Pootie Poo.

Dead Deer

So, today I was sort of kind of really depressed, but i've been able to not burst into tears because I've surrounded myself with friends and I feel like I shouldn't cry in front of other people. I almost lost it tonight though. Fortunately I was with my buddy and so I didn't start bawling. But anyways, we were talking about the source of my being depressed and then I said... 'we need to start talking about something that isn't depressing'. Thirty seconds later a deer crosses the street and I slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting it. The deer crossed the street. Then two more deer came out of the woods and one of them got hit by a oncoming suburban like fifteen feet away. The deer slid past my car and all of this fluff and hair slid by on the ground. I was in shock and I just sat there for a bit. How freaking tragic is that? I want to think about something not depressing and something dies right in front of me. I cried a little, but if I had been by myself I would have bawled straight up. And the thing is, is that normally, a deer dying wouldn't affect me a lot. But where I am emotionally today it was like the last straw or something. Yeah. True story.

So I am Satchel.... And for some reason this is way hilarious to me. Like seriously, I'm laughing way too much.

Columbia High School

Biography for Zach Braff
So...check out all the people that went to his high school... That's crazy.

war rationale

war rationale
Originally uploaded by mr marbles.

Yeah...How 'bout them apples?

Dread Pirate Roberts

To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: One, how artfully has the Dread Pirate Roberts been rendered and two, How important is that rendering? Question 1 rates the pirate's perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the pirate's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the pirate's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the pirate yields the measure of his greatness. Jack Sparrow might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. The Dread Pirate Roberts, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the pirate to be truly great. As you proceed through the pirates in this book, practice this rating method. As your ability to evaluate pirates in this matter grows so will your enjoyment and understanding of pirates.
-Mr. J. Evans Pritchard

As you can see, it is very important to understand the Dread Pirate Roberts in order to understand the world.

Sour Cream, Cous Cous/ Linguine, and Warm Flour Tortillas

I've decided that there are three food items that I can't live without. They are the following:

1. Sour Cream- It goes with everything/makes everything better. But unfortunately I use entirely too much. Mostly because any of my concoctions are way odd and need sour cream to even be normal. Yeah, I decided a couple weeks ago to be clever and actually cook stuff. So my collection of recipes has gone from 3 to 6 in the last two weeks. And actually, to be honest, two of the original 3 were bean burritos and tuna/bean tostadas which shouldn't really count as recipes. My other recipe was cous cous curry with brocolli(and sometimes chicken). I can't remember what the new three recipes are but I'm pretty sure that one of them is cous cous wraps (and all of them involve sour cream and couscous).

2. Cous Cous/Linguine- Which actually is just pasta. Why is linguine so much better than regular pasta? It makes no sense, but that's all good because I love it.

3. Warm Flour Tortillas- Ok. So cold flour tortillas suck hard core. But if you warm them up...they get this lovely texture/taste. They remind me of cooking meat on the open fire. If there were no warm flour tortillas, I could make do with warm hand made corn tortillas. Not the kind you buy in a tortilleria though. Even though they are all the same size, they suck really bad in comparison to irregularly shaped hand made ones. Bread cereal. Yeah. Also, here's a hint: don't eat soup with just tortillas and no spoon. It's doable- but it's not much fun at all. Especially if you only have five tortillas between two guys.

4. Concerns- Why are there four things here? I don't know. Just like there were eleven things on some list I made back in the Other Year. For sheer randomness. Mostly because I want to say something about something but can't do it to the one person that matters most to me.

Cadillac Mountain Sports

Cadillac Mountain Sports is the coolest store in the history of ever. I mean seriously. You can get cross country spikes and Prana in the same store. It just doesn't get any better than that.

The Roman Helmet Strikes Again!

Roman Helmet's Nuclear Proliferation Policy Rears Its Ugly Face Again

North Korea declared on Thursday for the first time it possessed nuclear weapons and pulled out indefinitely from six-party talks on its atomic ambitions, saying it needed a defense against a hostile United States. . . . The statement also poses a challenge to Bush, who has long backed a diplomatic solution to the crisis but now faces two nations he once named as part of an "axis of evil" being openly defiant about their nuclear programs -- North Korea and Iran. He went to war with the third axis nation, Iraq.

Why did this happen? As recently as 2000 we were having amicable talks with them and they had halted nuclear weapons production and had allowed Western inspectors into their nuclear power plants. Why are we now dealing with another enemy with nuclear weapons?

"The Bush administration termed the DPRK, its dialogue partner, an outpost of tyranny," the ministry said, adding that the U.S. aim was to stifle the North and achieve regime change.

Is there something I don't get? Is it really possible to 'spread freedom' by insulting people? Is this how diplomacy works?

Earlier this week, U.S. officials said an envoy sent by Bush to China had delivered a message to China's leaders about information suggesting that Libya had obtained uranium hexafluoride from North Korea and made the case that this underscored the need to restart six-party talks.

Now we have another country with nuclear weapons potential. Happy Day! This war on terror is sure going well!

A voice of Reason

Will somebody pleasespeak up? Let us PLEASE think this one through before we act and go invade another country that doesn't actually have WMDs. It's one thing to defend our country, it's entirely different to go invading defenseless countries because we just felt like it. Somehow, the people got Dan Rather fired for airing a story based on false information and yet we are at war on false information and it appears that we are on the way to war again and with evidence that is just as baseless.
And as far as I'm concerned, if they have nuclear weapons, what are they going to do with them? The same thing we are doing with ours and the same thing Israel is doing with theirs.

I can't believe this...I mean really.

Condi is a Goof along with Roman Helmet

My favorite part?

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Wednesday that Iran must live up to its international obligations to halt its nuclear program or "the next steps are in the offing. And I think everybody understands what the 'next steps' mean," Rice told reporters.
But Rice on Friday said that the question of using military force against the Tehran regime "is simply not on the agenda at this point in time."

(By favorite I mean Most Ludicrous).
Why can't we have a reasonable conversation with the Iranians? I'm bread cereal here. This is the time for diplomacy and it can't be so incredibly overshadowed by threats of war. We need to understand that it is entirely hypocritical of us to allow Israel to have nuclear weapons and yet refuse to allow Iran to have them. And that's if we assume that Iran does want nuclear weapons. If what they say is indeed true, then what is the problem with them having nuclear power? We need to understand what this looks like to them and the history that Iranians have with the West. We overthrew their democratically elected government in 1953 to further the economic objectives of British Petroleum.
If we really don't want them to have nuclear weapons, then we need to force Israel to give us their nuclear weapons. Otherwise, we merely propagate the Islamist idea of a Zionist conspiracy in the West.

Musick

My roommates have distinct musical preferences (mostly they listen to the Strokes and old school Hip Hop) and, according to them, my musical taste is deficient. This is because I have a particularly strong affinity for punk music and, more specifically, punk-influenced music. Despite the allure Punk has for me, I attempt to maintain a unique musical spectrum, and thus my collection of music includes a large subsection of the Angry Girl Music genre (Tori Amos, Sarah Mclachlan, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Letters to Cleo…). I say Angry Girl Music and you might think I mean music that Angry Girls make, but I really mean music that I envision Angry Girls listening to. This could be completely off and no Angry Girls actually listen to this music, but that’s my mental picture of who the principal audience is. I like to think that I’m a big fan of Emo, but apparently my concept of Emo is really Pop-Punk. Now- the differences between real Emo and what I listen to elude me to this day. Apparently Sunny Day Real Estate IS emo, but the Get Up Kids are NOT Emo. Recently I had the shocking realization that what I thought was screamo is really….I’m not sure what. And apparently Saetia IS Screamo but Thrice, Emery and Underoath aren’t even though they say they are. So….what is what? How is a well-intentioned guy like me supposed to know the difference between Emo, Screamo and Pop-punk?
All of the confusion that I experience as a cause of multi-genre cross pollination is quite unfortunate. It’s unfortunate because a big part of Who You Are is what kind of music you listen to. If I start talking about how much I like Emo- someone will inevitably ask ‘what’s Emo?’ And I have no answer. But there must be a name for the genre of music I listen to. And Pop-punk just doesn’t do it for me.
So I think to myself… is my music Who I Am? Why do I listen to the music I listen to? There must be some reason other than social pressure and conditions. Like, if I was a black man, would I listen predominantly to rap or would I still have an affinity to punk-esque music?

Hotel Rwanda

Hotel Rwanda
Originally uploaded by mr marbles.

Recently my taste in movies has improved dramatically. Previously, my roommates would constantly mock my viewing choices. Granted, I was watching movies like Van Helsing and other similar movies. Hotel Rwanda is a definite step up (or two or three) on the scale of movie quality. The director weaves the movie with cinematographic bliss...It is truly a wonderful piece of art. It is based on real events and the nature of the story contributes a great deal to the overall effect of the movie, but I was still impressed with the way the director presented the story. It was suspenseful until the last. What most struck me was that there is no physical difference between the Hutus and the Tutsis. They lived together for hundreds of years with the same culture and were divided along tribal lines rather than racial lines. But, according to the movie, the Belgians divided them and caused the racial tensions. The whole situation boggles my mind, as does what's going on today in Darfour. It's a crazy crazy world.

Triassic

that guy doesn't have a shirt on!!!
Originally uploaded by mr marbles.

Went down to Triassic today. Freaking amazing. I mean...awesome. I mean....one of the funnest days i've spent ever- climbing or not. This is me pulling on this awesome V3 on Dyno Boulder. Took us like...a bunch of tries and some blood...but we finally sent it.