Happy Frog Day!

(Though of course we all know the Gregorian calendrical system, parasitical entity that it is, completely sucks the life out of everything. Then again, today only happens once every four years, and we only age so fast...I wonder what that means, cosmically-speaking?)

But yes; hooray for galactical unity! I’m so glad we haven’t all slipped into oblivion nowadays; I love everything (almost) and everyone; February is such a draining, cold, dreary, clammy month—in fact it’s already snowed twice over here already—! But it would be cooler (no pun intended) if I could trade places with you, Ana. :O)

Anyway, I guess I don’t really have anything doubleplus-meaningful to enhance the aesthetic ambiance of this blog or whatnot (well, unless you count my daily dose of mindless drivel, ha!), but I did dig up a pretty interesting film clip that could use some serious collective TASPer analysis...

So, without further ado, THE CAGE DUDE.

(It’s not on YouTube. Everything is on YouTube. The fact that it’s not on YouTube, surprisingly, annoys me a little, because, well, that’s just not right, right?)

Ralph Ellison SUX!!!!!!!!!

So Invisible Man is just about the most obnoxious book I've ever read. It is the most ham-handed, clumsy excuse for prose to lay claim to the title. I bet Ralph Ellison thought he was so cool, writing with all his symbolism and his clever allegories for racial oppression and the battle for social equality. He's not.

I just wanted to share my opinion with all of you.

Planet of the Apes?

With God as my wittness, not a word of this is made up.

Some backstory:

My friend Dev is a blackbelt in karate (which is worth about one hundred hilarious stories in and of itself), and his old instructor's brother recently bought some substantial acreage in Wilson, on which he has constructed one of those epic, Tasteless Mansions that anyone who lives in the almost-country knows and loves. No one really knows how this guy got so much money, but we are aware of one source of his income. "Charlie the Chimp," a small chimpanzee with relatively impressive martial arts training, is a staple at state and county fairs. When our new neighbor goes to the local grocery store, you can bet that Charlie is with him, seated comfortably in a bag while his master peruses the Hamburger Helper. I suppose "Karate Chimp" counts as a helper animal, though I'd be more inclined to use the word "henchman."

Remember what I said about this being true, and stay with me here.

For the past two years, this guy has been trying to construct a chimpanzee sanctuary on his property. Some problems:

1. His first proposal utilized a chainlink fence and, I'm assuming, prayer to keep the chimps inside his property.
2. Since animal sanctuaries are untaxable, everyone assumes he's doing this as some kind of a crazy tax dodge, especially as his McMansion is on the same part of his property as the sanctuary would be (and would therefore be tax-free).
3. Neighbors are afraid that the chimps will escape his property, eat their garbage, and be impossible to shoo away as they will be trained in karate... I'd just like to recap here: they are afraid that chimpanzees trained in the martial arts will get into their garbage and run amok, due to their superior skills in hand-to-hand combat.

In response to all of the above, there was a huge town meeting a couple of weeks ago to attempt to resolve the issue. He unveiled elaborate blueprints detailing a sort of chimpanzee compound/supervillian lair, with three layers of concrete walls and automatically-sealing doors, a cage network, and for absolutely no reason, several thousand birds. Experts were brought in from across the region, character witnesses attested to the fact that, no really, this guy isn't a Batman villian, and a neighborhood watch official from an area in Niagara Falls that has such a sanctuary reported that he had experienced no chimp-related incidents, though the Niagara Falls chimps went untrained. "They have the strength of ten men, you know!"

However, I am sad to report, the Karate-Chimps-Will-Eat-My-Garbage-And-Render-Me-Helpless-What-With-Their-Plank-Breaking camp stayed firm, and the issue goes unresolved. The two-year battle continues. It isn't even a legal battle, really, as there's nothing stopping him from building the sanctuary right now. That's actually the most baffling part of all of this. His neighbors include a dairy farm and perhaps two other houses, depending on your definition of "neighbor," and he still demands community support before he begins constuction.

I'd send Charlie my condolences, but I'm afraid he'd eat my garbage and incapacitate me.

Anyone free on May 2?

I've got a plan, an evil plan.
No actually, it's not evil, just completely awesome.
Are any of you free to, you know, come to Colorado for the weekend of May 2?

-10 Degrees and Getting Colder!

I love having a consolidated school. Even if there are only three inches of snow at my house, I'll still get a snow day, because there are two feet elsewhere. Or, if I get two feet of snow at my house, school can't possibly go on without me, and I get a snow day. Put these two scenarios together and I get...two consecutive snow days! So, this last week, I had a spontaneous four-day weekend. And, I had lots of chemistry and calculus homework, not to mention a chemistry test once I got back to school, and I had a novel to read. Did I do any of it? Well, what do you think?
I have an obsession. No, actually, it's an addiction. As Dom would put it, I might be one of the only teenagers who can say I've failed chemistry because of this particular addiction.
If any of you would like to guess what my addiction is, write the answer on your suitcase and come deliver it (along with yourself) to me!
Love,
Ana

3. La mujer pasa mucho tiempo arreglando su pelo.

I'm doing my homework for one of the classes I'm taking at Truman, Spanish Conversations.
There's a grammar review and a vocabulary lesson for each chapter in the book, Conversación y controversia. This week's chapter is "La popularidad: hombres y mujeres," the idea of celebrity and the battle of the sexes.

All I really have to do for the grammar review is type out a bunch of sentences from the book, changing them from the present tense to the present perfect tense and stuff.
For example:
The exercise says, "You say that women are always more beautiful than men, right?"
And I change that to say, "You have said that women have always been more beautiful than men, right?"
Same with "Women observe the stupid things that men do" and "Women spend a lot of time fixing their hair."
I keep expecting Microsoft Word to put a bright green zigzag underneath what I'm typing, and when I right click on it, it'll say, "Unspeakably sexist (consider revising)."