Phantasmagoria

I took my parents to the McColl Center, a museum in a very old refurbished church.  They used the basement for an exhibit that my school and another local high school had come together an created under the influence of another art exhibit that was on the next two floors up of the museum.  On the way in, a lady approached us in the parking lot, and asked my dad, in the name of Jesus Christ, to spare a few dollars so that she could feed her kids.  Her hair was messed up and there was a cut over her left eye with some dried blood on it.  My dad, being the cautious man that he is, inquired as to where her kids were and how she got hurt.  She motioned vaguely behind her and said that her husband had jumped her.  My dad pulled out his wallet, saying that he could help out a little bit, giving her two dollars.  She mentioned something about “enough for a pizza” but my dad said he didn’t think so. “God Bless you” and we went into the museum.  I don’t really feel like describing the museum.

KrAzY Glue

While working on a museum exhibit in first and and second periods at school (who needs Calculus and Physics anyways?) I found a tiny, uncapped tube of Krazy Glue. I pocketed it. I continued to fiddle around with my project and “provide input” and stuff like that to the other projects.

So in the last class of the day, I remembered that I had krazy glue in my pocket.  I pulled it out, and that’s when I realized that it didn’t have a lid on it.  I plunged my hand into my pocket to see if it was still functional or completely ruined by the glue. It wasn’t. There was only a stiff bit at the bottom with some pocket lint in it.

Then, I glued a quarter to the floor.  It was classic. Several people tried to pick it up and eventually one girl decided it was some kind of challenge and pulled out a screwdriver. She hacked and scraped at it for a bit, rather unsuccessfully.  The quarter and the floor around it was scratched up, but the quarter was still firmly part of the floor. She asked me what I had done to it.  I told her I had stomped on it really hard and she believed me.  Eventually the teacher wanted me to get it up, so I used an X-Acto knife to burrow under the edge of it and then pried it off the linoleum with a screwdriver.  It came up with the back of it covered in floor.

Moutain Top Youth Camp

Well it looks like I’m going to be STAFFING at MTYC this summer. And that just completely awesome.

A good chance for me to get off my butt and do something.  I don’t know all the details yet, I just wanted to write down something before I actually found out more about it.  I’ve attended MTYC as a camper every summer for the past… six or seven years I guess, and last year I was a Junior Counsellor  for  the Junior Boys week.  That was a lot of fun, and I look forward to spending a whole summer up there.

mediastinum

I found this picture among some others like it, and it just made me wonder at the complexity of the human body. I can’t understand how any of this would happen by chance, accident, or even survival of the fittest.

The website provided the following caption:

This mediastinum, a central chest compartment located between the lungs, houses the heart. Immediately to the right of the heart is the aorta, the largest artery of the body. To the right of the aorta are groups of blood vessels (one artery and two companion veins) that run between the ribs to distribute blood through the body. The phrenic nerve, which sends messages to the diaphragm to breath, is visible as it crosses the heart vertically.

source

Note: If you are just utterly grossed out by stuff like this, let me know, comment or whatever, and I’ll not post this kind of material in the future.

Purple

This I drew in Physics class, for the most part. I touched my purple sharpie to the paper and then I just let it flow. Very satisfying. Very fun.  I drew this for no one in particular.  This was one of the first things I drew with Sharpie.

KFC is Creepy.

Especially when it’s combined with a Pizza Hut.

I went to a Youth Rally in Conway, South Carolina this weekend. Three other youth and two youth leaders went with me.  It was a lot of fun and I got to see a lot of people that I enjoy being around but don’t usually get to. The messages were good, given by one of my personal heroes, Tony Myers.  John Glock was scheduled to give them, but a few days prior to the rally, his mother became ill.  And priorities are priorities.

Anywho, we stopped at a KFC/Pizza Hut on the way back to grab some food.  I had been listening to Andrew Bird in the van.  Now, I never really thought that Andrew Bird was very popular, or that very many people have even heard of him.  To my surprise, the very song that I had just listened to was playing in the restaurant.  It was pretty weird.  The chicken was as greasy as ever, and the biscuit tasted like plastic butter.  Gotta love fast food.

A Flower

I drew this in Network Administration class. And yes, a girl asked me to draw it for her. I scanned it in and then gave it to her the next day. I love technology. And girls. But not in entirely the same way, or with the same intensity.

I got my hands on a convenient hard disk platter, one of the old gold-ish ones and used that to draw the primary circle around the flower. The rest is freehand, but I won’t claim those kinds of circle-drawing skills quite yet.

Organized Crime

Pirates of old were much more organized and brazen than the ones that society seems to focus on. Much different than the loners at home in the Caribbean, these Indian Ocean pirates in the 1300s embraced piracy as a way of life. Whole communities of pirates would board their ships with their wives and children, usually about 100 ships. Most of them would scatter and spend the whole summer wreaking havoc with merchant ships and committing other vile and sundry acts of piracy.

Sometimes, however, 20 or so pirate ships would line up 5 miles apart in the ocean, effectively covering a good 100 miles of water. If one pirate spotted a ship, the other ships down the line would be signalled and the merchant vessel would be overwhelmed. The pirates wouldn’t harm the sailors intentionally, and after taking their cargo they would let them go telling them something like “Go and fetch another cargo. Then, with luck, you may give us some more.”

Some of the more wily pirates would take tamarind with them, a spice or juice made from the pods of the tamarind tree. When they apprehended a merchant vessel, the pirates would make the merchants drink tamarind and sea-water. This would make them throw up, and the pirates would sift through their vomit for precious stones and small valuables like that. It was a common habit among merchants to swallow some of the smaller bits of treasure when they realized they were going to be boarded.

One of the kings of the area was even known to have had a deal with a lot of pirates. He wouldn’t be aggressive against them or attempt to stop them if they gave him all of the horses that they pirated. Horses were, in fact, a large portion of their loot because of the fact that India didn’t breed very many horses at all so they were always shipping large numbers of them in.

Let it be known, however, that the merchants were no easy prey. Pirates were common enough that they would go out to sea heavily armed and ready to fight. Many a pirate was defeated by the very merchant it was planning on looting.

A tree

I drew this in history class. A girl asked for a picture for her brother, who was about to leave for some kind of military school. I don’t know her brother very well, so I must say that I was actually drawing the picture for her, so she could give it to her brother.

I didn’t plan on it being a tree, I was drawing some curvy lines when I realized that it looked like a tree trunk. I then proceeded to add the foliage part of the tree.

I like trees. They’re all so detailed and unique, even in nurseries where they grow them all the same way. What makes them all grow differently? It must all lie in the seed. Nature is so incredibly versatile and untamable.

Blue Moon

According to Google, once in a blue moon is about .17 × 10^-8 hertz. And then some other people say that means once every 32 months or so. I’m assuming they’ve done some calculations.

Popular definition seems to agree that a blue moon is the second full moon to occur in one month.

You can also take it for fact that the average interval between full moons is 29.5 days, and the average length of a month is about 30.5 days. This means that it’s not very likely for there to be two full moons, or a blue moon, in an given month. That probability calculates out to give us the numbers showing us that a Blue Moon actually takes place every two and a half years.

Conveniently enough, there is a “Blue Moon Calculator” which lists all sorts of blue moons taking place all over time. The next one is going to be on December 31st, 2009, at 7:11pm.

Fancy that.

Disclaimer: Blue moon meant something a little bit different to farmers and such in the 19th century.