Destinations

There's a well know hiking trail in the San Gabriel Mountains where I live called East Fork Trail. About 5-6 miles up this trail is a bridge, called the Bridge to Nowhere. I've made several attempts to reach this bridge during this past year, all failing due to several reasons, mostly getting lost, but yesterday, I finally made it.

Previous attempts have all been overnight backpacking trips, but this trip was a pack light dayhike specifically targeted at this bridge, do-or-die. I even brought along a woman(first time hiker) as extra incentive to see it through, that I wouldn't risk shaming myself in front of her by not reaching the stated goal.

I think she had fun, but God knows how well I know womenfolk's minds.

About as well as I know the air speed of a swallow(an African or European swallow?).

It's a good hike, provided dry passage can be found over the many river crossings. Those more accident prone might be better served by bringing a helmet, as there are loose rocks present along the trail that could come down on your heads.

Highly recommended.

In other news:

I saw Sherlock Holmes today. Good movie, though not much of a mystery. I was hoping for something more true to the book, what with some sort of puzzle or something for the audience to work through, but the result was acceptable. The ending is open ended enough for a sequel, but probably with a different villain than the one this movie hints at.

An Eve of Philosophy

It's an hour and a half till Christmas Day as I type this.

I purchased and watched Ghost in the Shell the movie today. I finished it about 5 minutes ago, and it has left me in a pensive and contemplative mood. I've watched Ghost in the Shell before. I'm actually quite the fan of the works of Masamune Shirow(the creator of GITS). His works are always extremely philosophical and much more serious than one might garner at first glance.

The remastered 2.0 version just cuts in some completely unnecessary CG shots, which seem entirely out of place. I prefer the original.

Cognito ergo sum. I think, therefore, I am. I do not question my existence. I question the "how" of my existence. The question of what existence is and what come after it does not cross my mind every day, but it is always riding there, niggling me in the back of my brain. How does a collection of nerves and synapses make up what I am? When does the physical cross over to the metaphysical?

And even if I had the answer, would said collection of nerves and synapses have the ability to understand it? Especially when it can barely understand higher level mathematics?

Enough of this...off to do something else.


In other news:

I purchased my own copy of Scrabble today. Then, I realized that it would make a good present for my cousins in Taiwan, who are learning English. Whether or not they'll like it is a different matter.

I also purchased Super Mario Bros. Wii for my older cousin, who brought a Region 1 Wii back to Taiwan, then realized that it couldn't play Region 3 game disks. I'm tempted to play it myself, but I'll wait till I get back to Asia and play it with her.

As a last note: How lonely is a man who will spend Christmas Eve playing games with equally lonely men over Skype?

Last day to prove how naughty or nice you were this year

Had a long, eventful, and somewhat time constrained day today.

Worked in the morning, which was, again, a bust. Took the car to Goodyear Gemini to get the 80k tune up and to have the rear shocks replaced(total came out to about six Benjamins($600USD), ouch. Picked up some Moleskines at Barnes and Noble($8USD) and went to get both a regular flu shot and an H1N1 shot(which literally took about 2 mins, from walking in to walking out) at a private clinic ($20USD apiece).

Visited Turners Outdoorsman in West Covina, nearly put the money down for a Ruger 10/22 rifle that was on sale for $250(Still might do it, if they're open tomorrow) and fondled a couple of Mk IIIs.

A bit pricey for me though. At the moment, anyway.

Discovered my iPhone mysteriously died in my pocket. Unable to revive.

Made it back to Goodyear with 5 minutes to spare to pick up the car, plugged the iPhone in, then drove to Toys-R-Us to check out some stuffed animals, which were unbelievably expensive for some Made in China cloth bags stuffed with fluff.

iPhone was still dead upon return to car.
Returned home, resuscitated iPhone(hold both home and lock buttons for 10 seconds).

Now Blogging.


In other news:

North America Aerospace Defense Command(NORAD) Santa Tracker comes online in around 3.5 hours.

That's right, that NORAD, that Santa.
Track Santa here.

And I do believe that I just wrote an entire blog post without using the word "I."
Except in the sentence of declaration of such before this one, of course.

What I want for Christmas...

Didn't have much in the way of adventures or opinionations(I know that's not a word, but I expect ya'll to understand what it does mean) today/yesterday, but I saw something awesome while I was browsing around on CheaperThanDirt. And I now have something to post about.

African Blesbok hides, how manly is that.

If people walked into my room and saw that hanging on my wall, they'd surely say "Now this is the room of a Man."

But if that won't do, I've been eyeballing the Ruger Mk II and the Mk III Target model. I don't really like the tapered barrels of the standard models.

That said, I'd be happy with a brick of .22's or a box of .45s too!

In other news:

It seems like Obamacare is inevitable at this point. Anyone want to make a bet that it fails terribly and drags the country down with it?

That ****er

So Nan decided to start a blog. Even after bagging on my blog. But there are no hard feelings. In fact, I'm happy he started a blog. I hope he has the dedication and will to keep on with it.

Because now I can bag on his blog.

Mother****er.

Board Games

Today, I played several board games, something I have not done in quite some time.

After a short and unfortunately uneventful work day/morning, I purchased and half installed a deadbolt on my closet door. I say half installed because my father drove off with the remaining tools I needed to drill a deeper hole for the bolt. I expect to organize the walk-in over the week and move most of the dangerous gear in there, while at the same time organizing the closet that contains my clothes. Also, I'm current looking into a more secure door system than just the deadbolt due to storage of weapons and ammunition. I'd get a safe, but most of the safes of the capacity I want won't fit through my closet door, not to mention there's no way I'd be able to carry it up there in the first place. I'd really rather just secure the door.

After installing the lock, I went over to Nan's, where i watched him install his own new lock on his bedroom door. I suppose he got tired of his mother barging in at random times.

We then went off to visit A mutual friend of ours, who then became host of a small gathering of friends in her kitchen/living room. We had homemade crepe and vegetarian(ugh!) lasagna while playing through several games of Munchkins, LIFE, and Scrabble.

With so much emphasis these days on co-op/multiplayer video games, I wonder if many have lost touch with the lower tech base games. I mean, getting a 35/6 K/D spread in Halo is great and all, but do you get the same "things to do before you die" satisfaction as when you use all seven letter tiles in a game of Scrabble and earn that 50 point premium?




In other news:

My car, Claus, is informing me of the fact that she is now 200 miles overdue for Service B, whatever the hell that is. I'll need to take her in either tomorrow or Wednesday.

Oh, and I totally forgot to drop off the dry cleaning today. I'll do that tomorrow, depending on work.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Making New Friends

There are some people out there who get nervous and scared when meeting new people. I think I used to be one of them. Nowadays, I can't imagine anything more enjoyable.

The last week, I got to know two new people. I got to conversat'n with them and took the opportunity to pick their minds and understand how they think. I think we hit it off well. One can never have enough friends, they say. As a plus, one of them is now an avid reader of this blog!(or so he claims.) But I think the best reason to make new friends is so that they might introduce you to their other friends. Then, you can have more friends!

Be selective though. It is as they say: You can't choose your relations, but you can choose your friends.

But since we're on the topic of friends, let's have a discussion of the recent advances in friend-making technologies. As far as I know, the best way of starting good, long lasting friendships is through the old-fashioned, tried-and true "friend-of-a-friend" method. This method has been used for as long as humankind has been around. But recent(relative to the existence of humankind) advances like telephones(cellphones increasing the technological benefit by a exponential factor of 5ish) and the internet have improved upon this friend-of-a-friend method. All the myriad of new networking sites(Facebook, MySpace, and, God forbid, Classmates.com) have made it easier to keep in touch with friends, old and new, and the potential benefits of these sites to stalkers and authorities alike cannot be discounted.

However, as time goes on and the world becomes more wired to this thing called the internet, can you imagine the possibility that one day, your friends will only be identified by a 'net handle? It's already happening, on instant messaging applications, through email, on gaming networks...

If it happens that one day, the world becomes immersed in virtual reality, in the tradition of Surrogates and The Matrix, do you realize that it is not beyond belief that your child's future BFF will be an entity named 1337aCer2092?

In other news:

Why the hell does everyone believe I'm gay? Is it because I'm not as homophobic as you are? Post your reasoning in the comments, so that I might either come out of the closet(unlikely) or go slap you across the face with a trout(much more likely).

On the other hand, if I was gay, are there any hot women out there who might wish to try and cure my gay? Hypothetically speaking, of course.


Tag teams are allowed, even encouraged.

Imma call you...Irena

Today(technically yesterday now) I picked up that Christmas gift to myself that I purchased eleven days ago(see post: Rain Over Me). Beautiful.

A Soviet-made 1933 Mosin Nagant 91/30. The receiver is a Hex-type rather than Round-Type, and the markings indicates it was made at Izhevsk Arsenal.

I have named her Irena, for two reasons.

One: it's a Russian name.

Two: Izhevsk and Irena both start with the letter "i."

Now I need to get the ammo to feed her with. Did you know that lots of Soviet-era ammunition was shipped in sealed spam cans? You actually need a can opener to get to it. Think of the tactical implications. That's socialist decision making for you.

I will leave you all with this link to a Mosin Nagant vs AK vs AR(M-16) comparison. It definitively proves the Mosin Nagant is the superior weapon.


In other news:

I'm leaving for Asia on New Year's Day. Requests are accepted first come first serve, and by feasibility.

What I like about Mormons

I'm not a religious person. That said, I do believe there's something out there, and I do believe that the very existence of the universe is not something that happened at random.

I believe religion and belief are two different things, and religion is not something I really practice. Actually, I am of the mind that religions have caused more trouble than good, what with all the religious conflicts throughout history, but occasionally I will run across something I find particularly useful, yet related to religion.

If any of you are curious, what religious leanings I do have gravitate toward Shinto, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism. I find them more...serene, for lack of a better word, than other religions I've encountered, but that's a post for another time.

Anyways. So I was surfing the net while on a long (emphasis on long) break from studying for finals, and I ran across some mentions of a survival preparedness guide published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints(the Mormons, to those of you who haven't figured that out yet). Intrigued, I Google'd it and found this.

And I'll tell you right now. It gets real. 222 pages of real.

Apparently, the Mormon Church believes in self-reliance in a big way. They  require adherents to prepare a year's worth of food for every member of their households. If said adherents really follow these instructions, I can see Salt Lake City being the best chance for humanity's continuation if we ever had a TEOTWAWKI(The End Of The World As We Know It) situation.

In the guide is a comprehensive week by week schedule for purchasing supplies, with descriptions of what to buy, when to buy it, how to store it, when it should be rotated, substitutions, and how to prepare whatever it is you bought. There's plans, instructions, suggestions and straight out "Don't Do That"s for numerous situations, nuclear war included(no zombie infection strategies though). Also included are possible situations where the authorities will violate your Constitutional rights on whim, giving you reasons why going it alone might be the better option. Bug-Out-Bag and 72 hour plans and equipment lists can also be found within these digital pages.

Read it. Preferably before any SHTF.

Strays

I had two finals today, one in the morning, one at night. The morning final was uneventful, and since I had a six hour gap between the two finals, I decided to go home and get some shut-eye.

My last final of the day was at 1930, so I left the house at 1900, plenty of time. Well it just so happened that there was a cop blocking the access into the parking lot I use, so I wasted some ten minutes on that. By then, it was 1935, and I was late to the test, and the nearest student parking was still a ten minute walk to the business building. Fuck it. I pull into a no parking zone as close to the business building as I could manage, grabbed my gear and sprinted into the classroom. Sixty scantron questions and 5 minutes later, I was out the door and back in the car at 1945. Didn't even check my answers. LIFO, Last In, First Out.

On the way back to the house, I dropped by a friend's(see post Modern Warefare 2 Midnight Release!) house to chill for a bit before I put my nose to the grind stone again. She was doing fine, but not sleeping enough, in case anyone was curious. She also had a rather disturbing picture of her boyfriend as her laptop background, but that's irrelevant to the current topic. After a bit of conversation, I accompanied her to pick up her younger brother from school, and the three of us made an additional stop at the Albertsons on Diamond Bar Blvd because she "needed" a gingerbread man cookie cutter(me: "Just use a knife, think of all the fun shapes you could make." her: "No!"). Well, as we pulled into the lot, a dog dragging a leash ran dashed us.

Her: [Teko], go chase it!
Me: Ugh...

I ran after the stupid mutt, eventually caught up and stomped on its leash, causing it to trip over itself. Obviously it wasn't very happy about it and growled at me. It wasn't very intimidating, as it was some kind of mutt chihuahua and rather small. Then my friend, who had "parked"(I say that very in the most general way, seeing as she parked on top of the line between two parking spaces) her car, said "Here! Come here!" in that cutesy high voice girls use on little dogs, and what do you know? The mutt went over to her, tail wagging all the while.

We couldn't find a tag on the dog, or an owner lagging behind the dog somewhere, so my friend decided to bring the dog home with her. It's whining in her garage at the moment. Here's a picture of it:

She plans on making some "Found: Dog" fliers and posting them up at local businesses and neighborhoods. But if any of my readers(all eight of you) recognize the damned thing, tell me and we'll get it back to it's owner.

Ninja Edit: Dog is gone, maybe it'll find its own way back.

In other news:

Did you know that there's one place out there that's still hiring people? Lots of people! That's right! It's the US Government! And current employees get pay raises(some over a $100kUSD, before bonuses!) during the recession! So the public sector grow bigger and more costly to maintain, while the private sector hemorrhages tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of jobs a month.

Forgive my questioning of the Man of Hope, but isn't that like...I dunno, fucking over the productive bit of the economy to fund the growth of the unproductive bit?

I think that elections these days have become a popularity contest. People have forgotten that just because he's some figure of hope doesn't mean he knows how to run a country. Someone needs to explain to the man how a capitalist economy works. If Jesus was reborn and found as a 5-year-old, would you hand him the reins of presidency?

If you said yes to that, remember, he's 5 years old, he probably couldn't even repeat all the words of the Oath of Office, much less understand it.

On the other hand, we could probably find a not-as-popular but super-competent VP for him.