Darkon: Everybody wants to be a hero

I think the reason I love this trailer is because it provides evidence for an idea I have about why 95% of my guy friends love video games. I think there's an intrinsic part of us, as humans, that wants to go to war. Especially in men, there is a desire to fight a battle, to defend something, whatever. But it's there, and it doesn't leave. Maybe it's the desire to be a hero that then turns violent. Whatever it is, I think it's fascinating. And role-playing Darkon is comparable to playing Halo 3 for hours.

larping: (def) Live Action Role Play-ing

Thanks to Julie for finally finding this thing.

Darkon website
Darkon IMDB
Darkon Wikipedia

End Results of Senior Year Tour

This whole senior year tour thing has been awesome. It's made me appreciate my time at Mizzou a whole lot more. Although I still have a couple things that I haven't done, I'd prefer it that way. Or else I'd feel like I tapped out the city. There needs to be the potential for more things to do. The things I haven't done are go to the Wardrobe (thrift store that has dime and quarter days - where everything in the store can be bought for a 10 or 25 cents), go to the 63 Diner (whatever), and go in the tunnels under Mizzou (this is difficult and hot and there are reportedly video cameras down there, I don't know).

BUT, I did finally get to go to the Mizzou Observatory!! And, since my blog comes up when you google Mizzou Observatory, I'm going to give the information on it, since Mizzou sucks at this.

It's open on most Wednesdays from 8-10pm on the top (5th) floor of the Physics building, which is next door to the new Life Sciences building on College Ave. Take the elevator. It's just two Physics professors up there and they'll show you how to work the massive telescope. Perfect for dates. Do it.

We went up there twice when it wasn't open and waited hours for them to come open it. When you come out of the elevator, it's the door to your left. The door in front of you goes out onto the roof of the Physics building (which is also pretty cool, as it is one of the highest points in Columbia and you can see a lot of stuff).

Thanks to Julie for the photos.

Architecture in New Orleans

(nytimes.com)

Last summer I interned with a company called Evolve24, which was in the business of tracking companies' reputations and giving them advice about the future. My job the whole summer was reading every article written about a couple companies. One of the clients was an insurance company that took a lot of flack for their policies in Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida because of Hurricane Katrina.

So basically I learned the ins and outs of the insurance industry for three months. Not too great for summer hang out conversation, but I learned a lot. Here's what the issue was in a nutshell (sorry for the typos, it's finals week): People bought home insurance from a company, in which 'hurricane insurance' is included. Hurricane Katrina hit and wiped out millions of homes in the Gulf. The insurance company claims adjusters came in and looked at the houses and said "no, no, this is flood damage. that coverage is extra and you didn't sign up for it." People were pisssssed.

But, after a summer of reading these articles, and comparing this American insurance company with ones overseas (UK, France, etc.) I learned that for insurance companies to actually offer full hurricane insurance to everyone in the Gulf who gets hit by hurricanes every ten years, no one would be able to afford the rates. In some areas of the UK, no insurance companies will offer coverage at all. You just live there at your own risk and rebuild after your house is blown over.

All this to say (I've been long-winded lately...), I had a conversation with my boss last summer about what houses would withstand a hurricane. A bomb shelter? Then I asked Julie's brother Andy (who's at architecture school in Arkansas) about it and he said that some people came up with an idea for a house that was on an axis, so the house could be blown by the wind and just move with whichever direction the wind was going. Weird. But then I was looking at my friend Marion's architecture and design magazine (Metropolis) and they had an article about Brad Pitt trying to figure out the same issue: what houses can withstand hurricanes in New Orleans?

Well, he started a campaign called Make It Right, where he had a design contest for architects to design homes that would withstand a hurricane and be under $150,000. The house above is designed with pylons underneath the house so it will float if there is a flood. Pretty sweet idea.

nytimes.com "Brad Pitt Commissions Designs for New Orleans"
Metropolis Magazine "Saint Brad" - click here for pictures of the designs

Faux Prank War

Awesome did this to my car. I poured middle school girl glitter all over Jeff and Chad's clothes on Tuesday, and so thought it was them that did this. She would have gotten away with it, had my neighbor not told me that it was a girl who post-it noted my car. The middle picture is Julie trying to act surprised when she had been in cahoots with Awesome the whole time.

culture, balance, & community

"Balance" - won the 1990 Oscar for Best Animated Short

"The truth is that a large percentage of Latin Americans either nurture or tolerate relationships in which personal loyalty is rewarded and merit is substantially ignored. In Latin American culture loyalty rarely extends beyond the circle of friends and family. Thus the public sector is profoundly mistrusted and the notion of the common good is very weak." (Carlos Alberto Montaner, "Culture and the Behavior of Elites in Latin America" in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress)

A couple weeks ago I was sitting next to Julie in church, acting like a brat. Being a cultural studies major I have a hard time listening to speakers talk about things relating to culture because I spend the whole time quibbling with the things they say inside my head. Also, I'm a senior in college and I think I know everything.

We've all heard the sermons and talks about how individualistic America is and how our utter lack of community is putting us on the road to hell. Right. Well, if I've learned anything from cultural studies, it's that every culture can turn good things into bad by taking them to the extreme. Just like in most things in my life, if I forget to maintain a balance, everything is ruined.

I've been slowly working my way through this awesome book (that I've talked about before) called Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, and you could basically call it an anthology on how sin affects entire cultures and holds them back. It's sin's destruction and human depravity on a meta-scale: meta-depravity.

The quote above is how Latin America (and other cultures, too) has screwed up a good thing like community and family. When a culture gets to a place where they don't trust the public sector, where individuals cannot win elections or make business agreements without bribery, the reliance on community has gone too far. Henri Nouwen says that (I'm paraphrasing) if an individual cannot be alone, they should not be in community, and if an individual cannot be in community, they shouldn't be alone. Balance.

Brief Senior Tour Update

(columbiamissourian.com)

MU Basketball Game - finally went to one. It was kind of sad because Mizzou isn't that great this season. It was literally the last home game of the season - my last chance. Patrick went with me (after 1.5 hours of convincing). We only stayed for about 45 min, and found out later that Mizzou beat Iowa State in two over times. Dang it.

Universal Thrift: kind of like a garage sale in a building (I know that's what most thrift stores are like, but this seemed crappier). Mostly home furnishing stuff. Did not meet expectations.

CJ's Hot Wings: absolutely wonderful. Went with Julie and Stacey. Really really good food and quite cheap. You know you're in the right restaurant when construction workers come in for dinner after work. They know.

Added to the list:
- Go to Mojo's (club/venue)
- Go to the Mizzou Observatory

Columbia Peace March

Here's the KOMU coverage of the 1,000 strong march for peace today in Columbia.

And...Julie and I are in the video (briefly). I think this is the first time I've ever been on TV, pretty exciting. And for a good cause.

Here are some of my pictures:

Shaking and drumming down 9th Street.

There were Journalism kids from Mizzou everywhere. I swear, everything in Columbia is very well documented because of the J-school. At one point he was hovering near a woman and she started yelling and riling up the crowd, almost because he was there. It reminded me of a part in Don DeLillo's White Noise, when there's a disaster somewhere but no news crews come and one of the characters says something like "Where were all the cameras? It's like it didn't even happen this way!"

Girl Scout Season!

I couldn't really figure out how to write about this, in order to capture its full beauty. It's hard to blog about articles, I wish they had a button that would just transfer the whole thing, linked, to a post. They probably do. People are so smart.

Wired Magazine has been pretty consistently interesting lately, whatever I've had to look up. They're pretty witty. Ok - here's the article, also mostly for Julie.

'How to: Kill Someone with a Girl Scout Sash'
A martial-arts expert is trying to hawk a "Cold Steel Sarong" as a martial-arts weapon: "Sarongs aren’t just isn’t ordinary items of clothing though, they’re blankets, sunshades, cloaks, backpacks, and a formidable self-defense tool as well." Watch the vid, it's worth it.




- in other news, I got the Vampire Weekend CD, I'm quite pleased.

John Legend + Steven Colbert = too hot to handle

John Legend = hottest man alive. This is of him and Steven Colbert singing to lady liberty.

This is mostly for Julie.

mmm...Obama

Thanks to Julie for this!

Two Websites by the Talented Julie VanMater:

www.columbiaearthday.org

teach.darfurgenocide.org

Enjoy!

Crochet me something.

I've always thought that Julie should guest blog on this thing, and probably Claire, too. They find the most interesting things online and show them to me. This one is from Julie, and it's just really odd.



She found it on a website, strangely enough, called FFFFound.com that has all sorts of strange photographs and images from the web. There are just so many miscellaneous things online, some strange and wonderful. This crocheted TV dinner instantly recalled something from my memory of being at L'Abri. I remember staring at an article again and again about a UK artist who crocheted her own Farrari. Weird, I know. Here's a photo and article.



Ananova: "Student knits her own Farrari"

Shooting at Triki-holla

My sophomore year I lived with Cassie, Julie, and her sister Jaime at 5383 Trikalla. This past Friday I was hanging out there and we heard some shots and we joked that they were gun shots. There were police cars down the street for the rest of the night. We just thought some lady got scared at the car backfiring and called the cops. Au contraire...

Man wounded in Trikalla gunfire - Columbia Tribune
A 36-year-old man suffered multiple gunshot wounds Friday night during a disturbance near the Lake of the Woods area...Atkins said the victim told deputies he returned gunfire at his assailants... The shooting occurred at about 7 p.m. outside of 5369 E. Trikalla Drive in the Godas subdivision, according to neighbors... Hudson said the victim has introduced himself to neighbors as "Cornbread" and "Big Daddy."

Belz @ The Artisan

I went to a poetry reading tonight at the Artisan of my old Worldviews teacher, Aaron Belz. It rocked my face off. Awesome and Julie were a little less enthused. I thought the three poets who went ahead of Belz were really good and some were funny and many of the poems were really beautiful.

Belz gave a discount to his students in the audience (two of whom I knew...where else did he teach? Or...Belz, if you read this: where else did you teach?) if they bought his book, and so I did. It's called The Bird Hoverer and it's on Mondo's favorite books list even though HE HASN'T READ IT.

My favorite poem of the night was the first one he read:

"Among Birds"

Having spent the better part of the morning
among birds, having heard
what they whisper
to each other as the sun comes up,

having noted how they name their offspring,
with names like Fuzz Packet and Mr. Charming,
Devily Doo and The Potato Famine Boy,

having observed, if momentarily,
as they begin to glide, their haughty eyes
and knife-like toes,
I hereby reject birds
and not only birds but
the places where they dwell, the patterns
of their lives, the very cosmic instinct
that brings them into being—in fact, the skies;

having been raised by birds and
having nursed at their impossible teats
and been subjected to their whimsical
sarcasm, also having been approached by
them on several occasions—

when my star had risen and theirs perhaps had not—

in the name of
neighborliness or good citizenship and having
politely asked them to step off,
can't you see
I'm busy, type of thing, and having quietly
informed them that I no longer belong
to their so-called tribe,
I hereby request
that they wipe the silly smirks off their faces
and find other people to circle, other places
to drop their glob-like feces, and that is all
I ask of them, not that we can't exist on the same
planet, free-thinking individuals,
in equal

if separate and clearly demarcated communities.


Poem that should have been read Mitch Hedberg-style:

"Hidden Microphones"

I am all about hidden microphones.
If you pay me a certain amount of money,
I will plant a certain number of microphones
around your home, or a friend's home.


Conclusions from the night (mostly based on the readings of the two female poets who went ahead of Belz):
- If I ever become a poet that people come to hear read my poetry I will be a lot more expressive in my voice than they were, with hand motions and rhythm in my voice.
- I think Belz's poems were ten times more funny if you had him for class.

Taxi Driver

Okay, so Darjeeling Limited was sold out, which might have been my fault for not getting tickets because I thought the RagTag opened at 5. Whatever. So Julie, Awesome, and Soulmate (not mine, Awesome's) went to see a free showing of Taxi Driver in Jesse Wrench Auditorium. It was really intense. I was expecting for it to be really bloody and gruesome, being Scorsese. But I wasn't expecting it to have nothing of the familiar narrative arc of anything I've seen before.

Julie and I were talking afterwards and she started the movie off thinking that Travis (Robert DeNiro) was looking to Betsy (Cybill Shepherd - who used to be really pretty and not at all scary) as a love interest for his hope in life, but then discovered that she was "like all the rest of the girls" and moved on to try to save Iris the 14 year old prostitute (Jodie Foster - weird) but that kind of failed too and then tried to assassinate a Presidential candidate as a last act of desperation. I kind of thought that the whole thing was a message towards the meaninglessness of life and how Travis couldn't really find anything to fight for or live for.

There's a great scene where Travis goes up to another older Taxi driver they call the Wizard and in a round about way asks him what the meaning of life is.

---

Wizard: Look at it this way. A man takes a job, you know? And that job - I mean, like that - That becomes what he is. You know, like - You do a thing and that's what you are. Like I've been a cabbie for thirteen years. Ten years at night. I still don't own my own cab. You know why? Because I don't want to. That must be what I want. To be on the night shift drivin' somebody else's cab. You understand? I mean, you become - You get a job, you become the job. One guy lives in Brooklyn. One guy lives in Sutton Place. You got a lawyer. Another guy's a doctor. Another guy dies. Another guy gets well. People are born, y'know? I envy you, your youth. Go on, get laid, get drunk. Do anything. You got no choice, anyway. I mean, we're all f---d. More or less, ya know.
Travis Bickle: I don't know. That's about the dumbest thing I ever heard.
Wizard: It's not Bertrand Russell. But what do you want? I'm a cabbie. What do I know? I don't even know what the f--- you're talking about.
Travis Bickle: Maybe I don't know either.

Oh, and on Wikipedia (article) they said that the end is a dream sequence. That makes a lot more sense. Also, whenever this movie would come up while I was growing up my mom would always talk about this crazy guy who was obsessed with the movie and tried to assassinate Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. Here's the story. Weird.

Oh, and Julie -- the passenger in the taxi who was stalking his cheating wife was Martin Scorsese!