The Wrong Thing

Sometimes I try to say the perfectly wrong thing.

You may think this isn't that hard to do, but it really is.

I know what you're thinking...."How hard can it be to be wrong?"

And I understand your reasoning. Most people look at being right in almost mathematical terms. They think of being right like taking a math test where, for or any given problem, there is only one correct answer and a countably (sometimes uncountably) infinite number of incorrect answers...so if you want to get the wrong answer all you gotta do is write something and you have a 1 over infinity chance of producing the answer you want (sorry, math friends, for treating infinity like a number).

Well, I gotta say that being perfectly wrong is a lot harder than that.

You see, in most day to day situations the right and the wrong answers aren't very clear. We usually deal in shades, and when there are shades we usually have a "more correct" and a "less correct" answer. And when there are degrees, the less correct answers range from "almost plausible" to "so stupid your soul cries."

Here are some examples.

Say a person asks you: "What were the names of the boats Columbus sailed on?"

Correct answer: Columbus sailed on 3 boats: the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria."

More correct answer: Columbus sailed with 3 boats: the Pinta, Santa Maria, and Santa Clara (nicknamed Nina).

Less correct: Columbus sailed on boats with Spanish names.

Even less correct: Columbus sailed on boats with Mexican sounding names.

Least correct: That's a trick question. Columbus wasn't a sailor. Columbus was a detective on a syndicated crime drama featuring Peter Falk. The show was so popular they eventually named a holiday after it."

As you can see. The answer can be traditional. The answer can be more correct and snooty. The answer can be ignorant. The answer can be ignorant and painfully ethnocentric. And the answer can be stupid and a little bit funny.

So, what I'm getting at is there are a lot of wrong answers and each wrong answer (and right answer) has a particular flavor....and somewhere there is the most wrong answer. Finding this wrong answer requires you to 1) know the right answer, and then 2) deviate from that answer as much as possible. This requires skill, and this is why coming up with the worst answer can be a really fun and creative game.

Here's an example of the absolute worst answer.

Last Sunday a girl was telling me about eating disorders. She was telling me the statistics of how many girls have them etc., and I was listening attentively. Now, I agree it's horrible how many people (women in particular) suffer from eating disorders. I also agree that eating disorders, in a large measure, are the result of the unreasonable expectations placed upon women.

But, I also know that there is very little I can do about this, and that I'd much rather laugh than talk about such a depressing topic. So, when she said"Did you know that only 3 percent of women are happy with their bodies?" I thought about all the answers available to me. I weighed the direction the conversation was going. I thought on the objectification of women and how their objectification leads to mental illness and dissatisfaction with life....and I said, "Wow, I bet that 3 percent is really hot."

That, I'm pretty sure, was the worst possible response.

And I'm almost 90 percent sure she knew I was joking.

Anyway, this is a fun game. You should try it out. Just don't play with people who don't like you/are looking for evidence against you/are easily offended. Oh, and don't play this game if you plan to run for public office.

Actually, on second thought, do play this game if you plan to run for public office....it will make your campaign more interesting.

Hope you all have a great day.

Baby Talk

Note: This post has a new title now. The reason for this was I was trying to find a post yesterday and I couldn't because my post titles are so undescriptive. Well, that was one reason. The other was the 1st comment on this post which points out (almost fairly) that I frequently title my posts "update."

Hello Everyone,

Well, first off I wanna say how great it was to have my family together for Christmas. I came back to Utah last week; it was hard to say goodbye to everyone.

One of the best parts of this visit was my little niece, Summer. She is an amazingly cute baby. Somehow her smile is larger than her face, and if you're around her too long it's downright painful because she has more smile endurance than just about anyone, so if you smile back your face starts to hurt.

The only downside of having her with us was her short battery life. She's only awake for a few hours at a time, and she loves to sleep at the worst times...like Christmas morning at 10 o'clock.

Spending time with her made it pretty clear that she's probably going to be an adrenaline junky someday. She likes to be held upside down, she likes flying around like an airplane, she likes being used like a marionette to mimic crazy dance moves (for example: the song "Jump" by Van Halen (with extra high throws in the air when the chorus yells "jump!")).

One time I was even able to rock her to sleep by playing songs with "rock" in the title. I started by rocking her to "Rock You Like a Hurricane" and then I went on to "Rock is Dead" and then "Rock and Roll Band" and then finally the little bit slower "I am a Rock." She was completely out of it by the end.

One thing I don't get about babies is how women talk to them. When Summer would enter a room it was as if every woman in the room were alerted to this by some mysterious extrasensory perception rooted in estrogen.

Once their mysterious extrasensory perception alerts them of the child they surround the mother and baby and then proceed to say the most inane things in a high pitched voice....making sure to say the exact same thing more than once (in case the baby hadn't caught their cryptic message's powerful meaning the first time due to their inexperience with language).

It goes something like this:

"Oh, you're just a little princess aren't you? You're just a little princess AREN'T YOU! Oh, yes you are, you're a little princess."

Then the next woman in the circle has a go and says "You're just so precious! So precious!"

The next lady sees lady #2 is done already, looks down at lady#2 for lack of baby cooing creativity and then starts to showboat a bit with some alternating endearments like "Aren't you just the cutest thing? Oh, she's so beautiful you have a beautiful baby. Yes, you are a beautiful baby aren't you, oh yes, beautiful baby."

As you can see here, that's a person balancing two conversations: one with the baby, and one with the mother. The ability to flatter both simultaneously, and to shift from the high pitched baby dialect to the more formal dialect traditionally used to flatter mothers is a sign that the woman (in this case woman #3) is experienced in the art of baby cooing.

And it goes on like this for as long as the endurance of the baby will allow.

Since I'm not a baby expert I just try to tell the baby things I'd find interesting. For example, when I was home I explained to Summer the etymology of words I liked, how the electoral college alienates voters, and the limitations of the scientific method. I told her to stop me if something didn't make sense or she disagreed.

I took her silence as proof that she is an intelligent and agreeable child.

Oh, and here are some pictures of Summer to give some context to this post.

In other news I did finish that song. Here's the video:

It would have turned out a little better but my fingernails were a bit too short (and I recorded too late in the day so the video is really dark).

I wish I could compromise and only have nails when I'm playing guitar...you know, have retractable claws like a great cat. It's so frustrating to have nails when you're typing or doing something with your hands, but it's even more frustrating to try and play a classical style song when you don't have fingernails...you're just plucking the string with the meaty part of your hand and this is not only uncomfortable, it also sounds horrible.

While recording this song I was so frustrated that I almost went with my sisters to get some fake fingernails.

Cause, you see, my sisters get their nails done ritualistically every time they're both in town. And when they returned from the nail salon after during this last visit they found me sitting on the couch, vulnerable, wishing I didn't have such short and utterly unmusical nails.

When I saw their new long and strong fingernails I thought "that's what I need, I could play with those."

But, that thought was short lived cause then I got to logistics.

To get nails like that would require me to enter a nail salon (and probably be the only guy in said salon). Also, I'd look weird cause I'd only want fingernails installed on my thumb and index finger (is that the right word? "installed"? Does one "install" fake nails? Whatever.)....yeah, I just couldn't make that many compromises.

So, I thought things through and realized that the music would have to suffer for the sake of propriety.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say this morning. Hope you're all doing super.

Hello

Hey everyone,

Sorry it's been so long since I last posted.

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year's. My Christmas was as wonderful as usual, and my New Year's was as uneventful as usual...so by my estimation everything was perfect.

One of the really nice things about Christmas is how it brings the whole family together for a few weeks, and this year was no exception. The Christmas was made even more special because we had little baby Summer with us. She's an amazing baby. She has the perfect temper and she rarely stops smiling.

While we were all together my dad created a minus track for the song "A Final Dream" from the album Beethoven's Last Night so my sister, Katie, could record a lullaby for her baby. She did an amazing job. I can't think of a more beautiful lullaby.

A Final Dream

In other news I tried to record that song I was working on, Asturias, but I really struggled to get a nice recording. My big problem was my fingernails were a little bit too short. Also, I haven't been playing the song much lately so I was a little bit rusty. Hopefully I'll get a good copy finished during the next few days to share on here. That was a really hard song to learn and I'd like to have it recorded.

In other other news, I had a really strange dream a few nights ago. I think it might have been caused by the combination of watching A Christmas Carol and all the family interrogation regarding why I'm not married yet (happens every year around the holidays).

As usual, the marital prodding started out with kind wishes...things like, "I hope you have someone next year" etc. After everyone got that out of their system we started the problem solving portion of the discussion. This goes something like "Well, if you did X then Y would probably happen." You can substitute X with anything from "be kind" to "never take a girl on a date to a hospital," and Y with anything from "not freak people out" to "get married."

Anyway, after defending my singleness (and not even a few weeks ago watching A Christmas Carol) I had a dream where I was sort of put on trial and I had to defend my dating past. I guess that isn't too similar to the situation in the Dickens' classic, but it had a similar feel because I was dressed like Scrooge, it happened at night, and I was constantly referring to everyone ruining my slumber as "spirit."

Actually, now that I think about it there was a little bit of Defending your Life in my dream. That's an older comedy starring Al Brooks where, after his death, he had to defend a few key moments of his life from a relentless prosecutor and show that he had behaved correctly.

Well, in this dream I sat in a remarkably comfortable nightshirt all Scroogelike and I was visited by a spirit that accused me of pushing everyone away. Then, the spirit paraded a whole bunch of girls from my past and I had to explain why things didn't work out.

Sometimes it was really easy. For some all I had to say was something like "She was really really dumb and I only took her on one date cause I thought it would be fun....I stopped calling cause I didn't want to have really really dumb kids." Other times I could say "She wasn't a very good person." After these simple explanations the Ghost would just nod and then move on.

The difficult part was later in the dream. The more recent girls I've dated from the past few years were brought up and they weren't dismissed as easily. Each time one of their faded and slightly translucent images appeared I felt like I was making up excuses. The conviction I felt with the earlier manifestations disappeared. Eventually I just had to admit that, regarding one girl, the thing that had ruined our relationship was fear; I had ruined everything because I was afraid. When I admitted that the spirit looked pretty disappointed with me (always a bad idea to make the spirit mad).

What was the most frustrating was how poorly I argued my position in the dream. I've never been handled so well...that spirit really knew what he was doing. He made me look like a stammering, romantically challenged idiot.

Well, I better get on with my day. That was my dream. I know it was pretty strange. Please keep your psychoanalysis to yourself :) I'm only sharing it cause I thought it was pretty funny. If dreams really are the unsorted files from our daily memories than I think my unsorted files are about 30 percent movies, 30 percent classic literature, 50 percent guilt, and 10 percent basic addition.

Hope you all have a wonderful day!

Engagement Story

I woke up this morning to find an email detailing a very ridiculous engagement story. The story went something like this:

Guy puts ring in girl's milk shake.

Guy challenges girl to milk shake eating contest.

Girl takes contest seriously.

While eating milkshake girl eats ring.

Guy gets worried when she finishes shake and there's no ring in her cup.

Trip to E.R.

Find ring in X-ray.

Everyone is happy, she eats extra fiber, and the ring arrives a day or so later.

Final line of the article paraphrased: "If they can survive this, their marriage will survive anything."

***********************

Okay, so first off, the ring was the real survivor in that story...not their relationship.

Second, I can't help but think this was a bad omen. Did they just clean the ring off and put it on her finger? Someday as she lovingly reaches out her left hand and brushes his face isn't he going to think "That's the ring that was in her poop... now it's touching my face. Awesome."

I think they should have traded the ring in together and then picked out another. I don't see why they were so excited (or at least they appeared to be in the article) about their experience.

Also, if he really loved her he would have dug through her poop for her. That would have been true love. A real test of commitment She could never question his love after that. Also, if they're writing their own vows they could throw something like "in sickness and in...." well, you get the idea.

Who proposes by putting a ring in a milkshake, anyway? That's a bad idea. The best possible scenario is that she sees the ring and then puts a sticky sugary ring on her finger...which can't feel good. The worst scenario is that she chips a tooth on the thing...or she eats it. Not worth it.

My thinking is that the ring in the shake is a Mormon homage to the classic ring in the champagne glass. But the difference is that champagne is clear enough that you can see the ring at the bottom of the glass. Shakes....not so much.

This dudes best bet would have been sticking the ring in a Martinelli's.

Oh, and why on earth would you challenge someone to a speed eating contest when you want them to find something in their food?

There is just so much failure in this story.

I know what you're thinking now....."I'd like to see you think of something better."

My answer to that is "It wouldn't be hard to do better...but it might be a challenge to think of something worse."

Ben Franklin Method: Take the girl flying a kite in a thunderstorm. But, instead of using a key to diffuse the lightning, use the engagement ring.

Kidnapper method: Break into her house (or apartment) at night, throw her into the trunk of your car and drive to the desert. Then, open the trunk, cut her bindings, and wait for her on bended knee. When she finally lifts the dark hood from her head the first thing she'll is her loving (fingers crossed) fiancé. How romantic is that?

The dead body proposal: Have someone call the girl and say that you've died in a car crash along with your immediate family, that she's your emergency contact, and that she's needed to identify your body.

Go to the morgue with ring in hand.

Have the mortician (who's in on this of course) take her to the back to identify the body. When he pulls back the sheet covering your supposedly dead body you reach out your hand (containing the engagement ring) ...as if from beyond the grave.

Or, you could have the mortician say "We found this engagement ring on the body, do you know anything about it?" As she gets even sadder (because now she's lost a fiancé in addition to a boyfriend) you jump up and say "Tadaa!"....then propose.

I know, Romantic right?

The melodramatic: Have two boxes. Tell her to pick one. The inscription on box one reads: "a happy life together." The other box's inscription: "Plan B." In the first box place an engagement ring. In the second....a gun.

Top of a mountain: pretty obvious....propose on a mountain, but if she says "no" you're in real trouble...cause now you gotta walk all the way down the mountain together,,, and if she said "no" I can't help but think conversation would be awkward.

Lord of the Rings proposal: Watch the entire trilogy together. During a bathroom break step outside and dress up like Gandalf. Come back inside, take a knee, and invite her to be your ringbearer...now you can start a whole new "fellowship of the ring."

Fishing: Take her fishing and use her ring as a sinker. Pretend she has a bite and tell her to reel it in. When she sees the ring at the end of her line pretend she caught it in the lake. Declare it a divine manifestation you should be together.

Action movie: Have someone you know dressed in black bump into her, snatch her purse, and run away. You chase him down, heroically knock him unconscious in a scuffle, and retrieve her purse. As you search the "criminal" for identification you find the man had recently robbed a jewelry store (you plant a bunch of fake jewelry on him). As you sort through the fake jewelry you "find" your engagement ring. You grab the ring and say "So, he had this on him...wanna get hitched?"

The honest approach: Take a knee and say, "Hopefully this conflict diamond is the only conflict we'll ever have in our marriage."

Telephone: You remember that old game of telephone...you know, the one where you connect two cups with a string? Well, put a ring on the string and shake the string until the ring makes it to her end. The first thing you say into the cup is "will you marry me?"

Maybe I'll come up with more bad ideas later. I think this enough for now. Hope you all have a wonderful day!

p.s. I just thought of a better way of doing the proposal from the original story.

What if the guy had a fake X-ray made up of a ring in his stomach? He could complain about pain and ask the girl to take him to the hospital. The doctor (who is in on it) could then put the X-ray up on the wall and stare at it. He could point to the ring and say "Well, I think that's your problem..what do you think it is?" Depending on the intelligence of the girl a lot of explanation might not be necessary.

When the ring is discovered you take a knee and give her a substitute ring. You can say something thoughtful like "You're going to carry my children inside of you, the very least I can do is carry your ring inside of me."

Wow, that's terrible.

Roman Holiday

Last night I couldn't sleep so I decided to watch the movie Roman Holiday.

For those of you unfamiliar with the movie here's a little break down:

The movie came out in 1953. It was Audrey Hepburn's first major role and the only film for which she ever won an Oscar. It's a romantic comedy from the Golden Age of Hollywood and a fine example of the postcard genre (a film shot on location capturing the beauty of some exotic place).

The story is about a princess who is fed up with being a princess so she takes a break and runs away. She gets picked up by a reporter played by Gregory Peck. He takes her around town hoping to get a story...and the rest you can probably imagine.

Now, I realize that runaway princess stories are overused. In fact, the princess market might be the only market more saturated than the vampire market...but luckily Roman Holiday isn't your average princess movie.

(Oh, and be careful cause I'm going to spend most of this post talking about the ending so if you're gonna see it you probably shouldn't read much more)

At first the story is very formulaic: the jaded journalist (Peck) sees dollar signs when he meets the princess. But, after a a few scenes of Audrey Hepburn being her incredibly charming and lovable self, Peck's character's interest shifts and becomes more than financial. This is, of course, very formulaic and it leads you to expect that the film will continue in the stagnant romantic comedy genre: 1) secret in relationship 2) relationship secret revealed 3) fight over secret 4) post fight regret causes realization of feelings for other 5) reconcile with new insight into love for other (usually through some thoroughly romantic gesture that depicts the uniqueness and fun of the relationship....then rinse and repeat.

Roman Holiday is a great movie because it gets derailed from this genre at step 2 and it never makes it to step 3. The two begin to care for each other, they eventually kiss (all of this according to the painfully predictable romantic comedy formula)....but then they share a sad parting and walk away from their magical day together. Their lives are both changed and invigorated because of their time together...but they're practical enough to know that their time together, as magical as it was, was just a day and that they now gotta get back to their real lives.

So, he drops her off at her place, they tearfully say goodbye, and they walk away with neither of them expecting to ever see the other again...but of course that's not the case (this may be a twist on the romantic comedy but it's still a romantic comedy) and they see each other the next day.

The next day Peck goes on assignment to a royal press conference. When the princess enters the room she sees him with his fellow reporters and her face pinches with concern. In front of everyone she realizes that she spent the previous day with a reporter who now has the makings of a very salacious story(a princess in a fist fight, spending the night in a strange man's apartment, getting arrested etc.).

Gregory Peck can see that she's shocked and a little scared when she sees him, but he's on the job so he can't tell her that because of his feelings for her he won't use their time together to sell newspapers, so he tells her that she can trust the journalists and he places extra emphasis on the word "trust." She looks relieved (she acts this very well and somehow looks relieved while also looking like she never lost her princessly calm). She walks up and meets the members of the press on the first row and shakes their hands. When she gets to Peck they share an extra warm handshake and she is given the pictures that he was originally going to use as evidence for his article. She smiles to herself when she sees them, tucks them away, and then moves on.

It's such a bittersweet ending. The last scene is amazingly acted. When they shake hands you know they want to say so many things to each other, but they can't cause of everyone else around them. Somehow both actors convey everything they'd want to say to the other beneath the surface: through tension in the eyes, a set to the jaw, a half smile. It is really impressive.

Roman Holiday is a great movie because the end doesn't give you what you want, it gives you what you should want. Both of the characters know that there are two many things separating them. They both know that they can't throw their lives away on a whim. They both know that they can't throw their lives away because of one special day--regardless of how magical that day may have been. And while they both know these things, we as viewers don't. We're so trained to want and expect a relationship to overcome anything, even if the result is damaging.

We enjoy watching a guy throw his career out the window through a bold declaration of love during a board meeting. We enjoy watching a woman spurn all suitors while she wastes the best years of her life waiting for a soldier that might never come home...

But these stereotypes are a little bit different from the love in Roman Holiday, because hopefully, at the very least, these relationships were older than a single day.

The ending to Roman Holiday doesn't attack love, it attacks whim. It attacks the idea that the course of an entire life should be abandoned because of what feels good rather than what one knows is right. It attacks the idea that love can exist between two people who act so selfishly that they'll allow the other person to become something less so they can be with them. At it's most fundamental level Roman Holiday attacks the idea that love exists outside of virtue rather than through virtue.

Anyway, back to the movie. So, they both say goodbye. Bound by their respective duties they part and we as viewers assume that the parting is permanent this time. Both of the characters have grown for their meeting. The princess is more possessed. She's more affirming. She is willing to take risks she never would have before. The reporter is now softer. He now sees that the value of another person goes beyond what he can get out of them.

And I think at heart this is what makes this a good story. Love should, ideally, make you a better person. The stamp of approval that we have for the love between these two is that at the end of the movie they are both better people. But this wouldn't have been possible if they'd been together at the end.

Because if they were together at the end then the princess would still be a whimsical girl who never took control of her life. And if they were together at the end then the reporter would still be a selfish man profiting from the princess's misfortune. But separate...letting the other go...that shows that they really did have noble feelings for the other. That shows that they did really fall in love in a single, wonderful day.

So, this single wonderful day, and the love it fostered, is why this movie is a classic. If they'd gone for the happy ending they'd have changed this movie from a classic love story to a forgettable fairy tale depicting forgettable fairy tale love. It would have removed the feeling of realism and forced a suspension of disbelief.

We'd all have gone along with it I'm sure. We'd have been happy and feeling all warm and fuzzy inside....but we'd also have known that that isn't how it would really have happened. We'd know that in our painfully realistic lives it wouldn't have turned out that way. We'd say "Oh, if only life were like a fairy tale, then I could have something magical like that happen."

So, while this hypothetically happy ending forces resolution, it also leaves us with the sad thought that the sort of chemistry and excitement we just saw only works out in a world where practical considerations are suspended....but Roman Holiday with it's slightly sad ending gives you something so much better than that. It depicts love outside of a fairy tale. It shows love happening in a real world where circumstances can take it away from you...and it reassures us that love can still be magical despite its brevity. Roman Holiday elevates cinematic love to something believable.

Roman Holiday is a beautiful movie because it shows the power and immediacy that love can have in spite of the frustrations and complications of life. But beyond that, and perhaps even more importantly, it shows how love makes people better, even when it's only for a day.

Triceratops

Today I read that some paleontologists in Montana are saying that the Triceratops might not have ever existed.

I need to vent a little on this.

I mean, when I was a kid I loved The Land Before Time, and while the "3 horns" were never as courageous or as kind as the more noble "long necks," they were contributed to the community..and I'd be lying if I said that Sarah never helped Littlefoot out of a scrape.

As a kid I'd spend hours pouring over dinosaur books...trying to figure out who would beat up whom. At the top of my list of pre-historic tough guys was the triceratops. I figured that the triceratops, along with the Tyrannosaurus, were the top dogs of the Jurassic world. I liked T-Rex way more than the triceratops, but I figured with Rex's puny arms and Trike's defensible armor made them a pretty fair match up.

(My plastic dinosaur toys re-enacted this battle many times. According to my scientific battle re-creations, in ancient times the T-Rex usually won the fight by picking the Triceratops up in its jaws and then throwing the Triceratops out of the planter and onto the sidewalk).

Anyway, all I'm saying is that this animal captured my imagination (and I'm sure the imagination of a whole bunch of other kids).

So the question is who do these childhood attacking scientists think they are? What gives them the right to take the triceratops away?

It feels sorta like a betrayal when they try to.

I mean, well, look at it this way. Dinosaurs are fascinating to a kid because they're like science-based dragons. When you're a kid anything big and tough and monstrous (as long as it's not hiding in your closet when you sleep) is awesome. And while it's fun to imagine a dragon, you always know in the back of your painfully pragmatic childhood brain that dragons don't really exist outside of stories.

...But Dinosaurs? Scientists in respectable lab coats tell us all about them. They tell us how big they are, what they would eat, and they give us bones to look at and point to so we can say "See! That existed. That's a fairy tale monster with scientific support!"

Anyway, given that dinosaurs are basically fairy tales that we were told we could believe in, and given that they keep telling us that some dinosaurs never existed....it's sort of destroying one of the things that make dinosaurs so fascinating...that they're something we can believe in.

Dinosaurs are amazing to kids because they're horrific and real.

When you're a kid and you're told that a dinosaur that was accepted as fact never existed, it puts a hole in the imagination. That hole creates a vacuum of cynicism that sucks the rest of the dinosaurs down the ontological toilet.

You can't say "Dinosaurs are real, oh, except that one we told you about... our bad. So, all those daydreams about that dinosaur...yeah, might as well have been about a unicorn."

Also, to make matters worse, we're being told the awful truth about the Triceratops right on the heels of losing Pluto as a planet....this is just too much.

Is there some sort of trend now to take away beloved childhood science? It's like scientists in the exploratory disciplines like astronomy and paleontology can't find anything groundbreaking and new so they're trying to create excitement by attacking iconic things with redefinition.

Well, I say let's get ahead of the game and beat them to it.

Did you know that the big red "eye" of Jupiter really isn't a storm?

Yup, it's just a huge crater because, unlike Earth, Jupiter doesn't have a crack team of oil drillers in space suits lead by Bruce Willis to protect it from rogue meteors.

The pterodactyl? Yeah, it couldn't fly. Take all those daydreams as a kid of soaring through the air held up by the leathery wings of a huge dinosaur and toss them out the window...cause the pterodactyl's wings were used for swimming.

In fact, lets just throw dinosaurs out entirely. The bones we find were actually buried by angels to test the faith of biblcal literalists.

Now that I'm re-reading what I just wrote it's beginning to seem like a rant, so I'm gonna go back to the Triceratops now.

So, here's my problem with these wacky childhood attacking scientists, and their new position on the Triceratops...

What they're saying if I remember right is that the Triceratops is actually the Torosaurus. Supposedly, the Triceratops as we know it is just a Torosaurus in the early stages of development.

But here's the problem I have with that: even as I type Torosaurus my spell check is trying to tell me that Torosaurus isn't a word....this is cause everyone knows about the Triceratops but no one knows about the Torosaurus.

So, why do we have to lose the Triceratops? If there really is only one dinosaur being referred to twice, why are we losing the iconic dinosaur? If the Triceratops is nothing but a nascent Torosaurus, can't we just make the Torosaurus an aged Triceratops?

That compromise could have been made just as easily...only problem is no one knows what the heck a Torosaurus is so no one would care to lose it and the scientists that decided to attack our childhood wouldn't get research money for destroying a dinosaur no one cared about.

So I guess what I'm saying is this is how the conversation should go if someone wants to discuss the loss of a dinosaur:

"Did you know the Torosaurs never existed?"

"I've heard that "

"Yeah, scientists just discovered that it's just a geriatric Triceratops."

"Awesome. Never heard about a Torosaurs before, but I like the Triceratops so it must be cool too."

See? No waves. No controversy...just enlightenment.

We need to fight these scientists. They're the real ones that killed the dinosaurs.

If we don't let them get away with this nonsense we can get them out into the plains of Montana making real discoveries. They could find something like Superomegasaurus--a dinosaur that eats rocks and breathes fire. That would be a discovery that I'd be happy to read about. Yeah, do that...and leave Sarah and Littlefoot alone.

As far as I'm concerned The Land Before Time is an historical document.

Well, that's about all I feel like ranting on today.

In other news today is my dad's birthday. Happy birthday, Dad!

Also, a cool word is brobdingnagian. It means enormous and huge.

Here's a sample sentence: The Triceratops was a brobdingnagian beast.

Anyway, hope you all have a wonderful day.

Random Stuff

First off, here are two words that I've been thinking about lately...

Jehu: this words just means a crazy driver. It's the name of a crazy king and charioteer in the bible.

Pulchritude: this word is great because it sounds nothing like what it means. A girl in my ward asked me how she looked and I told her she looked "pulchritudinous." She almost cried before the dictionary saved the day.

Oh, and the word means "beautiful." Honestly, I don't see why we're so fascinated with Latin. That's an extremely ugly word and it's all Latin's fault.

In other news I haven't posted much lately because I was busy having what might be considered a nervous breakdown. Basically, I holed myself up for a while and didn't do anything (socially at least)...trying to simplify life a bit. It was sorta like Walden, but instead of going out into nature I troglodyted it up.

In other news, I'm pretty excited for the fall (my favorite season). Fall is beautiful in Provo. The trees are all yellows, oranges, and reds. and the weather is crisp. Also, hot chocolate tastes better, I I can find more flavors of eggnog at the store, and the holidays are on the horizon.

It's the perfect season.

On a side note....it bothers me that we don't capitalize seasons. We capitalize the days of the week for heaven's sake...why not the seasons?

Speaking of season names. What's everyone's opinion on "fall" and "autumn.' I think autumn is a more beautiful sounding word, but fall is more descriptive sounding word (leaves falling and all). Most other English speaking countries call the season "autumn." I guess we silly Americans wanna be special.

Oh, and I really missed the time change this year. Yesterday I woke up to my (uncorrected) alarm at 7 o'clock (really 6 o'clock) and rushed and got ready to make it to church by 8 (really 7) for a meeting.

I thought I was 4 minutes late so I just went right into the door and I walked right into the bishopric meeting that happens right before the meeting I'm supposed to go to.

So, I walked right in on the bishop having a meeting and I started my introduction by apologizing for being late. The bishop looked at the clock and said "do you know what time it is?" I said "Well, by the looks on all your faces, and by the fact that no one else is here, and since you thought to ask me that question...probably not."

He then explained that I lost an hour of sleep for no reason. It was a hard piece of information to take. My frustration at my lost sleep overpowered my embarrassment and I left the room to take a nap for an hour.

To make things worse, when the meeting finally did start up, another person walked in (this was a day for interrupted meetings). This guy was from the stake and he needed pictures of everyone with leadership callings so they could be put on the stake president's wall. The problem was that I hadn't shaved (I thought I was late after all).

When the guy came into the room the bishop looked at me and laughed and said "Well, this isn't a good day for you!"

I posed for the picture and then asked the guy if he wanted to photoshop me clean shaven. He laughed (guess he assumed I was joking). Oh well, I guess I'll just be the one scruffy face on the president's wall.

Well, I better get going. I gotta get a lot of stuff done today. Thank you for making it to the end of this disjointed and rambling post.

I hope you all enjoy Fall/Autumn (I'm capitalizing them in rebellion (and screwing up capitalization throughout the rest of this post for Consistency).

Have a wonderful day.