people work together. If you find that you are pushing people away, perhaps you need to look at your message, yourself, your situation, your attitudes, and your assumptions. Try to understand people and what motivates them. You may “weep for the world”, but the world certainly doesn’t weep for you.
I saw Star Wars Episode III at 12:01 this morning, and although I’m not going to say anything about the movie now, I will say that my theater experience (having nothing to do with the movie) left a lot to be desired. First of all, there was a lack of nerds. I mean, people dressed up in Star Wars costumes, with plastic light sabers and such, and all that which would make seeing Star Wars at the first publically available time on opening night (or should I say opening morning) the most fun time to see the movie. There weren’t really any interesting people in line at all, it seemed. Perhaps, having often been in Hollywood or Westwood or populous places where such movies are a big deal among fans, I am spoiled in this regard, so nevermind. Because I saw the movie in El Monte. Why? Some of my friends happened to be seeing it there and invited me along, so I thought, sure, I’ll still live if I only get a few hours of sleep tonight. That’s the first-of-all. The second-of-all is that I was sitting to the left of a very large man, and I’m accustomed to booting people off the armrests so I can have them (”all your armrest are belong to us”), but this person overflowed onto the armrest so that it was his body which was taking it up, not his arm. And the seats were very narrow. The movie began 15 minutes late because some kid was raffling off a couple movie posters and didn’t start doing so until the time the movie was scheduled to begin. He didn’t have a microphone so it was hard for anyone to hear him, and he insisted on reading all 16 digits on each raffle ticket rather than just the last four and waiting while people climbed over seats to have their tickets checked under the light emitted from his cell phone, since he had no other light, then sent back to their seats because the numbers didn’t quite match. I’m not sure who arranged this. Actually it was part of a charity club of some sort, because this kid along with some others went down the line before the movie collecting money. I wanted to donate a dollar, like they were asking for, but I didn’t have a bill, so I fished out four quarters from my wallet. I gave one of the kids my quarters, and evidently he thought I must have been asking for change, because he gave me a dollar bill back. I said no, I don’t want change, I’m just giving you a dollar, so I gave the dollar bill back to him. And then he gave the quarters back to me, and I was thinking, maybe you just don’t want quaters, but he had taken the quarters from me the first time, so I assumed he could take quarters and tried giving them back to him, but he wasn’t paying attention anymore. Disorganized people. I kept my quarters. So the movie started 15 minutes late, and the show progressed without incident, but then, the second the movie ended and the main theme song starter to play and the credits started, literally that second, someone shut off the projector and turned on the lights in the theater. I know a lot of people don’t stay for the credits, and I was thinking about not staying this time because it was late and I’ll probably see the movie again with another group of friends, but it’s the principle of the thing. The theater shows the credits. If you walk out, you walk out with the music playing and the flicker of the screen at your back lighting the way. Maybe the projectionist was upset because the movie was a late showing and had started even later because of the antics of the raffle kid. I don’t know, but that’s no excuse, because no matter how many people walk out, you still show the credits. That’s how movie theaters work and that’s the expectation you have when you buy tickets. My friend and I went up and knocked on the projection room door and there was no answer (scared?), but thrashing the projection kid or whatever we were going to do wouldn’t have accomplished anything anyway, because the pervasive lack of professionalism had already left a bad taste in our mouths. Actually I’m personally placing a black mark in my black book next to the City of El Monte due to all of these issues, but particularly its dearth of nerds or otherwise interesting people. El Monte is a suburb east of Los Angeles. (Urban sprawl. Blegh.)
Enough with taking breaks. I installed Wordpress and mucked around with it a bit, then decided that although it’s nice, it’s going to take a lot more mucking around before I can make it live and put it up on my homepage, meaning, here, of course. In some ways it seems overly simplified: I like my “advanced” user options and configurability. I like easy-to-edit templates and having to use Server-Side-Includes. On the other hand, with WordPress I can enable comments finally, so that the nonexistent people who view this site can write deeply expository missives upon… I’m not sure what. But maybe they will, and this site will become a think-tank for future world policy, technology, health, and all sorts of important social issues. On the other hand, perhaps they will simply write single word comments such as “*drool*” and “poo”, which a certain person whose name starts with ‘Z’ tends to do.
There’s a cat here, now. My little sister’s cat, actually. He’s a gray one-year-old silver tabby who doesn’t have a definite name yet, doesn’t mind being handled and is friendly in that sense but doesn’t seek out human contact, and who jumps up on all the windowsills of the house one at a time and meowls loudly, wanting to go outside. But there are all sorts of dangers outside for a feline of his stature, such as a bunch of stray cats who fight at night. One lives under the house, and its eye was injured, presumably in a fight, though it looked better the last we saw it.
I transcribed the “B” background music from the Gameboy Tetris game, which sounds rather nice when sythesized on a piano. I’ll upload it when I work on it some more and iron out some kinks.
My grandfather passed away the week before last, and I said a few words his funeral. He was a good man, and perhaps I will post what I said, here.
WordPress supposedly had a “post in the future” option, whereby one could write an article and put it in a bin for automatic posting at a certain date/time. I liked the idea of that feature, but couldn’t find it in the program as distributed. WordPress also has a “post by email” feature, which is incredibly simplistic in its controls. I fail to see how this would work without several more options, and in fact when I set it up to check a particular mailbox and mailed something there, nothing happened. There’s no test feature or log which could help in debugging the issue, either.
I also see some WordPress sites which have a graph showing “posting by time of day”. That’s pretty neat. It fits in with my Birthday Histogram, somewhat. All my postings would probably show up at about 4 AM. Although I’m typing this at noon, so perhaps that thought isn’t valid anymore.
Does a plugin for Firefox exist which saves the contents of form fields as you type in them? If not, someone ought to write one.
I’m liking http://www.trillian.cc“>Trillian 3 better than http://gaim.sourceforge.net/“>Gaim, at least for the moment. Both have annoying behaviors, but Trillian has fewer. For example, when a message is received, Gaim flashes the window in the taskbar either indefinitely, or not at all (depending on a setting). Trillian only flashes it a specified number of times, and then it remains solid. There’s nothing like a flashing thing on your screen to annoy you, but you might not want to interrupt what you were doing to respond to an instant message, therefore, the flashing issue was insufferable.
There, don’t you now want to write some earth-shattering words of wisdom as feedback to this entry? Come on, I know you do. But you can’t! Yet, that is…