Archive for November, 2008

Spontaneous memory recovery

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

I often have spontaneous memory recoveries from many years ago that pop into my head for no apparent reason. I had one today.

This one took me back to high school. I believe sophomore year chemistry. Mr. McKewen was lecturing on some wacky chemistry concept. My friend Mark had a question, so he raised his hand.

Upon noticing Mark’s hand in the air, Mr. McKewen calmly asked, “Question, Mark?”

I burst out laughing. Question, Mark? Question mark! Ha! He said a punctuation!

Yes I know, it’s not funny. It’s not even close to being funny. But at the time I sure thought I was. And of course, no one knew what the hell I was laughing at. Slouching low in my chair, I let the awkward moment run its course.

I told Mark after class why I was laughing. He was actually more amused than I thought he would be and decided that if it ever occurred again, he would promptly jump to his feet and yell out “exclamation point!” It sure would have been awesome for him and I. Alas, the situation never came up again, which is probably a good thing.

I also worked with Mark at McDonald’s for a while during high school. I once convinced him to say to every customer coming through the drive-thru speaker during his shift, “Hi welcome to McDonald’s! My favorite band is Van Halen! What’s yours?”

He was later fired for a different, non-related infraction that I would prefer not to disclose here.

The end.

For one minute, McCain won California

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

It was quite interesting to see all of the interactive election maps that news websites had created for last night’s election. I spent most of my night following CNN on tv at Nelson’s house while monitoring 4 or 5 other interactive maps on my laptop.

Of course I also had to follow the Fox News map. I didn’t notice any bias in their state projections throughout the night, except for one huge exception:

At about 7:50pm, just before the California polls closed, I loaded up the Fox News map. To my surprise California was colored red! Woah! 

I hovered over the state and John McCain’s name was also highlighted and checked! At this time last night, the only chance McCain had to win was some sort of a miracle. Something like, oh, him winning California…

However, even if McCain did win California in Fox News land, he still would have have come up short.

I took this screenshot since I knew it was probably an error and sure enough upon page reload it was back to uncalled.

Still funny though.

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