Just wandering you can discover some amazing things.
Kris, Mike and I went to Raleigh today in the search for astronomical knowledge at the museum of Natural Sciences. Right across the street I ran into Myke and Arwen conducting the fracking protest. I felt bad that I couldn’t join in as they were already in the middle of the procession. Some people asked questions as to what fracking was, which signaled to me a job well done on their part. Curiosity is the first step!
I learned that the sun contains 99.8% of the entire solar system’s mass plus over a million times the volume of Earth. That. Is pretty fucking big. I can’t even fathom how big that is. I also learned that they have successfully started growing plants in microgravity among other Dead Space like society things already. Thirdly, I asked an astronomer about his view on the whole Keplar-22 B article, and he gave a straightforward answer about how reporters tend to either stretch the truth into hype, dumbed down, or way too analytical. I gathered that it was mostly bullshit.
Lastly, I learned that on June 5th, there is a Transit of Venus, which is basically that you can see Venus traversing across the sun. It is an event that will not happen EVER. AGAIN. IN YOUR LIFETIME. EVAR. So go to http://www.transitofvenus.org/ and schedule that day off! Places to go to are the museum in Raleigh or the museum of life and sciences in Durham!
Ryan, Angel, and Yuri and I went to Raven Rock today. Then. We napped liked we all never napped before. Ihop is awesome. The end.
I tried building my own sun jar and the tutorial definitely made it sound easier than it actually was. It worked for a night or two but then the diode died and the LED isn’t as bright as it should be and it’s just balls frustrating. 1984 is good so far, I enjoyed it during the short-lived thunderstorm that graced the property this mid afternoon. Very chill day today.
Just a rainy monday at biochem today. Took an exam. Made a B. Got really Asian on myself and said forget a damn B I should have gotten an A. Quickly forgot about it upon the purchase of happiness peanut M&Ms. Did a lab on aerobic respiration. Ripe pinto beans are possibly one of the worst things to ever present itself to the human nose. Seriously awful. I couldn’t even describe it to you. It was like if ten thousand gross hairy vikings were to eat rotten carcasses and then poo and farted in a stilo, and then the stilo was left to rot for ten thousand years, and then some unsuspecting geologists uncovered the viking poo and fart stilo and caused an ozone rip in the air by opening it. Worse than that.
Awful.
A Clockwork Orange: A Grammatically Incorrect Review.
So after a good two and a half weeks I had the pleasure of finishing Burgess’ novel (or novella, rather) A Clockwork Orange, and I’d have to say that feeling it left me with was a sort of confusion mixed with satiric hilarity. I had watched Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic portrayal of the book and to be honest I was too young, too shocked at a scene or two, and too lost in the garbled nadsat dialogue to really grasp anything. For starters, even though the book is only a mere 192 pages, this classic isn’t easy on the eyes with it’s heavily laden nadsat speak. What the hell is Nadsat? Well it took me a bit to grasp the language, it’s the slang talk used by the teenagers in the book. Mostly Russian in origin. Google was an excellent helper. If you have a decent memory and take a minute to learn the words then you can viddy the novel makes a bit more malenky sense. Reading the book however made me appreciate the film much more, and I plan to see it over again to absorb what I had missed.
^ This is Malcom McDowell playing Alex in the film. Kinda cuuute…
The book of course describes the socially chaotic and dystopian life that is Alex, a fifteen year old delinquent that is described shortly as “loving rape and Bethoveen”. He and a gang of his friends prowl the streets of a futuristic Britain, terrorizing villages and neighborhoods such as breaking into homes, beating up hobos, ripping up books from the library, raping women and beating more people up. The novella is separated into three parts, Pre-jail, In Jail, Post-jail. A theme that is noticeable in the first part of the book is clearly the battle between the old and young. Alex is constantly belittled and chastised for his young age by older peers and at the same time Alex and his gang are constantly targeting people that are “starry”, or ancient in Nadsat talk. This later on reveals itself to be sort of a twisted dark metaphor of Alex’s journey through puberty, the innocent wiles of youth versus the more “calculated” and “socially conditioned” adulthood. All of this is oblivious to Alex however, who seems to have a twisted moral conscience if he appears to have any at all. The wrongdoings and horrendous insidiousness that Alex unleashes upon his fellow man makes it hard for the reader to really sympathize with his impending demise. He even states in the novel that he knows he’s aware of the existence of bad people versus good people, and he openly chooses to be bad. It’s like watching an angsty teenager punching a teacher in the face while skulking away to spray paint a shitty anarchy symbol on a snack machine and then going off to shoot up heroin with your so-called best friends, you just shake your head; one because you are aware of the sheer ignorance of the young and secondly, deep down you sort of were that teenager in a sense.
I decided to take a trip to the retirement-homes laden town (or city? what’s the difference anyway, land mass? population?) known as Asheboro. Besides all of the cow farms and gourd bird feeders, Asheboro is home to the lovely NC Zoo. Yuri came along with me, and although the day was a disappointing 53 chilly degrees, the animals made it all better. Here are some of the pictures, although a lot of the animals I couldn’t get a great picture of due to a lack of a zoom function. The black bears, otters, cougar, and lemurs are just a handful of great creatures that I couldn’t capture. BUT ANYWHO, AWESOME TIME TIME.
This Spring Break was really interesting. Caught up on some reading, shot my .22 and hung out with Yuri and some dear friends. And then…
Well yeah. Then yeah. Sure. Fuck.
Beautiful rainfall during sunset in the first photo, although the phone couldn’t capture any raindrops. The second was taken during the day. Ahh…I live quite the distance but yet it is so peaceful to be away.
Took a tour around the property today in this gorgeous weather. Instagram came out for Android, woo-sah!!! Now anyone can be an amateur photographer!
