Alphabet soup

Who decided to put the letter N right next to the letter M, when they're so similar? They should be apart, like O and Q are. I and J have some of the same characteristics, too, what with the dots they both have. Odd.

For Example

I just posted a status of "If no news is good news, what does that make good news?" on Facebook.

I then proceeded to delete any comments made on it.



Also, this blog title won't make sense for a while. Be patient.

Go jamba-jam!

Tonight, I happened to be listening to two very different, and both rather strange, songs on youtube. After I had listened to them back-to-back, I was struck with how weird they are. I figured I'd let you guys "enjoy" them. :P



and




Which song is better? Compare and contrast.

Tpying

As you may have noticed, sometimes when people are typing quickly, they will mess up words. Often, the person is trying to get two letters out, and will hit one key beofre the other key, rather then the other way around. I have left the word "before" in the last sentence as an example of this.

Now, some of the time, the word that results from this mistake is actually more interesting looking or more entertaining than the original. I recently typed "Snet" instead of "Sent". I think we can all admit that snet is a much spicier word. I also like the word "stpuid" instead of "stupid". It has an iorny to it.


I'm naming this type of messed-up word "wrods", and I'm also planning to use wrods whenever I can get away with it. But only if they're funny-looking.

A few quotes

I like quotes. Not just the good ones. I like the ones that are purposefully bad as well. They get the same point across, but they force you to think about them a bit more. Here are a couple as examples.

"Never judge a book by its content."

"Life: it goes away if you close your eyes."

Song One: New York Night

This is the (chronological) first song in the musical project that I'm working on, tentatively titled A Jolly Good Musical. I'm planning to write a total of 12 songs, which, when put together, will tell a complete story. Each song is like an episode, and will be a fairly self-contained story that should feel as if it belongs to an actual musical play, but all 12 songs together will tell the story perfectly fine, without any extra dialog besides what I may throw in at the beginning and end of each song.

Just for the record, I am employing unnecessarily detailed stage directions as a way to get the story across as well as the occasional good-sized amount of dialog.

Anyway, I might improve upon this song in the future, since I don't think it's quite the literary rhyming masterpiece it could be. Comments are welcome and wanted.



1. New York Night

    In New York, two figures walk down a street, dodging into alleys and dark corners, while glancing furtively around.

    Street lamps light the way on the otherwise empty street.

    This being a musical, one of the men, Simon Privett, spontaneously breaks into song.

Simon:
It's twelve o'clock; the witching hour
the night is dark and damp and dour
but in the town
no lights are down
The street venders are out and hawking flowers

People bustle about just like busy bees
Jostling each other with never a "please"

And that's terrible-

    The shorter and more portly man, Ed Hoff, comments.

Ed:

Quite!

Simon:

But it's still alright

So long as you can avoid their fleas.

Tonight I find myself out on the street

Enjoying the non-fresh air on my two feet

With this guy Ed

Who's my dear friend
I've just finished a job to make ends meet.

Ed:

"A job," he says. That's rather droll

We're not out here for a simple stroll

We're on the run

For a con we've done

And now escape is our only goal

Somewhere behind a store clerk waits
Though to be fair, I doubt he hates
us since he's Amish

despite our con-

    Simon breaks in innocently.

Simon:

...ish.

Ed:

I'm sure he'll forgive us post-haste!

    Up the street, a trio of policemen show up, dressed in the old-fashioned costumes of the 1920's. They proceed to peer suspiciously and authoritatively into every window of every shop along the street, almost bumping into each other as they go.

    They resemble three of those rocking toys that flip back up after being tipped over.

Cops:

It's twelve o'clock on a New York night
Us New York cops have just begun the fight

Cop 1:

I'm a New York cop

Cop 2:

And I'm here to stop

Cop 3:

This enormous thief-and-scoundrel blight.

Cops:

You'll find in each nook and cranny in town

A crook or a fiend or merely a clown

We'll get Simon and Ed

be they alive or dead

It'll give us a smile, and give them... a frown.

    Up ahead, Simon and Ed continue the song.

Ed:

If we are caught, we're out of luck

In a pickle is where we will be stuck

Since to be clear
We stole a deer

Simon:

But come now, who'll miss just one buck?

And after all, the venison's gone

Been in our stomachs for far too long
And I would hate

To regurgitate

A meal that makes my body strong.

    The cops still search fruitlessly.

Cop 1:

They're over here, by this dead end.

Cop 2:

No, I see them here, just around the bend.

Cop 3:

This won't do

We need a clue

Let's all question this by-standing bartend.

    By now they've worked their way up to where Simon and Ed are. Ed is leaning on a barrel by the side of the road, wearing a false mustache. Simon is nowhere to be seen.

    The cops approach Ed, having mistaken him for a reliable witness.

Ed:

You say the manhunt must be directed?

By an informant, no doubt respected?

Two sneaky crooks

With dashing good looks

Just hopped a train for New Jersey directed

Cop 1: (spoken)
New Jersey! There's not a moment to lose!

Cop 2:

Have a tip for your trouble, good sir.

The cops leave. 

    Ed removes his false mustache and Simon emerges from the pork barrel that Ed is leaning on.

Simon: (slow)

It's twelve o'clock in New York state

Gone are the cops we love to hate

As they chase a wild goose

It is time to cut foot-loose

Moving the opposite direction is our fate

    With this said, Simon and Ed nimbly scoot off into the night.

Coming soon.... ~ Song Two: Trains and Revenge

Those tags...

I dunno. I might do them sometime. I don't have anything else to blog about, and the last suggestion I got was to wait until Easter, which isn't that far away.

Anyone have thoughts on the matter?

My storytelling career

(If the post below seems less lively than usual, it's because I wrote it for several essay competitions. Since a lot of them ask for a "personal experience", I just copy and paste the same essay, to save time. And now I'm reusing it as a blog post, too. I'm so economical.)

    I have always been an avid storyteller. My love for narrative was what drove me to achieve one of the larger accomplishments of my life: getting published.

    I started writing at the age of eight. I couldn't actually write words very well at the time, but I had many ideas for stories, so I drew a long series of cartoons about an adventurous baby named Jeff. Jeff braved villainous pirates, volcanoes, and ancient pyramids, and flew his own airplane, despite not even being one year old. Around the age of twelve, I graduated from making comic strips to writing stories, starting with a series about a bumbling detective named Blumber. Eventually, after a few years of writing, I decided to take the initiative and attempt to publish something. 

    In order to reach my goal, I first had to research the different short story markets available. I looked on the internet to try to find magazines, but had to sift carefully through the barrage of possibilities to find the best ones. Only a few magazines would accept the type of fiction I wrote, and I needed to match the genre, style, and word length with the sort normally published in each magazine. Eventually, I found a good one: Stone Soup, a magazine that publishes the work of children thirteen years old and younger. At the time, I was still young enough to be published in it, so I sent in my first Blumber story. It wasn't accepted.

    Not to be deterred, I pressed on past the rejection, and decided to try sending another story to Stone Soup. This time, however, I wrote the story with the Stone Soup magazine firmly in mind. I had noticed that the magazine liked stories that were on the serious side, with morals to them, and so I modeled my story accordingly. I also added one of my favorite plot devices, a twist ending, waiting until the end to reveal that the setting for the story was on the Titanic.

This made the story fresh despite its slightly hackneyed moral. This time, my story was accepted by Stone Soup. 

    By applying the lessons learned from my Stone Soup experience, I have had another article published, this time in Cicada, a prominent literary magazine for teenagers. The initiative and persistence that I put towards research and writing for a specific market led to success. By using these skills, I plan to continue widening my literary horizons, and hope to one day become an official, self-supporting author.

It's February 14th, and you know what that means...

It's President's Day Eve!

That's right, tomorrow is the one day in year that we celebrate the birth of good ol' George Washington. Now, interestingly enough, I have learned from three or four separate people today that this day is also the date of another celebration. This celebration, according to them, is called "Singles Awareness Day".

Now, why on earth someone would pick the eve of President's Day to be Singles Awareness Day is beyond me. I've racked my brain trying to come up with a correlation, and the closest one that I can find is that George has been called the father of our country, a possibility that would require him to no longer be single. However, I have to say that this correlation is tenuous at best.

Perhaps instead Singles Awareness Day is meant to help raise marriage rates in order to revive the US of A. But I'm afraid that I'll have to remain forever clueless about the true meaning of this strange happenstance.

Hope you have a good Sunday, regardless of what holiday it may be.

Maybe This One

One aspect of my blog is the little clickable check boxes under each post. I customized them to give "dumb", "odd but cool", and "42" as the options for "other ppl's yodelin". (I had to use the abbreviation in order to fit "yodelin" into the word limit. I think we all know that yodeling is more important than proper spelling.) 

Anyway, people hardly ever click on them, and sometimes I have a hard time telling if they have, since I sometimes randomly click them myself. 

Also, none of the information you have just read matters in the slightest, but that is the point of a blog.

But Not This One

Often, I think that my post titles promise more entertainment to the reader than the actual blog post contains.

 I mean, my last one was "Sherlock through the Looking Glass", for crying out loud. And then the post just had a little paragraph from Wikipedia, of all places.

However, this particular post won't be like that. This time, the title doesn't even make sense until you read the entire post, and, by the time you finish it, you probably won't be able to tell which is more clever.

Sherlock through the Looking Glass

"In his memoirs, Conan Doyle quotes a reader, who judged the later stories inferior to the earlier ones, to the effect that when Holmes went over the Reichenbach Falls, he may not have been killed, but was never quite the same man. The differences in the pre- and post-Hiatus Holmes have in fact created speculation among those who play "The Great Game" (making believe Sherlock Holmes was a historical person). Among the more fanciful theories, the story "The Case of the Detective's Smile" by Mark Bourne, published in the anthology Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, posits that one of the places Holmes visited during his hiatus was Alice's Wonderland. While there, he solved the case of the stolen tarts, and his experiences there contributed to his kicking the cocaine addiction."


~Wikipedia

All the ax-murderers work at candy shops

All the ax-murderers work at candy shops

Slicing licorice with machetes

Roiling gumdrops in vats

Pulling taffy cautiously

Wax lips are cherry-red

Smiling

Smiling for you

Eyes flick over rows of cotton candy

Never stopping, working behind the counter

And giving you a lumpy paper bag

With a surprise inside

I wrote that poem late at night, after having the titular phrase kicking around my head for a while. I like it cause it has a stylized feel to it, since it combines two concepts which are both very stylized: the card-carrying, bloody-blade-swinging, psychopathic ax-murderer, and the colorful, innocent, infectiously sugary candy shop. I suppose it's more evidence of my taste for the creepy and the whimsical. You guys have been getting a lot of that lately... I hope you don't all think I'm disturbing now.

The Pear: Part 5

And now, dear readers, we come to the chilling, thrilling, and twist-end-spilling conclusion of the Pear Saga. This final chapter will have you glued to year seats! It's dramatic! It's hilarious! It's heartwarming! And yes, it's groovy, too!

Ready? Reeeady?

So there I was one night, thinking to myself... "That poll's been over with for over a week now. I really should do something." The poll results, for those of you incapable of looking three and a half inches to the poll on your right, were 6 votes in favor of pear consumption, and five votes in favor of pear protection and release into the wild.

So, by a slim margin, the indiscriminate Powers That Be have determined Lemuel the pear's death by molars. I decided to do something about it, and so dug Lem out from the freezer, in which he had been frozen for about two weeks. He was rock solid, and well-frosted, so I stuck him in the fridge to thaw while I was at school.

Here comes the twist ending, which those of you with either preceptive minds, mothers, or perhaps even both, may already be able to guess.

My mom threw it out.

When questioned, she gave the reason behind her action as, and I quote, "It was turning black." I must admit that this is a strong argument for Lem's burial in compost. And, since I had actually placed two votes myself in favor of eating, which may have conceivably skewed the results, I have decided to officially settle for the runner-up at the poll and allow Lemuel the escape into his natural habitat that he so richly deserves.

I hope that we can all keep Lem in our hearts and minds, and, as I close what has proven to be a scintillating and informational epic, I say these words to that lone pear, now alone at last to rot in the no doubt exhilarating comfort of decomposing vegetables: Good night, and good luck.

Uh huh, Sure

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his English class one day. "In English," he said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

Roses Are Red

So I've been trying to come up with a clever idea for a valentine for my dear eldest sister, who's off in college and appreciates my sense of humor. Once again, V-day has sneaked up on me, and, once again yet again, I am put on the spot to try to think of clever things to put in my valentine's cards to family members. After all, the only other alternative is something mushy, which is obviously out of the question. Good ideas never seem to jump out at me to begin with, but I've always managed to pull through with them every year.

The "Roses are red" type poems are fun to compose, so I've been trying to think of some. Here's a few that have been made up by either myself or my family.

At first I thought of this one, which reflects my feeling on my current ability to compose clever poetical statements:

Roses are red

Violets are blue

This poem is very

Pid comma stu

It took a while for some people to get that one... Anyway, this next one was inspired by the movie Up, and cracks me up every time I read it:

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Elly is dead

And soon Carl too

It's proof that I have a sadistic sense of humor. And if you've seen the movie, the extra emotional attachment improves the joke. :)

My favorite is still the poem that my brother Eric came up with last year, though, and so I'll end with it:

Roses are red

Monkeys have bones

I'd give you my heart

But I'm not Davy Jones

An interesting thought

It would be strange and cool if you actually could send information back in time through the internet, rather than physically. It would have to work differently from normal time travel. Huh.

One Twelveth

I made a resolution for 2010, which is pretty abnormal for me. In fact, it's the first one that I've made in my life.

In the past, I've refrained from making any resolutions. This is because I know that, due to the fact that I'm a very unmotivated person, I would never finish any resolution worth making. Another thing I've been a little too apathetic to try is "shooting for the stars", eg. trying to accomplish something that seems impossible. I'd like to say that I'm now trying both, but the truth is that I'm only taking up my new resolution because it does seem doable.

Okay, okay, I know you're all just dying to learn what my resolution is. This year, I plan to A) finish a novel I'm writing and B) send it in to an agent or two.

This actually seems worthwhile, and this year would be the best time to do it. We'll have to see whether my procrastinating and apathetic nature puts up much of a fight. So far, I'm 1/12 of the way through the year, and haven't gotten much more then five hundred words written. Me: 0, Failure: 1. But that's alright, I'm optimistic about the next month. After all, I did make a resolution this time. It's mystical powers will save the day in the end, you wait and see.