Highwaymen

I love the poetry in the Highwaymen's songs, so I'll be posting a few over the next couple of days.

Look here is that you I see
You sure seem down to me
Would you like to tell it to a friend
I can help if anyone can
You know I understand
Everyone gets crazy now and then

I know those empty nights get lonely
Sometimes you feel like you're the only one
To lose more then he wins
Guess these trouble times get scary
But that's just ordinary
Everyone gets crazy now and then

And who can say they've never stumbled
Never fallen to their knees
Your dreams like castles when they crumble
Well I know what you mean
And I know how hard it can seem

I get crazy just like you
Lost and lonely too
Like some old flag left flying in the wind
Time has taught me this for sure
Time is the only cure
All your blues will turn to gold again
Oh everyone gets crazy now and then

Masks

Our school publishes a biannual student poetry-short story collection called reflections. I've stopped buying it lately, because although the good artwork balances out the mostly mediocre poetry, I just couldn't stand seeing another 'mask poem'. I don't know why they're so damn popular, but it seems like every student at the school needs to write an emo poem about the mask they wear, dragging poor Mr. Dunbars work through hell and back. After having a nice chat with Layla about all this, the following lines came to me (I'm tempted to submit it under a pseudonym just to see what would become of it...) :

I wear the mask that grins and lies,
It lies to hide my awful eyes,
It grins to mask my pitted skin,
The sight of which kills lesser men.

I may look sad, I may look cold,
But if the mask were backwards-rolled,
I'd stand yet changeless before thee,
In dear-bought truth, the mask wears me.

Vocabulary Resolution

A list of words I'd like to resolve to use more often (or at least to use) this year:

Amarulence
Argent
Azuline
Azure
Bubulbicate
Celadon
Celeripedean
Celeste
Commandeer
Cosmogyral
Deloricate
Etaerio
Eternitarian
Fallaciloquence
Ianthine
Isabelline
Jacinthe
Mazarine
Myriander
Myrrh
Nepheliad
Nevermore
Oriole
Plegnic
Ponask
Riviation
Serendipity
Scrounge
Smaragdine
Solferino
Sorrel
Spigot
Stiricide
Tintinnabulate
Thural
Tropaean
Witticaster
Vermillion
Yelve
Zinnober

I happened to find one for you, too, Ary: Minoritetsbærerdiffusjonskoeffisientsmålingsapparatur

Taxi!

In Shakespeare, 8598 words (abaissiez, abash, abatements, abates, abbeys, ..., zo, zodiac, zodiacs, zone, zwaggered) are used only once

TAXI is spelled the same way in eleven languages, according to Dixon: English, French, German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech, Slovak, and Portuguese. Jeff Volgyi reports it is also spelled the same way in Hungarian. G. Strauss reports it is also spelled the same way in Romanian. However, Emerson Werneck says that in Portuguese, taxi is actually spelled táxi.

Emerson points out that SAUNA is spelled the same way in nine languages: Finnish, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch, and Danish. Readers of this page have reported it is also spelled the same way in Lithuanian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, and Norwegian (although in Norwegian the word badstue is more commonly used). In Swedish, bastu, a short form of badstuga meaning (approximately) "bathing-hut," is more commonly used. [Juozas Rimas, Nikola Petrovic, Gabriel Ionita, Thor-Rune Fiskum, Andreas Engström].

Phil Smith writes, "Regarding the fact that 'sauna' is spelt the same in nine languages, in Japanese the word uses the katakana characters (used for words that have come into the language from other countries) and is spelt 'sa-u-na' too. This is unusual for katakana words, as they rarely match the original spelling, such as 'kamera', 'pasokon' (personal computer), 'apaato' (apartment) and 'sabiro' (suit, originating from the road name Saville Row in London, where tailors used to work)."

Dan Tilque has found that VETO is the same in at least 24 languages: Albanian, Azerbaijani, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, SerboCroatian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. In Hungarian it is spelled the same except for a diacritic. In Basque and Tagalog it's spelled 'beto' and in Polish it's 'weto'.

Jefferson B. Morris points out that www as an abbreviation for "World Wide Web" has 9 spoken syllables, whereas the term being abbreviated has only 3 or 4 spoken syllables. A similar occurrence is WWII for "World War II."

I wish I could post the link Im getting these from, but its too brilliant. I'll share tomorrow.

Semester Grades

Remember when I posted my possible, best case scenario grades? Well, I pulled through on all my exams and got all of them. Neat that my GPA can survive a C in Math, but sad realizing what it would have been otherwise...

Latin 4 - H
Spanish 3 - A
German 1 - A
Honours World History - A
Honours English 2 - A
Honours Biology - B
Algebra 2 and Triganometry - C

Treading on Sacred Ground

I heard this song for the first time the other day, and its a decent song throughout, but the way the chorus is sung is... spine tingling. No real reason. :P

This ain't just some neon love come lately
Its a precious thing you don't know nothing about
We were joined in the eyes of the Lord, in the eyes of our hometown
Why don't you leave her alone
You're treading on sacred ground.

Schedule for Next Year

These are the classes I've signed up for next year; I hope I get into all the ones I want because I've played mean games with the district the last few years and now I need every credit I can get.

Honours English 3
Pre-Calculus
German 2
Spanish 4
AP Comparative Government and Politics
Honours Government
Honours Wainwrighting
Honours Chemistry 1 and 2
Business Management

Nasssty Ssstian.

Did you fall asleep during our text message conversation? I don't know if I should be happy or upset about that... :P Anyway, dirty rotten trick of you. Do take my advice, though... if Im going to be spending all this time typing out letters on my phone, I may as well use my brain a bit and get some practice, right? ;)

Research Paper

We were encouraged to pick a topic we cared about, but predictably half the class picked global warming and obesity anyway. Erin tried to pick New Orleans, which she was from and all, and Sara is so into politics she did alright too. I picked something I might be a little too interested in... Monolingualism of United States Students. I need to remind myself I have other classes and that just because I can look up such things under the guise of homework doesn't mean I should :P

I'm finding some interesting things, though. More later, I'm sure ;)

Will you hold my hand for her?

My friend Lauren is brilliant at Spanish, but doesn't like to talk in class. Fine and good, except it's twenty percent of her grade. As an attempt to get her to talk more last semester, I made a stick with a hand of cardboard covered in felt at the end of it that read "Yo quiero hablar!"

But this semester, we're in different hours. So I had to ask Sra. Rodriguez, "Will you hold my hand for her?"

(Apparently it's working!) ;D

Just The Way We Are

"We're compulsive spenders. We like to spend. We spend it before we get it. That's just the way we are. Thats the way Americans have always been. It's just the way we are."

- Mrs. Sachtleben, Honours History Teacher

Activity Bus

I rode the Activity Bus home yesterday. The following is a conversation I heard from about 3 rows back. They were quite loud.

"If you have sex with a girl, are you still a virgin?" - F1
"Well, actually, you have to kind of be, broken..." - F2
"Broken?" - F1
"Inside." - F2
"...." - F1
"Only for Girls." - M1
"But why?" - F2
"I was drunk! I didn't know!" - F1
"If someone gets drunk and kill someone, is it their fault?" - F2
"I dunno! But I didn't know! I was drunk!" - F1
"Some part of you wanted it. Some part of you wanted to experiance it." - F2
"But have you ever... with a guy?" - F1
"Yes!!!!" - F2
"I meant him!!!" - F1
"Yea." - M1

And So On.
Another bizarre mix of humility/naivete and nastiness...

Ven Pon meeting tomorrow!

Yay, we have a Ven Pon Creative Writing club tomorrow, and we had a great turnout last time, and even though Meghan probably wont show tomorrow due to the late notice, she seems interested in joining. W00t and all that that encompasses.

Ah, Ven Pon. If there was ever a tired old joke, there it is. And yet we have fixed it to our club, and so it will never die, only grow... well, thin. Yes, yes, like butter spead over too much bread. Damn that Tolkien. Ven Pon!

So it remains to be seen, whether it is an Elven Acronym, another word for Cojones, or Come Put as they say in La Clase de Español.

Mixed Metaphores

Mixed Metaphores (A.k.a. I put my foot in my mouth and jumped off the deep end), can be a nuisance. Unavoidable in everyday life, disgustingly common in amateur fiction, the funny pictures they cause can be forgiven the average man. But the writers of Time magazine? These people should know better... unless they were going for humour...

"Bill and his wife Melinda, another computer nerd turned poverty warrior, love facts and data with a tenderness most people reserve for their children, and Bono was hurling metrics across the table as fast as they could keep up."

To Be Fifteen

To be fifteen is to have a combination of freedom and carelessness that you will never experience again; it is the life of the infant prodigy and the infant mind to experiment with everything, for anything to be impressive and novel. Never again will life be so easy, or such trivial brilliance so profound.

Female Leaders

There have been a flood of female leaders being elected recently, with many others making headlines that are the first female head of states. I guess they're still really in the minority when you look at how many nations there are, but it seems like there are a lot all of a sudden. I just hope they're all competent leaders and not just following some sort of feminist trend :P

Spanish Exam

I needed an 89% or higher to keep my A, due to a participation grading system devised by El Diablo himself. When asked about the difficulty of the exam, Sra said only, "I've had A's"
However, I was probably one of the only people in the school to raise an A with the final. Although, 90 to 91 isn't that impressive, the idea of it sounds pretty nice. She said I got the highest grade in Spanish III. ^^ That's a relief. Funny though, I didn't spend a minute studying...

Random Quote

"I've never seen so many people with brown hair in my life!"

-Jutta, a student from Germany, upon seeing our Cafeteria at West High.

Football...

All they care about in Camdenton is football. We met a few boys, and after the formalities of names were exchanged, the first question asked was, "Do you play football?"

We blinked. "We're girls..." We explained patiently.

They shrugged. "Our sister's on the team."

What followed was hours of Tackle Football (2 vs 2), Dodgeball, Chase the fool dog, and Smear the Queer. It was disgusting how much my sister liked to be tackled... :P

How many Methenys...

How many Methenys does it take to change a lightbulb? I dunno, but it only takes Miranda to break the lamp and plunge half the house into darkness trying. The family was less than thrilled, but its hardly my fault that while I thought I was untwisting an extremely stubborn bulb I was actually tighting a short length of wire beyond its frail endurance... while it was plugged in...