Fun Text Stuff

.pǝɔıʇou ʎ1qɐqoɹd noʎ sɐ 'uʍop-ǝpısdn ǝq p1noɥs ʇı ǝɹǝɥʍ dn ǝpıs-ʇɥbıɹ ʇı sʇnd ʇsnظ ʇı  ¡ǝuo sıɥʇ sɐ ɥɔns 'sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ ǝbuɐɹʇs ǝɹɐ dı1ɟ ʇ,usǝop ʇı ʇɐɥʇ buıɥʇ ʎ1uo ǝɥʇ .ʇuɐʍ noʎ buıɥʇʎuɐ oʇuı ʇı ǝʇsɐd puɐ ʇnɔ sı op oʇ ǝʌɐɥ noʎ 11ɐ ¿ʇɐɥʇ sı 1ooɔ ʍoɥ ¡noʎ ɹoɟ ʇı dı1ɟ 11ıʍ ʇı puɐ 'ʇuɐʍ noʎ ʇxǝʇ ǝɥʇ 11ɐ uı ǝdʎʇ uɐɔ noʎ bɹo.ʇxǝʇdı1ɟ.ʍʍʍ oʇ ob noʎ ɟı .ǝɯ pǝʍoɥs puǝıɹɟ ʎɯ buıɥʇǝɯos sı sıɥʇ

Here is another cool website: ASCII Art Generator.  All you have to to is give it a picture, and it will turn it into ascii text!!  Here is my picture in ASCII art!!

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Not too shabby, eh?

Do you ever come across those scrambled words that you just can't un-scramble?  Well, here is your solution.  If you go to that website, it'll unscramble just about any word.  I like it a lot.  

Well, thats all I've got, I sure hoped you enjoyed it!  If you come across anything that you particularly like, feel free to post a comment with it!

P.S.  Don't try to plug the flipped text back into the word flipper so you can read it.  I tried it, and it doesn't work.  ¡ʎɹɹos

What I Was Voting For

Bear with me here, I seem to take a fairly controversial stance on these things. 

This election has been an interesting one.  I really wasn't able to find what I was looking for in a candidate this election.  I look for strong family values, I am very pro-life.  I do not agree with contraceptives or in-vitro fertilization.  I also do not agree with gay marriage.  Divorce should be nearly impossible to obtain.  I do also look for the ability to lead the nation, but these attributes eclipse the others in my eyes.

I believe that the family is the basic building block for all of society.  If the family disintegrates, then there will be no well-formed children who will grow up into productive individuals, and the entire nation will collapse.  

Before I go further, I will give you my definition of family.  A family is a man and a woman joined in marriage for the purpose of raising children and bringing them and each other to God.

Abortion is not family supportive.  There is no family if there are no children.  I believe that life starts at conception, so it is murderer as well.  Contraception has a similar effect.  In-vitro fertilization allows a woman to have children without being married, which is not a family.  A union between two men or women is not marriage either.  From a purely physical standpoint, it just doesn't work!  There is no way to have children naturally from such a union.  Also, mothers and fathers each contribute different things do the development of a growing child.  Men are typically more physical, and women are more social.  Without that balance, children do not develop properly.  

Even though neither of the candidates held the same moral values as I, one was closer than the other, so I did vote for him.  I will be praying for the president, whether I voted for him or not.

Video Games

     Video games.  I have been playing video games for as long as I can remember.  The first one I ever played was on our ancient computer.  The only thing it did was make interesting patterns on the screen whenever you pushed any button on the keyboard.  We always had a terrible time trying to exit it, though, because all of the keys were neutralized so that a toddler could just mash the keys and watch the screen change colors, and never exit the program.  That was its entire purpose.  Good times.  That computer had some of best games.  Nibbles, Gorillas, Tut's Tomb, Pepper's Adventures in Time, Commander Keen (1), and a couple others.  Its really funny, though.  That computer had an eight megabyte hard-drive.  That hard drive was the size of a small book.  My flash Drive holds four Gigabytes.  Amazing.  

     It seems to me that video games have become part of our culture, yet I don't think they've been around for more than 30 years or so.  I'm amazed at the speed at which the world is changing right now.  I think it is the ability to communicate which makes it possible, but I'm getting off topic.  

     I disagree with the people who say that graphics are what gaming is all about.  Granted, they do help, but the gameplay itself is what truly makes or breaks a game.  Some of my favorite games have poor, or even no, graphics.  Take ADOM, for example.  It is a rogue-like game, and everything is text.   EVERYTHING .  Its free, so you can download it here if you like.  It is so deep, people are always finding different tricks and nooks and crannies.  The most amazing thing, though, is that one person wrote the whole game.  Just for fun!  I wish I could do that.  

NoSHAVEember

I'm sure some of you noticed I've been a little "scruffy-looking" lately.  I decided to participate in No-Shave-November, aka NoSHAVEember.  I heard about it through my roommate when I didn't shave for a few days near the end of October.  I immediately became an advocate.  

I've heard of a couple different origins of the month.  Originally my roommate told me it was a way of remembering the Pilgrims during this Thanksgiving time.  Thats cool.  I also looked it up on wikipedia, and apparently Australia calls it Movember, like "Mustache" and "November" put together.  As the name implies, they only grow out their mustaches, not full beards.  It raises awareness of Men's health and the like.  Some cool trivia.  

Then I got to looking at beard stuff, and someone (I don't remember who) showed me the world-record holding beard growers on this website.  Wow, that is a lot of beard.  I know I wouldn't be able to grow that much beard, or take care of it.  Thats just crazy, and crazy awesome at the same time.  

I really don't know how my family will react when they see me at Thanksgiving.  They know I'm doing it, but it will still certainly be an interesting encounter....

McCarthyism

I admit, I really didn't know much about McCarthyism when group 1 announced their topic.  I think that there is a very interesting connection between their topic and our topic, the internment of the Japanese Americans.  In both cases, there were strong feelings against a nation with whom we were at war.  In a nutshell, McCarthyism claimed that everyday people, and even some government officials, were Nazis who were trying to infiltrate the US and transform us under our very noses.  It turns out these facts were largely groundless, but the force and charism that McCarthy portrayed was enough to sway the people in his favor.  

If memory serves, Chad was looking into the role that McCarthyism played with our foreign relations at that time.  I don't know what the final verdict is, but iI do find it very intriguing.  How much did people really buy into McCarthy's story?  Did everyone, including those in office, listen and adjust their behavior?  I think it is fascinating how much people can be swayed with an idea, even if it doesn't have ground behind it.  Are there any ideas going around now that apply in the same fashion?  How many of our political leaders are standing on emptiness?  Its our job to know, but they don't want us to if they are.  Why don't people just tell the truth?

Fall Broken

My fall break wasn't nearly as relaxing as I had hoped it would be.  I didn't bring any clean clothes home, because it was all dirty in the form of laundry.  The first thing I saw when we drove up was the grass.  It was long.  I was sad.  I also discovered that we were renovating the bathroom at the end of the hall, so the bathroom I used to have almost entirely to myself had been completely taken over by my sisters.  There were other various items that had been deposited in my room which didn't really belong there, so it didn't quite feel like my room anymore.  I did get a good night's sleep, though, and that was a welcome change from the normal college day.

After I got up on Saturday, we started working on the bathroom.  We took out the toilet, because we were replacing the floor.  That was interesting.  I tried to shut the water to the tank off, but it didn't work.  What makes matters worse, the seal between the tank and the bowl broke, so water started leaking everywhere, and we had to clean that up.  Ewwww.....  Long story short, we eventually got it out.  

The rest of my break largely consisted of doing nothing, or getting ready to go back.  I had to go shopping to get a few more college needs.  I got a new pair of shoes for the first time in years.  I didn't realize it until after we bought them, but they are black and gold, so that was an unintended bonus.  

I'm sure this sounds far worse than it actually was.  It was really good to see my family again, and just the change of pace was nice.  I liked going to church at my home parish, and seeing some of my friends that haven't gone to college yet was really nice too.  I had a good break, it just wasn't what I expected it to be.  

My "Holey" Uncle

     This is a paper I wrote after interviewing my uncle awhile back.  I really like it because I feel it really captures his character in many ways.  It also lets you get a little look at what my extended family can be like.  I hope you enjoy it.  

     My Uncle has always been interested in the earth.  His uncle Roger sent him a book for Christmas every year, and these books were usually about geology.  Leo doesn't know why they were about geology, but he always found the books extremely interesting.  His fascination in the earth was often manifested by his digging around, where he discovered neat things.  

     His first digging adventure occurred at the age of four or five when he was digging with a soppn in his front yard by the sidewalk.  He found something.  "I didn't know what it was, just a little nodule of some sort."  He brought it inside and set it on the radiator in the kitchen.  As it turns out, it was a grasshopper egg case.  When it warmed up on the radiator, all the grasshoppers hatched!  What made matters worse, the kitchen floor was an old linoleum with little specks on it.  "You could drop a piece of toast on the kitchen floor and lose it," he said.  All the practically invisible baby grasshoppers started hopping around the kitchen and into the rest of the house.

     He kept digging as he grew older.  He decided to dig a bomb shelter in the crawl-space of their house.  He had an electric light on an extension cord so he coulc see as he dug.  "The dirt was real hard, it's like clay when you get just down beneath the surface of the topsoil.  It's just solid clay, really hard to dig because there's no toom with the floor joists above your head.  But it was fun," he says.  Years later a mechanic came to fix the dryer vent and had to do a bit of work in the crawlspace.  He went down below, and after a couple minutes came up and said to my grandmother, "Lady, do you know there's a big hole underneath your house?"  It is still there to this day.

     My uncle soon started another hole in one corner of the backyard.  He says it was about six feet deep and roughly four feet across.  He found some near tocks and was amazed to find earthworms down there, six feet down in the solid clay.  He put a 2x6 board across "the hole," as it was named, to help prevent people from falling in.  It didn't work too well.  His younger sister tried to ride a tricycle across the board, and she fell into the hole.  He was forced to fill it in, "But, I put a cigar box down there, and I put in some trinkets.  I couldn't even tell you what I put in there, maybe a dime and who knows what else."  He was about ten or twelve.

     After these adventures, Leo moved on from the books given to him by his uncle, to those required by his professors.  He went on to get his Master's degree in Geology.  He now knows that the clay he had to dig through is termed "Glacial till," because it was deposited by the glaciers in the ice age.  He no longer has time for digging holes, but still enjoys finding rocks, identifying plants, and learning about the world around him.