Saddam and Storm Warnings

Doing laundry is actually less fun when it's raining with lightning outside. Poo.

I'm taking a break from cleaning my place to watch CNN's coverage of Saddam's pending execution. I'm torn between following the story (it is news in the making) and switching over to Cartoon Network because I'm so squicked by the whole affair (I fully accept that he's a murdering dictator, but the thought of hanging turns my stomach).

EDIT: CNN is running a "tour" of the chamber where Saddam will be hung, complete with a play-by-play of what will probably happen -- complete with model skeleton to show how his spinal cord will be severed.

"The next thing is the compression of the major vessels that supply blood to the brain [. . .] At three minutes, the brain will be dead from lack of oxygen [. . .] When the brain runs out of oxygen, the person will be declared dead, although the heart may continue to beat."

WHY?

Update

Turns out, Borders.com is having a huge sale. With my $25 gift card, I got

The Beauty Myth

The Working Woman's Legal Survival Guide

Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of Our Children's Teachers

Grand total, I have $23 left in gift cards to spend. Yay!

Also, my grandfather got the complete Mission Impossible (TV show) boxed set for Christmas. It's pretty great.

Weekend fun

Today was fun -- went to breakfast and out shopping with the family; I even got to distract my brother while mom and dad got his gift!

The weekend challenge on the Puzzle Pirates forum is to caption a few "cartoons" drawn by other PP members. I've submitted two, but this one's my favorite (ignore the typo; we're not allowed to edit it once submitted):

Oops.

Did I say "I'll update soon?" Because by "soon" I must have meant the obscure Middle English meaning "much, much later."

Anywhich, almost as soon as I got back from the house things got busy, so now it's time for a nice long update. Yay for me. It will be in list form, viz.:

Things I've Done in the Past Week:

1. Latin tutoring - I met with the girl on Sunday, and am pleased to announce that she's doing pretty well for having been a whole year behind on the language not too long ago. All my doing, of course :-P
2. Taught kinder kids about the Solar System. Last week and next week's theme is Astronomy; I'm still debating whether or not to include Pluto, given that the poster we're using lists it.
3. Bought a book of crosswords. To make it even more interesting (I stink at crosswords), it's a book of Latin crosswords. I'm five in at the moment and haven't managed to complete a full one without looking at the answer key at least once. Fun, though.
4. Watched Doctor Who. The Satan Pit was on last night, and it was teh greatness. Because only The Doctor can be five feet away from Satan and not notice right away.
5. Watched Van Helsing. I'm actually currently watching it right now. Dad was right. It blows. Even the dramatic rescue swing from the rafters is done in horiffic CG.
6. Started my most final of final papers I have to write this semester. That's right, after this one (due Tues.), I have no more papers to write until next semester. This one is, of course, a three-page proposal on how I would design a project to study the effects of the Peloponnesian War on Athenian art.
7. Decided on my Halloween costume for next year.

Kiwi

Alright, you all know I love kiwis. So, when I saw the YouTube video named "Kiwi!," I had to watch it.

And, yeah. It's AWESOME. Go see.

Afterwards (it contains spoilers), you can go see the interview with the creator.

Free Comics!

Man, Thursday and Friday went by reeeally slowly, and then the weekend just whizzed on by. Typical.

Thursday we had the Halloween Festival for the residents at work. It added an extra hour and a half to my work hours, but I had a lot of fun. I did face painting with a woman from one of the other centers, and halfway through the Festival we had a line of kids literally out the door. Awesome. The other woman wound up doing all the "girly" designs, like hearts and flowers and rainbows, but I got the fun designs: skull and crossbones, dragons, ghosts, and for some reason broken hearts.

The party was awesome - Ivy brought Evil Dead II and an Italian zombie movie, and my brother brought Army of Darkness. I have polaroid photos tacked around the door to my bathroom, and I may just leave them up until the next party -- I'm planning something for before Christmas next month. Fun theme ideas, anyone?

Links to see:

Hellboy comics free on the web!

Tense(s)

So, take this passage:

The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this subject is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-traveling forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from a standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of this book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs. (1)

Got it?

Ok, now pretend it's in a foreign language, and that you have an exam over these tenses on Monday.

And that is how my Spanish class went today.



(1) From The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

PhotoPost

I must record the following exchange:

Drunken "magician": Pick a card.
Niki: *picks card*
*pause*
Niki: IT'S THE SEVEN OF DIAMONDS!!
Sarah: *chokes on noodles*
Sarah: Eating is just not safe around you.

Rundown

Whew. So, I've been to each of my classees once (and, in one case, twice) so far. Rundown time!

Accelerated First-Year Latin meets every morning at 10. And by "accelerated" they mean "intensive;" we're going to be covering something like two chapters a day in 50 minutes. The class is pretty cool, though, since the workload means that everyone in the room wants to be there. The prof. is from England, I'm pretty sure, and he seems to enjoy his subject.

Adv. Spanish Grammar and Composition is "eh" so far -- we didn't do much on the first day, but I'm sure it'll pick up soon. Our first assignment is to write a poem, which I'm not looking forward to, but the prof. is nice enough and a native speaker (I heard two of the girls in my class discussing a SPanish IV prof. who apparently has a horrible accent).

English Grammar should be ... interesting. The prof. went into great length about how the "traditional grammar" we learned in middle school is "flawed" and wrong. Fine by me; I never learned grammar the traditional way, so I have nothing to forget for this class. The prof.'s sense of humor is dry as dirt, but he seems ok.

Greek Archaeology promises to be a LOT of fun. The prof. is a field archaeologist with a great sense of humor (*coughandhe'scutecough*). Which will hopefully make up for the fact that the syllabus is teh scary. We have to keep a journal, there're lots of readings, three essays, and our first quiz is memorizing the Greek alphabet.

Physical Anthropology is self-paced, so hopefully my biggest problem will be making it to the special lab we have to take our weekly tests in.

And now I have to go to work.

Dinos!

Yeah, I made it through the first week of school (at work; college doesn't start until the 30th). AND the first Monday, since last week was a short week.

The first day back was pretty confusing, considering the complete lack of communication between the transportation system and, well, everyone else on the planet meant that half the kids didn't show or showed up late. On the other hand, I have some pretty great kids this year, and I'm looking forward to a month from now when they've settled in enough that we can do more than one thing a day.

Oh, and apparently we don't have class on Fridays anymore. I was disappointed because I had already done lesson plans for the next two weeks and thought I would have to squeeze everything into four days instead of five. BUT (!) it turns out that almost every kid in class already knows at least the basics of dinosaurs and fossils, which actually puts us a day ahead of schedule. Way cool.

Today, I was really pleased that the kids were engrossed by the online sites I wanted to show them. We actually got through all the dinosaurs on the interactive site at discovery.com, with time for discussion about which dinosaurs were bigger and smaller and faster and slower. Most importantly, I was glad that the one girl who showed up today was showing just as much interest as the boys. Also, getting done early gave me time to let them "design" their own dinosaurs.

And now, it's time to go grocery shopping.

Ann Coulter

So, in browsing the lj group ljdemocrats this afternoon, I found this article. The title pretty much sums it up; Plagiarism Expert: "If I Never Read Coulter Again, It Will Be Too Soon." Apparently, some new software found evidence that Coulter, well, steals shit. Lovely. My favorite line?

"After combing through Ann Coulter for a while, it doesn't take long before you want to call it quits. I want to prove the technology, but I don't want to make my eyes bleed."

I feel his pain. I once went line-by-line through a Coulter article pointing out inaccuracies and idiocies in order to make a point on a conservative's blog. It does, in fact, hurt.

A google news search brings up a few more fun links:
Update: Company to Probe Coulter Plagiarism Charges
Olbermann Talks to Coulter Plagiarism Spotter
UPDATE: Coulter's Syndicate Requests Report From Plagiarism Prober -- As She Hits Back at 'NY Post'
Will the media outlets who host Coulter ask about recent charges of plagiarism?

Happy 4th!

I want to submit this to blogexplosion, but I just realized I don't have enough content. So, I figured I'd spice things up a little with links to some animation! My friend Ivy did these back in high school for multimedia projects and they're a lot of fun. Plus I enjoy putting her in the spotlight. *evil grin*

Here they be:

Mothra

Ladybug

Monsters

Bunny

Final Project ... of DOOM!