Lord of the Rings swept the Oscars
It was the only reason I watched the show. I wanted to see a fantasy film sweep the Oscars, and they did. 11 out of 11 awards. It was definitely one of my favorite movies, and it was definitely one of my favorite series of all time.

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The most important issue...ever!

"The public is watching the Legislature very closely on this issue. This is the most important thing that faces us at the moment." -- Brian Bosma, Indiana Republican House minority leader

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I saw this blurb in an article without seeing the title of the article so I immediately went to read the article. He was talking about the gay-marriage amendment.

Am I the only one that looks at this and thinks, 'golly, I can imagine 50 more important things than this right now'? I know we've been beating this topic to death, but why do people really feel this is more important than no jobs, a current war being fought, actually, current WARS being fought, corporate lying to stockholders, corporate lying to customers, corporate lying to corporations, finding female partners for legospacemen, poverty, an eroding educational system, terrorism, the evils of aspartame, Charmin's squeezability, the evil of Wal-Mart, whether or not Lord of the Rings is going to sweep the Oscars, did I mention finding a female legospacewoman?, etc.

Even if you think gay marriage is the worst thing to happen since the cancellation of Seinfeld, why do I keep hearing that this is the MOST important issue ever? It's not. Most people complaining about it aren't gay. It doesn't affect them in any way, shape or form.

What bothers me the most is the hype behind this issue so that people actually feel they have to come up on one side or the other. I'm not gay. I don't care if they get to marry or not. I don't care one iota. I'm not gay. I have friends that are, but to be honest, I don't care if they get to marry or if they don't get to marry. It's not going to make my future marriage to Ann Coulter any stronger or weaker if gay people marry. What does bother me is this dictated thing that makes it appear that I have to have an opinion, that this is more important than any other issue.

Who cares if they marry or not? I say let them marry and tax the hell out of them. But who really cares?

What I feel is the problem is that this issue is becoming the filter for real issues. Much like most presidential election issues, we're being fed crap for content and then told that this is what we want. Meanwhile, the real issues continue to be ignored over and over again.

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Some of the OTHER amendments Bush is considering....
We all heard about Bush's intention to support a constitutional amendment to stop gay marriage, so this got me thinking that there must be more very important election year issues that are so important that we need constitutional amendments to fix. I mean, we all know that gay marriage is just as important as ending slavery or guaranteeing that the federal laws also supercede those of state laws, so let's just go through what I consider to be important issues that will probably come next.

1. The Returned Bottle and Can Amendment: this is really important because even though we're paying 10 cents per can or bottle, people just aren't returning them. This will require a constitutional amendment backed by the president's bully pulpit to make sure that people DO turn in those bottles and cans. As leaders of the capitalism movement pointed out recently, "if people are hoarding bottles and cans to turn in at one time, they might all turn them in at one time and possibly cause a supermarket to run out of singles and five dollar bills at once, possibly sending the economy into a tailspin and forcing the president to increase tax cuts for extremely rich multi-millionaires."

2. The Internet Spam Amendment: after this amendment is enacted into law, all spam will immediately be eliminated and the whole country will rejoice because spam will never be able to be sent again. What a wondrous day.

3. The Poverty Elimination Amendment: Upon enactment, poverty will be outlawed. If poverty is spotted by government agents, which will be part of a new cabinet post requiring billions of dollars of funding, poverty will be grabbed, shaken vigorously and then driven to the next county and dropped off. Poverty will no longer be allowed.

4. The Enron/Haliburton Innocent Amendment: all charges waged against either of these two entities, anyone who works for them, or anyone being paid off by them, will be innocent because that's just the moral thing to do.

5. The Moral Amendment: people will be required to be good. If not, they will be asked to leave.

Any amendments of your own that need to be added?

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Just another long day finally over. The day started off with Dr. Kuersten's class. Had to deal with students that wanted to know what was wrong with the grades on their papers. One of my favorites was "how come I got an 80?" Well, I said, the grading scale works so that for each question you miss, you lose 10 points. You missed two. "Okay," he responded, "but why did I get an 80?" Gotta love it sometimes.

Read Dr. Kachun's book for class tomorrow and then made my webct entries that are part of the requirement of this course. Didn't really have much to say and kind of find the whole webct thing a waste of time as I get the impression that aside from Nenad, no one in the class actually reads the books anyway but wings it everytime they come to class.

Had an interesting argument with a student I know who I run into every few days who started this conversation about the evils of people who commit suicide. Using a very Socratic method of questioning this person, I found myself actually making one of the strongest arguments one can make for why someone is justified in taking one's own life, completely winning over the other individual. Somehow, I didn't come away from that conversation all that excited about life. I really need to stop relying on debate techniques for conversations sometimes.

Found an old book I read nearly a decade ago that I have started reading again. I really found it fascinating back then, and now that I'm reading it a second time, I'm realizing that it's a much different book with the knowledge I've picked up since the last time.

Currently Reading:
"The Cry for Myth" by Rollo May
"The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In the New Century" by Paul Krugman
"The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand

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The paper rush again....
I'm in the middle of grading a million papers for Dr. K again. As usual, I've done nothing since this weekend started (Thursday) but grade papers, and they're not going to be done by Monday. Yet, she made an announcement in class on Wednesday that all of the papers will be turned back to the students on Monday. In other words, even if it is impossible, Duane will do it.

You know what the worst part of it is? We just turned in our applications for associateships for next year, and I'll bet very good money I don't get picked up, even though I've done excellent work all year long. They'll give the associateship to someone new and figure I can flounder on my own but will somehow get through. It's been this way with this department since I've been here. I'm rarely taken seriously by any of the professors.

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This is so cool. You have to read it.

Thor and Loki As College Roommates

The whole thing is done in post-it notes. This is the kind of thing I should be doing. I'm wasting my time in college.

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My first law when I become emperor
Heretoforth, the following phrase will be banned from ALL news articles: "suspect did not return a call for comment". You know, maybe some moron calling your house doesn't deserve a return call. In a similar story, my phone calls to Claudia Schiffer also have not been returned for comment, even though my messages included graphic descriptions that left lots of room for commentary on her part.

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My latest article

The Western Herald - Politicians should focus less on hate, more on solutions

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My desire to beat the crap out of authors sometimes...
There is nothing I hate more than to read page after page of an assigned author who writes to show that he's intelligent without actually saying anything that he could have said so that the rest of the world might have understood. It is one thing to write intelligently; it is another to write as if everyone is in on the little secret of allusions that are known only to oneself using words that humans don't use anymore. My god, it's like pulling teeth trying to get through a scholar like this. Do people like this actually think they're contributing to scholarly pursuits by making scholarly work harder to understand?

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Page is changed a bit
I did some revamping of my page. Different pictures and that sort of thing.

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Disproving general thermodynamics
I think I have disproved the law that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. When I started today, I had 38 papers to grade. Now, after grading 12 of them, I now have 42 left. This just isn't possible, yet out of the ether 4 papers were created. My only guess is that they were turned in as energy and now have taken solid form. But that would indicate that there were originally 16 papers in energy format (because of the 12 I already graded). Could this perhaps be "solid" evidence of dark matter, especially because "dark" usually means bad, and having 16 more papers is always a bad thing?

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Just one of those things I need to say
The framers of the US Constitution are NOT the framers of the 14th Amendment. Different century.

I had to say it because I've probably written it 83 times so far over this weekend on papers.

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A productive day....
I finally managed to crank out 10 query letters for five of my novels. They will be ready to send out on Monday. I've decided to send off query letters for five of the novels and then try to send the other five novels off directly without trying to get an agent (to give myself twice the chance of making a successful connection). For those who are not aware, I have written 11 novels, of which only one of them has been published so far. I am seeking to change that soon.

My next goal is to get at least thirty of my short stories out there as well. Sometimes the work process of the writing has very little to do with the writing itself.

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Other people with my birthday
I was actually kind of surprised to find out that a few people had the same birthday as I do. I knew Abraham Lincoln, but I just discovered Chynna Phillips (the blond-haired singer of the former music group Wilson Phillips) was born on my birthday. She once kissed me big time in the Grand Ballroom of the San Francisco Hilton Hotel in front of everyone. That was a really cool day. And I never even knew I shared a birthday with her when it happened.

Ah, those were the days.

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Changed email
I finally decided I had to do it. I am using my university email now instead of the one I've been using that's from the hosting of this page, the sarbonn.com one. I have set up my old email address (flippery@sarbonn.com) to use a bounce command so that anyone writing to me will get a bounced message stating to contact my yahoo account if they want to get my new email address (which is the school one).

I had to do it. The spam was destroying my ability to use my computer for the internet. The amount of mydoom viruses coming through my computer because of this was ridiculous. I may end up with a different email address eventually (that allows me to authorize email addresses I'll accept) but I'm going to try the wmich address for a bit first to see if that can handle the problems.

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Today's my birthday
Yep. Today's the day. Everyone keeps telling me I should do something "special" but to be honest, I don't have anything "special" to do. I looked to see if there were any movies playing, and I can't really find anything interesting. I don't really have any close friends anymore that I hang out with, so that's kind of out of the question as well. So, I figure I'll do nothing but what I've been doing every other day anyway. But I'm one year closer to Social Security.

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If you buy a clock, buy one from an Earthling
What's the one thing that a clock really needs in order to fulfill your most important need? Before you answer that, let me inform you that this clock radio I have has everything in it. It has a CD player, a radio, a countdown timer, sleeper, snooze button, Al Qaeda detection grid, everything. Today, as I looked at my clock (one I bought back in December), I discovered it was missing the one thing I really wanted it for: it can't tell time. Today, at 9:45, it was now telling me it was 9:58. Somehow, it just doesn't have the ability to keep time like...well, like a clock. I understood we were sending all our jobs overseas, but to another planet with a different time scheme? No wonder Bush wants us to get to Mars as soon as possible. He probably needs to pick up an order of refrigerators that were manufactured up there by local labor.

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Useless Email 2.0
Well, this is just wonderful. After installing Norton Internet Security, I now seem to have a nice little pop up box that comes up warning me that Mydoom has been found in an email message and quarantined while the message has been deleted. There's no information about where the message comes from, but now I'm getting this message over and over and over again, meaning that someone is spamming the Mydoom virus at me, and Norton deletes the email message before I can figure out where it's coming from so I can't permanently block this person from spamming me with this virus.

I hate the internet. I am so going back to two cups and string for communication.

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Back to the grading grind
Over 130 papers to read and grade. I've only done 10 so far. Seems like I've been working on them for a month now, and again, only 10 completed.

Must...reach...utility...belt...and...get...coffee.....

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Howard Dean's overly feminist wife
Did anyone catch the interview that Diane Sawyer did with Howard Dean and his wife? Sawyer made a huge point about how Mrs. Dean didn't actually take the name of Mrs. Dean (in other words, she kept her own name) and then seemed to harp on it like this was such a horrible thing.

Let's put this into perspective, shall we? A married woman named Diane Sawyer, who is married to Mike Nichols, grilled the wife of Howard Dean for not taking his last name after their marriage. Am I missing something here? It's okay for Diane Sawyer, but Diane Sawyer is justified in attacking this woman for not doing exactly what Diane Sawyer didn't do either?

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Finally starting to see the problem
Yesterday, I was reading the Chicago Tribune, and I came across an article that was about a just-released study about the problems universities are having keeping their PhD students. It appears that a lot of PhD candidates are giving up in the middle of the process and universities are starting to be threatened with losing their programs completely. I read this and I realized that one of the main reasons is probably why I have been considering leaving this program so much lately.

The problem pointed out was that PhD candidates fall into this rut where they feel they really don't belong anymore. That's exactly where I am. The article talks about how surveys have pointed out that one of the problems is lack of attention from graduate advisors. I completely understand this. This is one of the things that really bothers me like you wouldn't believe. EVERYTIME I go in to talk to my graduate advisor, I get the impression that I'm being tolerated and that there's somewhat of a desire for me to get out of the office as soon as possible because I'm taking up valuable time that can be used for more important things, like staring aimlessly at the wall for long periods of time. I got that feeling today, and that's when I started to realize that this is probably a huge part of the problem for me.

I get the impression that I'm really not taken seriously by too many people, especially other professors. It's kind of disconcerting at times.

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Forcing myself to get back to what's needed
Let's just say that being sick all of last week really sucked. But at the same time, it also helped me realize that I've someone been wasting a lot of my time lately. I don't just mean at school because that's just one of those things that I need to do because I'm here (it's a responsibility), but for those that know me, I'm a lover of online computer games, and that's sort of consumed me lately. I've been playing Star Wars Galaxies, which is not a great game, but it gives me a chance to roleplay certain characters and bring humor to wherever it is I'm playing. I just realized last night, while roleplaying a hermit that stands outside the gates of Anchorhead (an established city in the game) and yells at everyone because city people are evil, that even though I was getting a lot of people to laugh (and when they would wander down and talk with me) also giving me the chance to create bizarre stories on the spot, I was doing a disservice to myself.

You see, I'm a fiction writer. I write novels and short stories. But while I'm playing a game like this, THIS is where my creativity ends up taking place. And that's where it ends. I've discovered I'm not doing any real writing other than those snippets in the game, and that's about it.

So, I closed my accounts of the game this morning, and I'm now catching up on a lot of other things that need done, and then I'm going back to focusing on my writing, and that writing career I keep fantasizing about.

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