My Musings

PS-Ashley Rocks!

Thursday, November 21, 2002

Dan’s Sad Story

Those 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 PM

Sunday, November 17, 2002

The 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 PM

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

My Poofy Coat

It 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 PM

Saturday, November 09, 2002

A Blatant Excuse For Making Another Blog Entry

Well, 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 AM

Wednesday, November 06, 2002

Margins...

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 PM

Andy 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 PM

Tuesday, November 05, 2002

Andy Vs. Roger: the Showdown Continues

I 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 PM

Monday, November 04, 2002

What’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 PM

Andy 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 PM

Hit 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.