Tornado

Last sunday, an EF 5 tornado destroyed the towns of parkersberg, dike, and new hartford. Its the first time that a tornado actually killed someone, actually seven people died. I didnt think much about it at the time, but we went up there as a baseball team one week after the torando had been through. The destruction was unbeilvable. The tornado was a mile wide as touched down for forty one miles. The torando actually went through the town, which is pretty suprising. I had played baseball on the field like a month before the situation happened and I remember there were a lot of really nice houses all the down the right field line, but when we returned, the was only rubble where the houses use to stand. There are only 1800 people that live there and 220 houses were completely destroyed and 200 were severley damaged, I wonder how many more houses there were. One guy who we had been assigned to help told us that all of the animals in town had either been killed when the tornado hit or died several hours later due to severe injuries. The tornado also hit the school directly. Our job was to clear all of these old things out of this farm so the new weight facility could be built because the other one had been demolished. It was just sad.

I hope you in someway you can help those people out.

End of the Year

Well, this is our last full friday of the year, and needless to say that Im not sad at all. I still have one year left at kennedy and maybe even one more after that if i fail a few more classes than I usually do. Were suppose to have a baseball game in Cedar Falls today but its raining cats and dogs out there, so I doubt that will happen which also means that i dont get out of 6th hour early today. My 6th hour is spanish and were watching a depressing movie about a quadreplegic who wants euthanasia. It has that one guy from the movie No Country for Old Men. I have to do this blog entry plus one before the end of the year, and my project is already done for one class. I dont even know why the juniors have to come to school once the seniors get out because I am only learning in one class, and it was a senior math class and theres only 6 people left. In one class we are doing a community service project, one class we're watching a movie, one class we are building a cardboard boat, and my last class, we are reviewing for the final.

Well I have to say that I'm excited about the end of the year, but not so excited about the last week and finals.

Photo Essay

Our project is finally finished! We did a photo essay for our final project and bond finished editing it last night. If you want to see it go to youtube and search "becoming a champion photo essay". This graphic peice of literature tells the story of a nerd who isnt very athleteic and ends up being horribly embarassed in front of all of his other classmates. But later that night he decides to make a committment to train hard and become the most physically fit kid in his class. I'm not going to tell you how it ends, but i will tell you that it is pretty funny, plus the music's not bad either.

I was watching some other photo essays on youtube and ours blows the others out of the water. They are more of a serious nature, and arent really in an order, they are just random pics that the person took and then put them together in a random order, not really trying to geta point across. I think that our essay is very good because as a person who knows what the story was suppose to portray, its very clear and easy to understand.

So please go watch the vid.

UFC

I was watching a UFC fight the other day on t.v. when I started to wonder why someone would voluntarily get the crap beat out of em once a month for an occupation. They could just get a job at target or somewhere like that. Heck I would rather be in school for the rest of my life than be a professional fighter, well maybe not that far but you get the point. And have you ever noticed that a UFC fight never ends in a split decision? It usually gets ended becuase somebody fractured there eye socket in six places or they passed out because somebody was choking them out. If I was put in that situation I would probably just tap out because you know, it would be the smart thing to do. Plus, do you know how many hours those athletes put in on training to build muscle, and excercising to loose wait? And they dont get to eat whatever they want, they have a strict diet plan. Do you still want to be a professional fighter after all that I have just said. Although It would be pretty tight to be able to fight twelve times a year and be able to make a decent living off of it.

I hope you enjoyed this essay.

Lunch Lady

Did you ever have to work in the cafeteria when you were in middle school? I remember in eighth grade when I had to help the lunch ladies out for a day. A kid named Andrew Berger and me reported to the cafeteria at about 8 30 or so. When we got there we were a little scared because the lunch ladies at our school were a little scary (one of them was missing an eye ball and another had parkinsons disease and could never get the food on the plate). They told us to start making sandwiches that consisted of ham cheese bread and crap. We excluded the crap from our sandwhiches and they turned out to be delicious, who wouldve thought it? But anyways, while we were slaving over the hot stove making lunch for all of our classmates, the lunch ladies were playing craps in the corner. Im kidding about that but we really did do most of the work. They were pretty nice to us because they let us have free ice cream and we didnt have to pay for our lunches when it was time for us to eat.

In the end, I realized that the lunch ladies were nice but thet were really, really lazy.

Google Earth

Google Earth. What a conveinient, neat little program. But I was thinking and I started to ponder, what does google do if they take a picture and theres something thats not appropriate shows up in the picture. Do they just leave it in or do they take it out? It's not like they can just tell the entire earth not to be tanning nude outside at a certain time, and if they did, I suspect there would be a quite a bit of strange things that would be there if people knew when they were going to take a picture. I have this "friend", and if "he" knew they were taking a picture of where "he" was going to be, "he" would probably make a huge banner with an expletive on it and then try to find "himself". You know, something like a big "eat ____ google", or something along those lines. I was trying to do a little research on how often they update their pictures, but i couldnt find. However, I do know for a fact that they update it fairly often, so keep that it mind...

Google earth is a fascinating tool that can give you visuals of the entire earth with just a few clicks, but the most important thing is that it is something that was meant to be messed with. So I think that it is our duty as human beings to just sit outside our houses for a couple days at a time, and fake a picture like you have just stabbed your sister to death. Remember, we owe it to ourselves.

Crime Lab

I dont really have anything to write about so Ill tell you about my physics project. This week, we are doing this special unit where we have a few police officers come to our school to talk about their job which incurs accident reconstruction. I personally dont see how it relates to physicis, well i guess they use displacement formulas and coefficient of friction problems, but considering the fact that we did all that stuff about four months ago, i would say that they are just trying to kill some time. About the only thing that we have really done was look at bloody, gruesome pictures of horrific car accidents, so it really doesnt relate to anything physics.



Today, KCRG came to our school so that they could feature the lab on the news, but they didnt even come to our class, they went to fourth hour. Oh, by the way if that is going to be on the news, than im guessing nothing special happened today that is worth covering.

Continuing my blog...

I was presented an interesting question in class today. Should I continue to write on my blog after the school year is over? My original thought was no, but then as i started to think about it, i realized that there wouldnt be any requirements and i could do whatever i wanted to with it. You know, drop a couple of f-bombs here and there, put up some funny youtube videos that are inappropriate for a school sponsored project (by the way, if you dont go kennedy, this is a requirement). Do you know what the most interesting part of this assignment has been to me so far? I put a couple of ads from google on my blog (you probably noticed) just for the fun of it, not expecting anything to happen. A couple of weeks passed and nothing had happened, until I went to my adsense account and added a video ad. I checked my adsense account just for laughs, and what I saw next suprrised the heck out of me. I had made one thousand dollars in five days. I'm kidding about that part, but I swear to god that I made fifty-four cents off my blog. Just by being lazy, clicking on a couple of things, I made half a dollar. Isnt America great?

Back to the original point. Should I keep my blog going? The toughest part of the question is wether or not I will forget my password. You might be laughing now, but it's happened before, especially when it comes to padalocks on your gym locker. I've wasted 12 or 13 bucks buying new padalocks because I forgot the combonations. And let me tell you, nothing is more embarassing than having to break off your own lock with a weight plate.

GTA IV

I just got the video game Grand Theft Auto IV on tuesday when it came out, and let me tell you, it is sick. You start out just getting off of a ship and you have never been to the city before (the city is called Liberty City). The reason you came was because your cousin (Roman), told you that he is rich and has a mansion, and all of this stuff. When you arrive, it is quite the opposite. Throughout the game you have to work your way to the top of the crime ladder and become the biggest gangster in the city. Throughout your quest to the top of the ladder, you meet some pretty interesting people and are asked to do some interesting tasks (that i cant mention now because they are a little inapropriate). The graphics in the game are stunning, and all of the missions are like real. When you are driving a car and you hit a telephone pole, your headlights go out, or if you run over a fire hydrant, water starts shooting out of the ground. The only thing that's not realistic is that you can drive as fast as you want, or on whatever side of the road, and you can drive through stoplights and stopsigns and the cops dont care, you just cant hit a cop car though. If you get injured, to heal yourself, all you have to do is purchase some food-either from a vendor on the street, or a resturant. If I were going to rate the game, I would give it 9.25 out of 10. The reason that it looses 3/4 of a point is because the camera gets messed up when you are driving.

Other than that it's perfect, and i would suggest that you get this game.

Ayers Blog

If you want to see Mr. Ayers blog, Bond found you just have to google "michael ayers" uiowa blog.

Two Questions

This is a reading entry response to the essay that we read that was entitled Two Questions. Two Questions was written by Lynda Barry and it is basically a comic that is all about her struggle with drawing as a career. The story starts out as her asking herself two questions: Is this good, and does this suck? After this first intro, she descrbies how she fell in love with drawing and how she made picture after picture into story after story. But as the comic goes on, the more crowded each drawing gets with angry little charcters who tell her that she cant draw very well and that she needs to give it up. On the second to last picture she is trying to guess what her drawing is and the little figures tell her she has one more guess before she has to give it up. So she finally says she doesnt know what it is, which turns out to be the correct explantion. And in the very last picture, she one of her formally evil little charcters help guide her pen into what she is trying to draw. I liked this story because it was pretty easy to understand and it was minimal reading. The pictures that were the story were pretty good and easy to understand. I think that we should read more alternative forms of essays, you know to change it up a little.

My Weekend

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Movie Makin'

Dude I was thinkin for like two seconds in between blogs about what this entry was going to be about and I came up with a genius one. I would be a sick movie director becuase I've got some great ideas that I've never really taken seriously- till now. First off, I'd have to change my name to something like Schmeven Schmeilberg, kidding about that but my real name would be like that one director whose name is M. Night Shamalan or however you spell it. Great name just came to me C. Day Llamahon. That was a joke too (haha).

My first movie would be one that was consisted of a whole bunch of skits like the shows Cahpelle's Show and Human Giant. I would get some crazy funny actors. I don't even want to say any of my ideas right now due to the fact that they are so good that some director somewhere would steal them and claim them as there own, and they are a little half-baked. But I'm still coming up with solutions to the problems. Another idea would be a mix between James Bond and The Matrix- so basically alot of gunfire in slow motion that features people who wear sunglasses in the dead of night. Dude, just came up with that joke on the spot, and it still wasnt funny. I'm going to quit while I'm still ahead by a little bit.

Dude, terrible blog entry, dude.

Baseball Practice

I am straight p.o.ed right now because the first baseball practice starts tomorrow. I think I wrote like two months ago that it was gonna start and I didnt know if i was going to be excited or nervous. Well I'm neither because I'm pissed because I didnt take enough preseason preperation and I know that I am going to suck it up out there but do you know what? I do care, but I already know that I'm not going to be playing varstiy this year, so I'm pretty much holding out for JV, which I am pretty confident I'll be starting in.

I have a bit of an issue however. I just started learning to play catcher this offseason because the head coach asked me to. He did it because we only have one junior catcher, and he wants a back up in case he gets hurt (but hes pretty good). Anywho my issue was that I dont know what my primary position is going to be tomorrow because he was pretty firm that he wanted me to at least learn the posistion, but last year I was a pretty decent outfielder. I know what I'm going to do, I'll just ask him what he wants me to do even though I think I know the answer but I'd rather be the other one. Oh well I guess I'll just do what he thinks I can do to help the team. Dude, great idea, Ill just say that my primary posistion is utility. That means that I play everything which i do. Freshman year I played second base, last year I played left field, and this year, I might be catching. How crazy is that?

P.S. baseball's not tight.

Golf

The weather has been so nice lately, I have played two rounds of golf. The latter round being yesterday (Saturday) at Airport, and the first round being at Twin Pines. Saturdays weather was actually pretty crappy because it was super duper windy, plust airport is like a links course so its very open and there are no trees in sight. There's this one hole that is about 380 yards long and about 70 yards downhill with a cornfield to the right and a wind blowing 20 mph from the left. I aimed my driver two fairways to the left and my ball ended up barely being in bounds. It was pretty fun though because I played with three of my friends. We played a two on two best ball. We won the front 9 by one stroke, and they won the second 9 by two strokes and we didnt play the back back 9 (airport has 27 holes). They ended up the champions because of a lucky shot on the last hole. We were both on in two shots except we were six feet away from the cup and they were probably 46 feet away with a severly sloping put. All we had to do was to beat them by one shot and we wouldve tied overall, but one of their guys hit a super hard lag put, perfect line, hit the cup and pop out to about six inches away. If he wouldve missed the cup, they wouldve been a good 25 feet away. They made a par on the hole which meant we could still tie for the overall score. We had two puts to make a six footer and my partner went first, as he had the entire game. He hit his on a pretty good line and it lip out on the bottome edge. It was all up to me. I spent a good two minutes lining up my put to make sure that I wouldnt miss. I stepped up to knock mine in and when I hit it, I knew I missed it because I shanked it straight right.

And that's why I'm not playing in the US Open, this year.

Speeding Ticket

Remember a couple of blogs ago when I was writing about that speeding ticket I got? Well I went to the courthouse to pay it and finalize it on my driving record, but the judge informed me that there was an option to write a theme on driving and the violation wouldnt go onto my record, so the insurance company wouldnt know about it and the fine was reduced from 89.60 down to 50.00. I was happy about both things.

Anyways all that happened on March 17, and the judge gave me a due date of May 1st so i had a chance to work on it over spring break, but guess what. That sure as h-e-double hockey sticks didnt happen and now im stuck with writing another two thousand word essay on top of the one that im already working on for AP Lang. Ive allready got 1115 words done, but I really dont think that i can make a coherent essay on the topic of safe driving that is two thousand words long. Ive already repeated the same point three of four times throughout it and Ive still got 900 more words to go. Maybe the people at the courthouse wont actually read it, so Ill catch a break and theyll let me off scott free without realizing i only wrote 500 words and pasted it four times.

Anywho only six more posts this evening.

My Weekend

Nothing to write about, so I'm going to bore you with what I did this weekend.

On Friday, I met a friend at the KPL at about, oh I dont know 8:15. We stayed there for a little bit and then we went to go get some food at Wendy's on Blairs Ferry Road. On our way there, one of my friends called and he said that him and another kid were going to meet us there, so I said what the hey. When we were at Wendy's, I ordered a Baconator sandwhich, some 99 cent nuggets, and a small chocolate frosty. It was pretty good, but a little expensive, the total ended up to be about six dollars and fifty cents. I'm not too woried about money though because on Saturday I umped to baseball games for some eight year olds, it was extremely boring but I made thirty dollars a game so it was worth it. After I finished with that somebody called me and wanted to golfing so I went to go play eighteen holes at Airport International Golf Course in Eely. We were gonna get two carts, but we didnt have enough money, plus we werent eighteen. But that didnt stop my friend from lying to the clerk and said he was old enough but he left his drivers license in his car (we all rode out together) and the clerk just said "you promise me youre eighteen?". I was very suprised at this but i just rolled with the punches. Since we only had one cart and I didnt have enough money, me and one kid walked while the other two rode but it was fine. On Saturday night my grandma was it town, and since she only comes over like once a year my parents made me stay home even though I just chilled in the basement the whole night and didnt even see or talk to them. Oh well, it was kinda nice just relaxin at home for a night.

How stupid was this entry? Well I have seven more to do tonight, so there probablly going to get worse.

If a tree falls in the woods...

If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is there to hear it will it make a sound? You've all heard this before and have your own opinions. I personally don't care what you think, but I think the tree does make a sound because it makes sound waves that are there even if no one is around to hear them. But some others people's definition of a sound is an audible noise that must be detected by an ear. But that definition is wrong simply because of the fact that if a frequency is so high that it is impossible for the human ear to detect, it is still around. Kndy25 was quoted saying "if a tree falls it produces a sound wave, but a sound wave must be detected for it to be a noise, but a noise is classified as energy that is transfered into a sound wave, therefore we are back to square one, but the true answer can be found in Einstein's theory of relativity, therefore when one plugs the ammount of sound energy into the equation E=MCsquared, you must take the derivitive on the trigonomic function of x." He's full of crap. But the bottom line is, if you dont agree with me, than you're wrong.

If you have an opinion on the debate, please let me know.

Spring Time

You know what today reminded me of? Yep, you guessed it, spring time. I know we may officially be almost a month into it, but today was the first day that I felt the weather was nice and warm. I wore shorts and a long sleeve shirt to school, and I was about perfect when I was outside. The reason I brought this up was because of the fact that I was supposed to have four baseball games this past weekend, but they were cancelled due to a mxture of rain, snow, and temperatures that were below freezing. I'm not saying that I was upset that our games were cancelled by any means, I'm just giving an example. Speaking of spring league, I am having just a break out season...not. This is probablly the worst I've played in a while. I only have like four hits and six walks, oh well, it's just spring leak, noone cares, or at least that's the way the saying goes.

Why am I writing about spring time you may ask. Well that's quite simple I was letting my iTunes play, and I ecountered a song that I had put on my iPod for my dad that is called forty below by Johnny Horton. It's like a country/bluegrass/hick song, but he enjoys it. But the other actuall reason that I am writing about spring time is because when you have to do three mandatory blogs per week, you run out of topics to write about. My next blog will probably be about what i thought of the movie mean girls. Good movie btw. Oh in case you are wondering btw means by the way. Wow I'm really bored right now, I'm about to dip and go play some halo. But I would like to close with a joke.

How do you catch a unique rabbit? Unique up on it.
How do you catch a tame rabbit? The tame way.

Oh my god, those are hilarious.

Research Paper Again

I know you are probably sick of reading about what I'm going to write about, but this is the last non mandatory post about my research paper.

I've decided to switch topics because the topic that I picked was to stupid, plus I couldnt find any credible sources and let me tell you, I am one lazy kid. My new topic is blood doping. How legit is that? Not really if you actually know what I'm talking about, but it kinda sounds cool. But what blood doping really is is the process of taking blood from your arm, or neck, or groin and putting it into deep freeze for a few weeks until your body replaces all of the red blood cells that it lost, and then injecting yourself with your pre-frozen groin blood. It sounds kind of dumb, but some professional cyclists do it because it increases endurance and stamina because your body has a higher-than-normal hemoglobin level within your body. It is also very hard to tell wether or not an athlete has been blood doping because of the fact that your own blood, believe it or not, is a natural compound that your body makes. Sounds like a blast, I'm gonna try it pretty soon...not. There are some serious diseases that can come from injecting yourself with a non sterile substance.

In my paper I hope to discuss the who's, what's, when's, where's, and why's pf my topic. I plan to use a variety of persons. By this I mean utilizing the first, second, and third person throughout my writing. I even plan to interview convicted blood doper Floyd Landis. Oh wait that's right, he wasn't aware he was blood doping. I guess I can't include that interview in my paper.

I hope this outlook of my paper has made you interested in reading my paper, but probablly not.

Spring Break

It's been a while since I last posted, but noone reads my blog anyways so I dont think it matters. I would like to tell you a little bit about how my spring break went.

My first day off, I had two baseball games. Thankfully they were in Cedar Rapids, but I played absolutely terrible, but I didnt care because I was thinking about how awesome the rest of my spring break was going to be without baseball. On Sunday, that's when the real fun began. We got of all of our stuff ready to fly out to Colorado. That's right skiing for three days on some of the best snow in the world. Well that might be a bit dramatic, but it is some pretty good skiing out there. The trip started out by our luggage getting sent to Chicago. That doesnt sound so bad right? Wrong. We were on a direct flight from Cedar Rapids to Denver. It was a pretty good start out to our vacation...not.

We didnt even think we were going to go skiing the first day because we didnt have any of our gear. But as luck would have it, our stuff showed up about 10 o'clock. The worst possible time because the mountain opens at 9 and closes at 4. We decided we would squeeze in a short day of skiing. When we had all of our stuff on, one of the people I was with said he was gonna go get the car cleaned off (it had snowed the night before) and we thought it was a good idea. We get down to the car five minutes later to see the car running and him sitting on the ground. We asked him what had happened and he said that he started the car and accidentally locked all the doors. We called the cops and they came and got the door open, but it delayed us about another 30 minutes. We finally got up on top of the mountain at about 11:15 and only got to ski for 4 or 5 hours.

We got back on Wednesday morning only to find that our luggage had been a flight delayed and we had to go back to the airport to get at like 8 o'clock at night. But the rest of my vacation was just fine, I even won 75 dollars because I won a pool for the NCAA tournament, that was the cherry on top of my spring break.

Why I would be an awesome mascot...

As you probably could've guessed, I think I would be a pretty daw gone good mascot for my high school, the Cedar Rapids Kennedy High School Cougars. I was just thinking about this the other day because at our basketball and football games, we never have anybody dressed up in our mascot suit, except on a few occasions. One reason that I would be legit would be because I can dance really good, I mean really, really good. When I hear music, sometimes I just lose all control and dance until my heart feels like it's ready to explode. I'm just kidding, I embarass myself most of the time I try to bust a move. But an actual reason would be that I'm not scared to be embarassed, and especially since I know most everybody that attends the games. I would be all over the court if the ref made a bad call because they wouldn't know who I was (unless they're reading my blog, but nobody reads it, so I think I'm safe.)

Plus, with that comfortable suit I could break dance really well. And our mascot is wearing clothes that come off, so I might be able to do a little strip tease to get the crowd into the game. I think it would be a good credential to have on my college application and hey, it would be pretty neat to be a mascot at a school like the U of I because you get to travel to all of the games for the sport that you are the mascot for. So for instance the Hawkeyes had a game in Ann Arbor, I would get to go watch them get their behinds handed to them, but free admission is free admission, plus you are literally on the field next to the players.

My friend said that his cousin or his cousin's friend use to be the mascot at Iowa State and he said that hardly anybody tries out. As a matter of fact I learned most of this stuff that I am writing from him. I bet to get the job title, you would have to be obnoxious and outrageous, two things that I am everyday. Some of the negatives would be getting your legs split on a goal post, or having to put up with drunken fans give you crap all day.

That's about all I know about mascots, I hope you learned something because I sure didn't.

Spring Break

Only one more day of school until spring break. That means I get to wake up when I want, and do whatever I feel like, but most of all, it means that I get to go to Colorado skiing. ALthough judging by the weather, it looks as if I could go skiing in Iowa. I mean it is absolutely coming down out there, we probably have an inch of snow that is one the ground, plus all the snow that melts when it first in the ground.

But back to my spring break. We fly out to Denver on Sunday morning at like 10 A.M. and we plan to land about 11 their time and get out bags and rent a car and things of that nature. It's about an hour and a half drive to the town that we are staying in. Also, we're probably going to go get all of our ski stuff and groceries that we need. Our first day of skiing will be on Monday when there will hardly be anybody on the mountain because it's a work day.

I think we are going to ski two or three days on Copper. Copper mountain is probably the most known mountain in the area that we are staying. They don't have very many lights so we will probably be limited to 8 to 10 hours of skiing, which is kind of a long time, but we like to ski. I have to tell you about this thing that we do when we are skiing. If somebody falls, the person behind them yells out "skiier down", and everybody that is able comes full speed towards our fallen skiier and sprays him with an avalanche of snow that usually gets inside their coat and pants and uh, it's really cold.

Even when I get back on Wednesday, I still have four days to whatever I feel like, plus I'm pretty sure that I dont have any homework because I have about thirteen tests on Friday.

Well that's all I gots to say, so peace bra.

Bucket Racing

When we were younger, we use to think of stupid things to do in the summer to try to avoid any and all boredness, and one of things that we came up with was bucket racing. There were only two rules in bucket racing, the first was there were no rules, and the second was treat others as you want to be treated, so I guess the first rule really doesnt apply. The object of bucket racing was to make it down my neighbors driveway, turn into the street, do a 180 degree turn around the manhole cover, and back across the sewer line in the middle of the street. But there was a catch, you were sitting on top of a bucket whic was sitting on scooter that was about an inch and a half wide, so I think it's pretty safe to say it was dangerous. It was one of the funnest things I have ever done in my life, and most painful. You could, punch, kick, tackle, shoot an airsoft gun, you could do whatever you wanted to the other racers, and on some occasions there are people in the street who throw balls at your scooter because we only had four scooters to race, so the others would do whatever to try to make you wipe out.

I only remember a few occasions when someone was badly injured, and none of them were me, so I didnt care. One of them was when my friend was getting ready to turn the corner and I was slightly behind him and I kicked his bucket off the scooter and he turned his ankle, and uh it was a mess. He sprained his ankle pretty good and couldn't play baseball for like three weeks, and after that incident, my old man said that we couldn't bucket race anymore because it was to dangerous, but we didn't listen.

You should probably try it some time.

NCAA Tournament

Well, nothing else to write about, so I figured I would inform you how the NCAA Tournament is going. The first thing you should know is the NCAA Tournament never turns out like you think it is going to, by this I mean everybody always says that there isn’t going to be very many upsets this year, and do you know what, they’re always wrong. So far there have been 11 upsets in 30 games. It might still be too early in the tournament to tell but, I think it’s safe to say that my bracket is busted. Well not completely but two of my elite 8 teams are out and 6 of my sweet 16 teams are done as well. I still have a good chance to win the pool however; you can see this if you click on one of the links on the side of the page.

But my surprise team of the tournament, which I am officially calling right now, is Washington State. They have already stunned a lot of people by beating Notre Dame (which wasn’t even an upset, everybody just picked Notre Dame to win), and they’re next game is against North Carolina or Arkansas, but North Carolina is winning by thirty with less than a minute to go so I’m picking North Carolina to beat Arkansas, and then picking the cougars of Washington State to beat the tar heels of Northern Carolina. It would be a huge upset, and if it does happen, you’ll realize how much I know about College Basketball (even though my bracket doesn’t reflect that.) I’m out of ideas so, I guess I’ll close with I hope you enjoy the rest of the tournament.

Wow, I just realized how stupid that sounds, oh well.

Why Baseball Isn't Fun...

You might be wondering I’m writing about baseball in the middle of March, and it’s because I had a game yesterday. Not a pick up game, or a game with some friends, a real life game against another team from Waterloo. That may not even sound that bad, but when you add in the fact that it was below 32 degrees, the wind was blowing, there was no sun, and oh yeah, it was snowing. That’s right snowing. I’m not talking about a flake here and there, I mean it was coming down out there, getting in my eyes and shoes, boy let me tell you, snow is cold.

Alright let me get into the specifics. We were told on Friday that we weren’t going to be playing on Saturday unless it was fifties and sunny, so imagine my surprise to find out in the morning that our game was on when all of the previous conditions were taking place. You know what the worst part of the whole situation is? The guy who sets up the team for our school was contacted by the other coach who said that they didn’t have enough players to make a whole team, so we weren’t going to have a game no matter what. But do you know what the guy in charge of our team said? He said well that’s too bad, I guess you’re to have to forfeit both games”. So the other coach found enough guys to put a team together and we played, and got beat pretty bad.

And that’s why baseball’s not fun when it’s snowing.

Research Topic

Its final! Ive decided what topic I'm going to do my research paper over. Its the sport of boxing not boxers the undergarment like kndy25 suggested. That's right I've decided that boxing would have a vaster river of knowledge than sports heroes from Iowa, all though I learned something interesting. Did you know that Parkersburg, Iowa has more NFL players per capita than any other place in the world. They have four active NFL players for about a town size of 400 people. Plus they have had others in the past which help their numbers. One of the players is Aaron Kampman of the Green Pay Packers.

Back to my original subject. I decided to right about boxing because I know less about it than I do than the other topic, so I would learn a lot of things as well as the reader being able to learn about boxing to. Some of things that Ive been looking into for my paper are going to see a real life boxing match. There are no good ones in Cedar Rapids, but there are a few in Des Moines, but I'm not sure if they are after our paper is due. At any rate I think I should narrow the subject down into something less broad. For instance some of the aftereffects of a boxers career, or the preparation they go through before their first fight. Some of my research shows that some boxers go through seven years of training before they are ready. I wonder if that's true or that was just written to get the point across that boxers train hard-and for a long time.

Well that's it for now, but I would like to close with a joke.

Two men are riding a camel through the desert, and the camel collapses. The men can't figure out what's wrong with the camel, so they carry it to an oasis, but the camel wont drink any water. So one man says to the other "ill suck up the water by putting my mouth on it's butt, and you guide it's mouth into the water" So they do it, and the man not helping out the camel notices that its actually working. But a couple of minutes later the man who is helping out the camel yells out "Stop we've hit the mud"

And with that joke, I'm just like a prom dress-I'm off.

Research Paper

Well, I've been doing some research on the two topics that interest me the most, and I have to say, its pretty exciting.

The first topic, which is in the lead, is local sports heroes from Iowa. I really like this topic because it is about two things near and dear to my heart. Sports, and Iowa. Just kidding about that second one, I only care about the first thing. But anyways I would like doing this topic because I've got a little insight because I've met a couple of these athletes in person. The only bad thing would be that it would be too familiar for everybody because they already know all the things i am going to talk about.

The other topic was boxing. The reason this topic is on my list because people beating the crap out of other people for money really interests me. I might be able to attend a boxing match as part of my research? Just one of a million bright ideas that i have. Plus the biggest pro of writing this paper would be discussing the greatest boxer of all time-Mr. Ali himself. The only bad thing would be that it's kind of a shallow topic and it would be hard to find ways around it.

Well hopefully you can help me decide what topic I should write about, peace homes.

Minor Law Violations

Do you know what sucks? Getting a speeding ticket. Yup, that’s right, yours truly got picked up for speeding about a week and a half ago by the po-po because I was going a little over the speed limit. By a little over the speed limit, I mean doing a 55 in a 35. It’s no-biggy, but I’m probably going to have my licensed revoked and start riding the buss again. That’s ok though because they’re a lot of um, interesting people that ride the buss. But anyways, let me tell you how it happened. Okay, I was turning onto 42nd street from Sycamore drive, I think. And I wasn’t paying attention and as it turned out, I may or may not have pulled out in front of a guy who got really pissed, so I figured I better speed up so he doesn’t get even more aggravated. So, I accelerated up to 55 which I figured was a good “get a way pace”, but apparently the cop thought it was a little too good of a “get a way pace” so, she turned it into a “speeding pace”. Did you know that cops hide in parking lots so they can catch teenagers who barely going over the speed limit? Well I wasn’t as well informed, so me never having been pulled over before, I figured I was immune to a speeding ticket, boy was that a mistake. And the weird thing is, I had three people in the car and one of them happened to say “twenty over, that’s a pretty hefty speeding ticket”, and albeit, he was right. So the cop turns on her lights and I may have used an expletive or two, but I pulled my vehicle off on a side street, and waited for her to come up to my window and explain what I had done wrong. Well, right before she had walked up to my car, one of the people in my car suggested the idea that all of us should start yelling “Bees, Bees, they’re everywhere”, which we all thought was pretty dang funny at the time, so we were still laughing when the cop walked up to the car and do you know what her first words were? “You think it’s pretty funny, don’t ya?” And I didn’t even know how to respond, so I giggled throughout the experience, which I don’t think she appreciated. But when it was all said and done, she marked me down to ten over, which still ended up to be like 89 dollars and 60 cents.

And now, I have a court date tomorrow, which my dad is making me go to, so I will “learn my lesson”, but thinking about it now, I just got a great idea. I’m going to represent myself. Yea, that’s a terrific idea, because what’s the worst that could happen? I end up paying the ninety dollars anyways and I get to miss more school. I gotta go and think of a good argument, cya later.

March Madness

Today is March 9, and do you know what that means? Only eleven more days until the start of the NCAA tournament. 65 teams, and only one national champion, I wonder who its going to be this year. Last year, and the year before, the University of Florida won the national championship, a pretty rare occasion, considering the odds of all the teams in the tournament. If I were going to bet money on the tournament, which I am, my money would be on Tennessee, but that’s right now because none of the bracket’s have come out, so it’s kind of hard to see upsets right now.

Back to the betting thing, did you know that this brings the most amount of money for Las Vegas than any other sporting event of tournament? There are even bets on who will even make it into the tournament. I will probably even lose twenty or thirty dollars only by filling out four of five brackets. But I usually do pretty well when it comes to knowing sports because that’s usually all I do on Saturday mornings and afternoons. Plus, I like to do a little research on teams that I’m not sure about or haven’t seen play in a while, I might be a loser but it sounds like a good idea.

The tournament is regarded as one of the greatest events in sports history because it rich with tradition and upsets, powerhouses and emotion, you never know what you’re going to get when it’s March, and that’s why I’m so excited.

State Basketball

I’m sure everybody else is going to be writing about the same topic, but oh well. I am talking about our state basketball team that is absolutely amazing. Yesterday was our first round game against Southeast Polk, a team from Des Moines that landed a pretty big upset to earn their ticket to the tourney. We didn’t play so well yesterday, however we turned out to be the victors by four points in a down-to-the-wire nail biter. The crowd was dressed in all-white; I have to admit it was pretty nasty.

For our next game, we are planning to wear black t-shirts over our white clothes, and peel them off at the start of the game, and then use the shirts as rally towels, I think it’s a waste of time, but then again, it could be really intimidating. We play a pretty good Davenport Central team who played a very good game against a tough Waukee team who has a pretty good outside presence. It is going to be a good match up and we are going to need to play a heck-of-a-lot better than we did against Polk.

But the game of the tournament is tomorrow, Linn Mar vs. City High. Between us and those two schools, we were ranked one, two, and three all season. And our only two losses came against those two schools, which is bad for us because if we advance into the finals, we for sure would have to play one of those schools. I personally hope it’s Linn Mar because we have a bit of a rivalry and personally, I think they’re worse than City High, but either way, the championship game is going to be crazy.

I hope you enjoyed my journal entry, please keep reading, please.

Research Paper

For the upcoming research paper that we are going to write, here are some of the topics i would like to write about:

1. Sports Medicine- this career field has always seemed interested me because it combines two things i like, sports and medicine. When writing the paper i would hope to discover some of the things that somebody in the sports medicine field does, or how much education they need, or whatever.

2. Local Sports Heros- This topic would be one that i would enjoy because it could grow to include many aspects of the athletes lives. For instance my dad went to school with a guy named Dave Mucurry who ended up in the NFL playing for the dolphins. Stories like that are what interest me.

3. World Records- This is a tricky subject, but an exciting one at that. I would like to write about this because i someday would like to posess a world record of my own. Plus, there are about a million and a half records that will blow your mind.

Danger Island

Do you remember the days when you were younger and use to play those stupid games for hours on end and now that you look back on them and you realize how idiotic they were? Well I have a game that trumps 'em all. It was called danger island and the point was, well there really was no point. But the jist of the game was to make it from one area of a room or floor to the end of the "level", but the catch was we would booby trap the hell out of the area, and you would usually have to do it in the dark. The game was ridiculous. I remember one such occasion when we had purchased a few mouse traps to enhance our fun. It was usually three or four people against the person who was trying to scramble through the level. Oh, did I mention anything went? We would lean two hockey sticks on either side of the doorway and tie them together with fishing line, so when you would walk through the trip wire, you would get hit in the head by the wooden hockey sticks. People would wear dark clothing so we could hide in corners and chuck balls at our opponet. But one of the worst/best ideas we had (depending if you were on offense or defense), was to flip the thing that the computer chair sits on over and put it in the middle of the room. It may not sound so bad now, but it had those tiny plastic pricks on it that would poke your feet pretty bad. Ahh good times.