My Musings
Email me if you wish. Sunday, December 29, 2002Nationals, Part One: The Plane RideOn and off throughout the course of the entire winter break this year, I’ve been trying to write a huge, monster entry about my weekend at the chess nationals in Atlanta held earlier this month. Almost immediately I saw that the entry was getting nowhere. Quick to grab the problem by the reins, I began an unrelenting campaign to end it, primarily by whining a whole lot about my writer’s block to everybody. This is what I generally do to try to solve a lot of my problems, such as the fact—as I’m sure I’ve mentioned about fifty times already to any of you who I see on a somewhat regular basis—that I’ve lost my biology book. Instead of doing something like, say, perhaps looking for the book, I instinctively see ways to bring it up in virtually any conversation. I don’t even do it on purpose. Guys—if you’re sick of hearing me complain about how I lost my biology book, I am really truly sorry, it just seems to acquire relevance to every single topic. Like the chess tournament. My lost biology book HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the chess tournament, and yet here I am, going on and on about it. But just to give you an example: Person: I can’t believe we have a bio test tomorrow. I don’t know anything. Boris: I know! And what’s worse, I lost my biology book, so I can’t even study the dang stuff. Person: I don’t have a study hall because it doesn’t fit into my schedule. Boris: Oh, I would DIE if I didn’t have a study hall. I use it sometimes to do math and history, and since I lost my bio book, I have to use the one in the study hall to read the assignments. Person: Oh no! I left my wallet with 500 dollars cash and a signed blank check that I was planning to give to Harry and all my credit cards and my home address on top of a bar stool at the strip club I went to last Saturday!! Boris: Well, at least you didn’t lose your biology book, like I did. It’s the most expensive book you could lose and I have to read all the chapters in study hall. So you see, it somehow becomes extremely relevant to every single facet of my life that I, Boris Dvorkin, lost my biology book. Now, in the case of the biology book, whining, I’m sad to admit, doesn’t help. But in the course of my wailing about my awful case of writer’s block, I stumbled upon Lila, who offered me some wonderful advice. Confessing that she really lacks the attention span to read anything that lasts longer than about 19 letters, Lila suggested that I ditch the whole monster entry idea and just write about the tournament in a series of installments, which would allow me to hold true to the one page limit. I was hesitant at first, but coming up with no better solution myself, I decided to follow Lila’s advice. This first installment was supposed to be about the plane ride to Atlanta, but as you can see I’m already nearing a page and I haven’t even gotten to the part of the story where I wake up, much less the actual flight. I got carried away with the whole biology book thing, which frankly I don’t know how I got started on, and I’m too lazy to check, and too lazy to delete all this and start over, so I guess I’ll take another crack at writing about the plane ride up to Atlanta in an upcoming entry. .: posted by Boris 6:07 PMSunday, December 22, 2002Little KidsI hate little kids. They’re mean and stupid. Mean, because they make fun of fat kids. And stupid, because they don’t realize that it’s not necessarily the fat kids’ fault that they’re fat. Now, I know exactly what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Aha! I found a hole in Boris’s logic! His sole basis for saying that kids are mean is the fact that they make fun of fat kids, but obviously fat kids don’t make fun of themselves, thus they are not mean, thus not all little kids are mean, and thus Boris is wrong, as usual.” I have to admit, that was pretty impressive of you. It’s a pretty good argument. Very good, actually, when one considers that you came up with it in, what, ten seconds, probably less, however long it takes to read four sentences. Unfortunately, you’re wrong. Here’s why: take a fat kid and give him liposuction, turn him into one of the normal kids, and you know what he’ll do? He’ll turn right around and start making fun of the fat kids that used to be his friends. We all know it’s true. In fact, it serves as even greater proof of how evil little kids are. I hate them. .: posted by Boris 10:36 PMSunday, December 08, 2002Crack ConfusionMuch as it may embarrass me to do so, I have to bring up something serious that was recently brought to my attention. In the previous blog entry I described a blue fish AIM tongue smiley as looking like “a large quantity of crack was recently forced up its nasal tract.” But as Marina pointed out, fly197: one does NOT snort crack! that's cocaine I frankly don’t know anything about drugs and have no idea what crack and cocaine are like. For all I know they come in pink chewable tablets sold in childproof aspirin bottles in aisle 5 at CVS. Marina, on the other hand, I’m sure has years of personal first-hand experience with drugs of all kinds, so I’ll have to trust her here. I hereby make an official correction to my blog: the description of the fish smiley in the “Smileys” entry should read that the fish looked like “a large quantity of cocaine was recently forced up its nasal tract,” not that “a large quantity of crack was recently forced up its nasal tract.” And let me just say that whatever was forced up the nasal tract of the idiot who designed those terrifying animal smileys, I greatly appreciate the keen eyes of the readers that make this a better blog. If you ever fined even the most minutest mistakes in here please don’t hesitate to let me know and I’ll be sure to fix them right away and make fun of you a lot about it. Since I still have half a page left, I guess I’ll use it to tie up some loose ends. Michelle’s blogs are gone from the links section because she’s given up doing them. Part of this is my fault, and the other part is that Blogger seems to hold some sort of personal grudge against Michelle’s computer. The problems started when I offered to put links into Michelle’s blog. She gave me her password and we were all set, but when I logged into her name I found that I couldn’t get into her blogs. Michelle logged out to see what the problem was and when she logged back in, she could no longer get into her blogs, either. We emailed Blogger about it but since they have so many users it’s doubtful that they will ever reply. So Michelle made a new blog. But then after a while she couldn’t get into THAT, either, whereas I could. Basically I think Michelle’s computer pissed Blogger off at some point—maybe it had an affair with Blogger’s mom—and now Blogger is doling out revenge. Whatever happened, Michelle is ticked off and not doing blogs anymore. The links section looks awfully short and pathetic without Michelle’s blogs in there, and I hope that Michelle’s computer and Blogger sort out whatever trivial personal quarrels they had so that Michelle can start writing again. On a happier note, Adam’s connection to Redace got fixed and his web page is now officially being updated again. I added a link to his site and I urge you all to take a look. In addition to having entries personally written by Adam in a blog-like fashion, the site has a huge collection of downloadable MIDI files and all of Adam’s widely heralded quote lists, plus other goodies. For those of you who have seen my computer, the background I have on it was taken from one of the numerous images Adam has on his site, way back in the day when it was still at Stargate and all the pictures were in a nice thumb-nailed section. Now they’re in a parent directory and you don’t see the picture until you actually click on it, but since Adam’s updating his site again maybe he’ll change that…(nudge nudge) .: posted by Boris 2:04 PMMonday, December 02, 2002SmileysAndy, I put this blog here for you so that you don’t get jealous of the fact that Mandy and I talk online all the time. This is what we invariably end up talking about: Chessmen15: mind if I tell Steven? :-D Buffy4386: WHY are you using that face? Chessmen15: because I'm kidding Chessmen15: though! Chessmen15: it does leave you with the opportunity to say yes Buffy4386: You do no it shows up as :-D, right? Chessmen15: yes... Chessmen15: what did you think I meant? Buffy4386: And not an actualy face.... Chessmen15: oh no Chessmen15: ohhh no Chessmen15: you don't see the faces anymore! Buffy4386: Do a smiley Chessmen15: :-) Chessmen15: :-P Chessmen15: :-D Buffy4386: You're doing the command wrong!! Buffy4386: : - P Chessmen15: Mandy...they are on my screen... Buffy4386: Not : - d Chessmen15: as smileys... Chessmen15: wait Chessmen15: so when I type :-D do you see a smiley or just a compressed version of : - d Buffy4386: Does that show up? B/c that's : - P Chessmen15: yes, it shows up Buffy4386: A compressed version. Chessmen15: oh dear Chessmen15: Mandy! Chessmen15: now look what you've done! Buffy4386: Type in :- P Chessmen15: :-P Chessmen15: it's a smiley over here Buffy4386: There! Chessmen15: what?! Buffy4386: I'm SO rigjt Buffy4386: right Chessmen15: whoa, whoa, whoa Chessmen15: I've been typing them in the same way all along Chessmen15: :-P :-P :-P :-P Buffy4386: There, those are ALL correct. Chessmen15: wha...? Chessmen15: okay, how about: Chessmen15: :-D Buffy4386: No Chessmen15: well then! Okay, I realize that this is longer than a page already, but just barely, and it’s pretty fast reading anyway. And the conversation kept going. For another three pages. I thought about posting it all here, but it’s hard to follow and, frankly, not very funny. At all. Or even remotely interesting. So I just cut it there to give you all a sense of the sort of deep and meaningful exchanges Mandy and I share online. Because online smileys are extremely important things, and if we don’t argue and whine about them to no effect, nobody will. And Mandy, for the love of god, those blue fish are awful. Could you just delete AOL and start using AIM and the regular yellow smiley faces like normal people? Please? I’d like to argue more about various smiley issues, but I have a nagging feeling that I will get to talk about them again with Mandy soon and I don’t want to use up all my fuel here. Coming up next: Mandy and I Make Fun Of Each Other’s Typos. Actually while I was typing this, it happened again: Buffy4386: And Kenny had a microphone in his thing, so he was talking to me. Buffy4386: It was SOOO cool. Chessmen15: cool! Chessmen15: neeeeat Buffy4386: I was jumping around with enjoymen. Chessmen15: hehe Buffy4386: t Chessmen15: yeah Buffy4386: [psycho grinning blue fish] Chessmen15: enjoymen is just a...funny word Buffy4386: [the psycho blue fish has now stopped grinning and is instead sticking out his/her/its tongue in an attempt to appear kidding and playful, but that only makes it look as though a large quantity of crack was recently forced up its nasal tract] Chessmen15: if you delete the intervening words, you get... Chessmen15: I...enjoymen Buffy4386: That's funn.y Now you're being like Steven thiough. I..kill... Chessmen15: what?! Chessmen15: ohhh Buffy4386: Remeber.... Buffy4386: ? Buffy4386: +m Chessmen15: gotcha gotcha Chessmen15: kkkikill Buffy4386: Yeah! Buffy4386: That! Chessmen15: yep Buffy4386: Yes indeedy. Whoo, here I am at three pages. But just for the record, this entry so far only has…599 words. The previous one, however, which was only a page long, had…680. I figure I’m in the clear. And with these parting words, I part you. .: posted by Boris 10:07 PMSunday, December 01, 2002This Blog Entry Is Really Really Short, I Swear!To make a long story short—and trust me, I could turn this into such a long story that it would make you want to disengage your spinal cord from the rest of your body—at euchre club yesterday we were all talking about my last blog entry and Steven was like, “Huh? What happened with Dan?”, and I snottily replied, “Well, SOMEBODY hasn’t been reading my blog!”, to which Steven retorted, “I don’t READ your blog—my god, it’s so LONG!” That earnestly hurt. When Andy first complained about my blog’s propensity for digression and wandering, I wrote it off as lack of taste on Andy’s part. But I now wonder how I could have been so dumb. Though as a young kid Andy hated reading, he now reads more than just about anybody I know. So if there’s something he’s not willing to read, and he has a reason for not reading it, then perhaps the person who writes the thing which he is not willing to read should do something about it. It’s sad that it took another person’s complaint for me to realize this, but, I suppose, better late than never. There have now been two people who have told me that my blog entries are too long, compared to zero who have told me that they are either too short or of the proper length, so starting now I have imposed a limit of one single-spaced page, including spaces, on all my blog entries. Today’s entry—which, if you will note, is really only half a page long because I just wasted the first half of the page talking about how my blog can only be a page long, which if you think about it is a pretty dumb thing to do if you only have a page in which to write something, but then again, my brilliance, as Marina would say, knows no bounds—is about my spacebar. I don’t know the exact statistics here but I’m fairly sure that the spacebar is the most often-pressed key on the keyboard, and I use the keyboard a lot, so naturally I really love my spacebar. Unfortunately some members of my household don’t fully seem to grasp the proper level of respect that the spacebar deserves, so when I returned home in mid-July after three weeks at debate camp I found my spacebar broken. Somehow it had been unhinged in my absence, functioning only when hit square in the middle. Fortunately this is where I usually hit it anyway, but few things are as aggravating as periodically hitting the spacebar off to the right or left and having it not respond, forcing you to grumble and backspace and try again. You know it’s a sad world when a man can’t leave for debate camp without knowing if his spacebar will be whole when he returns. I asked Dan about it online and he tried to give me a walkthrough of how to fix it. While my fiddlings with it seemed to help a little, the poor spacebar was still depressingly broken. So imagine my surprise when at euchre club yesterday Dan emerged from my computer room having successfully accomplished in about 16 seconds what I had been trying in vain for four months. “Oh, by the way Boris, your spacebar’s fixed.” I could only stare at Dan in overjoyed shock and mumble thanks as I prepared to bow before him and kiss his feet. Regrettably I didn’t get that far because a pressing game of euchre could be heard calling us, but I would like to take this moment to thank Dan from the bottom of my heart for fixing my spacebar, and also to say that that I am nearing a page already, which means I must stop. If this upsets you, feel free to take it up with Andy and Steven. And if it doesn’t, then you suck, because I WANT TO KEEP WRITING THIS ENTRY DAMMIT BUT I HAVE TO STOP NOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooo… .: posted by Boris 1:59 PMThursday, November 21, 2002Dan’s Sad StoryThose of you who have been with this blog for a while are probably starting to get annoyed by how self-centered it is. I mean, all I ever do in here is talk about ME, MY life, MY attempts to fiddle with MY blog, MY thoughts on various subjects of literally no importance, and so on. If someone who didn’t know me read this blog, they’d think that all I ever do is update my blog, try to come up with fitting adjectives for musical instruments, play in the band, run AIM contests, ponder the deeper meaning of the squirrels I periodically find lying dead on the sidewalk, and just generally complain. Which is pretty much true. And not very interesting. Hence, the compromise—while this blog will still remain very much about Boris, I will every now and then try to include things from other people’s lives—which are infinitely more interesting than mine—starting with this very entry, which you are now reading. Or at least, I think you’re reading it. I mean, how could you be reading these words without reading them? Well, I guess somebody could be reading this blog out loud to you. But would that count as reading? Hmm. You know, I think I just hit on a big topic here. Very big topic. We’ll have to discuss it sometime. Later. Right now we’re going to discuss Chris. Chris is a great kid. He plays the bass, which is a sweet instrument, not to be confused with the bass drum, a crappy instrument, and definitely right up there with the piccolo on the list of instruments that should never have been invented. Chris thinks that saxophones are the Coolest, provided we’re limiting the discussion to just band instruments. Otherwise, he says, basses are definitely the Coolest. Clearly Chris and I have some conflict here. But there is one thing that we do agree on, and that is, namely, to quote Chris, that “flutes are the worst instruments ever.” I would also like to quote Chris on his opinion of piccolos, but that would be a little inappropriate here. Way to go, Chris! I’m with you all the way, buddy! Another cool thing about Chris is that he has, without a doubt, the second best AIM profile ever. The first place definitely goes to Dan, with his profile that…well, I won’t ruin it; you should just see it for yourself. I would post Dan’s screen name here except he gets really touchy about me giving away his screen name to people, just in case they turn out to be ninety year-old ex-convicts with a penchant for stalking 18 year-old boys or something. But if you know Dan, and you know his screen name, definitely try to check out his profile before he changes it. Chris’s profile is one of those Sub-Profile thingies and it’s really neat. It has…well, lemme just open it up and see here…crap! Chris just signed off! Well, hopefully I’ll get most of it correct from memory. The 1000-something character limit imposed on normal AIM profiles (actually, it’s more like only 800-something characters; for more information on this shocking development, see “Final Contest Details” entry below) is gone in the Sub-Profile, so Chris can make it as long as he wants. There’s a little thing that generates a random Yo Mama joke on the front page every time you open it, along with links to a quiz, some quotes, a profile, and other cool stuff that I can’t remember at the moment. Also—this really made me tingle—there’s a “journal” thing that is frightfully similar to a blog, which Chris periodically updates with his witty entries. So basically a Sub-Profile is like a blog, except it’s much cooler and has more features and is conveniently stuffed into your AIM profile, and though Chris’s isn’t the first Sub-Profile I’ve ever seen, it’s definitely the nicest. And finally, there’s a guestbook. This guestbook is the main reason I started talking about Chris in my blog, because undoubtedly one of the saddest and most pathetic things in this world of ours right now, right up there with world hunger and the AIM character limit, is that Chris’s guestbook currently has only two entries in it. Can you guess whose they are? Well, I won’t tell you. If you want to find out, you’ll have to add cbearfunk into your AIM buddy list and, the next time he’s on, look at his profile. Chris has told me that he is really very upset that nobody has signed his guestbook, and since my blog has a steady readership of about one people or so, he has asked me to advertise his profile here and try to agitate people to sign his guestbook. It doesn’t have to be fancy; you could just do “Hi I’m Ashley I have no idea who the hell you are but Boris says you’re cool and I trust Boris so here I am signing your guestbook bye!!!” And the nice thing about Chris’s guestbook is that, unlike my blog, once you’ve signed it, you never have to read it or look at it or even talk to Chris ever again—just one signature is all Chris wants. Okay, Chris—I tried. Oh, and I forgot to tell you—advertisements in my blog are $5.00 per word, so if we do some quick calculations…fire up the ol’ word counter…let’s see here…370 words…ooo, what an even number…at five bucks a pop…that makes…um…how come I can easily find the differentials of logarithmic equations, but it requires an inhuman amount of effort for me to calculate 370 x 5 in my head?…grrr…and the sad thing is I’m too lazy to go get my calculator…37 x 5 is, I think, 185…add the 0…so Chris, you owe me $1850.00, please check my math, and since you’re such a great friend, I won’t charge you for the whole “Chris is a great guy” segment; that was on me. Pleasure doing business with you! If you don’t have cash, that’s okay, I take checks, make ‘em payable to “Boarass.” And now we move on to the second non-Boris related topic of this blog entry, which is—he was briefly mentioned earlier—Dan. Dan’s awesome. He likes to spike his hair so that his head looks like a bunch of miniature plastic traffic cones are super-glued to it, presumably to attract girls, and, oddly enough, it sometimes works (more on that later). What’s most important about Dan is that he is the only person who, like I asked, left me a written record of his thoughts on musical instrument adjectives. There’s a lot I could say, but I’ll just let the record speak for itself: Dan says: saxaphones [sic] are the coolest...i [sic] agree (although i [sic] don't agree that they are the stereotypical jazz instrument...alas the most frequently played jazz instrument is trumpet) [who cares? HE AGREES THAT SAXES ARE THE COOLEST!!!] Dan says: as for trumpets...i [sic] think "best" fits better than "greatest" Dan says: oh no wait Dan says: "bestest" [most definitely not a word] Dan says: yell yeah! [I’m assuming he means “hell yeah” here] Dan says: but just ta [sic] let ya know, i [how many times is he gonna leave his “I” uncapitalized?!] always thought of saxes as much cooler than trumpets...i [groan] wanted to play them way back in 5th grade but...*sigh*...couldn't produce a single note from the damn thing [Dan, brother, I feel your pain] But the real reason I bring up Dan is because I want to share with you guys an amazing story about what happened to him, which he related to me on Monday during bowling practice: As some of you know, Dan leaves school at lunch to take a couple of post-secondary classes at Columbus State. Well, last Monday he got there a little early, so he sat down at a bench and got out some homework. There he was, innocently doing his homework, minding his own business, not trying to impress or impale anybody with his hair spikes or anything, when, all of a sudden, without warning, a green beam of light shot out of the sky and sucked him up into a spaceship where a bunch of blue Martians with rubber gloves began to… Oops, wait, that’s from the other story that Dan said I WASN’T allowed to put in my blog. My bad! So, um, you guys didn’t read that. Yeah, so there he was, sitting on the bench, innocently doing his homework and so on, when, all of a sudden, this totally hot—and I mean TOTALLY HOT—90 year-old ex-convict with a penchant for…wait, wait, that part comes later. What happened then was this hot college chick sat down next to Dan and blatantly started checking him out. I can’t imagine that the bench was all that big, so I’m sure this created quite an awkward situation. Now, if this were me, I probably would have scared the girl away by, I don’t know, maybe faking a series of traumatic apocalyptic seizures, and then run home to write a blog about what happened. But Dan doesn’t have a blog, so this option wasn’t open to him. He had no choice but to rough it out and see what resulted. Dan coolly kept at it with his homework, all the while noting that while this girl got out a bunch of papers and pretended to do stuff, she was really quite awful at keeping her eyes (and her true intent) to herself. Moments passed. Glances were thrown. A few of Dan’s exquisite spikes started to melt and I think one of them fused permanently to his head. Finally, when the tense silence reached fever pitch, the girl slowly extracted a small scrap of paper, and then a pencil, and then she began to write, laboriously, a logarithmic equation that she had just been dying to differentiate all day. That’s right—her phone number. She took one last look at her latest catch, the cute mystery boy who apparently overdid it a little with the hair gel that morning, one last longing glance, and then, just as she was about to hand over the piece of paper that would inexorably change their lives forever, she turned into a blue Martian ex-convict and started eating Dan alive. Well, not quite that, but I wanted to somehow get across the magnitude of the horribleness of what happened next: she saw his class ring. Instantly, the tension that just moments ago could have been cut by a knife dissipated as though it had been smashed with a wrecking ball. A series of startled and disgusted expressions flashed their way across the girl’s face as she hurriedly packed up her stuff and left the bench, leaving Dan to sit there, alone, and cry. That’s pretty much exactly how Dan told me the story, except for maybe some of the more obnoxious parts involving Martians, and definitely not the part about crying—Dan most certainly skipped over that little tidbit. But we all know it’s true, don’t we? And the moral of the story is: don’t buy class rings! They’re a rip-off, they make a really loud annoying noise when you rap them against a wooden table AHEMdanCOUGH, and they don’t even have real gems. It turns out that the big blue thing in the middle of Dan’s is just glass. Crikey, for 300 bucks you think they could stick a real lapis lazuli in there or something. Plus there’s the fact that the single most beautiful opportunity to ever grace Dan’s life vanished into a steaming dog turd solely because Dan had his class ring on that day. Well, Dan wears it every day, though whenever we’re sitting around a wooden table I always wish he didn’t, but in any case he always does, so his grief right now is strictly traceable to the fact that he bought it. Finally, Dan—don’t sweat it, man. There are other fish in the sea. Never mind that most of them suck while the others probably don’t want you. You started dating before some of us knew what a girl was, so you have nothing to be ashamed of. Heck, some of us haven’t even technically started yet. So don’t let setbacks like this one get you down, or like that one girl you went out with in sixth grade who eventually threw a rock at your house with a note attached to it saying, “Congratulations! You have just been dumped!” By the way, Dan, what exactly did you DO to her?! I didn’t know sixth grade girls could get so angry! But anyways—Dan, I’ll always be your friend no matter what, whether you’re going out with a hot college chick or a 45 year-old hairy housewife. On a side note, I was just wondering DAN OH MY GOD YOU IDIOT WHY THE HELL DIDN’T YOU GET YOUR ASS UP OUTTA THAT BENCH AND CHASE AFTER HER?!?!?!?! .: posted by Boris 9:06 PMSunday, November 17, 2002The Links! They're Gone!No they're not. But I put two of them to sleep because I had a nagging suspicion that they weren't getting too much action over here--the lemonade game and Flipside. Somehow I think we'll manage without our dear companions. But if you were actually using my blog as a springboard to play the lemonade game 6 hours a day, let me know, and I'll see what I can do about resurrecting that link from the abyss of cyberspace in which it currently rests. Another change I made just now is something I should have done long ago--the time zone. A while ago I noticed that the time of day that appeared at the bottom of each entry was three hours earlier than the actual time here in Columbus, Ohio. I thought that this was because the Blogger server was based somewhere in the West, which is three hours behind us, but it turns out that the real reason is I'm a buffoon. There's an option under the Settings tab that I never bothered to mess with that decides which time zone determines the hour that the blog is updated. I messed with it and I think that's all fixed now. On another note, I tried to change the archiving mechanism for this blog, because there is WAY too much stuff on the front page. I don't really mind it all that much, but when there's a lot of stuff on one page the scroller shrinks to a thousandth of an inch and it becomes very difficult to scroll precisely. Also, a lot of material increases the page's loading time somewhat, making "It takes too long to load" just one of the many reasons why people wouldn't want to read my blog, joining the ranks of "I have no time" and "It's long" and "It's boring" and "It's stupid" and "It's pointless" and "Boris can't write" and "Half of the freaking entries in it are about Boris's futile attempts to edit the blog" and "Ashley's blog is way better anyways." Hypothetically my blog only shows 31 days' worth of entries, but if that's the case, then could someone please explain to me why my very first entry--dated way back to September 4, which if my waning math skills still serve me was over two months ago--still shows up on the main page? There are other options I could mess with to try to fix this, but I think I'll just leave it alone for now. By the way, guys, I was just kidding earlier! I know you all love my blog! And if you don't, please tell me, because I realize quite well that "stupid" doesn't always equate to "funny" and I would greatly appreciate any constructive criticism you have to offer me in the matter (the unconstructive kind works, too, I guess, though I wouldn't recommend doling it out to my face unless you want to end up with a cheap pair of clip-on sunglasses lodged halfway down your throat). If you have any input, please don't hesitate to email it to me or tell me in person (don't worry, those clip-ons were actually quite expensive and I really wouldn't want to lose them in your thorax) or IM me online. Thanks! And finally, I added two links to replace the ones that were lost. The first is something I discovered totally on accident while passing through Yahoo today. Yahoo updates a little "Ask Yahoo!" column every day and today's question was, "What are blogs and how did they become so popular?" The answer is pretty interesting and I added a link to it for your pleasure. The other thing I added was a link to email me. Hopefully people will be somewhat more inclined to send me email if they have a button to open up their email program for them. Enjoy! .: posted by Boris 12:56 PMTuesday, November 12, 2002My Poofy CoatIt is always disheartening when people choose to greet you not by saying “hi” or “hello” or even “get the hell away from me, buttface” but by simply laughing in your general direction and then carrying on with whatever they were doing before. Such was my morning. The second Tuesday of every month is a Late Day, for which school starts an hour earlier and the periods are all seven minutes shorter, with the exception of lunch, which mysteriously becomes five minutes longer. I frankly see no point in Late Days, but I’m not about to complain about their existence. On Late Days my parents, who normally give me a ride to school, leave before I wake up, which is nice, because it lets me take a nice morning walk to school after getting an extra refreshing night’s sleep. I like walking. I’m sure many of you have heard me quip that walking is the only exercise I get. So I was in a good mood today—which, you will note, was the second Tuesday of November. I was traversing the back route to the school, which runs through a gap between two houses that leads to the parking lot, when I crossed paths with Julie and her little sister, Randi (Randy? Randie? Randey? Randeigh? Rwahnnedhyiee? I have no idea how it’s spelled), who were coming from another direction. Julie sits next to me in homeroom and Randy, a freshman, sits next to me in study hall, because their last name, Edelman, comes right behind mine in the alphabet. Dvorkin, Edelman—you’d think that out of a school of 800 people there’d be someone in between, but I guess I was just cursed with bad luck. No, seriously, I like Julie, and Randie seems okay, though Julie and I got off to a bad start in Mr. Showman’s 7th grade Technology class when we sat opposite each other while doing architectural drawings and she and Laura Wienblatt constantly made of fun of me and laughed at me, much as Julie did today, actually, now that I think about it, because as soon as she saw me she began chuckling hysterically and immediately whispered something to Randey, who took a look at me herself and then started her own bout of uncontrollable giggling. At that point they both briskly turned away and resumed their stroll towards the school. “What!” I whined as I tried to catch up with them but couldn’t because of the new construction fence that was recently imposed upon the already cramped and inadequate parking lot. Julie glanced back at me. “Oh, nothing!” she sang. “It’s just that you look really, really funny wearing your hood and gloves and everything when it’s really not that cold out.” “No, I, well,” I responded cooly just as Chris came striding up to us. We were almost at the school by now. “Yeah, Boris, are you THAT cold?” Chris asked, his taunt made ever more biting by the fact that he himself was wearing only a tee shirt. At that point I tried to explain but failed. I’ll explain it better now. What Julie was laughing at was my poofy winter coat. She is by no means the sole or even the harshest critic of this coat, which has been the target of more than its fair share of ridicule. This should come as no surprise because for some reason people have always enjoyed making fun of my clothing (for more info on this, see the “Marching Band Uniforms” entry below). It’s big, black, and bulges to the point where I look like an amateur sumo wrestler when I wear it. It has a black hood with a black clasp in front of my mouth and its pockets contain black gloves, and I use all of these features. The hood alone makes me look funny, and I look funnier still when I clasp the hood shut around my face and zip my coat up all the way and put my gloves on and wear my sunglasses—not the regular kind of sunglasses that make you look cool, but the dorky clip-on kind that attach to your glasses and make you look like a dork. This coat turns me into a hulking, blob-like mass of poofiness that renders me completely unrecognizable to anyone who knows me, unless of course they happen to know about the black winter coat I own that turns me into a hulking, blob-like mass of poofiness, in which case they could easily spot me from an airplane. Indeed, the way I wear this coat makes it look as though I’m about to prepare for an expedition to Antarctica. First we have the hood. I like hoods. If I’m wearing a coat that has a hood, I feel wrong not using it. I can’t explain this. I also feel like a part of me is missing if the coat I’m wearing doesn’t have a hood at all. I can’t explain that, either. In any case, I will generally wear a hood unless it’s really hot or itchy or not there. As for the clasp, it depends. Sometimes I wear it on a whim; sometimes I don’t. If it’s snowy and cold out, though, you’ll probably see me using it. The sunglasses, now, I wear because I’m a wimp. My eyes are bad and I’m afraid of making them even worse, and I hate it more than anything else when the sun glints off of stuff and flashes into my eyes. I also hate squinting, so if it’s remotely bright outside I’ll whip out the clip and sunglass myself. Another thing I like about the sunglasses is the illusion they give me that other people can’t see my eyes. Of course the cheap-o clips are nothing like the mirrored shades I wish I could wear, and people can plainly see my eyes behind them. But I somehow forget this when I wear the sunglasses and act as though people don’t know where my eyes are, which makes me feel like I can look wherever I want with impunity. On a side note, I can be a real moron. The gloves, now, I don’t like. What I like is to warm my hands in the coat’s pockets. However, I keep the gloves in these pockets, and when I put my hands in there, the gloves take up a lot of space and it’s just not the same. If I wear the gloves, which are very stuffy and scraggly, then my hands don’t fit into the pockets very well and it’s not the same, then, either. It’d be nice to leave the gloves at home, but sometimes I need them, like when I’m carrying something and can’t stick one or both of my hands in my pockets, or when I’m walking around at night while entertaining weird fantasies in which my hands have turned into lethal knives. Yes. See, I really like mittens. They let you rub your fingers together for warmth. Gloves, on the other hand, isolate your fingers and gradually freeze them, almost doing more harm than good. So what I like to do is pull my fingers out of the finger slots of the gloves, making a fist inside my gloves. This makes the glove fingers empty and flabby. When I dangle my arms and walk past street lamps at night, the shadow of the gloves looks to me like there are knives attached to my arms. That’s when it all comes together. The light from the street lamp casts a shadow, and the poofiness of the coat, combined with the weird gloves, transforms my ordinary shadow into a towering, muscular brute with knives for hands. As I continue to walk past the light my shadow gets bigger and bigger, the monster shadow grows and grows, and right before it disappears, the towering giant stands at the peak of his height, his arm-knives several feet long, his snarling, bestial face turned into a perpetual scowl, ever ready to jump into the thick of battle and start slashing everybody to bits, ignoring the enemy attacks that fall limp at the powerful, poofy muscles. If I was a better writer I could explain this better, but hopefully you’re getting some glimpse here of the fact that I’m pretty messed up and you should probably stay away from me. I also hope you’re seeing that I’m a pretty insecure person, and the coat, in its own special way, makes me feel secure and protected. It also keeps me warm in the winter when I’m too stubborn and stupid to wear a sweatshirt just like every other normal human being alive. So the next time you see a black, poofy blob with astoundingly geeky sunglasses staggering towards you, start laughing, because you might as well, and there’s nothing I can do about it. But don’t---- Uh, hold on a second, folks…I’ll get back to finishing the essay as soon as I solve this little problem…uhhhhh…hmm…yeah. I just realized that there is absolutely no point to this blog entry. Originally it was going to be a pathetic plea to you guys to stop laughing at me for wearing my poofy coat because I have supreme reasons for doing so, but then I realized that it IS really funny and stupid, so, um…well, hrm. What a predicament. Ho, hum, I guess it’s not the end of the world—I’ve written pointless blog entries before. Talk about taking the wind out of your sails, though! Rats. I should really plan these things better. .: posted by Boris 11:04 PMSaturday, November 09, 2002A Blatant Excuse For Making Another Blog EntryWell, it looks like everybody's pleased with the newer margins. Of course, I suppose I may have been a bit unfair--I told everyone to email me if they DIDN'T like them, and I know you guys would never email me for ANYTHING. I could post on here that giant crocodiles are eating my house and slowly tearing off my important body parts and I doubt that I'd get a single email of sympathy. So I guess the silent majority has allowed the fatter margins to remain. .: posted by Boris 11:46 AMWednesday, November 06, 2002Margins...I'm trying out some fatter margins. If you really hate them, please let me know, so that I can change them back. Maybe. To increase your chances of actually getting the margins changed, have some of your buddies tell me that THEY hate them, too. .: posted by Boris 5:07 PMAndy Vs. Roger: the Showdown Continues—Now Adam is Involved This really reminds of the time when we were little and Andy and I got into an ongoing fight about whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. Scientifically, it’s a fruit. But Russians, apparently, consider it a vegetable, presumably because it grows out of the ground. So I had grown up assuming that tomatoes were vegetables (for those of you who don’t know, I was born, and spent the first six years of my life in, Estonia), while Andy and all the other friends I would ultimately make in America grew up knowing that they were fruits. Needless to say, this was trouble waiting to happen. One day tomatoes somehow came up in conversation and everything went downhill from there. The debate must have lasted at least a couple of years. I’m not exaggerating here—we started arguing in elementary school and didn’t stop until the middle school science teachers finally settled the matter by proving to me that tomatoes are, scientifically speaking, fruits, because they have seeds. But before that happened, as Andy and I grew older, whenever we made new friends, such as Dan and Adrian, after the brief period of politeness was over the first thing Andy would ask everyone was: “Hey, [insert name here], is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?” And NOBODY agreed with me. As the years went on, opposition against me grew. I was a lone figure standing before a mountain of enemies, the underdog, the sole supporter of my views, a brave man standing up for his beliefs. I was also completely wrong, because, well, a tomato is a fruit, and to hell with what the Russians think. Roger now finds himself in such a position. Nobody agrees with him that the soap would freeze. I had a short, but heated, argument with him about it in the lunch line today. Then I come up to Adam. He’s the cashier. Well, he’s one of two cashiers. The other one is Mr. Anderson. Mr. Anderson I do not like very much, because he doesn’t seem like a very cool man and I think that he is secretly the one responsible for raising the prices on all the food items. I mean, this year EVERYTHING has gone up by AT LEAST 15 cents or more from what it was last year! Now, I may not be as good at math as Adam is, but I know it well enough to understand that inflation doesn’t work THAT fast, people! Not to mention many food items, such as the rice crispy treats and the meatball subs, start out big and get progressively smaller as they year goes on. I refuse to believe that this is an accident. If it was all random, then they would fluctuate; maybe start out small and get big and then small again or something. But this is deliberate and it happens every year. The food item is BIG at the beginning of the year and SMALL by the end. It’s not the cooks. What do they care? No, it’s somebody with power. Somebody “up there.” Somebody who can say, “Hey, don’t make the rice crispy treats so big from now on, okay? And if you shrink them gradually enough, maybe people won’t notice.” Somebody like Mr. Anderson. So I always make it a point to get checked out by Adam, even if his line is longer (which it usually is—once again, I don’t think this is a coincidence) and even if Mr. Anderson is incessantly whining at everybody to “Come on around!” Andy read my blog yesterday and says he doesn’t like it when I get off track and talk about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the blog. Boris [whilst handing over $2.00 to pay for his pretzel, which turned out to be rather disgusting, and his Flaming Hot Cheetos]: Hey, Adam, I got a question. If you put a wet bar of soap on the— Adam: It would slide. Boris: Whoa! How’d you hear about that?! Adam [handing over $0.55 in change]: I read it last night. Boris [happily surprised]: Dude! You read my blog? That’s sweet! So you’re against Roger on this one, and with me and Andy? Adam [dropping his voice]: Well, Roger’s a dumbass. I don’t know what would make him say that [the soap would freeze]. Boris [getting ready to leave the cafeteria so that he can go to his locker and get his math book to finish the math homework he started in study hall during chess club]: Can I quote you on that in my blog? Adam [taking some other poor sap’s money]: Sure. ***LATER*** Boris [whilst entering Mr. Minot’s room, where a small knot of people is already hanging around for chess club]: Hey guys! Can I ask you all a question? Steven [Bouyack #2, not the trumpet player]: No. Jay [could someone please tell me who the hell this kid is and where he came from?]: No. Other People in Chess Club Whose Names Boris Isn’t All Too Clear On [in unison, or at least something close to unison]: No. Steven [feeling guilty now]: Sure. Boris [setting his stuff down]: Okay, if you put a wet bar of soap on the— Adam: It would slide. Boris: Hey! You’re not here yet! You’re still in the cafeteria, cashiering! Adam: Oh, right. *disappears in a puff of smoke* Everybody Else [kind of mumbling]: It would slide. Boris: Why? Because some people think it’d freeze. Jay: Because I know. It would slide. Boris: So if you were at one end of a skating rink and pushed the soap, would it make it all the way across? Jay: No, not all the way across, but it’d go pretty far, and it definitely wouldn’t freeze. This is an interesting new perspective—the soap has friction, so the coefficient of friction between it and the ice is not 0, but it also would not freeze, because (I am using Roger’s own argument against him here) the heat generated by said friction would stop it from freezing. In this view, Andy and Roger are BOTH wrong! There is friction, and it doesn’t freeze. Now let me make it clear that I do not advocate any view—I’m just bringing them all out into the light. All I have to say is: I feel for ya, Roger! .: posted by Boris 4:52 PMTuesday, November 05, 2002Andy Vs. Roger: the Showdown ContinuesI don’t know who among you guys told Andy about the blog, but he found out about it somehow, and he found out FAST. Less than a day after I posted Roger’s defamation of Andy, Andy caught wind of it and left me a long string of seething IM’s while I was out giving Steven a ride to Capital University here in Bexley for his trumpet lesson. Here’s what’s happened so far: Andy says that a wet bar of soap on ice would have a coefficient of friction of almost 0. Roger blasts back with: Vorlon says: andy is bad at physics WA-BAM! So now the showdown continues. Don’t you hate it when you type a bunch of exclamation marks in a row but you let go of the Shift key just a hair too soon and it puts a 1 instead of a ! at the end of your statement and it just throws the WHOLE thing off, like this? BadHair17: Toss a wet bar of soap on a sheet of ice... NO FRICTION!!!!!1 KA-POW! And that’s not all! This stunning smash is followed up later with: Auto response from Chessmen15: Giving Steven a ride to Capital! Erm, no. Wait. Lemme find it here…okay, here we are. This stunning smash is followed up later with: BadHair17: You'd have to be a total moron to let to soap "freeze" to the ice. BadHair17: Although it was Roger, so.... BA-ZONG!! Andy implies that ROGER IS A MORON! Youch! Quite an overkill in my opinion when you consider that all Andy had to do was find a decent comeback to “andy is bad at physics.” Lay it easy on the punches, there, Andy! We now have Andy’s retort to Roger’s scathing blows, and I can’t wait to see what kind of weaponry Roger will bring forth in his upcoming retaliation. More of Andy’s comments: BadHair17: It's one thing to tell somebody they're wrong [referring to the fact that Roger talked to me instead of telling Andy himself], but to tell other people that somebody is wrong, it shows that they're so uncertain about their answers, that if they were to tell the actual person, the ideas would be shot down right away. BadHair17: This fear shows, without a doubt, that Roger was, and still is, WRONG! BadHair17: And please inform Roger so that he can defend his previous statements...I give the people *I* argue with fair warning. [emphasis added] Roger, you have been informed! Now, I have a few issues with some of Andy’s comments: BadHair17: Furthermore, your blogs ARE long BadHair17: It shouldn't take me that long to scroll through them. BadHair17: So dang long BadHair17: It's crazy When I got to this point of writing my blog, Andy came back from wherever he was and started talking to me online. I was annoying and he got mad at me and signed off and I don’t think he’s gonna read my blog anymore. By the way, it was his girlfriend, Mandy, who, believe it or not, really exists, that told him about the showdown, so that’s how he found out about it. Moving on with the blog. I have one word for you, Andy—never mind that you’re never going to read this blog, but whatever; I have one word for you nonetheless—pumpkins. Isn’t that a cool-sounding word? Pumpkins? Yes, pumpkins. Pumpkins. I also like: sucrose. It just sounds so luscious. Sucrose. Sucrose. Mmmmm. Sucrose. But really, though: margins. Yes, margins. Look at them. Aren’t they frickin’ huge? Now, if you take a normal, two-page essay and put 25” margins on it, you know what will happen? The essay will disappear completely because the paper is only 8½ inches wide. But if you put that essay into this blog template, whose margins are only about 78 feet thick, what happens is that the essay is squeezed down and therefore looks much longer than it actually is. As for the scrolling, the scroller on the blog page is slow because there’s a ton of crap all stuffed into one page and that makes it lag, and don’t even TELL me that “scroller” isn’t a word, you stupid dumbass word processor!! ARRGGG! BILL GATES SHALL DIE! Or at least whoever it was that compiled the dictionary for this stupid thing. Maybe from now on I’ll just type my posts directly into the blogger page, risks be damned. Or maybe not. Oh well. Finally, Roger: you need to get AIM. Now. Because I think after this Andy will never talk to me again, so you’ll have to sort out this wet bar of soap thing with him directly, and there is NO WAY Andy’s getting MSN, because I pestered him about it for years to no avail, so you’ll have to be the better person here and just head on over to www.aim.com and download the stinking messenger. Yeah, I know, MSN is way better, but these are the sacrifices we sometimes have to make in life. To summarize: Andy says: wet bar of soap + ice = coefficient of friction is 0 Roger responds: the soap freezes to the ice. You’re bad at physics. Andy shoots back: well, you’re just a moron for letting the soap freeze. What will Roger say next? Tune in next week to find out! Or whenever I get around to doing it. Might be tomorrow, might be January. Who knows. BUT WAIT!! THIS JUST IN! Vorlon says: in order to keep from freezing heat would have to be expended, thus friction would have to exist for that heat to exist Vorlon says: in conclusion: you're bad at physics too All right, folks. This is getting out of hand. I don’t even know if you can make sense of this blog entry anymore. But now it’s personal. First of all, Rogey, I’m just the middleman here. Did you ever see me pick a side? No. You have no grounds for saying I’m bad at physics. And okay. You throw the wet soap onto the ice. Initially there’s no friction. It slides indefinitely. What, you think the soap, as it’s sliding there, is just gonna FREEZE instantly to the ice and stop?! It would leave a wet trail along the ice. Sure, the water would freeze later, but by then the soap wouldn’t BE there anymore!! It’d be farther down the ice! The only way it would stop the soap and freeze it to the ice is if the ice was so cold that it could freeze water INSTANTANEOUSLY. I don’t think it does that. Maybe YOU’RE bad at physics, huh? Or maybe I’m just an idiot. MR. LOGSDON!! PLEASE COME HERE AND CLEAR THIS UP!! Erm, wait. He’s the biology teacher. This isn’t a biology issue. Who’d we need? Physics? Chemistry? Maybe one who does both… MR. MINOT! PLEASE COME OVER HERE RIGHT NOW AND RESOLVE THIS!!! Because now Andy hates me and Roger will in a second and I just want to find out if a wet bar of soap will freeze to the ice or not, dammit! Okay. We’re starting a poll. Email me at chessman@columbus.rr.com. You don’t have to put anything in the email. Just put a “yes” or “no” as the subject for whether or not you think the soap will freeze or not. Okay? Thanks! And now I’m gonna post this freaking blog already because the longer I leave it unfinished the more stuff keeps coming up. What have I started?! .: posted by Boris 6:55 PMMonday, November 04, 2002What’s a Saxophone?Don’t get the wrong idea. I know what a saxophone is. Really. I play one. A while ago Ashley and I had an online conversation that I unfortunately did not save. Basically it started as an argument, with me taking my favorite role of complainer/bitcher. This time the target of my incessant whining was: trumpets. I absolutely hate trumpets. Not the players, of course—many people I like play trumpet—Dan, Ben, Bouyack, Bouyack #3 (well, kind of; he switched to French horn, or F horn, or whatever the heck he plays now, but I know he’s a trumpet player at heart), Steven, Dan’s dad, Bouyack’s mom, Ashley, Nick (never met the guy but he seems cool), and I’m sure there are others that I forgot to mention. This is quite a contrast to, say, the percussion section, in which I like: precisely no one. But I absolutely hate the actual trumpets, as in, the instruments. Why? Let me count the ways… 1) They’re inexpensive 2) They’re small and easy to carry around 3) They take no time to assemble 4) They take no time to put away 5) They’re made out of hard metal and are extremely easy to swing around in a baton-like fashion; thus, they make good weapons 6) They get the melody EVERYWHERE they go—marching band, concert band, jazz band, full orchestra, pit orchestra, you name it: if they’re there, they’re playing the melody 7) They’re loud and their sound carries extremely well indoors and outdoors alike 8) They come with all sorts of accessories to make them sound funky, i.e. straight mutes, wah-wah mutes, those weird buzzy metal mutes, and so on 9) I was really kinda hoping to make a list of ten reasons, but it looks like I’m gonna have to top it off at nine 10) Oh, wait! You can get them wet and it doesn’t matter! Whew, that’s ten. If you want to get technical about it, then I suppose I don’t really hate trumpets so much as I’m just jealous of them. Take saxophones, for instance—my instrument. They’re heavy. They’re expensive. They take forever to assemble and put away. They’re shaped funny and attached to your neck, so you can’t really fight with them. They never get the melody except for in jazz band. Their sound doesn’t carry but they sound loud up close, so what happens is that everybody in the band around you bitches constantly about how loud you are while the audience never hears a peep of your existence. No accessories. The pads get ruined in the rain. When they play anywhere except for jazz band they often as not get crappy-ass parts because nobody really wants to hear them in the first place and they’re only there because the director lacks the authority to, say, kick them out, or make them switch to a worthwhile instrument, such as clarinet or bassoon or something. And they tune like crap. So from my perspective, trumpets really have it nice, which is what I was complaining to Ashley about (she plays trumpet). I forget who first said it, but one of us (I think it was probably Ashley) eventually said something along the lines of, “You know, trumpets are the greatest!” And I was like, hey, they really are. Small, cheap, loud, melodic—the Greatest at everything. The Greatest of them all. Ashley, I think, would have been perfectly content to let it end right there, but I, non-trumpet player that I am, was not. Sure, we’ve established that trumpets are the Greatest, I argued. But what about saxophones? What are They? My suggestion was that saxophones are the Coolest. They sound cool and they are the stereotypical jazz instrument, and jazz is cool. Also, saxophones can make all sorts of cool sounds despite not having any accessories. There’s growling and flutter-tonguing and dropping your jaw to make the note you’re currently playing turn really sour and drop half a step and all kinds of other neat stuff! Trumpets are the Greatest and saxophones are the Coolest, I proclaimed. Ashley wouldn’t have it. Saxophones are definitely not the Coolest, she said. If I remember correctly, we brainstormed for a while in an effort to come up with some kind of fitting adjective, but no conclusive decision was reached. Throughout the whole thing Boris kept pushing for Coolest but Ashley was incorrigible. Which is why I need your help! What, I ask, is a saxophone? I still stand by Coolest. What thinketh you? Email me at chessman@columbus.rr.com and tell me what Adjective best fits the saxophone. Heck, while you’re at it, you might as well just gimme an Adjective for ALL the freaking band instruments. Here’s my list: And I’m not kidding! Please email me! Seriously. I need to get some emails, people. Seriously. Trumpets: the Greatest Drums: the Dumbest Flutes: the Sweetest Clarinets: the Jolliest Drums: the Crappiest Tubas: the Phattest (get it? Like, they’re fat, in that they’re big, but also phat, as in cool? Yeah. Don’t complain unless you plan to email me a better one) Saxophones: the Coolest Drums: the Worst French Horns: the Roundest Trombones: the Second Greatest After Trumpets Frumpets: the Frumpiest (yeah, I know, this makes no sense, but Microsoft Word drew one of its infuriating squiggly red lines under “Frumpets”—there it goes again—and suggested I replace it with “frumpiest.” Saying that “frumpet”—arrrrgh, DAMN these squiggly red lines!!!—hold on a second—ahhhhh, much better—isn’t a word…really! That’s where *I* draw the line. Absolutely ridiculous. A frumpet is a musical instrument and therefore very much a word! But if Bill Gates, richest and most powerful man on Earth, thinks that Frumpets are the Frumpiest, then so it shall be, and if you disagree, then I just wanted to let you know who you’re messing with) Drums: the Worthless Oboes: the Meekest Baritones: the Euphoniums Euphoniums: the Trumpet Rejects Drums: I Really Hate Them, and It’s Not Jealousy This Time Bassoons: We Don’t Use Them In Our Band, So Who the Hell Cares There you have it: my list of Band Instruments! For the love of god, please email me yours. Oh! Oh! Here’s a way I can get you guys to send me stuff: I promise I’ll make a blog entry out of your responses! Pretty cool, eh? A chance to appear in Boris’s blog? Okay, maybe not. But please send me your lists anyway, and if you don’t want to appear in my blog, just tell me, and I promise I’ll completely ignore you. I look forward to reading your ideas! Fine, fine. Compromise. If you don’t want to waste your precious time coming up with an adjective for every damn band instrument, at least send me an email with the following: 1) A simple “yes” or “no” saying whether or not you agree or disagree that trumpets are the Greatest 2) A simple “yes” or “yes” saying that you agree that saxophones are the Coolest. 3) All right, all right—you don’t have to agree that saxes are the coolest. But if you are at odds with me on this one, then please tell me what Adjective DOES fit the mighty saxophone—well, hey now! The Mightiest? Hmmmm!—because the failure to come up with one is what forced me to write this blog in the first place. And if it just so happens that you’re some random person from Texas who I’ve never met and you got here via the link from Ashley’s blog (which, by the way, you should all check out!), then send me an email anyway! I don’t care. But please title your email “band adjectives” or something like that so I don’t think it’s spam and delete it. And I wouldn’t mind it if you stuck your name in the email somewhere so that I’d have some way other than your email address to refer to you when I make my blog (“But fartknocker@hotmail.com seems to think that Saxophones are the Swarthiest…”). And drop me your credit card number too so I can buy cool stuff online. All righty! Thanks a bunch, guys! The success or failure of the next blog hinges on YOU. .: posted by Boris 9:56 PMAndy Vs. Roger: the Showdown Andy, in his blog, which you should all by the way check out, states: "For those of you who don't quite understand, the frictional coefficient ranges from 0 to 1, and at 0, it's like a wet bar of soap on a perfectly smooth layer of ice.... no friction at all. 1 is for two things that are super glued together." Then Roger tells me: Vorlon says: andy is bad at physics Boris says: why do you say so? Vorlon says: a wet bar of soap on ice would freeze to the ice, plenty of friction there OUCH! Smackdown!! Now, I know what you're all wondering: What's Andy gonna do?? Is he just gonna let Roger stomp all over him like that?! And the answer is: yes, Andy IS gonna let Rogelio stomp all over him like that, because Mister Andy-poo NEVER READS MY BLOG! "Dude, Boris, I checked out that blog thing of yours," Andy told me a while back, "but all the entries were so dang LONG that I couldn't bring myself to read any of them." Well, he won't read this one, either, so he'll never be able to retailate against Roger's crushing blow to his ego because he'll never know that a crushing blow to his ego took place. Poor Andy. I feel bad now. Maybe one of you guys should tell him about this blog entry so that he can get a fair chance to defend himself? Because who knows--maybe the soap will be going so fast along the ice that it won't have time to freeze. Or something. I'm sure Andy will put up a good fight. Roger saying that Andy is "bad at physics." Yowza! .: posted by Boris 8:01 PMHit the Links! (Again) I put up some new links. One of them is self-explanatory. The other one isn't. I'll explain it right here. Vorlon says: [copied from the links section of my blog] -Home-Stah Wunnah Dot Net...It's Dot COOOOM! Vorlon says: explain Vorlon says: at length Boris says: click on the link Boris says: then click the "first time here" button or something like that Vorlon says: it's scaring me Boris says: just watch Boris says: it's funny Vorlon says: if I die it'll be your fault Boris says: fine Vorlon says: you frighten me Boris says: that's going into odd2.txt So there you have it! It's a great site with lots of funny toons. When Dan first showed it to me, I was kind of like, "What the HELL is up with this site?!?" but it really grows on you. I especially urge you to check out all three halloween cartoons and the Fluffy Puff Commercial. Funny stuff! Just ask Dan. .: posted by Boris 7:30 PMSunday, October 27, 2002Damn Rain!Sometimes you just have to sit back and ask yourself what the odds are. That it would rain. In Columbus, Ohio. Between the hours of 4 and 10 PM. On Friday. During football season. On the very last game. My senior year. I can’t believe it. It wasn’t raining when I woke up. It wasn’t raining when I was at school. It wasn’t raining AFTER the game, when I was leaving the school after putting my instrument away to get to my car and drive myself the hell home. And the very next day it didn’t freaking rain at all. So WHY, during the precise hours of the last football game of my senior year—which, if you do the math, is the last game of my high school career—did it have to rain? What are the odds? And just whose bright idea was it that marching bands can’t perform in the rain? I see no logic in this. One might argue that it’s to protect the instruments—in particular the very not-waterproof pads of woodwinds—but the instruments are already ruined just by being there. If we wanted to Save the Woodwinds then we wouldn’t go to the game at all. No, it’s not that. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why the football players are allowed to compete in the rain and we’re not. To me, aimlessly wandering around the field while carrying an instrument sure seems a lot easier than holding on to a small, slippery brown ball while running forward at breakneck speed and simultaneously trying to avoid squads of 200-pound men bent on burying your face in the grass. And don’t even TRY to pull that “oh, the field’s muddy” crap on me. The football players run and dive and fall in that stuff. We would just have to daintily tiptoe across it and get outta there after ten minutes. “Oh, but the uniforms! The uniforms would get dirty!” you cry. Yes, they would…if we had been wearing them. But we weren’t. To face the rain, we had once again used the parka + jeans combo, so the only things that would have gotten muddy were peoples’ shoes and jeans. They’d get over it. But we played our halftime show from the track without marching it. And the new pregame we had been practicing for a week that was to be performed in conjunction with the other team’s band? Didn’t march that, either. Football ended in the rain, with everybody cold, smelly, and miserable. This, coupled with the fact that it was, after all, my last game ever, made me very emotional. I didn’t cry, but the rain dripped down from my forehead and collected in the corners of my eyes, periodically streaking down my face in a way that felt strangely like tears. There was something very moving when the low brass section got together before halftime and shouted, for the very last time, “LOW BRASS KICKS ASS!!!!” This time, however, it was preceded by Adam giving a motivational “God May Make It Rain But Even God Can’t Stop the Low Brass From Kicking Ass” speech, interspersed with brief pauses during which he yelled menacingly at the sky for it to stop raining. As much as god may fear Adam, he apparently didn’t listen, so our degree of soakedness rose steadily as we trudged along the track to face the crowd of umbrellas in the Whitehall stands. I played as loud as I could and I can only hope that at least once one of those umbrellas managed to catch the sound I was making above everything else and realized that it was coming from a tenor sax and, therefore, since I was the only tenor sax, me. Speaking of tenor saxes, I just got a new one compliments of Steven’s dad! The only time I’ve played it was once at Steven’s house, but it was soooo much nicer than that crappy-ass school sax I’ve been using since seventh grade. A few days and 500 dollars later, it’s sitting behind me as I type these very words. Unfortunately, it’s past 1 AM and my parents are asleep and they think that I’M asleep so I can’t exactly play it right now. But I’ll mess around with it a lot tomorrow and I can’t wait to play it in band class on Monday. I’m so excited! I suppose it’s fitting that the last time I ever played on the school sax it got drenched all to hell. .: posted by Boris 1:25 AMWednesday, October 16, 2002Online WisdomYou probably didn’t know that there’s a shortcut to a Notepad file on my desktop named “odd.txt.” Well, now you know. Whenever a funny comment or a funny exchange occurs in the online conversation I’m having, I dutifully copy it into the file for the purpose of perhaps making a blog entry out of it someday. The file has grown fast and is kind of long and I’m basically strapped for another blog idea so I figured that now would be as good a time as any to share the hilarity with you. My comments are in parentheses and precede the messages they refer to. Also, the entries from MSN took up too much space so I changed them to look like the way AIM does it. That’s about it. Enjoy! (one word: stoned) mikerulez777: my monitor looks like a rabbit! (oh, wait, never mind…I guess I DON’T want to talk to you) S10penguin: hey S10penguin signed off at 8:00:19 PM. (quite possibly one of the oddest things anyone’s ever said to me online) Dapudd611: hey Boris, I need to go, I can't see out of my right eye (she really does exist, trust me) Adrian: who are you E-Mailing? Boris: Mandy Boris: we write emails back and forth Adrian: that's andy's girlfriend right? Boris: yep [jabber] Adrian: funny how I've never seen this girl... I think you and Andy are pulling an elaborate ruse Energetic56: youre missing the point Chessmen15: hmmm Chessmen15: what is it? Energetic56: did i say i knew it? Energetic56: no i just said you were missing it Energetic56: pay attention! (Mandy can be viciously sarcastic when she wants to be) Chessmen15: well, here comes [hole] 13 for me [in MINI-PUTT, which you should all by the way check out!] Chessmen15: I got it, thank goodness Buffy4386: Whew! Buffy4386: I was sweating bullets there. (the following comes from my debate coach’s profile and explains why our team never gets anywhere) There once was a guy named Fred. He got flattened by a semi, the end. And for those of you who think rhyme is important, the statement above is not meant to do so. So there. Also, my proclamation of self-greatness below shall remain for now if for no purpose other than to annoy John [my other debate coach who in many ways is even worse]. That's the way the cheese wheel rolls, oh yeah! All hail me, King of Trivial Pursuit. During the full version of the game I have never lost. None can withstand my worthless amounts of random knowledge! Now go cry and wish that you could know as much trivia as me, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. (don’t you hate it when you and the person you’re talking to both enter something in at almost the exact same time and this happens?) Chessmen15: how's it going? Buffy4386: How's it going? (oh, wait, I STILL don’t want to talk to you) S10penguin: hey Chessmen15: hey Sarah! S10penguin signed off at 9:23:53 PM. Chessmen15: so what keeps you up at these wee hours? fly197: too lazy to go to bed (conversations like this sadden me) icetune02: BORIS! Chessmen15: Steven! [a few hours pass] icetune02: night night Chessmen15: good night icetune02 signed off at 10:47:41 PM. (gets my vote for strangest hello ever) Boris: hey Roger! Vorlon: 'lo DanTheMan1010101: i'm sooooo wet (talk about a compulsive liar) Chessmen15: how'd your German exam go? rhflyweyr: hahaha rhflyweyr: um.. horrible rhflyweyr: cuz it was the day before i thought it was Chessmen15: I know Chessmen15: but I mean, how bad could it be? rhflyweyr: 40 % Chessmen15: hrm Chessmen15: what was the average? rhflyweyr: 85% Chessmen15: hrm Chessmen15: that's bad rhflyweyr: yeah rhflyweyr: well Chessmen15: so what'd you end up with in the class? rhflyweyr: i havent gotten it back yet rhflyweyr: so i dont really know Chessmen15: oh rhflyweyr: but we will see Chessmen15: so you made up 40% and 85% just now? rhflyweyr: yup (well, then!) Buffy4386: Have you seen Four Weddings and a Funeral? Chessmen15: nopers Buffy4386: Ahh. Blast. Chessmen15: why do you ask? Buffy4386: I forget. (Steven is now officially paranoid) icetune02: jhiujjjjk Chessmen15: precisely what I was thinking icetune02: I think that's what everyone was thinking Chessmen15: though I must confess I was taking it from a slightly more jdkkkikill approach icetune02: I think I see some subliminal messaging in that! icetune02: KKK I KILL icetune02: ?! (don’t you hate it when you type a bunch of exclamation marks in a row and then you release the Shift key to hit the Enter key but decide to throw in one last exclamation mark without realizing that you’re no longer holding the Shift key and you hit the Enter key before you can catch your mistake and this happens?) icetune02: I DIDN'T!!!!!!!!1 (if you know Roger and you imagine what he’d look like saying this in real life, you’d laugh) Vorlon: yo what up b? (here’s a LAME way of using the %n trick on AIM) on 10/13/02, Chessmen15 is da bomb. (here’s a GOOD way) It's very likely that I'm not at the computer right now, unless your screen name is Chessmen15, in which case I AM at the computer, ignoring you. (some people need to take a deep breath and relax before putting on an away message) Auto response from icetune02: LEAVE ME A MESSAGE!!! (Roger is one goofy kid) Vorlon: Boris... Vorlon: The B Man Vorlon: The Bster Vorlon says: B-orama (he’s also mean) Boris: I'm such an idiot Vorlon: I wondered when you'd catch on to that (so is Roger a hacker now?) Vorlon says: laterz (not again!) icetune02: hey Chessmen15: hiya [time passes] icetune02: night night Chessmen15: good night icetune02 signed off at 10:15:20 PM. (this comes from Michelle’s profile and I put it in here just to let you all know that I’m not the only one who hates the character limit) Ach...too much to put in my profile, not enough room!!! (thank goodness Steven never loses his temper like this in real life) icetune02: SHUT UP! (I can’t help but wonder if Roger secretely takes drugs) Vorlon says: lol Vorlon says: you are sooooo funny boris Vorlon says: sooooooooooo[the O's continue here to the point where they actually messed up my entire blog when I tried to put them all in] Vorlon says: funny (ha ha, guess what? I THOUGHT I wanted to talk to you, but I quickly realized that I don't) Chessmen15: hey Sarah! S10penguin: hey Chessmen15: how's it going? S10penguin: okay, what about you? Chessmen15: not bad Chessmen15: school has eased up a little S10penguin signed off at 7:36:57 PM. That's it for this edition! Right now I'm gonna make a new shortcut on my desktop named "odd2.txt" and with any luck in a while we'll have Online Wisdom: Part Two! Unless people become so afraid of being ridiculed online that they stop saying funny stuff to me. Hopefully that won't happen. PS-Ashley Rocks! .: posted by Boris 4:40 PMSunday, October 13, 2002This Is a Test to See If I Can Make My Blogs Show Up In Comic Sans MS fontIs this in Comic Sans MS? If so, yay! Now I'm going to blah blah blah blah the paragraph is over and I will start a new one. Let's cross our fingers... YES!!! I AM A GENIUS!! MWHAHAHAHHAAAAAAA! Aherm. Yes. Well, it appears that our hero, who heretofore was thought to be completely ignorant in the area of HTML, actually gleaned something from those useless HTML classes. I looked around the blog template and did a bit of messing around, so now this blog will be in my favorite font, Comic Sans MS! Isn't it nice and curvy? I must confess something, though--it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to save the changes to the template. I'd make the corrections, leave the template editor, come back, and...it was the same as before. I was overlooking the handy "save changes" button the entire freaking time... Thanks to the brilliantly written and deeply profound help file on the blogger website ("Once your finished, click the Save button.") I managed to resolve this issue, however, so now you will hopefully find my blog much prettier than it was before. If you're wondering why I wrote an entire post about it, it's because we blog writers will use ANYTHING as an excuse to make a post when we're strapped for ideas. Real post coming soon, I hope! PS-Ashley Rocks! .: posted by Boris 12:29 PMWednesday, October 09, 2002Hit the Links!If you read my description box before hastily moving on to see what kind of crazy madness Boris cooked up for you in his latest blog entry, you’ll know that it’s different now. If you haven’t read it, scroll up a little and do it right now. It’s okay; I’ve got time. I can wait. *twiddle* Okay, all done now? Good. Well, like it says, I owe the presence of the links to Ashley, whose aid this HTML-inept blog writer was forced to enlist. Unlike the title thing (Ashley had to tell me how to do titles, too), putting up the links was no easy task. It required a great deal of screwing around with the blog template, and since I know no HTML whatsoever thanks to the fact that the HTML classes at Bexley are taught by a very friendly and funny man who unfortunately knows less about computers than my lawn mower, Ashley had to go in there and do it all herself. That’s right—I actually let Ashley into my blog. I temporarily changed the password to “ashley” and set her loose (and yes, it WAS just temporary, so don’t even TRY to get in here, punk). Incidentally, she just put in the links that I wanted and left, but she could have done anything while she was in here. She could have deleted all my entries and changed the password to something like “I0wNborass” so that I would lose control of this blog forever. Or she could have played a big prank on me and made it so that one of my links led to www.peoplehavingsexwithgardeningequipment.com. Or she could have put, right in the middle of the page, a large, high-quality, digital picture that’s been edited to make it look as though my head is attached to the body of a naked supermodel. So you see that I was taking a huge risk by letting Ashley roam around in here. It just shows how much I trust her. I suppose, though, that she will eventually have to perform a greater display of trust when, in order for me to be able to send her the contest prize—which will be done soon, I promise!—she’ll have to give me her home address. Because who knows—maybe I’ll send her a bunch of pictures of fat, naked people partaking in interesting activities involving garden hoses. Ashley finished up working on my blog and was about to quit when my parents got mad at me and forced me off the computer to go eat. The last thing she said, however, was that “PS—Ashley rocks!” is now an irremovable feature of my description box. Well, I tried to get rid of it, and she was right. Now, the fact that I tried to delete it does not in any way mean that I don’t agree with it! In fact, quite the contrary is true. Ashley rocks very much. Few people rock as much as she does. In fact, I would have put it there myself if Ashley hadn’t done it for me. That’s how much I think she rocks. However, I thought that you might like to know that I WASN’T the one who wrote it, because 20 years from now when Ashley is married to a billionaire businessman half her age who made Michelle’s “hot guy” blog TWICE and I’m a drug addict living in Hort Dawg’s basement (Adam will be insanely rich, I just know it) and my description box says, “You can stop checking this page now because my hands shake too much from the cocaine and I won’t be able to type or therefore update this blog ever again. PS—Ashley rocks!”, it’ll look awfully funny and out of place, so I might as well clear it up right now. Now, of course, comes the fun part—a little bit about my links. Ashley’s blog—a while ago, Ashley casually mentioned something about a “blog” during one of our online conversations. I asked her what it was and she gave me the link to her blog, which was so funny and clever that I decided to make one of my own. Because Ashley inspired me, there was little doubt that the link to her blog would head my list of links. Right now you may be wondering why I never mentioned Ashley’s blog before, since I seem to have mentioned just about everything else, including many things that many of you probably wouldn’t have minded if I hadn’t mentioned, such as the fact that there actually exists a website called www.peoplehavingsexwithgardeningequipment.com (seriously! Check it for yourself if you don’t believe me!). Well, the reason is: her blog used to be a secret. For a while, only three or so people knew it existed. But her blog has recently been de-classified, so I urge you all to go read it! (Well, not until you finish reading MY blog, of course, but you get the idea). She’s a very good and funny writer who can sometimes even (*gasp*) be serious, which is far more than what I can say for myself. Golf—this is a spectacular online minigolf course. Simple but fun, the plainly-titled MINI-PUTT is a very addictive game that provides many hours, if not minutes, of enjoyment. I urge you to—get ready for this!—HIT THE LINKS! Ha, ha! Get it? Hit the links? Like, the links, as in the links to other sites, but also the links, as in the golf course? Get it? Links? Ha? Ha? Okay. That was bad. Well, anyway, there is a cheat in this game: if you’ve shot the ball and missed, you can right click on the screen, click on Back, right click on the screen again, click on Play, and voila—you’re back at the start of the hole. If you’re a loser who thrives on boosting his self-esteem by showing his “prowess” over an online golf game, you can use this cheat to simply cheat your way through to an 18. But if you’re a noble, sportsmanlike gentleman (or woman), you can use this cheat to try out new shots; to experiment; to find the best way to shoot the hole in one; to slowly and methodically conquer the course, hole by hole, until you’ve mastered the game and no longer NEED the cheat to shoot an 18 (I am currently capable of shooting an 18 pretty consistently without cheating. For me, a 19 is depressingly bad, and a 20 is pitiful). Thus, you can use the cheat not as a cheat, but as a tool for learning. A full strategy guide on this game and all of the best ace shots that I’ve been able to find may be in a forthcoming blog entry. Flipside—to date, this has been the best place I’ve found to play simple online games, especially card games. With an interface that is vibrant and easy to use, Flipside easily puts crappy sites like Pogo and Yahoo to shame. These places are not only butt ugly, but also slow and sluggish. The MSN Zone comes in a close second to Flipside, though it is somewhat drab. The one problem with Flipside is that, oddly, it doesn’t have as many users as the other places, in particular the Zone, so it can sometimes take a little while to get a game going. It’s like MSN and AIM, I suppose—MSN is clearly superior but nobody uses it. Flipside, however, has enough users that finding opponents isn’t altogether torturous, and while I’m forced to use AIM, I refuse to touch Yahoo with a ten foot pole. Another issue is that Flipside seems to create technical problems for some people; Steven still hasn’t been able to get it to work. Roger, however, who appears to have the slowest and most infernally annoying internet connection ever made, got Flipside working just fine, and we played a delightful game of chess (by which I mean I roasted him). When I’m alone, I greatly enjoy playing hearts, euchre, and spades on flipside. Though I’m fond of these games, I am not a master of them as I am at MINI-PUTT, so I’m really not qualified to write any strategies for them. I do, however, think that everybody should know how to play these fine games, so perhaps I’ll include the rules for them in future blog entries. Michelle’s blog—this is where Michelle writes about whatever she feels like writing about (except for the guys she finds hot—she writes about that somewhere else; see below). If you want to find out what’s going on in Michelle’s life, or perhaps just gain insight into her evil and sadistic nature, this is definitely the place to go. And if you don’t, go there anyway, because A) it’s a good blog, and B) I said so. Michelle’s other blog—this is where Michelle drools over the hot men in her life. Guys, don’t even THINK about touching this link! I myself peeked at this blog, but I was frightened by her second entry, so I will henceforth set an example for guys everywhere by never checking this blog again. Don’t click on the link, fellow males! Girls, go right on ahead. It’ll interest you. The lemonade game—this game was recently introduced to me by Steven. The first time I played it, I was like, “Wow! This game is incredible! Incredibly boring and stupid and crappy, that is.” I decided to give it another shot, though, so I ran crying to Steven for some help. He gave me a couple of starting tips and I was off. A day later, I obliterated his record of fifty some dollars by ending up with an amazing $134. A full strategy guide for this game may worm its way into my blog as well, but first I’ll have to refine my technique, because even that $134 game had flaws. Oh, right! I should probably tell you what this game is ABOUT! Well. You’re a snotty little kid with 20 bucks. Now, 20 bucks is a lot of money for a snotty little kid. But as it happens, you’re a snotty, GREEDY little kid, and you want MORE money. So you decide to open up a lemonade stand for a month. (It doesn’t say what month it is, but since the game only gives you 30 days, it must be a thirty day month, and since it’s often hot and sunny, it’s probably in the summer, so I’m guessing that the month is June because it’s the only summer month with 30 days in it; it also happens to be the month in which I was born. In fact, many people I know were born in June. It starts with Hort Dawg on the 10th, Andy and Benjy on the 12th (although a year apart), my dad and a girl named Genya who lives in New Jersey on the 22nd (although many, many years apart), Dan on the…the…he was born on the…um…Dan…let me see here…*cough*…uhhh…DAMN!! I ALWAYS forget when Dan’s birthday is! And I know he’s told me THOUSANDS of times! Crap. Well, I’m gonna say it’s the 27th, but don’t hold me up to that. And my cousin Danny (but don’t call Dan that because he HATES it when people call him Danny), who lives in Los Angeles, was born two weeks after me, on the 30th. Also, Becky Schleich was born on my birthday, although a year earlier, and I know absolutely nothing about her except for the fact that she was born on my birthday, although a year earlier. Plus we can’t leave out my cousin Jacob, who was born on the…erm…was it the 20th? Beats me. Well, it was in there somewhere, definitely in June. So there are a lot of June birthdays. If there’s someone I left out, please tell me and I will edit my blog pronto!). Where was I?! Ah, yes. The Lemonade Game. What you don’t know when you read this is that I actually wrote over half a page of description before I deleted the whole ugly mess and tried to come up with a short version. Okay! So here is Boris the Concise: 1) It’s “Day 1” 2) You set the price of lemonade 3) You decide how much sugar, lemons, and ice cubes to use 4) You buy supplies 5) You sit in front of your computer like a braindead retard and watch people go past your stand 6) The day ends 7) You now have a different amount of money than you did before 8) Hopefully, the new amount is higher than the old amount 9) Though you won’t know for sure if you forgot the old amount 10) So pay attention! 11) Repeat steps 1-10 and you’ll eventually hit step 12 12) After 30 days, the game ends 13) Though you probably won’t get to this point because you’ll break down into a crying fit after realizing that the game is a lot harder than it seems 14) Well, so much for being concise 15) But this is much conciser than it was before, trust me 16) What do you MEAN, “conciser” isn’t a word?! 17) I swear, we need more words 18) Like “aswarm” 19) If you didn’t get step 18, then you obviously haven’t read my older blogs 20) They are in chronological order from the BOTTOM, dummy! 21) Some people, I swear… So that’s the Lemonade Game. I’ll go into more detail in the strategy guide that will someday appear in this blog. For now I would like to offer Ashley one last round of thanks for making my blog wonderful for me, and I wish you all a fun time at the links! (hee hee hee) By the way, if you actually went and typed “www.peoplehavingsexwithgardeningequipment.com” into your browser, then, first of all, you’re a sick bastard, and second of all, you are really, really gullible. PS-Ashley Rocks! .: posted by Boris 5:26 PMThursday, October 03, 2002"Why I Hate It When My Pencil Lead Breaks" Is the Title of a Blog That Used To Be Here But Now Isn'tThere used to be a real blog here, but I deleted it because it sucks. Now, I know what some of you are thinking: “Boris is such an idiot.” You’re probably right. But the rest of you are probably thinking: “Ha ha, oh, that Boris! What a kidder! He probably just came up with a goofy title and then wrote a funny blog about how he wrote a bad blog and deleted it and replaced it with a funny blog! Because Boris is such a great, lovable guy, and he’s my favorite person in the whole wide world and I KNOW that he couldn’t EVER write a BAD blog because all of his blogs are so hilarious!” I wish you were right. But there really was a real blog here, and it was remotely connected to the title, and it sucked. A lot. If you don’t believe me, I know for a fact that Michelle read it, and perhaps Dan, so you can confirm it with them that A) the blog existed, and B) it sucked. If you still don’t believe me, just send me an email with a request to see the blog that once existed here, and I’ll happily send you the Word file that used to contain the blog but now simply states that “Your request, though appreciated, has been denied.” Speaking of blogs, I heartily suggest that you never use the word "heartily." And you should also check out Michelle's blog, the link to which is in her profile. I'd put a link to it here myself but I don't know HTML, so I can only write out the URL and force you to copy it and paste it into your browser yourself, you lazy monkey: www.thefroggerblogger.blogspot.com. Michelle's profile also has a link to a new blog that she made, which is, quote, "only for the female eyes!!!!!! ONLY!!!!!!" Upon reading this, I did the natural, obvious thing, which was, seeing as how I'm not a female: I didn't click on the link. Ha, ha! Yeah, right. No, what actually happened was my curiosity got the best of me and I clicked on the link in order to find out what exactly it is in there that we males aren't allowed to read. This was very bad of me, I know, but, for the record, I had a severe attack of conscience before entering the forbidden land and decided to make up for it by A) telling Michelle later that I had violated her rule and clicked on the link, and B) rationalizing to myself, "Hey! Don't make rules you can't enforce! If Michelle can't stop us guys from clicking on the link in her profile, then tough noogies for her!" Well, after I read her blog and told her about it, Michelle said that she forgives me and will even make an exception in my case and let me read her blog continuously just because I'm so special. But the rest of you guys: stay away! And if you're dying of curiosity just like I was, I'm going to dispel that curiosity right here by telling you what was in Michelle's blog: "100% Proven Guaranteed Methods To Get That Guy You Like To Notice You! Trick #1: come up to him and say, "I like you." Trick #2: invite him to your house and take off all your clothes. Trick #3: ..." and on it goes. Hee hee. Dangit, I AM a real kidder. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a real blog here once! Okay. So anyway, seriously, Michelle's new blog is basically a big long list of guys that she finds attractive. Unlike her regular blog, this one isn't updated daily, and each post only contains one guy, plus a description of his hotness (I'll be interested to see how Michelle makes this vary from guy to guy: "Joe Finkelburger is very hot in a quasi-post-impressionist kind of way, with roughly a 92% symmetrical face, which, as I look into it, reminds me of the moon on cloudy nights. Doodle Doofushead is very, very, VERY hot, having Adonisean features characterized by a smug suaveness that precious few guys are able to attain, bringing about the profound imagery of the ancient Greek myths in which beautiful nymphs periodically have passionate sex with forest animals. Harry Monklemonkey is hot, with..." and so on). So far she's only posted once, and having never seen or heard of the guy, I honestly can't say if I agree or disagree with Michelle's assessment of his hotness, though I imagine that she and her girlfriends will eventually have quite heated discussions about it (Michelle's girlfriend: "What?! Sure, he's hot, but he SO does not have Adonisean features!" Michelle: "The hell he doesn't! And YOU'RE the one who thought that Minkus Nordbringum wasn't good looking just because he had ONE TINY ZIT on his forehead! You are SO shallow!"). So if you're a guy, that's what Michelle's new blog is about, and you now officially have no reason to click on the link. And if you're a girl, I urge you to check out Michelle's blogs, particularly the second one if you live in Bexley (sorry, Ashley, but you may not be able to relate to this, seeing as how you live in Texas, so you'll have to satisfy yourself with Michelle's other blog, and just for the record, we don't have guys named "Harry Monklemonkey" here in Columbus; I was just making that up). So that's it! I hope that this blog is better than the putrid garbage that was here before (by the way, thanks for the great blog idea, Michelle!), and in the future I think I'll take the extra time to come out with a good blog rather than fill this space with a bunch of crap. Short Addendum Regarding Marching Band Uniforms: the forecast for yesterday predicted heavy rains, so Mr. Schneider decided to use the parka + jeans combo again. But although some heavy rains after school forced us to hold the band spread in the cafeteria instead of at Andrea's house, by pregame there was nothing more than a faint drizzle and by halftime there was no rain at all. This made yesterday the second game in a row for which we could have worn the uniforms but didn't. There are only three football games left and we STILL haven't worn the uniforms! Does anyone else find this a little sad? .: posted by Boris 10:06 PMSunday, September 29, 2002Final Contest DetailsRecently, Ashley and I both made it to six days before logging off of AIM for various reasons, so nobody, technically, has won my contest yet (not even me!). However, Adam has a rock-solid DSL connection (or so he says) and will soon hit 6 days, so I'm gonna assume that he'll eventually make it, unless something funky happens and the Chinese decide to mount a nuclear strike on Bexley, or the same drunk asshole who wrecked the back end of Adam’s car yesterday while it was innocently parked in the happy streets of Bexley comes back and drives his drunken ass directly into Adam’s house, destroying his computer in the process. Now, a while back I promised Ashley that I'd give her a CD for her effort (the poor girl made it to six days TWICE, bless her little heart), but I'll give Adam a CD, too, for actually winning the contest (assuming he wins it). At this point nobody else is trying, so that'll patch it all up for my little contest; if you ever become interested in trying my contest for the chance to put whatever you want in my profile, you’ll have to let me know, because the “People Trying to Win Contest” category in my buddy list will disappear sometime around Tuesday (if Adam wins). All that's left for me to do is get two 74-minute CD's (or just one, if Adam doesn’t win) and actually make the prizes (or prize, if Adam doesn’t win), at which point Ashley will have to overcome her fear of giving me her mailing address (because, for all we know, I might just drive on over there and egg her house or something) so that I can actually SEND her the CD. One warning about the “write Boris’s profile” contest prize—it seems that my character limit is a lot lower than it should be. I first picked up on this when I realized that other people were sticking WAY more into their profiles than I could have ever dreamed of putting in mine, so I decided to test things out to make sure that all was well. I began to type the above paragraph into my profile until AIM would let me type no further, at which point I copied the whole mess and stuck it into Word, which has a nifty “word count” feature that, in addition to counting words, can also count characters. I booted up the word count and was shocked to find that AIM had only let me type 800 something characters, and not the promised 1024. After a bit of thought, however, I realized that there was a simple and straightforward explanation for this problem, which is: it’s all a giant conspiracy and everybody’s out to get me. See, AIM sends probes to the planet Neptune that capture millions and millions of these little aliens, which are then enslaved and forced to monitor all of the IM conversations going on at any given moment. One of these aliens then picked up on the fact that I was bitching about the low character limit in the profile (I can’t BELIEVE that I was actually stupid enough to complain about it ON AIM, but that’s all behind me now), which he reported to his evil AIM superiors. So now AIM is punishing me, in its own subtle way, by reducing the already-low character limit of my profile ever so slowly, perhaps just one character a day, so that eventually all I’ll be able to fit in there is “Die, AIM!” and then “Die AIM!” and then “Die AIM” and then “DieAIM” and then “DiAIM” and then “!AIM” and then “YAH” and then “UG” and then “P” and then .: posted by Boris 10:31 PM |
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