George Washington Movie

If you're a fan of George Washington and crack cocaine, here's a little clip you might enjoy:

George Washington

Short on cash...

It's been two whole weeks since I killed me a man, and already I'm starting to get the itch. Problem is, I ain't got nothing to scratch. God I'm hungry. Hungry for action. Hungry for blood! Hell...I'm just plain old hungry.

Feel I'm getting weaker, while charlie's growing stronger in the jungle. I can't lose my edge. I've gotta keep my strength up. I've gotta maintain discipline! Because the hard reality is...I've gotta get a job.

No Child Left Behind

Last week, Friday, I think it is, I'm sitting out on a bench in the middle of campus, and I see a bunch of bastards standing around in the middle of the greens, all wearing the same color shirt, balloons tied to shit, handing out flyers. Now, right off the bat I'm calling these people bastards, without knowing their cause. There's a reason for this. Standing around in matching shirts in the middle of a bunch of balloons handing out flyers is not a good way to support a good cause. Example:

I want to save the manatees. How best to do this? Maybe I could collect money for a manatee-related charity, or get a group of people to do this, or possibly just donate some time or work to save the manatees. Maybe I want to raise awareness of saving the manatees. I could tell my friends and family about it, and since they know me, I might have an impact on them. OOooo No! Wait! I've got it! I'll tie balloons to every god damn thing I can, get matching shirts with the money that I could have used to save the fucking manatees, print out a billion flyers that say "SAVE THE MANATEES" in some kind of fucked up handwriting font, and hand those out, and use more money on that, and litter the fucking campus with god damn little blue flyers, and maybe as complete strangers walk by, they will be hit by a fucking bolt of lightning from above, and realize that my cause is just, and I obviously am the man to take advice and life goals from, and they'll go seek out similar shirts to wear as the ones that I fucking have. Yes, and I'll put a Jesus fish on my car as well, and people will see that and suddenly become christian.

No. Bastards who stand around handing out flyers in tacky shirts with their flair littered around the damn quad have a motive, and generally it's 'Being Stupid'. These bastards were no different. I'll finally get to my title, they were promoting the No Child Left Behind act.

Now, there are a lot of things I don't agree with: Eating people, outlawing all sports except polo, even some less-outlandish things like 'Bothering Me', or 'Acting Like Paper Science Is A Real Major', but you have to be so god damned stupid to support the No Child Left Behind act, that it boggles my mind. I seriously can't imagine a group of students dumb enough to think this thing is a good idea.

If you don't know what this is, go to Wikipedia and read the article on it. I was going to sum-up what a fuck-up the whole thing is here, but they've already got it nailed pretty much. One thing they don't point out is how much extra work it puts on the teachers. Good teachers are already overworked. I'm not talking about your art teacher from junior high who spent class passed out behind his desk, I'm talking about teachers who actually care. This act just gives them a ton more work to do, not only stressing them out (my mother was a teacher...), but also detracting from the amount of useful work they can do.

Anyway, if you're part of this new student group and you happen to read this, please just go walk in front of traffic. Try to time it right so you get hit by an suv or something, I don't want you damaging someone's car.

Fun Shirts

Fun Shirts available here. Buy em up! Get one for me! But not the duck.

Air Bags (with cursing)

There's an AllState commercial out right now where a guy notices that he has to stop quickly, drops his coffee in his car, grabs the wheel with both hands, slams on the break, and still ends up hitting the car in front of him. The airbag deploys, and the guy looks like he's still ready for work, and he's glad he's safe.

I have been in car crashes, and this is some bo-shit.

First off, when your air bag goes off, you are not looking good. You are looking fucked up. The air bag is supposed to inflate really fast, and then deflate so that you get a cushion instead of just slamming your head into the wheel. This does not mean that there is no big impact. Your head hits the bag like a the big juicy melon that it is, and you get fucked up, all melon-style.

Secondly, after you go face to face with this exploding sack, you're not glad that it happened. Don't get me wrong, air bags save a ton of lives, and a lot of people are glad later, but when you get your brain smashed around during your accident, you don't know what the shit is going on. Hell, you probably don't realize you're human, or in a car. The last fucking thing you are is glad that anything happened.

Just made me think. Very untrue portrayal of the air bag. I just don't want you to be disappointed if you're ever in a crash. It's not as cool as they make it seem.

Priority Scheduling for Cheerleaders

The issue of priority scheduling for cheerleaders is being discussed in Miami Administration, apparently. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it. Currently, all the sports people get priority registration so that they can get the classes they need, and not have them interfere with their sports. Cheerleaders, however, have to register with all the non-sports people. I guess I look at it this way:

To me, my studies are the most important aspect of my college type stuff. That means classes. To football, soccer, baseball, cheer leading, whatever, they have either a mixed priority between scholarly and athletic pursuits, or their atheletic stuff is their priority. So, according to that, here's how it should go:

If you're just focused on academics, you should get first choice on classes
If you're doing other stuff along with classes, guess what? You've chosen to split your priorities, and thus you have to deal with it, something that schools generally don't make athletes do.

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, since athletes do bring a lot of attention to a school, they get priority treatment, and I guess honestly I can't argue with that. It's advertising. But if every sports person gets priority, so should cheerleaders, I guess.

Give The People What They Want

Pappy always said: Give the people what they want

In that spirit, here you go:

Live Webcam Action

As near as I can figure, that's a Japanese laundromat. As of posting, somebody's got laundry in the third dryer from the right, but nobody is sitting and waiting. I'm going to watch until they come back.

Presentation Day

Today I had a big presentation to give in Software Engineering class. While only technically presenting to 6 people, this was by far the biggest presentation I've ever had to give, because the people weren't just noob students; they were important technology people from JPMorgan Chase, and some consulting firm. I know we did ok, and I feel like we did well, but I can't tell if we were great. Also, I don't know if I used the ';' mark correctly up there.

Anyway, presentations make me really nervous, so I was nervous for this presentation (that's an inference you should have been able to derive if you've made it through 8 weeks of Artificial Intelligence Class, but not all of us have). Got through it ok, and now I feel a lot better. Unfortunately, I have three tests this Thursday, and two of them promise to be quite difficult.

Jon and Sheena are back into World of Warcraft.

So there's an update on my life. Hope you're doing well too.

Tall Stacks

Today I went down to Cincy and had dinner on a river boat and rode up and down the river for the Tall Stacks festival. I didn't bring a camera, so I do not have any pictures, but I will tell you that there were a lot of river boats. Dinner was wonderful, and we spent a while just lounging on the deck watching all the other boats as we went by.

The entire thing was courtesy of Amber's mother, and we went with her and Amber's brother who was down from college. That's all I've got for you! Sorry there are no pictures, there were certainly some cool boats.

And Some Niceness

A tidbit I found on DeviantArt that brightened up my day:

When I See You Smile

U.S. Driving Statistic:

There is an accident in this country every 5 seconds.

STOP FUCKING DRIVING SO MUCH

You can walk there, seriously. And you need to. Freakin' fat-ass.

You Are My Buddy, Buddy

There has been a lot of activity in my blog lately, and I for sure do not want to disappoint, so here's some more for you:

I am on myspace now. My myspace page thingy is:

http://www.myspace.com/bigdave_smith/

MySpace is a piss-poor attempt at a social networking site, but it caught on, and people use it, for good and for evil, and since I do both those things, I joined. I am also on Facebook, however I am there for educational networking purposes, and evil purposes, and not good purposes. This brings me to my topic of the hour:

Friend is defined by some dictionary as: a person whom one knows and whom one has a bond of mutual affection.

That's what a friend is. So if you met me once, or someone you know talked about me once, I am not your friend. Now, words are just words, and if social networking sites used the term 'friend' or 'buddy' or 'amigo' or 'acquaintance' it wouldn't matter, but the point is that if I don't know you, I don't want you on my friend list, because I don't give three flying poops what you're doing. If you really think I should know what you are up to, talk to me, and inform me, and we will develop a bond of mutual affection, and then I will care. That is the nature of things.

That is all for now. I have class. Databases.

A Tidbit

I love this guy's photography:

Way Beyond The Outhouse

I'm a Bad Person

Okay, so today I was walking around campus early in the morning, and the people were few in number. So I'm passing this girl/woman, and she's Muslim or something, because she's all hidden in clothes and whatnot. So it occurs to me to wonder whether or not she has long hair, or short hair. Now, me being prejudice, I assume she has long hair, because in a culture where you're not allowed to show your body like, at all, I doubt they would tolerate short and sassy hair. But so I'm wondering what her hair is like, and if I can tell anything through the like...whatever she's wearing, and it's hard to imagine hair just on a head, because you need to know more, like the person's style, body type, how they walk, etc. There's a lot of stuff that goes into this. So then I start trying to picture what she'd look like without her Muslim robe type thing, and so of course I have to imagine if she's fat or skinny, or athletic, or whatever, and so one thing leads to another, and basically I'm just trying to imagine this Muslim woman totally naked so that I know what she looks like.

Now...isn't that the opposite of the purpose of their hidden-women idea thing? Anyway, it wasn't my fault, because if she just wore some normal damn clothes I probably wouldn't have looked twice at her. And don't call me a pervert, you would have wondered too. And it's not like I was doing it with bad intention, I just wondered if she had short hair or long hair. So anyway. If Allah is out there, chalk up one more reason for me to go to hell, or whatever Muslim hell is. Probably has lots of Americans in it, that's for sure. Don't think I'll mind.

Calvin and Hobbes

Calvin and Hobbes is probably my favorite comic strip of all time. The reasons are too many to list, but I don't need to anyway, because you agree with me, don't you? What's that? You don't? You probably like Kathy, or that stupid Marmaduke, you oaf. Oh look, it's a huge dog, it's doing something, Oh Marmaduke! You bastard. Here, go educate yourself. And go read some Calvin and Hobbes. It will make you feel young again:

Official Calvin and Hobbes Website
Wikipedia: Calvin and Hobbes
Some Calvin and Hobbes Quotes

Musings on average people

Half of the people in the world are above average intelligence, and half are below. That's just the way it is, because half and average, that's what they mean.

Now, you might think right away, or maybe not, that because of that, half the people in the world are smart, and half are dumb. Or maybe that's not 'correct' enough. Maybe half are intelligent, and half are unintelligent. At least, that's what I'd think if I didn't really think about it, but that's not true. That's an abstraction of sorts.

See, if you have like a billion rocks, randomly chosen, half of them are above average quality, and half are below average quality, but until those rocks start turning into gems, they're not really worth shit. So even though half of them are above average, only a small percentage are good.

I'm not saying that only a small percentage of people are intelligent, although that's my suspicion. I'm just wondering where the breaking point is. Not just for intelligence, but for anything. You take 10 people, half of them are below average blank, and half of them are above, but how many are actually blank?