Yes. Yes That is What She Said

I think that our society is collapsing. I say this not because of our economy or our country's "Declining Moral Values" but because of four simple words: That's What She Said. 

Allow me to explain: I love words. Finding the perfect phrase to describe a situation makes me absurdly happy. Conversely, using my mad language skillz to make a joke is also something I pride myself on. That is why it saddens me that the pinnacle of humor is to use a prefabricated line to turn something innocent into something sexual.

Not that I'm against turning people's innocent statements into lewd remarks and making them seem a pervert, I'm for that by all means. But where is the creativity? In the spirit of originality allow me to weave a metaphor:

In days of old humans worked for food. Either working the land or hunting prey to satiate their hunger, the calories earned were just enough to pay back the calories used to acquire the food. Today its a different story:

Thus, we have grown fat and lazy. "That's what she said" and other prefab jokes (Pwnd, LOL, Any un-ironic movie quote) are to humor what hotpockets are to food. Lost are the days of wit where Winston Churchill could dazzlingly outwit a crotchety aristocrat after having enough Scotch to kill a horse. Instead we are left with clashes of wit being fought with Internet memes and movie quotes.

In conclusion, that's what she said jokes are ruining society. It is simply too much to swallow.

Manny

For those of you who don't follow baseball or the news, Manny Ramirez was today suspended by Major League Baseball fifty games for testing positive for a performance-enhancing drug. He cheated.

Manny Ramirez was, in many ways, one of the best stories in baseball. Perhaps the most talented hitter in the game, one of the hardest workers in baseball, a charismatic clubhouse leader, and fundamentally goofy and loveable, it was hard to dislike Manny. As a Red Sox fan, I was witness to some of his worst moments, where he let down the team because of his bad attitude and desire to play for another team. Somehow, he remained likeable enough that, even at his worst, I found myself able to forgive him; he seemed like some sort of man-child who you couldn't really get mad at. I looked a gallery of Manny pictures over the years today on the Sports Illustrated website, and in all of them he is either hugging Papi, emerging from hanging out in the scoreboard, listening to an MP3 player during a game, rocking his dreads, and just generally being cuddly and awesome. He certainly seems like that rarity in professional sports: a man who didn't take himself too seriously.

All that vanished today. He cheated. He claims he was just taking something his trainer gave him, didn't know it was banned. Others point out that the substance he tested positive for isn't a steroid, and has only been banned for a year. Still others speculate that he took the drug because of a problem in the bedroom. No matter. It is a responsibility of every modern sports player to know what substances can affect on-field play and are banned. Manny took a banned substance, and has to pay the consequences. He may have passed fifteen drug tests in the past five years, but he failed one, and that's enough to make his entry into the Hall of Fame unlikely.

I don't know. Why on earth do we keep looking up to sports stars? As a group, they've proven to be singularly incapable of the responsibility of being childhood heroes. And yet. Manny was on the Red Sox for eight years, and was a face of the team for most of them. And with one failed test, that all seems to poof away. Maybe I'm just in an emotional mood, what with all this last day of freshman year stuff going on, but I am truly saddened by Manny's fall from grace. Just seems tragic.

Cam's To-Do List

1. Ride in a hot air balloon or blimp

2. Set foot in every state

3. See Trevor Hall live again

4. Jump into the river with a flaming torch every year of college

5. Become less scared of snakes, just a little bit

6. See every movie in which Samuel L Jackson stars

7. Become an adequate dancer

8. Live next to a body of water (lake, beach, river, etc)

9. Create a YouTube video that gets over 50,000 views

10. Throw something quite unusual off a cliff

11. Go to a music festival or two

12. Never run a marathon

13. Own a pair of jeans that are more than 20% patches

14. Read War and Peace all the way through

15. Name something (team?) Lightning In Wyoming

16. Own a really friendly cat

17. Make a movie more epic than Ninjas en mi Armario

18. Enjoy Cheezits into old age

19. Go to Africa

20. Avoid prison

21. Play the cowbell/triangle on stage in front of an audience

22. Visit Woodstock

23. Swim with a sea turtle

24. Make friends with an Australian

25. Write a good poem

26. Go bungee-jumping or skydiving, or just jump off something really high

27. Never own an expensive car (exception: a Mini, ‘cause that’d be sweet)

28. Drink appletinis with Kathleen
29. Keep a journal for a year
30. Never consume an energy drink

31. Participate in an outrageous sport

32. Own home with secret passage/spiral staircase/fire pole
33. Look good in a hat

34. Skinny dip
35. Go to a film festival
36. Write something that gets published about the Legendary Stardust Cowboy
37. Hike the back of Half Dome
38. Learn one song on guitar or piano
39. Build a great ropeswing
40. Be an extra in a movie
41. Acquire carpentry skills and use them to create something useful
42. Don’t do karaoke. Ever. You may think it’s funny, but it’s not.
43. See Sigur Ros live, or go to Iceland. OR DO BOTH.
44. Grow impressive facial hair
45. Go a year without drinking bottled water
46. Learn to drive a stick competently
47. Go to a drive-in movie
48. Build a freakin sweet sand castle
49. Own a cool vinyl collection
50. Sleep on the beach
51. Captain a sailboat
52. Work on a political campaign
53. Quit a job in a ridiculously dramatic fashion
54. See the Northern Lights, MAYBE WHILE IN ICELAND
55. Get good at snowboarding
56. Don’t live in Florida when old
57. Scuba dive
58. Pet a manatee or emu or iguana
59. Spend time in an igloo
60. Meet a past or present Prime Minister of Canada
61. Don’t sell my Legos
62. Signal someone in Morse Code
63. Encounter quicksand but do not step in it

64. Get a Callahan in a competitive game (frisbee)

65. Go to Stonehenge
66. Knit myself a hat
67. Solve a NY Times crossword (asking friends for help is kosher)
68. Wink at a stranger and have them wink back
69. Have a catchphrase

70. Convince someone I have an authentic British accent
71. Create cool graffiti
72. Be the really awesome uncle/grandfather
73. See lava flow
74. If in a fight, don’t get embarrassed
75. Support the Red Sox come hell or high water
76. Visit some Greek isles
77. Get up on 1 ski waterskiing

78. Win a fantasy baseball league
79. Graduate college
80. Go a week without looking at a clock
81. Pull a con
82. Wear only awesome ties, unless at funeral or something like that
83. Live in a town/city with a delicious icecream parlor
84. Call in to a radio show
85. Live longer than the average American
86. Learn to telemark ski
87. Become a talented maker of cookies and brownies, maybe even cake
88. Own a plant named George
89. Attend either a summer or winter Olympics
90. Throw a message in a bottle into the ocean
91. Create a truly great, lasting nickname for someone
92. Go camping with just my dad
93. Grow an apple tree
94. Never get a tattoo
95. Whittle a walking stick
96. Go to either an opera or orchestral professional performance
97. Be able to recognize more than 15 constellations
98. Play a game of chess via mail
99. Have a pleasant vegetable garden
100. Build a tree house

An Amusing Habit Pays Off (edit: not really)

I'm in the (amusing) habit of picking up pieces of paper and reading whatever's written on them in the hope that its something interesting. Most times its a homework assignment or something like a shopping list but every once in a while my odd tendencies are rewarded. Next to a travel mug (which I also claimed) I found this poem scrawled in hasty cursive which I struggled to decode. There was no title, there was no author, only the musings of what I imagine to be a tortured soul. Enjoy:

Untitled

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at the

close of day

Though wise men at their end know dark is

right

Because their words had bored no lightning

they do not go gentle into that good night

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have dared in a green by

rage, rage against the dying of light.

Wild men who caught and sang the song in

flight;

and learn, too late, they grieved it on its

way,

Do not go gentle into that good night

Brave men, near death who see with blinding

sight, blind eyes that blame like

Ok thats not the end, but as Cam pointed out to me this is actually a very well known poem by Dylan Thomas called predictably enough "Do not go gentle into that Good Night." I suppose the hope of having stumbled across a mysterious and anonymous poem was enough to quell my instinct to type the words into Google. If only I had taken AP English, perhaps I would not be such an uncultured swine....

Question: Are Swine Flu Jokes Kosher?

The answer? Very. So I'd check out http://doihaveswineflu.org, if I were you.

In other amusing Swine Flu news, Joe Biden happened. I, for one, have been extremely disappointed by the lack of Joe Biden gaffes over the first 100 days of the Obama administration. It was with some happiness, then, that I heard Joe Biden tell Americans to totally freak out about swine flu and lock themselves into a bank vault until it all blows over, or whatever he said.*

* "I would tell members of my family - and I have - I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now"

In my personal favorite story of the epidemic, a deputy health minister in Israel has said that the virus should not be referred to as 'swine flu' because pork is not kosher under Judaism. Instead, he suggested it be called 'Mexican Flu.' Oddly, Mexico has not taken particularly well to this suggestion, and the Mexican ambassador to Israel has lodged an official complaint.

So, the weekend up here in Canton was pleasantly swine flu-free, leaving time for other activities like JUMPING INTO A RIVER WITH A FLAMING TORCH. This happened. Check Facebook if you don't believe me. Certainly a major highlight of my year. Certainly broke the monotony of studying for finals.

In the last note of the day, because I really want to be Evan Doucett at a fundamental level, I have emulated him and created my own list of life goals. It's 57 items long right now, and when I finalize it, I'll be sure to share.

Have a lovely Monday

Phil Collins Etc

This weekend is my LAST at St. Lawrence this year, and it's kinda weird. Everyone has these 'finals' things lurking over them, and respond to it in different ways: going to sleep at 10 or becoming exceedingly drunk. Wasn't really in the mood for either extreme tonight, however, and when a friend told me that she was going to a bar to watch her friend's boyfriend's band play, I leapt at the chance to accompany them, despite the rather tenuous connection.

Mistake. The bar was in Hannawa Falls NY, which called itself a village but only qualified as such under an exceedingly liberal definition of the word. The bar wasn't as grim as it might have been, or was at least dimly lighted enough that its worst deficiencies were hidden. Amusingly, when the band called out "This one goes out to all of you who who grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere," I was LITERALLY the only one not to respond with a cheer and fist pump. The band, I must say, was interesting: I can now cross off Hear a Metal Version of "Something In The Air Tonight" from my things-to-do-before-I-die list... Still though, two things prevented the evening from being a total waste. Firstly, I owned a lot of grizzled old guys at fooseball, which made me feel really good about myself. Secondly, I made the decision earlier in the night not to wear a hawaiian shirt, and thank goodness. It would have been thoroughly jarring next to all the locals with Slipknot t-shirts and John Deere hats (which qualifies as jarring in its own right, I'd say).

It all got me thinking about college in general (although I can't say how exactly I arrived there). I'm completely pumped for schoolwork to be over with in less than a week, but less certain how I feel about being home for the summer. On the plus side, this summer looks to have old friends, family, lots of concerts, lots of frisbee, lots of free time, money-making, and lots of sleeping in; all of which sound outrageously pleasant. I reckon that if I can work in enough visits with current college friends, it should be pretty much the complete package, and totally worth being excited about.

I still can't believe I spent two and half hours at a bar in Hannawa tonight.