Alright, its time for another round of the beloved LJ MADLIBS: Pretend You're Me! This time we're going to focus on that saucy time period known only as Mid-May 2003 ::cue thunder strike::


Person A - someone on your friends list you barely know
Mascot B - some interesting mascot type thing, like "blogger" "geoduck" "Fittz" etc
Mascot C - same as above
Mascot D - same sa above
Person E - someone on lj you're secretly in love with (but not so secret that you're not going to post the results of this!)
Person F - Person D's best friend (or someone on your friends-list you'd imagine could be, or something)
Action G - such as "scampering" "blogging" "prancing," etc

(note: some events or facts may have been fictively conflated for dramatic purposes)
   Friday (2003-05-16) You and Person A go to Mascot B Liquor and buy a keg of Mascot C Ale, one of MGM, and are persuaded into "Grandpa St. Rote's Honey Sweetened Crunk Sludge Elixir" for the third by the very persuasive proprietor.
   Friday Evening you go to a party across town with Person E and their friends. You meet Person E's friend Person F and are hitting it off pretty well. Person E then gets hit-on be a superlecherous guy in a blue hat.
   Saturday (2003-05-17) - You and Person A throw the most awesome party ever, with three kegs, five bands (including the critically acclaimed Action G Mascot D) and an estimated 200+ people. You trick everyone by placing the Mascot C Ale keg in the far corner, the MGD in the middle of the backyard, and the "Crunk Elixer" right in front of the door with a "Heineken" written on it. Your ex and your brother's future girlfriend both try to waylay you but you escape to hang out wth Person E.
   Next week you hang out with Person E and meet their boyfriend (yes, even if in your version Person E is male!)


( This time period in history )

iTunes - Apple's continuing campaign to introduce the lowercase "i" prefix into English
   Some nine months ago, I get a new computer, and restarting my music playlist for the umpteenth time, decide to make the change from winamp to itunes. It took awhile getting used to the new program and overcoming the self-loathing that having something from Apple on my computer causes me, but eventually I got used to it. iTunes is much more convenient for having multiple lists and sorting one's music in various manners. And it displays all kinds of useful information simulteniously, so that for example I can know that my most played song is "Unknown" by "Unknown Artist," with 782 plays.
   I shortly discovered, that I could use the automatical "recently added" playlist to satisfy my desire to play repeatedly my newest acquisitions. And in custom playlists one can place songs in any random order, so I could make a list with my very favourite songs at the top and descending from there in favouriteness, which is my preferred playlist orientation. Only recently, however, did it occur to me that since I tend to select to play my favourite songs more, and tend to skip over songs I'm not in the mood for, ordering the whole list by "most played" would give me an automatic list ordering approximately most favourite to least. This has been my preferred setting for the last month.

   However, obviously it will take some time for recently added songs which I may think are awesome to ascend high enough to challenge those with 782 plays. I began to think that maybe it would be nice if one could rank things by total play count / time on list, to counteract the fact the songs I've had longer I've had more time to play.
   As far as I can tell, there's no way to make itunes do this. But it got me thinking, so I whipped out my favourite blogging tool --Excel-- and started crunching numbers to see how things would break down. My hypothesis was actually that the songs I've downloaded more recently would have significantly higher play/time ratios. My hypothesis was wrong.

   So first on my playlist is of course Unknown - Unknown with 782 plays. This averages out to 3.1 plays per day over the 8.4 months since I've had this computer. The next highest is Tiger Army - Cupid's Victim with 480 plays, and a bunch of Flogging Molly / Street Dogs / Against Me! / Planet Smashers all from around 6.8 months ago. Why the huge difference, considering I don't even really like the Unknown song THAT much? I think its because it was ambiguous enough to fit into all of my different genre playlists.
   At approximately the 40th-42nd spot down on my playlist (one of the things iTunes doesn't provide is a ranking of how far down you are on your playlist for whatever ranking mechanism you're using. In this case I estimated the song to be 10% down out of the 352 songs, rounded to 40 for a round number) are three songs which highlight a diversity of playage. Filthy Thieving Bastards - Neverkind, with 166 plays, is my least-played FTB song. Its been played .89 times per day over the 6.2 months its been on my playlist. Next, #41, New Amsterdams - Four More Years has been on my playlist only 2.3 months, but played 158 times for a play/day ratio of 2.29, putting it among the very highest ratios of those I looked at (3rd of 18). And, #42, Momsex - Zombies v. Pirates (by none other than trembyle), with 143 plays, only comes out to .57 plays a day. Now, Zombies v. Pirates is one of my favourite songs -- along with Filthy Theiving Bastards, Momsex is one of the only bands I'd go back into booking for. Totally underrated band. Unfortunately, they broke up. )= I don't know why they aren't higher on my playlist, I think I somehow forgot to put them in the approprate special list.

   The arbitrariness of these numbers is highlighted further by two songs I discovered to be on my list twice. At what as far as I can tell is the very middle of my list, The Magnetic Fields - Sunset City has 59 plays, for .31 per day; but much further down it has 1.41 plays per day. Coldplay - Green Eyes has .13 plays per day at appx #300 on the list, and 1.07 plays per day at appx #324 on the list.

   Anyway, so the bottem line is that it appears, probably because my list was much smaller in the begining so songs got replayed over and over and over again, that the oldest songs also have the highest ratios; and also what lists the songs ended up on has a primary effect on play count of those earlier songs. So yeah, not much of a conclusion, but I had already done all the work so I figured I'd make an entry about it anyway. Hopefully maybe you were tricked into reading it through liking one of the bolded bands or something. ;)
   I still wish I could rank things by ratio, or itunes would at least show me all the ratios without me having to hammer it out in excel.

   Also of note, Red Army Choir - Soviet National Anthem is appx #26 on my list, which I play .75 times a day.


Meanwhile in Real Life
   Yesterday Kristy ate with me at the Fat Cat Cafe and visited me at work. We gave her a tour of the Courthouse. Later, I was in the middle of making my lj update during my break when the civil process division staff presented me with a certificate of appreciation and cake, since they liked the entry so much it was my last day there.
   Today I went with Kristy into her work, at the Cat Factory. To do this I had to go through and airlock-like "disease control barrier" and take a shower. On the other side: cats, lots of cats. Pictures coming soon.


Entry of the Day: emd's dog assistant. The rest of you, less than a week to go, come on, finish strong!


Previously on Emosnail
   Three Years Ago Yesterday: Marination - My little brother joins tha marines, the band Smile breaks up.
   Three Years Ago Today: Godlite - God tries to communicate with me through scrabble. Also the beginning of the Most Awesome Summer Ever. Met my friend Shalane.
   Two Years Ago Yesterday: 30 in 30 I # 12 & 13 - Echidna Hype - Hyped up my former weekly humorous newsletter, the Chosen Echidna. Someday it will rise again!! Reproduced an article that originally I had just plastered around on walls on the third floor when moving to division one athletics was a big topic of debate -- I urge that we should move DOWN to division three athletics (which as far as I know doesn't exist).
   Year Ago Yesterday: 30 in 30 II # 23 - BlogSETI - I conduct a major investigation across the blogosphere in search of potential 30 in 30 participants. I would deem it a success in that it is responsible for bringing this year's participants pavel_lishin, bartgroks, insolent_pool, and eazyt. I'd do it again but.. it was a lot of work.
   Year Ago Today: 30 in 30 II # 24 - Guest Opinion - My mother writes an entry for me!

   This entry is post-dated from Thursday, in preparation for my expected death on 06-18-06.

   So let's talk about Godwin's Law. For those of you who don't know, Godwin's Law is this: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one" (that is to say, eventually every conversation will devolve into a mentioning of Hitler). Wikipedia goes on to further explain "This adage was formulated because many people compare anyone and anything they mildly dislike with Hitler. There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress."
   Clearly this law sums up the general feeling of such references being totally played out; and this sentiment is reflected for example by the defrending of 2.7 (on avg) that occurs every time Oetimus posts.
   But seriously, I think sometimes nazi references are in need of the making. The lot of you tend to seem to think that there was somehow something particularly delusional about the Germans in the 1930s and it "couldn't happen to us," and I think its very important to keep in mind that there was NOT anything particularly different about those Germans, and such mistakes are the result of groupthink and "politically correct" thinking, which could easily happen to the rest of us. Anyway, I'll cease violating the law now.


   And then there's the Davis Apartheid page local demagog Rob Roy created on Daviswiki. While this may not violate Godwin's Law, I think comparing the lack of student representation in Davis city government to the former institutionalized racism of South Africa pretty badly violates the same principals of outrageous hyperbole. It may not violate Godwin's Law, but it violates at least Godwin's Noise Ordinance.


Kriswin's Law of Libel - (since "Godkris' Law" sounds kinda egomaniacal)
   Furthermore I'd like to declare a similar law of my own. In any contentious argument online, and especially if its about things related to "real" life, the odds that someone will incorrectly make claims of libel very quickly approach one. Seriously, I've seen more incorrect but "serious" claims of pending libel suits than I can count -- two times that come quickly to mind though: (1) the time the former ASUCD Elections Chairperson accused me of libel in a letter-to-the-editor, after I urged everyone to be wary of elections irregularities (her political death came soon after this of course); and (2) the time someone accused me of libel for implying Celeste Rose didn't deserve half a million dollars of student money (scroll down to the only indented comments to see the interchange). Most recently by Darth Laabs himself. I shall call this Kris's Fourth Law, though I don't recall the other three I coined (one was that anyone can and will find your lj I remember that)


Picture of the Day

Picture added Sunday, of Party on Saturday
It may not be what's actually happening, but to me in this picture it looks like Chris Bunch is being like "Sorry Forestkeet, I choose Olivia!"

   Okay now I have a pileup of ideas for entries again, and lots of debaucherous pictures from last night, but unfortunately it took longer than I'd thought editing them (since I took 165 pictures last night and all...). So I'm running really late for to rock out at Rock It, so I'm just gonna have to jam together the fastest entry ever.

Here are some teasers:









Now see the rest here.

That is all.


...

(if I knew how I'd animate these two pictures together...)

   Alright all, I'm not gonna have time to assemble my more crafty entry ideas for tonight, and I think I've used all my cop out ideas.

   Anyway so today is the 16th, just over halfway through 30 in 30. Most of us are relieved to have most of it behind us. Well two years ago, I joined 30 in 30 on this day -- having to do basically 30 in 14. And man, I think I did it better than I'm doing this year. For example I didn't end up making the actual Entry 16 (A interview with myself, but with less self-loving and more schizofrenia than when MatthewKeys does it) until the 25th.

   Anyway I gotta run off, because Kristy needs supplies to put kitty ears on her mortarboard for graduation tomorrow.


Entry of the Day: Anyway several other people did pretty good today, but the pick of the definitely goes to gerbilgrrl for writing the definitive biography of apoplecticfittz.


Previously on Emosnail
   Three Years Ago Today: Something About Scarves - I don't know, I honestly didn't take the time to reread it.
   Two Years Ago Today: 30 in 30 I - 1 - Blogology I - I discover the wonderful world of 30 in 30
   Year Ago Today: 30 in 30 II - 16 - Blogological Recap - Basically I recap how I discovered 30 in 30 ... and polls indicate 60% of respondants are "disappointed in my lack of libido." Such sauce!

From Ecofoot.org, based on fifteen questions my lifestyle requires the following acrage be dedicated to my upkeep:

ACRES / CATEGORY
5.2 FOOD
0.5 MOBILITY
1.2 SHELTER
1.5 GOODS/SERVICES
8.0 TOTAL FOOTPRINT

IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 24 ACRES PER PERSON.
WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 4.5 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE ACRES PER PERSON.
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 1.9 PLANETS.

   But what's it all mean? The implication of the webpage is that we're all living horrible gluttonous lives and should be ashamed of ourselves. But let us put this in perspective.

   Going back to the beginning: A popular misperception is that life during the stone age was nasty brutish and short. Modern research indicates that it appears in the stone-age humans, living off the land like hippies, only had to work about three hours a day between food hunting, food preparation, & miscellenious other tasks, and the rest of the time was theirs to lollygag about and doodle on cave walls. This however, was only sustainable if humans kept their population density at 1-2 people per square mile -- that is, having an individual "ecological footprint" of 320 - 640 acres. Over time the population increased and people had to work harder to get the same sustenance from smaller portions of land ... eventually leading to today's conditions where in the United States we have to work eight hours a day and have a footprint of 24 acres a person...

   Now certainly we should try to do whatever we can to be as efficient as possible and thus have the smallest footprint as possible, but we can't reduce our feetprints infinitely. And in the mean time I will not be shamed by guilt-tripping webpages.

   In conclusion, we're on a collision-course with a lack of footroom for our prints and all out world resource war. (=


   This entry shameless cobbled together from comments I made to insolent_pool's post, which was inspired by eazyt's post.
   My facts come from Of Cannibals & Kings, by Marvin Harris, which I flipped through one day during a meeting because I found it on someone's coffee table; and also Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond which I flipped through while waiting in an airport once.


   I'm not sure who the post of the day is either, since I'm in a hurry, but one thing I do know for sure:
The Award of SHAME for Most Pitiful Post of the Year: goes to otimus for pretending LJ Abuse was about to shut down his livejournal as an excuse to urge readers to comment about how much they love him. Incidently, only one person actually posted expressing concern, whereas at about the same time five people responded to my poll yesterday saying "anything is better than posts like Otimus's."
   Now why do I kick this obviously dead and decomposing horse you ask? Because (1) He had the gall to tell me I'm a bad blogger; and mostly (2) that entry really is offensively pitiful; (3) Also remember he started this by saying I "motherfucking suck" at no instigation of mine, so I don't think I can really be too harsh here.
   But really, that entry, wow.

   Alright so tonight I'm writing a paper on St Francis of Assisi. Or more specifically, I am to compare and contrast two movies about him, Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), in which he's portrayed as a flaming hippie, and Francesco (1989), in which this apparently famous guy named Mickey Rourke plays him and he's a bit more emo and rolling in the dirt oriented.
   Anyway, I really don't mind writing about history, but I hate having to analyze films for a history class. Maybe if I'd signed up for a film class I'd expect this kind of crap, but I didn't. I signed up for a history class, and here I have to write several pages on some crap-ass director in the 70s wanted to portray a 13th century masochist as a hippie.

   Anyway, so yeah I'm disgruntled, and in a hurry, so yeah. But by Wednesday I'll be done with finals, so I'll have almost as much free time as otimus, so y'all better look out.. at least until I die on the 18th.

   So for todays little entry, by popular demand, I am going to talk about Bailey. Bailey appears to be mostly an unusual breed called "Australian Mist," causing him to have an aweomse grey-&-black leopard pattern, with a golden belly. slosha got him at the Woodland animal shelter when he was wee (and sick). But Sloshie's allergic reactions to cats proved too much so his Other Mother Kristy took over Bailey-raising.
   Because he was really sick for much of his wee-er weeks, he grew accustomed to being held constantly. As a result, he is much more cuddly than most (and especially male) cats. When one comes home after he's been left alone, he'll frequently mew until you pick him up and hold him for a bit.

   Bailey is BFF with Kristy's flatmate Jardine's pet bunny. The bunny was named "Oreo" by Kristy's former flatmate Chrissy, who got him as a gift from some sorority older sib or something. Since Chrissy literally never took care of the bunny, however, it was adopted by Jardine, who just calls him "Mr Buns." Me I call it "Orca," since its patterned like an orca. One thing we can all agree on though is that "Oreo" is a dumb name.
   But yeah, Orca & Bailey are best friends. Also, Bailey is fond of lying about on his back. In fact he's doing that right now! He's such a master of loungin.

   Bailey likes to wake us up in the morning by licking our faces, something that kittenbehaviour.com (or something like that - I don't have time to check facts here) says is a sign of particular loving.


   But he's not all well behaved. He likes to throw fiestas & pool parties. Crap fiestas that is! He gets a little carried away while burying shit in his litter box, and next thing you know he's just watching the litter fly for the fun of it. And then when we are emptying his litter box and have his little gifts all wrapped up in a plastic bag, he likes to bat at it, and we have to say "no bailey, no! NOT a pinata!" And if one leaves the toilet lid up (which is gross anyway people, seriously), he will sometimes decide to throw a pool party in it.

   But mostly he's a good kitty, waging war on his eternal enemy, Dots on Walls, sitting in windowsills, and hanging out with his catmom Kristy. He's one of the most loving cats I've ever met.


And now for the only reason half of you read this crap: Entry of the Day Awards: xaositecte definitely wrote another entry which will be remembered in blog-memory for years to come (at least when I'm reminiscing about past 30 in 30s) - What the various 30 in 30 participants would do with two cows, respectively.

Previously on Emosnail
   Three Years Ago Today: Previous Year in Summary - Or at least highlights of it. Yeah and cryptic references to missing my friend Kristy over the summer.
   Year Ago Today: Controversial Sauce II - The Sanctity of Marriage - Man if I'd remembered I'd have linked back to this when I got you all hot & bothered about polygamous marriage this year. Anyway, last year's conclusion: as far as "abominations to the sanctity of marriage" are concerned, divorce is many times worse than allowing gay marriage; or at the very least, allow seperation if people were dumb and make eachother miserable, but disallow remarriage. Also, a picture of a typical Davis student behaving as we typically do.

   Alright ladies & gentlemen, it is time to have the talk. That's right, I've been meaning for awhile now to sit down and have a serious talk with you about the birds and the bees.

   You see, last summer while I spent my time killing countless small furry animals, I learned a few things about a secret order some of us like to call Hymenoptera. What I mean to say is I'm going to tell you about the bees and the other bees now.

Honey Bees - Are actually more like orange & black than yellow and black if you think about it ... and believe me I had more than enough time to think about that. If they live in a man-made box its a hive, if they've made their own nest somewhere its a feral colony. Colonies are much more prone to diseases than hive boxes (as boxes allow them nice evenly spaces straight corridors for cleaning), and so bees thoroughly benefit from their interaction with man. And yet some fascist vegans refuse to consume honey for god knows what reason.
   In what sounds like a classic science fiction story (only, its true) some mad scientist brought 26 Tanzanian queen bees to Brazil in 1957. They subsequently escaped and have created the entire "killer bee" population that has since spread up from there to the southern reaches of the United States. They really are not at all as scary as people make them out to be, just a little more defensive than more common Italian or Hawaiian bees (who spend their time riding vespas or hula dancing, respectively).
   Incidently the difference between these bees was caused by natural selection. In Europe bees were primarily cultivated by beekeepers, so the more "userfriendly" docile ones were selectively bred. In Africa, however, sustainable apiculture (beekeeping) never constituted a significant portion of the bee population -- rather, honey was harvested by destroying hives (both by humans and animals), so the colonies that survived were the "meaner" ones. So... suck it creationists.

Hornets - Some people, especially the elderly, like to refer to any wasp-like insect from a yellow-jacket to a humming-bird as a "hornet." I really don't know where they got this idea. Hornets are an endangered species in Europe, and have never been wild on the American West Coast. So seriously shut up about them. Also, I found an amazing cinematic quality video of an epic battle between hornets & honey bees, I can't believe its for reals.

Wasps - There are two main types of wasps one finds here in California (and a number of rarer types). Unfortunately the wikipedia article on them sucks so I'm going to have to go entirely from memory here. First off, if you don't know the difference between wasps and bees (and I've found an alarming number of people don't), you are in my opinion an idiot and I'm not going to take the time to explain. The two main types of wasps here though are the Golden Umbrella Wasp (Polistes Aurelius) (which is yellow and orange), and the European Paper Wasp (Polistes Dominus), which is slightly smaller and more common than the Umbrellas. Dominus wasps have sharp construction-vehicle yellow-and-black markings. The two species act essentially the same so I'll talk about them together henceforth.
   Now wasps look fricken scary, and whereas in elementry school I used to freak out my classmates by holding honeybees in my hands, I always gave wasps a very wide birth. Well it turns out they are actually the most pacifistic of the Hymenopterids I've had experience with, and will only sting you if you assault them personally. It could see you looting its nest and killing its children and if its not on the nest it'll just say "fuck that, make love not war" and go be emo.
   Funny story time: once we got this call and the lady told our fearless leader David Mardner that every time someone rang her doorbell a wasp would come sting them in the face. Knowing that wasps are not aggressive like that, David dismissed this claim as clearly the product of hyperbolic wasp hysteria. He took the call, and arriving at the house proceeded to the door and rang the doorbell. A wasp came out of nowhere and stung him him the face.
   Turns out the wasp nest was actually in the doorbell.
   Actually getting stung by a wasp is so rare that despite being employed killing them for over a year, my coworker Jeremy had never been stung by one. He once expressed an interest in actually trying to get stung by one to know how it compared to other stings (he'd been stung by everything else already). What a nut.

Bumblebees: Now bumblebees, on the other hand, are fucking flying battlestations. Fortunately one only rarely comes across their secret lairs, and I never had a bumblebee call during the summer I worked as a bee buster. Bumblebees live in colonies of a few dozen up to maybe a hundred. To quote wikipedia "Often, mature bumblebee nests will hold fewer than 50 individuals, and may be within tunnels in the ground made by other animals, or in tussocky grass."
   Jeremy once got a bumblebee call. It was on a hillside with small bushes. At first he couldn't find it, but then he stepped on a particular shrub and heard an angry buzzing sound that rapidly got louder. Suddenly a few dozen of these angry little deathstars launched out of the ground under the bush and set upon him. Bumblebees you see, can and will both bite and sting (and not die from stinging you), and are also capable of a certain degree of burrowing/tearing (I would of said they're closely related to Carpenter Bees, but Wikipedia is telling me they're no closer related than both are to honeybees, whatever they fucking look the same except Carpenter's are all black), so they'll land on your protective bee suit and start trying to burrow/tear a hole to jam their stinger in. Also I'd imagine they must have been somewhat resistent to our +3 nerve gas attack that kills other things immediately, because otherwise Jeremy would have made quick work of them. Jeremy sustained at least one sting in this encounter and he said it hurt and swelled up in a manner exponentially worse than the other stings he'd received.

Yellow Jackets: These guys are actually pretty underrated. I would have thought they were no worse than honeybees .. wrong. We get a call for yellow jackets, we call for backup. They're smaller than honeybees, so they are better able to get into any orifice they can find in your trusty bee-suit. They bite rather than sting, which just means a single one can get you about a million times more than a single bee could. Seriously, killer bee infestation: no problem -- yellow jackets: call for backup and break out the most potent chemical weapons.
   Yellowjackets are actually a type of wasp, but they look more like skinny honeybees (that are yellow and black). Interestingly, they are carnivorous. I once saw one carting away a disembodied bee head from a destroyed honeybee colony. Morbid bastards.

Mud Daubers: Are another type of wasp. They build mud nests on the underside of eaves. Apartment complexes would pay us a 100 bucks to get rid of them, we'd show up and bat them down with our hands or a broom if out of reach. These things will not sting you, and actually, like the paper wasps discussed above, are beneficial to have around, since they eat less pleasant things like spiders, and pests that are harmful to your gardens. So we've actually talked potential customers out of having us kill wasps before (since our boss Dave actually loves insects, and the rest of us, we get paid whether or not we kill shit so no need to be malicious / waste time & chemicals).


   So yeah, now you know. I actually find wasps strangely fascinating. I had two pet dead wasps named Romulus (a Dominus) & Vortigern (an Aurelius). Hey, people have butterfly collections, and no one says thats weird. I was going to try to collect a specimen of all the rarer types of wasp, but I only came up with this plan late in the season and didn't get a chance. Also I found a dead queen bee from a kill and placed it prominently in our office with a sign identifying it as "Queen Amidala."


Day 9 Pick: eazyt's entry concisely and effectively discusses a current issue relevant to the blogosphere. While it lacks in "the funny," so does this entry. And apparently a difference of opinion over the necessity of The Funny is partially responsible for the Otimus/Roter-Terror commiefascist jihad declared against me; but in my personal opinion an entry can qualify as megabloggery (& therefore 30 in 30 material) if suitably intellectual or informative.

Previously on Emosnail
   Three Years Ago Today: Ambulence Rides Are Fun - Not really. The worst part about being jumped by three wanna-be gangsters and kicked in the head while unconscious was having an IV put in my arm. Seriously. Nearly hyperventilated. I don't like needles.
   Two Years Ago Today: Delirium - RECENTLY DECLASSIFIED: I manage to thoroughly embarress myself by (1) writing a terrible paper at the last minute, (2) emailing myself the wrong version of it so that when I got to campus at the last minute I couldn't turn it in, (3) when I email the professor about this in my delirium I use the name of the author of the book I was using in place of the professor's name!! Oh man, awful. I was so shamed I friends-locked the entry, and that takes a lot.
   Year Ago Today: Making the Paper - My 30 in 30 entry got mentioned in the local paper, beat that suckers! Sure say I'm not funny all you want, lets see you get a 30 in 30 entry mentioned in the paper. (=

   A year ago today I extensively experimented with controlling substances for the sake of 30 in 30. Well I've experienced a lot of bullshit since then, so I thought I'd update you all on that. Also I've been spending 20 hours a day deliriously working on history papers, researching people's annals -- so I don't have time to make 30 in 30 videos or the sanity to do the alchemy necessary to create blogging gold.

Experimentation Redux
   Anyway, so yeah last year on this date I did a thorough review of 15 different types of energy drink. This is a sequel to that.
AMP - Amp, the Mountain Dew energy drink, is new since last year. It actually tastes like mountain dew on steroids.. in a good way. Unfortunately they don't sell it in four packs like the other drinks, otherwise I'd stock up. )=
Kabbalah - Kabbalah has come and gone in the intervening year. All of a sudden it was everywhere, and just as quickly it completely disappeared. It was so good, it founded a religion! But yeah I really liked it despite the fact that it was probably part of some creepy religious conspiracy headed by Madonna.
Monster "Juice" - And other forms of "juice" as well. I don't get it. I tried it and it was just.. I dunno. It tasted like an energy drink plus weird.
No Fear Gold - Sobe decided to try to harness the power of "blogging gold" by recreating the chemicals in a bloggists body during such moments of blogging glory. What they discovered was alarming and they promptly destroyed their research and mixed some chemicals together at random. I don't know what specifically they're going for with No Fear Gold, but its a different flavour than normal red can No Fear and I actually kind of like it. Plus both No Fear flavours are currently at $5.99 a four-pack while everything else is at $6.99 and I'm not one to argue with a dollar.
Other Developments: Most energy drinks used to be $1.99 a year ago but now they've risen to $2.19. Forget war for oil (which isn't even keeping the price down), we need to invade someone to keep the price of energy drinks down! Also Red Bull is still a ripoff, and the No Fear drinks finally realized that no one thought they were worth 50 cents more than everything else and actually lowered their prices to below average.

Bonus Question
   Three Years Ago I posed the following hypothetical question:
The Question: What would YOU do if you were sleeping with a russian, but when you woke up they were compeletely gone, like in those movies, only, its THEIR bed??
   And got the following responses:

[11:12:36] shid: uhh, go: hmmm
[11:12:48] shid: then try and scavenge some food from the kitchen
[11:12:53] shid: like ramen or something
[11:13:04] shid: or perhaps a danish

[11:45:46] RunModGirlRun: well, first of all, it would be a russian man
[11:46:01] RunModGirlRun: and second, I would check to see if I was tied up
[11:46:17] RunModGirlRun: third, I would wonder how he cut himself free
[11:47:25] RunModGirlRun: and maybe then, I would raid his refrigerator. and take a shower.

[16:14:00] willnotheal: Well, if I woke up in a Russian bed and my mistress had disappeared, then I would ask myself where the hell she went. I would look to my left (where she was sleeping), just to make sure she really was gone and that I wasn't still drunk from the jello shots the night before. Then I would turn to other hot Russian girl on my right and have mad sex with her until the other one showed up. Then I'd have sex with her. And then with both of them. And just to top it off...I'd have sex with them again.¹

   Well its three years later and its STILL happening to people -- just the other day it happened to Chris Bunch (though it appears likely he only THOUGHT he fell asleep next to a Russian)-- so what would you do?


   Entry of the Day: Okay otimus' entry today was actually pretty funny, though apparently he has way way too much time on his hands -- 30 in 30 - The Game


Meanwhile in the Real World
   There was an epic battle on the quad on campus today, which in accordance with tradition I completely missed out on. (Now in video!!!) Yeah thats how we roll at Davis.