WHAT'S
NEW
The Archives
6/20/06: Dixie Chicks; Back from U.S. Open
4/28/06: Wonderland of Rocks
4/4/06: Changes to Site
3/16/06: Website Pictures
2/8/06: Fun Website Stats
2/1/06: Detroit Renaissance Center; More Airport Security
1/15/06: "A Short History of Nearly Everything"; "What the Bleep Do We Know?"
1/8/06: Homeopathy
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It's been awhile since I've posted anything but a blog here and there, but I've finally got a slew of things coming in the next few weeks. Well, maybe not "slew" but definitely one great big thing. Week Three of the Road Trip is complete! Or at least, the writing aspect of it is. All that remains is designing the pages, which I hope to do very very soon. Right now though, I have a new essay for you about the ongoing assault led by Red State, America against the Dixie Chicks. Mind you, I consider myself a red state voter, and I come from the very demographic that seems to not be letting things go when it comes to the Dixie Chicks. And yet, I say enough is enough. Read all about it in this new essay.
Where did I finally find the time to finish all these things? Well last week I was up in Mamaroneck, NY providing Avid support for the U.S. Open golf tournament. And as I explain in a recent blog, Avid support done properly means hours and hours of downtime… for me, not the systems. So I got a lot of writing and a lot of reading done. I also rediscovered my white hot hatred of golf so there are two featured columns this week. One about my hatred of golf in general. And another about my hatred of golf as it pertained to last year's U.S. Open.
Read, enjoy, and check back soon for Road Trip - Week Three.
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I
received an email recently from a guy named Phil who had read my essay
detailing my hike into The
Wonderland of Rocks in Joshua Tree National Park. He too was planning
a trip into the rugged wilderness that, due to my own recklessness, I
had almost died in. Phil was a lot smarter about it than I was, taking
along both a GPS and a hiking partner and he came out the other side victorious.
He also brought along his digital camera, something I lacked on my trip,
and sent me several awesome pictures which he has graciously allowed me
to use in my essay to help better narrate the piece.
Some of you may remember me talking about an old hermit's cabin, as well as a "slot" through the canyon wall that I foolishly slid down, not knowing if I would come out the other side. Well Phil, and his brother-in-law Frank, found both of them. I can't tell you how eerie it was looking at these pictures, seeing the places I'd been, now nearly seven years ago. In some ways I could remember instantly exactly where I was standing, could remember everything that was around me as I stood in those exact spots. And in some ways, the locations didn't look at all as I remembered them. Imagination had filled in a lot that the memory had forgotten I guess. What it all means, of course, is that I have no choice but to go back and do it all again some day. Not sure when that will be, so for now I'll just have to transport myself there mentally via this essay whenever I need the fix. If you haven't read this essay yet, or haven't read it in a while, take a look and be prepared to say, "Wow," and "Good god, Brian, you're a jackass!"
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I've been a bit busy doing some minor overhauls of the site. First of all, I've decided that it is a collosal pain in the butt posting something new on this page as frequently as I'd like. It's not that I have nothing to say. There's always plenty to say. The problem is that every time I want to post something, it requires editing the page, formatting the page and posting the page... then archiving the page, formatting the archive and posting that... all the while making sure the interconnectivity of the site, which I pride myself on, remains intact (i.e. no broken links or pictures that show up on one page but not on another). I've found it hard working up the motivation to post something small here in a timely manor. So I put it off for a week and I feel like I have to post a little more, which makes me put it off longer. Next thing you know, 7 months has gone by because I've realized I CAN'T now just post a little "Hey here's what's new with me" blurb. Coming back after an extended absence, I'd better have a new column, or at least a long blog. How much easier it would be if I had the capability to edit this part of the site ON-LINE - you know, just type it into the text box, click POST and let the robots handle all the posting and archiving and whatnot. I know the scripts are there to do it. After all, that's how all those free blogs work over on blogspot and other sites like it.
That's when I realized, why not just USE blogspot. Since I haven't the foggiest clue how to create RSS scripts (which blogs seem to be based on) I'll use blogspot's free service and link a blog to this site. So that's what I've done. From now on, when you click on THE BLOG, it will take you to a page unlike any you've seen here at Hey Guess What. This is the new Hey Guess What Blog. It's still technically part of this site - all the files and archives are still hosted on my server and the webaddress still says "hey-guess-what.com" - but all the scripting and everything I don't understand is being handled by a free blogging service.
What this means for you: Now that I don't have to worry about all the pain of posting and archiving, I'll update more often and not worry that it's only a short post. Now that I can just type out my thoughts, click POST and let the robots handle the rest, I won't feel hesitant about posting several times a week or, if I have a lot to say, several times in the same day. Plus now, you too, faithful reader, can post comments to the things I've written at the click of a mouse without having to go through the horridly slow process of sending me an email. Oh the joys of technology.
The only drawback right now is that the blog page doesn't have that unique Hey Guess What look to it (you know, with faux wood and neon green buttons). It now has a generic blog look to it. But that's not so say that can't change. When I have more time, perhaps I will tinker with the blog template I was given and see what I can make happen with their stuff and my stuff.
So what of the OLD blog pages. Well, in concert with this change, I've also finally come to grips with the fact that a true "blog" doesn't last for 10 or more pages. At that point, it's become an essay. So that's what I'm calling them from now on. All the old blogs are now contained in the ESSAY section. And anything new that I find intriguing enough to write more than just a few paragraphs about will go in that section from now on.
Bear with me if some of the links on this site, don't work temporarily... In fact, if you notice any, let me know. I believe I've kept all the links valid, but with all the renaming of files and folders and whatnot, you never know what might have gotten missed. And from now on, the WHAT'S NEW page will no longer be the most up to date section of this site. I will only be posting here when I'm posting something else to the site as well: a new column, essay, list, etc. And as always, you can access the What's New Archives by clicking on the NEWS button at the top of this page.
As always, if you have something to say, a comment to make, feel free to send me an email... or post a comment at The Blog's new home.
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As you poke around my site, here and there you will find pictures that have faint text written across them. As I've taken the time to analyse my new webstats more closely, I noticed that a significant amount of "traffic" on my site, isn't really traffic at all. A good chunk of my bandwidth is being hogged by bloggers who "grab" a pictures from my site. That means that every time their page loads, the web browser shows one of my pictures and physically pulls it from my site. Rather than using their own drive space and bandwidth, they're using mine. Which I don't mind, but if people are going to be looking at my pictures, I'd at least like to give them the opportunity to click over to my site. But the way the pictures appear on the blogs, you'd never know where they originated from.
So
in an effort to... I don't even know what I hope to accomplish... more
legitimate traffic to my site, reducing people taking credit, and possibly
monetary credit for pictures that I took... in an effort to do all that,
I am going to be watermarking specific pictures with text that points
people to this site. My picture of the Rosa Parks bus alone is responsible
for seriously almost 90 percent of my "traffic" even though
none of those people have ever actually seen my site.
As of now, I will only be watermarking those pics where are seriously pulling from my bandwidth. With a little more motivation and time one day, I will put at least a small watermark in the corner of ALL images on this site.
The big news right now is I just had surgery. Nothing major. Just a hernia, but it was the only surgery I've ever had and it scared the crap out of me. But all is well. I survived just fine and I've produced a humor column telling you all about it.
Also new this week, I've updated the "Great Throwaway Movie Lines" list. Hopefully not everybody feels about that list the way my brother-in-law does. He considers it a cheap tease which only delivers a few seconds, if that, of entertainment. If you feel the same way, all I can say is just consider the lists as the little something extra. They're not the king-sized Snickers bars, but simply the little Hersey's-Kiss-sized added bit of joy to your day... If that doesn't help, well then... buzz off! YOU don't have a website.
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Over the next month or so, barring the time to actually do it, I'm going to be trying to do a little housekeeping with this page and the What's New Blog. The page is just getting incredibly too long, it's not easily accessible once you're there, and it takes forever to change it on my computer because the file is so big. So watch for that.
I have a new fun toy to play with on this site. I have just discovered a service included with my web hosting that allows me to view stats about my site such as how many hits per month I'm getting, what other sites referred people to mine, as well as what search engines referred them to my site. The stats just went into effect yesterday and apparently I've already had over 600 unique visitors to the site. That doesn't sound like a lot when you consider the big sites get millions per day, but when you're just a small time writer with a website, it makes you feel like John Grisham.
I
was perplexed when I noticed that the number one referring site to my
site was a place called King of Blackness. I followed the referring link
and apparently my picture of the Rosa
Parks bus is being used as part of this guy's blog. Apparently several
blogs have grabbed that photo for themselves. There are several online
forums that have driven traffic to my site including a runners forum,
a bodybuilding forum and a gay men's forum. So far I have been unable
to discover the specifics of their referral, but I'm amused at the diversity.
There's
also a Persian man running a blog who has grabbed a picture of me kissing
Allison's feet for his page. Unfortunately the whole site is written in
Persian so I can't tell if the guy is making fun of me or what. If anybody
speaks Persian and would like to shed some light, drop me a line.
The most fun thing to check out though is the keywords and phrases that people have typed into search engines like Google that drove them to my site. In the last two days, here are several of my favorites (with links to the specific pages I THINK they referenced):
bursting stomach:
Humor Column - Hold the Politeness
out of nowhere i get like a sudden feeling of fear in my stomach:
Essays - The Wonderland of Rocks
1963 seat belt exemptions:
Essays - The Vaccine Debate
dot and the kangaroo ending:
Humor Column - They Kill Spiders Don't They?
shoes metal point noise:
(I can't for the life of me figure this one out)
I'll periodically update this list. Actually when I get the time, I'll create a list of its own in the LIST section. Until then, back to work.
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The last couple of weeks have been a bit nuts. Setting up for Super Bowl alone should have kept me busy enough, but I was also in the midst of a really cool writing assignment… I'm sorry, really cool PAID writing assignment. I was hired to break down a book about Quantum Theory into six "hip and funny" essays that would be used as the narration for a companion DVD to accompany the book. It was a tough assignment (Quantum Theory defies all logic and common sense… and that's according to the scientists who STUDY it), but in the end a lot of fun and a cool challenge - and has already led to future assignments.
For
Super Bowl I flew out to Detroit to set up the Avid's for ESPN in a building,
or rather a SERIES of buildings, called the Renaissance
Center. The architecture of this complex is amazing. It consists of
four glass towers surrounding a taller fifth tower, which are all connected
by a colossal hub and network of concrete tubes spanning several city
blocks. It's such a neat look that I can't believe nobody has used it
as the setting for some big action or super hero movie. In just a few
days I was already able to envision multiple scenarios like the hero jumping
from tower to tower. Somebody falling off the top of one of the towers
and crashing through the glass ceiling of the central hub. Or, Independence
Day style, the center tower explodes from within sending cascades
of glass into the other four towers, which then topple over sideways.
Come on Hollywood! Let's give Detroit some love!
Fortunately, my stay in Detroit was uneventful. We were actually in a nice area of the city and I got through the week with my life and wallet in tact. Of course, at the airport I had yet another run-in with the overzealous TSA agents who can never just be nice about the fact that their pulling me out of line to perform highly unnecessary security checks. Apparently the antenna for my satellite radio with it's cable coiled around a box-like device put up some red flags and they spend a good 10 minutes wanding me and patting me down as well as picking through my backpack. The elderly agent seemed a bit perplexed by my stash of homeopathy, consisting of several non-descript vials full of non-descript white pellets, which to the untrained eye seriously looks like illegal drugs. But he just looked at them and put them back, never questioning me about what they were and I was on my merry way without so much as a "thank you" ten minutes later.
Oh and my new favorite bulls--- abuse of "national security"… On my flight home, the flight crew reminded us that, "FOR SECURITY REASONS, the forward lavatory is for the use of passengers seated in First Class only." Okay, I get that those people paid extra money for their seats and so fine, they're entitled to their own bathroom. But just say that and be done with it. Let's not go invoking the fear of September 11th just to keep use middle class lackeys out of the fancy bathroom.
I have a new blog and corresponding list this week about mine and Lauren's new love and fascination these days: Board Games.
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Rarely do I read or watch something that affects me so much that I insist others must see it. 24, which begins its fifth season tonight, was definitely one of them. Over the last few months two other titles have made the short list.
The first is the book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. Those of you who follow this website know I am a huge Bill Bryson fan. Most of what I've read by him are brilliantly insightful travelogues, including "The Lost Continent" which has been the inspiration for the Road Trip section of this website. "A Short History" is a different sort of book. In it Bryson tackles the extremely daunting task of breaking down the complicated yet integral laws and theories of science and presenting them in a way that the layman can understand. The result is a very accessible yet intelligent explanation of the Big Bang, evolution and the nature of the atom, amongst other things. If you have an active yet muted interest in science, this in an incredible jumping off point for further study. Bryson gives you just enough engaging information to incite your interest, make you feel like you learned something, yet leaves you with your own initiative to dig deeper and learn more… and he does it with a healthy dose of his trademark humor and irony. A must-read if you have even a passing interest in the world of science.
My second recommendation is for the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? (Yes, that really is the name.) The film is part documentary, part narrative, part kickass animation, and ALL mind trip. It interviews a dozen or so quantum physicists who talk about the nature of reality, perception, addiction, our effect on the world and our place in it - all as it pertains to Quantum Theory. Between the interviews and trippy animation sequences is a loose narrative about a deaf photographer who is beginning to see the effects of the quantum field in her own life, learns about its nature from a ten-year-old guru, and eventually becomes a God within herself.
Sound boring? Sound weird? Sound confusing? The former it is NOT, the latter two it definitely IS. But it is an absolutely amazing film that explains Quantum Theory in a way that a relatively intelligent person can understand yet not feel as though they're being dumbed down to. I'm still trying to process all the information.
I've watched it twice so far. Fortunately I was able to follow most of it because it incorporated or touched on topics that I have recently been reading about in several books, including "A Short History of Nearly Everything" as well as "How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker, and "The Dark Tower" series by Stephen King - not to mention a few hair-brained heady theories about the nature of existence and reality that I've been pondering for use in a future fantasy novel. The are certain parts you do have to take with a grain of salt. Some of the scientists are a little full of themselves, some of the information, I've come to realize through my own studies, is a bit misleading, and a lot of the thinking is very New Agey where it comes right out and says that there is no God, or that WE are gods. But I found these to be very minor road blocks.
Either way it's a really cool movie that will make you think and, if nothing else, will make you fly high if you watch it under the influence of an outside substance.
I've added a new list of The Scariest Movie Moments. These aren't the one's the AFI tells us are the scariest. They're the ones that creeped YOU out, gave YOU nightmares, scarred YOU for life.
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For the next few weeks, this page is going to be dedicated to playing catch-up on all the things I would have talked about over the last few months had I been updating this site every week. I'll be talking about things I've learned, giving recommendations on products and books I've come across and other such things.
This week, I'd like to take a moment to praise the wonders of homeopathy. Like most people in the mainstream, I never knew much about this practice. It always seemed just this side of witchcraft and voodoo healing to me. Basically if you've broken your leg, you eat the bark of a sage bush and it's supposed to make you better in a month or something like that. Through her work as a midwife, Lauren has been learning a lot about the subject and bringing that knowledge home and little by little I'm starting to understand and get into it more and more.
I'm not going to give a whole history and long explanation of homeopathy, one because it would bore the snot out of you and two because I am still learning it as I go and would probably give a lot of bad information. But what little I have learned is that it works essentially on the same basic concept as a vaccine. You take a little bit of something which causes your body to fight back against it and thus against whatever is bothering you. It's called the "Like cures Like" theory. So, if you have a sore throat, rather than taking something that fights the sore throat, you'd take a remedy that is essentially a diluted mixture of something that would normally GIVE you sore throat. That triggers your body to fight back against whatever is giving you the sore throat and thus heal itself… rather than just fixing the symptoms.
Yeah, I was skeptical at first too, but I decided to put the theory to the utmost test this past September. In the early fall, I always have the most crushingly debilitating hay fever brought on by Ragweed. Itchy eyes, itchy throat, constant sneezing and runny nose to the point where I simply cannot see or function. I usually end up taking Benadryl around the clock, which of course knocks me out, forcing me to drink coffee to stay awake. The whole month of September I am an absolute wreck, constantly trying to find a happy medium between sneezing and exhaustion.
Well this year, I decided to try a different approach. I wanted to see if I could treat my allergies homeopathically. So I went online and I typed "Ragweed, homeopathy" into Google. It took a little digging but I ultimately found a remedy: AMBROSIA ARTEMISIA FOLIA (or just Ambrosia) which is actually the Latin name for Ragweed. So quite literally I was using the "Like cures Like" theory by ingesting the very thing that was causing my ailments. I ordered the very inexpensive Ambrosia online and it arrived a few days later. I was honestly expecting it not to work
The directions were to let 5 pellets (each about the size of a BB) dissolve
under my tongue whenever symptoms presented themselves. As soon as I started
sneezing and running at the nose, I popped my pellets. And wouldn't you
know, before the pellets had even finished dissolving in my mouth, the
sneezing had stopped. Completely. The effects usually lasted a couple
hours or so before my eyes would start itching again and my nose would
start tickling and I'd pop another five pellets. It was absolutely amazing.
I ended up making it through all of September with minimal allergies and
ZERO drowsiness. I became a believer.
There are people who I'm sure would say it was all a placebo effect. In fact my boss, one of the most close-minded people I know made it quite clear that that's definitely what it was. There are all kinds of stories that could be told (and I've heard them from Lauren) about how homeopathy has worked on newborn infants and even on animals, thus eliminating any possibility of the mind coming into play. But all I can personally say about it is that even if it IS a placebo, I'll take it. If it means not wheezing or walking around like a zombie, I'll pop sugar pills all September. But the fact of the matter still remains that I went into this firmly believing that it WOULD NOT work. And yet…
So if you too suffer from seasonal ragweed allergies around late August and September, I encourage you to pick up some Ambrosia before you think about poppin another Benadryl.
A couple other homeopathic remedies that I already swear by are NUX VOMICA, which does just what it sounds like. It's great for if you've consumed too much food or alcohol. Pop a few of these as you start to feel your stomach turning circles and it'll cure upset stomach, heartburn, and from what I've heard (haven't experienced it personally) hangovers. The other remedy we keep handy in this house is ARNICA MONTANA which is good for sore muscles and bruises. Again, I've felt the symptoms disappear even while the pellets were still dissolving in my mouth.
A good resource for looking up homeopathic remedies I've found is abchomeopathy.com and then click on the Online Remedy Finder.
This week's column is all about something Lauren and I have been feeling for the last year or so; that we're living in some kind of weird vortex in which we are the only people our age anymore.
