"In 1959, Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev reacted angrily during a visit to Los Angeles upon being told that, for security reasons, he would not be allowed to visit Disneyland."

Apparently Khruschev was about four years old.

I can't shake this feeling that I'm effectively standing still. It's not that I'm not getting anything done, but it doesn't seem to be getting me anywhere.

I really want to write some kind of deep insight about the end of AP, but I can't honestly think of anything all that interesting to say about it. By now I definitely do not regret taking the class, but I'm not completely sure what the point of it all was. I've just spent an ungodly amount of time memorizing an incomplete history of the United States which I need to retain until I take the SAT II in June, after which I will forget nearly all of it. Barring my becoming some sort of major pundit, I don't see what doing all that did for me, other than the fact that now I get all the Bailey and Kennedy jokes that people make on NPR. That's about it.

And so, to summarize the last eight and half months, I'd like to remind everyone that the Aroostook "Pork and Beans" War was a small-scale lumberjack clash. With all due respect to Franklin Roosevelt, that was the most important thing I learned all year.

What??? Donald Trump escaped Wrestlemania XXIII with his hair in tact? I'm furious.

It is still 2007 right? For some reason the cover of the newest issue of Rolling Stone features Pink Floyd and a story about the Kennedy Assassination? When did it start being the 70s again?

So it appears that I am qualified to write for Esquire. I just read an article from the magazine where this guy David Walters describes being the only guy on board a plane of Victoria's Secret models, which at least in terms of essential details, sounds kinda familiar. His article was basically the same as an early draft of one of my college essays, only mine has a self-reflective moral whereas his conclusion is that he had a really bad case of blue balls. And yet he's the one getting paid for this. How is that fair?

Plus, he was wimp and bailed after the plane ride, whereas I stuck out the whole week. Eat that David Walters.

This week just keeps getting weirder. I'm pretty sure I'm having fun though. The MRI tomorrow = not so fun.

It strikes me that Jewish liberals do not always do so well in Texas, so I'd appreciate it y'all (yeah I said it) would keep in touch while I'm down in the Lone Star State. Just to make sure I'm still alive. Thanks.

I think the moral of this story is I win.

    In school my teachers have always emphasized that I should have a wide range as a writer. Accordingly, they have always given me a wide variety of writing assignments so as to diversify my abilities, with tasks ranging from critical essays to… well to research essays (the point is that they tried, okay?). Whenever I write for fun, I try make sure to take my teachers’ lesson to heart, which is why I’ve decided to explore new territory with this piece and write about… something that I saw on ESPN (which tells you two things; first, that I have a total lack of creativity, and second, I watch way too much TV).

    Unlike my previous literary exploitations of our nation’s progressively looser definition of “sport,” this latest attraction actually takes some technical skill. The folks in Bristol have started televising a game called sport stacking. The game is played with a pack of plastic cups, which the competitor has to stack and un-stack into pyramids of various heights, doing so in approximately the same amount of time as it’s going to take Kevin Federline’s “career” to collapse. In other words, it’s basically competitive beer-can-pyramid making, except it’s marketed to kids.
The stacking isn’t a problem though. I’ve tried it (yes, I’m a loser, I realize that, now be quiet), and it’s actually really tough, especially since the world class stackers can stack absurdly fast – we’re talking faster than Vanilla Ice’s acting career. The problem though is that you can’t stack with ordinary cups. Instead, you have to buy a special set of sport stacking cups, called Speed Stackers, which apparently stack better than normal cups since they don’t stick together as much, along with a special StackMat, which apparently exists purely to have a brand name attached to it.

    There’s nothing wrong with having official equipment for a sport, but merchandise should be secondary to the actual game. The opposite is true with sport stacking. Instead of selling special cups to improve the quality of the game, the game was created in order to sell the cups. Just try and imagine doing that for any other sport. Suppose you worked for a sporting goods company and you went to your boss and said “I’ve made a massive egg out of leather, and I put shoe laces on one side of it. I think it can make us a lot of money but we need a way to sell it. Our best bet is probably to tell people to get a bunch of friends together and have them try and murder each other while fighting to pick up the ball. Here’s the best part though; we’ll call it football, even though they’ll play it entirely with their hands.” Do you think your boss would tell you what a great idea it was? Of course not! He’d fire your ass since football was invented in 1874 and you clearly aren’t qualified to work for a sporting goods company if you don’t already know about football. But apart from being more than one hundred years too late, games have to emerge from the ground up. Games emerge because kids get bored and need to use their creativity and whatever they happen to have around them to entertain themselves, not because corporate executives and focus groups decided that something would make a good game. Sport stacking is a game invented to sell a product, and frankly it just isn’t right.

    Sport stacking isn’t hopeless though. Like I said, it does take a lot of skill, so I think it can be made into a decent sport, instead of just being a massive toy commercial with color commentary. I’ve got one idea right off the bat: the World Sport Stacking Association (yeah, they even have a league) should take the game back to its frat house roots and require competitors to drink a beer from each cup before they stack. Not only will stacking get progressively more difficult as the rounds progress, the constant threat of alcohol poisoning would let the competitors call themselves legitimate athletes since they suddenly have an actual chance of injury. Now that would be the perfect game to market to twelve year olds. In fact, the idea is so good that I can’t just give it out for free; WSSA, I want a cut of those profits for saving your game!

I'd like to leave a note, mostly just for myself, that this weekend has been absolutely amazing, and that I owe Becca, Carrie and everyone else a ton for all of it.

Let the record show that Chuck Klosterman is a god.
Let the record also show that Chuck Klosterman is profoundly dorky and excentric, as well as significantly less pompous in person than in writing (I don't consider him a pompous writer, but somethings he talks about have an air of superiority to them. Especially Advancement Theory. What the fuck is that?). The fact that he posses these traits makes him all the more noteworthy since it humanizes him, making his ideas all the more profound. Also he's fucking hysterical.

Have you ever had a day that has absolutely no right being excellent but is anyways? Today probably should have be awful, or at least not good. It was the end of an absolutely hellacious week that seems to extend for all of next week too, yet somehow today was awesome.

I just heard a cigarette commerical on the radio, and I'm pretty sure it compared the pleasures of smoking Monte Cristo cigars with having an affair.
That's a fucking weird ad campaign.

I finally got a copy of the Chuck Klosterman IV!  This is a pretty big deal for me.
I'm not really sure how to react to a book that begins with an essay on the cultural significance of Britney Spears' vagina, but it seems like a good sign.

This is so amazing it probably shouldn't even be allowed. Robert Randolph and Dave Matthews dualing guitars/dance off.




P.S. I may do a real update sometime!

Big news!




I'M HOME!

I'm really excited to be home, but I miss French Woods a whole friggin ton. That was an amazing summer.