Irrelevance Glorified

Last September, one my good friends from college tied the knot. Russell was kinda an inherited friend — he went to high school with Yusuke before Yusuke joined me at IMSA. So, when I went to UIUC and roomed with Yusuke, I ended up hanging out a lot with Russell and Cameron. Russell is a very likable guy. In fact, he would annoy me greatly because whenever we went out places, people were always coming up to us and greeting him. He was always knowing people. Infuriating. Anyways, after graduating, he went up to Wisconsin to work for Kimberly-Clark, becoming our go-to guy for absorbables. Early last year I found out that he had become engaged to a lucky lady, and was planning his wedding for later on that year. When I found out that Yusuke was engineering his vacation to coincide with the wedding, I knew I had to make it. A number of the pictures below showcase his adorable daughter Itsuki. I often wonder what goes through the head of young children when they visit another country where they don’t speak the same language. I mean, it’s gotta be weird to get into a big metal tube, appear in a strange new area with lots of strange looking people, and all of a sudden no one understands you! Maybe I’m just underestimating the youth of today.

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Pictures & descriptions after the jump

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Back in April, during a contentious debate in the Senate over the budget, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) made an interesting but embarrassing statement. The federal government does not allow federal funds to be used to fund abortions. In arguing against any federal dollars going to Planned Parenthood, he said that it is common knowledge that abortions are 90% of what Planned Parenthood does. Of course, that was an outrageous overstatement — it turns out that abortions are about 3% of what they do, i.e. federal funds help fund the other 97% of what they do in the name of reproductive health. When this came to light, questions were addressed to his office asking for some sort of explanation. Kyl said that his claim was “not intended to be a factual statement.” An absolutely ridiculously excuse. Anyways, when Stephen Colbert heard of this, he had a field day. He took to twitter, writing tweets like this. But he started it off with this segment on his show, one of the few times where he’s laughing too hard to stay in character.

Well, it’s that time again! Back by no popular demand, it’s the continuation of the Nano-man series. In case you missed it, here’s parts one and two. Again, these were stories that I wrote during my freshman year of high school, in Mr. Eichwald’s biology class. Each chapter we had a set of vocabulary words, and we had to explain them all in whatever way we saw fit. I decided to make a series of stories starring a microscopic superhero named Nano-man. At this point, all my success was going to my head. The class seemed to be enjoying my stories, which we had to read aloud. I’ve always had trouble being truly original, which is why I always tended to gravitate towards blatant parody, where I didn’t actually have to come up with my ideas out of the blue. For this story, I made the dubious decision to include some friends/nemeses into the story, adding some inside jokes that definitely did not age well. So, if you’re wondering where the hell Frank Quentin and Erich von Martin come in…well, there you go. But, enough of my excuses!!
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Last year, when I was planning out my vacations, I noticed that I had stuff for July, September, October, and November, but no August. Well, luckily Bruce and Tina were free for August, and they graciously offered to host a visit in Walla Walla. The last time I had the pleasure of going up there, they were renting a house and their youngest was basically a sack of potatoes. By this time, they had bought a place, and little Cyrus was turning one. Nile had taken an interest in all the pictures Bruce had taken in the past, and so he knew who I was, and had seen lots of proof that me and him had met before. I was looking forward to not needing a “warm up” period with him, at least. Just as advertised, when I was picked up at the airport, he greeted me with a “Hi, Uncle Jeet!” rather than just staring at me suspiciously.

With all the rugrats running around, long hiking trips were out of the question, but I’m a pretty low maintenance guest. All I look for is an opportunity to relax with friends. So we did a little wine tasting (Walla Walla has a huge number of vinyards), a little light hiking, and played some Axis and Allies.

Flickr Set Here
Slideshow below
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If you’re not familiar with Fox News personality Glenn Beck….well, then, good, actually. He is a conservative commentator who used to have a show where he would feverishly describe his conspiracy theories and lament the (imaginary) decline of the United States, usually due to something that libruls did. One of his greatest schticks is using multiple chalkboards to draw together the disparate strands of his theories, usually ending up with something like “Nancy Pelosi is brainwashing young children as sleeper agents for the Chinese Communist party in an attempt to overthrow the United States, and in effect, Christianity. I’m not gonna even post of the videos; I’ll just link to a Google search so you can look at the screenshots and marvel.

Anyways, John Stewart started making EPIC parodies of the rants-with-chalkboard-drawings, the first one back in March. He brought it back one last time after Beck announced he would be ending his show in April, and just in case you haven’t seen them, I thought I would post the videos. Better late than never, I guess.