Lt. Ducksworth's Angry Souls Travel Blag, Part 2

I'm using a leak of W8M3!

There was not a narwhal in the Thames when I was in London

Stuff happened.  Here might be a picture or two.  I think I'll rewrite all this once I'm back home.  If I add a rewrite, I'll link to it.

Rant About Nothing Important: Not spell-checked, copied verbatium as an unpublished reply to a Facebook comment thread on a friend's status: Title possibly longer than the post

I thought it was the stupid "post your bra colour" again and was hoping to disrupt it, seeing as the word orange can be used both as a colour, fruit, or mobile telephone operator.  If you really want to raise awareness of an issue, use the "share link" box and post a link to the organization you are currently passionate about with some text on top explaining why your issue is important.

Lt. Ducksworth's Angry Souls Travel Blag, Part 1

Since I promised irregular updates, here's the first part of an ongoing series of attempts to document my travels in Europe. Since it is obvious to all that this one is written well after the fact, here are some of my recollections of the first month or so. I'll eventually get up a list of trips, tricks, pointers, and whatnot after I'm back in the US.

First, I went to Chicago.The night I stayed there, I went up the Sears Willis Tower and got some pictures of the street below by night. At Jimmy John's they had some bread so French it must be liberated. The next day, before my flight, I walked down the street from my hotel taking pictures, including the one of my hotel at right. My father and I later visited the aquarium to fill the remaining time before I was to meet some of my classmates at the airport. I didn't get to meet my friends there, but I'm planning on doing so when I have to leave the UK.

The events at the airport made me realize why so many others say they hate flying. It wasn't playing strip poker with the TSA that was problematic; it was the d~~n employees of working the checked luggage stand. "Put in your card and take a nominal fee" seems to be their solution to everything. They don't even explore smaller nominal fees such as adding a second bag, which is cheaper than having an overweight bag for no reason. I hope never to have to deal with those people again. The flight itself was OK, but leg room was not in large supply in the cheap seats and I couldn't get to sleep. Luckily, the flight attendants were nice.

Going to the manor was fun. I'd elaborate, but I'm tired now. I think I'll describe it in a later post.

After the London trip, also to be described separately, the honours students got the opportunity to visit the town of Irnham, original home of the Lutterell Psalter. This book was commissioned back in the medieval days (remember those?) by Geoffrey Lutterell for his church. This book contains fantastic illuminations in the margins with all kinds on wonderful and bizarre grotesques among much more normal scenes of the daily life of the peasants, an extreme rarity for those days when illuminations were only about the rich landowners who commissioned them.

That's it for this update. I'll post the London stuff later and will probably end up blogging about this long after I'm back in the US.

Lt. Ducksworth's Angry Souls Travel Blag, Part 3

As an ongoing effort to document my misadventures in Europe, here's a rant about debit cards while it is still fresh in my mind.

Why can't my card just work? Seriously, this is ridiculous. When I speak to the fraud detection department of a bank and they tell me that everything is just fine, I expect to be able to buy my train and TSO tickets with absolute no difference from the times when my card worked. I don't know if it is a problem with Visa or my bank, but someone's not doing their job here. If there are lingering problems in a different department of the bank, don't tease me by letting ATM transactions through but not an online payment. This is really like none other.

The Vibe: New Decade

The Vibe: New Decade: "http://123.qqq.com/It's a new decade no, so don't be alarmed when things change suddenly."

It's hard to believe that I was blogging before I was born

The Vibe: Insomnia

The Vibe: Insomnia: "It sucks."

This is a test post!

New Year's Resolutions & Whatnot

So, I've found out that being in college doesn't leave much time (or willpower) for blogging. Anyway, here are some resolutions for those who want to hold me accountable to them.

• Write 4 hours of music this year and have 2 hours ready to give to people for final changes
• Get back in percussive shape

I'll see what I can do about these, seeing as I'll be in England the next 4 months for studying abroad, so I feel the summer would be the best time to get these done. The only possible monkey wrench I see is if I get a full-time job in the summer.

Anyway, I'll see if I can finally post some of my draft posts after I finish upgrading my HDD and migrating all my files

Insomnia

It sucks.

Bricks

I hate 'em. More accurately, I hate sand and gravel.

New New Beginning (for real this time?)

It's been a day shot of a calendar year since I said I'd update more and updates still aren't happening.  College does that to you.

Anyway, I updated the layout here in an attempt to make myself post more and make this blog useful.  I won't promise regular updates like last time, but I'll at least try to post some of my more coherent ramblings here and possibly some music-related things if I can get back to having the time to be musical.

I also upated the layout and design of my other blog and it now looks vaguely like Steam.  That is all for now.  I don't want to post too much before sleepiness takes away my coherency. 

New Begining

So I moved from my old site at http://wastespace.blogsopt.com to here and retitled the blog. I used to blog here, but then I discovered Facebook, which made it easier to do many of the things I previously did on this blog. That's why I stopped blogging. I'm going to do some restructuring of the blog and I'll post more when I have time.

Vacation 2007 Review

It happened, then I forgot to blog about it

Vacation 2007 Days 4-6

It's only 9:56PM, but it feels as if it were 23:00 in Ohio. Things really do happen earlier in Maine than they do in Ohio.

Tuesday

On Tuesday, I went to the Blue Moose Cafe in Blue Hill. The food was good, and so were the portions - although I should have had a more seafood-oriented meal. After that I had to wait for about an 15 minutes for my mom the finish writing some postcards to her family while I was outside waiting to go back to the Dragonflye (that is how they spell dragonfly) Inn. That evening, I went on a 3.5 mile hilly bike ride to the beach on the end of the peninsula that we were staying on to the beach. The H₂O was cold, but there were some interesting rock formations to look at. That evening, my family and I discovered that places like to close up shop early in this area, so we had to buy some rotisserie chicken at the store and then drive 15 minutes back to our inn. While we were there, someone made the bad decision to eat outside and enjoy the view. Unfortunately, it was dark and the mosquitoes were abundant. That just REALLY TICKED MY OFF. (Shouting necessary.)

Wednesday

Yesterday, I went to Bar Harbor, which will be described in a separate post because I am too tired

Today

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I'll edit this post with details tomorrow or on Monday.

Vacation 2007 Days 1-4

I'm on vacation in Maine right now, and the weather is cold. On the way here, I stayed at the The Stagecoach Inn, a very nice bed and breakfast near Ben and Jerry's in Vermont. The next day, I went to Ben and Jerry's and ate some ice cream and brought a patch to put on my letter jacket and see if anyone notices. I'm surprised that vacation is almost half-over already - 3 days in the car causes you to lose track of time. I'll post more while I'm at The Dragonfly Inn, and once I get back, I'll post a whole post with everything.

"I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!!!": Who knew that little children could be so violent?

Last week, I marched in the Memorial Day Parade (the largest one in the state) with the band. It was long and boring, but the events that happened at the after-parade BBQ were almost worth it. At the BBQ me and some of my drum line friends were hanging out when Catherine showed up with Jimmy little sister, Ava. Ava then went around and spanked random people and/or grabbed onto their leg and refused to let go. Later on, my sister, Theresa comes into our group and grabs onto my leg and refuses to let go, and she is significantly heavier than Ava. Things got interesting when Ava spanked Theresa. Theresa then started to fight with Ava, causing Pablo to say "Holy $#!&, dude, look at sMatlak's sister." Immediately afterwards, Ava chased Theresa shouting "I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!!!" as loud as she could. All I can say is that I never knew that small children could be so violent.

Test Post

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Powered by ScribeFire.

Oh nine, eff nine! Eleven O two! Nueve dee E three five be dee eight forty-one-fifty-six. See five sixty and three fiftysix eighty-eight see zero!

I think you already know what this post is about.

The Zebra

Last weekend, I went out and competed with the Drum Band. We ended up with 9^th place in PSA with a score of 89.90. However, if we got our prelims score of 91.9, we would have gotten 5^th. Anyway, for the last 2 weeks, the people @ my lunch table have been trying to get Digby to fit 10 zebra cakes into his mouth. The results were quite amusing, as the following pictures show. He tried to put the cakes into a mass, but he failed after only about 4.32 of them. We then put the remains into my empty lunchbag, and then put the lunchbag into Steve's backpack. You may want to note the look of shock on Digby's Girlfriend's face.

Drum Band

These don't need an explanation - drumlike is 73h 1337!

Flordia, Walt Disney World, Corporate Branding, ect...

I've been busy for the last three months. Here is what I have been doing:

Florida

I was in Florida with the band from Dec 27 to Jan 2, although on the start/finish dates I was actually on a bus in between locations. In general, I noticed a surprising lack of metal detectors.

Pet Co

On the first day of Florida, I went to Epcot, which is a hidden anagram for Pet Co. When I played the virtual-reality game (sponsored by IBM, the hidden name from HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey) in the future building (also by IBM), I thought about just how corporately branded all of Disney is. From there, the corporate branding only got worse. All the drinks were Coke, but there was not a single Cherry Coke in all of Disney World. I had to suffer with the refreshing bubbles of Sprite and the foul tasting Florida water, which should not taste any different from any other water because it should still be H₂O. This obviously means that the Floridan water has more impurities than my regular Ohio water.

Next, I found the belly dancing Moroccans. They had a drum-tar in their band. Also in Morocco, sBodkin brought a wood staff for about 38.00 USD.

In the Mexican exhibit I went with some friends on the log boat ride. When we were in the restaurant ares, we gave out a massive "O-H," and no one responded. More later, you'll know when you see it.
Finally, I spent US $20 on a pair of orange light up drumsticks. The other colours were purple (a bit dim), green, and blue.

Planet Hollywood/Downtown Disney

After Petco, I went to Planet Hollywood and Downtown Disney for food. After eating at Planet Hollywood and getting a free coupon without any visible expiration date (so I can use it on future trips), I went to the magic mart with Boso. There he brought a deck of cards with a self-contained wizard. The wizard would take any card that you put on the floor and using Wi-Fi technology, would than proceed to transfer it into his hand in a smaller form. After that, I went with Alb, sBrodkin, and Sco to Pleasure Island, igniting a potentially offensive comment about Alb and a car that was displayed for its tires. (But what would happen to your business if all 150 cars were used at the same time?)

Finally, while I was hanging out with the Drumline, we got kicked off the stairs where we were hanging out on because there were about 2x10³ people waiting to use the stairs because a show just ended. We tried to count them, but it was a futile effort. We [the Drumline & CO.] then realized that we didn't have anything to do, and about 30 minutes (1800.00 seconds) left before we could get back on the buses. What we decided to do was play cards outside the park and wait for the buses. Of course, we got bored quickly, so we went over to random people and had Boso do his card trick. {I got videos of a few, but the only worthwhile one was the one that gave me the idea to record, so it is from pure memory.} The best moment was when we went up to a group of Guard girls and one of them (I don't know her name) said, "I don't associate with weird people," to which one of us (I don't remember who) asked, "Then why are you associating with yourself?"

Then I slept from about 1:00 AM to 5:45AM.

The Magic Kingdom

The Magic Kingdom, filled as usual. I arrived at a comfortable early time and rode the monorail. However, there were still lots of people waiting in line... The first thing I did was the City of the Future ride. One of the most uneventful rides possible (although a portion was in the dark - "It's dark, so now we can make out!".) However, I would ride this several times later in the day to fill time.

Next was Space Mountain. The line was deceptively short. It was only about 20 minutes before the line went inside, however, once we were inside the building, there was an additional 1.59-hour wait. I liked the ride, but it was not worth the wait.

From then on, our group mostly wasted time looking at things and making fun of any flaws in spelling/grammer/logic in the park's signs and rides. After lunch I waited with some people for about an hour for the must un-haunted haunted house possible using Euclidean geometry. Finally, it rained and we rode a train and made some conclusions about last night and talked prepared the following story about why the Lemur kid would be late. (The Lemur kid didn't fall of a train this year, but that is a completely separate story.) I hoped that it would cancel the parade that I had to march in, but my hopes fell short. However, the plan fell through, because by the time we got there, we were too late to tell the story with any good humor (tell the "why I'm late story when you are 15 minutes early), nor were we late. The story, as best I can remember is (please leave a comment if I'm wrong):

You see Mr. Band Director, he was in the arcade with some friends when he decided to leave, however, he saw a game of Centipede which he just had to play. He decided to go to the coin changer and got 50 credits, only to discover that Centipede cost 55 credits to play. (What king of stupid video game costs 55 credits to play?) While going to the coin changer to convert his 5 credits, he finds that his wallet was stolen. About 18 minutes and 72 seconds later he found his wallet with 17.52 USD more than he left it with. In a completely expected and not ironic twist, he found that exactly 27.23 USD was counterfeit and π (pi) cents were counterfeit Canadian money. He then decided to go after the Canadian Mafia....

From there, we would make the story up, but we never had to use it.

The parade want on as normal, and nothing too eventful happened there, except that I saw Backstage Disney. I seriously thought that they would erase my memory because of the high security that they put into there (exploding briefcases, locked doors, high cliffs, ect...) However, I saw a genie and concluded that they are building an Aladdin ride (please let me know when it opens). I also saw the plain back to what is commonly known as the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. After the parade, we stayed for the fireworks. Thse were good, with the finale being a round so intense that it was brighter than day and you could feel the radiant heat, but then it all stopped at once. Finally, I rode the monorail back to the buses.

Sleep = 2:00AM-6:30AM

MGM

This morning I woke up, went to breakfast, and packed. Then I realized that my wallet was missing! I did a through search of the hotel premises and concluded that it was for real gone, even though I had it when I was eating breakfast, so I left a lost item report. However, the chaperones and the New Horizons travel staff (I think his name was Dave) were very helpful, and got me into the park and lent me some emergency cash to get me through the day.

When I was in the park the most amazing thing happened. After getting in without my original ticket thanks to the travel plan, I found my friends and went on the Hollywood Tower Hotel. When my group got on the elevator, we discovered that there was one Michigan fan, and that everyone else supported OSU (this was before the fumbled National Championship game). So whenever the elevator was at its climax, we all gave a hefty O-H! and at the bottom the rest of us responded with an enthusiastic I-O! Also, considering the amount that we fell, the amount that we were shot up inside the elevator was suspiciously little, at most four floors, and most of our drops were about six floors. I was smart enough to figure out that while we were in the obligatory introduction chamber and watching a video, the floor was slowly rising (I felt it.) This was similar to the previous day's haunted house where the punch line was "are you going crazy, or is the room growing taller?" (I suspected that that one was a ceiling raise because I did not feel any movement, or it was really smooth.) Finally, after being boosted the first four floors, the elevator moved outwards to the drop zone. At that moment, someone shouted "Elevators aren't supposed to go sideways!!," at which point we got into a brief discussion about the Great Glass Elevator at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Fun times, that ride was.

Next, we went to the Great Movie Ride and smashed 7 people into one row and during lunch the said Lemur guy got yelled at by a chaperone. He was called out because he was alone, even though he is legally an adult, and has extra privileges over the majority of the students on the trip. ("What do you mean that I should set a good example for the other band members!? Should I not vote to discourage them from underage voting?!") Also, there was a skywriter who displayed messages from God. Nothing else too important happened that at the park, baring that some freshman n00b was late getting back, and had to spend the next day with Mr. Maynard.

When I got back at the hotel in T (a Double Tree, much nicer than the Disney hotels), I found out that about 30 minutes after I had first discovered that it was lost, it was found in Planet Hollywood, even though I was staying in the All-Star Music Resort. All the cards were in their correct places, butt [oops, the other but(t)] the money was gone. Luckily, I had already spent most of the money, so I didn't loose too much. I the proceeded to make a 30 minute phone call home, breaking my previous record of longest phone call by about 10 minutes.

Sleep? 12 Midnight - 6ish AM

Sunday

First was a long, and painful band rehersal. Playing the Beach Boys for four hours can suck the fun out of anybody's life. Worst of all, some of the other bands got water bottles, and we didn't.

Next was the Ybor City Parade. It was short and not too painful, and we didn't get into the top three places. Then the fun began...

Bush Gardens (New Year's)

not much to say... another amusment park, another crowd...

sleep: 2:00AM - 5:30AM

The Outback Bowl

We banded real good, then went home. 17 hours goes by quickly when you are sleeping/telling bad puns.

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Finally, I took a Political compass quiz some time ago.

"Governments should penalise businesses that mislead the public." A bit ambiguous. Does it refer to businesses that lie or those who advertise only the "good" aspects of their services or products?
"Are the rich taxed too much?" Taxed too much in reference to everyone else, or are they being forced to pay more than their fair share?
"Multinational companies are unethically exploiting the plant genetic resources of developing countries." I don't understand the issues here. I usually don't read this type of international news, so I don;t know what they event that they are talking about.
And what is with the page on sex?
Anyways, I got Economic Left/Right: -2.75 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -0.15

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Note: I've been really busy with Winter Drum Band and winning first at all of our shows, so I haven't posted this until now.