Proof That We Need A Test To Have Children

6-Year-Old Drives After Mom Smokes “That Stinky Stuff”

I am not sure what would be on the test but it needs to be put to a government commission.

September 11

Eight years ago today, America was attacked as the day got going.

I was a senior in high school and I was in my second period percussion class. My band director came into the band room after having gone to the office for something and said something bad had happened.

There was a joke or two made but the look on Paul's face displayed the gravity of the situation. I could try and be the next Tolkien and describe the silence that fell on that large space with its great acoustics but that would be pointless.

He flipped the t.v. on and there was the coverage.

The second plane had went into the towers moments before and people were speculating about what had happened.

The thing that surprised me the most was the fact that school did not come to a halt.

I went to the rest of my classes that day and did my work like it was any other day.

Hell, we had band practice that afternoon. It went off without a hitch. We even went to a competition two days after it happened. The flag was at half mast for the entire contest but it went on.

I have read several accounts of what the government was like on that morning and it all seems like it would be a huge cluster fuck working in an agency when an event like this occurs. But it all went on.

When someone asks me what it means to be American, that resilience that we displayed as a nation comes to mind.

There are several nations across this world that are on the brink of collapsing in the next 36 hours (trust me, it's what my thesis research is on), but we took the hit and came back.

God bless those that gave the ultimate sacrifice in defense and aid of their fellow Americans and God bless the United States of America.

Web Comics: I Have Finally Given In.

I think this image says how me and many of my friends who are in school feel.

I finally found the urge to start writing a paper that I needed to have finished to pass, at 2am.

Same thing happened in graduate school. Huge project due? Psh, start researching the country and its government at 2am. No better way to do it.

So, imagine how surprised I was when I found a webcomic that dealt with the strife of being a student, especially in graduate education.

Piled Higher and Deeper (PH. D) comics are amazingly written and has a cast of characters that you will likely encounter on a daily basis in your department or a study group.

Apart from a massive archive that goes back twelve years, there is also a store where you can buy merchandise related to your favorite characters. Or you pick up a shirt that expresses your genearl malaise for the graduate education process.

















Those of you who read my blog consistently, you will know how much I love the sport of soccer. So, when I found a web comic for it back in June, I was highly excited.

Studs-Up is a witty insight into the players, the teams, and the random things that get done throughout the global game of soccer.

The archive for Studs only goes back to 2008 but it is still worth reading.

The Champions League Moving To Fox Is The Best Move Ever

I heard the devistating news back in April as I was on my way to the FBI Academy that the bidding for the rights to the Champions League broadcasts here in the US.

I have been watching the Champions League on ESPN2 for the last four years now. It's because of the Champions League that I became a fan of Chelsea.

So to see that the broadcast rights to the premier club competition in the world were going over to Fox Soccer Channel, a station that I don't have, I almost cried.

So imagine my surprise that when I flipped it over to TV Guide Channel to see if Sports Science was coming on, I saw those sacred words, UEFA Champions League.

I have the kettle on, getting ready for my tea and ready to watch Arsenal take on Celtic as they play for their right into the group stages.

So I know have the best of both worlds. I have the EPL on ESPN2 on a weekly basis and now I have Champions League football as well.

Late Summer Saturday Date: Yazoo Brewing Company

It was a hot ass day here in Music City USA but me and my girlfriend had a plan to cool things off just a bit.

We did not hit up the Titans game down at LP Field. Nor did we head over to the Bicentennial Mall and play in the fountains.

Instead, we headed down to the Yazoo Brewing Company to take the tour of the brewery itself and taste the beers that they had on tap.

From the outside, the building that houses the brewery looks like another abandoned factory of Nashville's yesterdays. But once you enter the doors of the old Marathon Motors Co. and take a right, you find yourself in a beer lovers paradise.

The anti-room to the tap room itself is semi-spacious, with chairs, tables, and a rather nice bench. Off to the side of the anti-room is a beer garden that was hosting a party for Vanderbilt alumi. Being an alumnus of UT, I steered clear of their party.

While the area described above is small, the tap room itself is smaller than that. I counted, at most, six tables that can seat four or so people a piece. There is also space at the bar for about six or seven. We happened to show up in the middle of someones birthday, so the spots at the bar were secured.

While the wait to purchase our sampler tray of beers was roughly thirty or so minutes, it gave me the chance to really get a feel for the customer base and the people serving the beer.

I have been to bars with crappy service and bars with good service, stepping up to the bar at Yazoo was like stepping up to my favorite bar from my college days. The service was quick, fast, and to the point. Apart from a few people that were ahead of me, their was no poking or prodding to get up to the bar.

I personally recommend the Nitro Stout. It was by far the best beer that I had out of the sampler tray. It was not as thick as Guinness but it had that wonderful stout taste and texture that hooks the dark beer lover.

My least favorite was the Hopps Project IPA. I'm not really an IPA kind of guy and this IPA surely had enough hopps to last me until next year. However, if you are a fan of IPA's, there is no reason that you wouldn't love this beer.

The culmination of our evening out was the tour of the facility.

Our amazing tour guide walked us through the process by which they made the delicious beer that we got to sample at each step of the way and for a low price of just $6, the tour is truly worth it.

Not only do you get beer samples, but you get a pint glass that you can keep, for tasting your samples.

Pros: Quick tour with multiple times offered (check the website for specific times), decently priced pints and growlers ($4 and $11 respectively), great staff.

Cons: It is balls ass hot in that building.. if you do not like to sweat while waiting for a beer, you may want to wait and make this a fall/winter/early spring outing, if you aren't use to a more trendy crowd then the brewery may not be the place for you.. I know I mentioned this point to my girlfriend and it brought a laugh, it's really cramped at times.. so if you have a problem with crowds you may want to try and schedule an earlier trip and possibly not on a weekend.

Overall:4 out 5

Oooh Look! A Pretty Girl

Boy, she sure is pretty isn't she? I certainly got off the Asian push years ago and therefore, I doubt that I would accept a download from one of my friends who decides to send an image like this to me.

Would you have the ability to resist?

I think most would but there are a select few individuals who would continue to download the image of what they think may be a beautiful girl.

So, lets run through a scenario before I go explain this post.

You are a young guy who is about to leave for college. Got your new HP Netbook or laptop to go with all the essentials of moving into your dorm.

You get to school and unpack your room. You get everything set up on your desk and around the room and before you head out to the Freshman picnic, you log onto your email account and see that your buddy back home has sent you the file containing the picture above.

"Hot Asian girl... I love Asians," you think to yourself and you click on the link. You get the picture and hurriedly send it off to your friends.

A few weeks later at noon on a Tuesday (your only class is at 4pm (you totally scored that sweet time slot for the class)) your dorm phone rings and you roll over and answer it.

It's your mom... and boy is she pissed.

Somewhere over the course of the first three weeks of school used your credit card that your parents have linked to their account (it was for gas and emergencies only) to download $200 worth of music from itunes and you also subscribed to a handful of small porn sites.

What happened?

You were attacked by a Trojan Horse virus.

And according to an post by my friends over at The Dark Visitor, this was common back in the day in the form of the "Maritime Girl."

Read the post. It's good knowledge to pass on to your less web savvy friends who don't really know that the hot Asian is anything but.

What About Bing?

I have seen the commercial for the "discovery" engine Bing, by Microsoft.

I think they over exaggerate the concept of the search engine. The average search will return some pretty oddball stuff. To truly get something out of a search engine, you need to have a nuanced query.

In my project work, I have had to root out some pretty arcane knowledge. In doing so, I've had to wade through a bunch of information that wouldn't normally come up.

I doubt Bing can really offer you a search result that is more nuanced than Google. But I am sure time will tell.

Tips For Phone Interviews

I have my second interview with a company in Virginia tomorrow that I am hoping to go to work for. It's a phone interview so I have the ability to roll out of bed twenty minutes before hand and not really put much effort into my appearance.

While this seems like a good idea, it probably isn't the best thing that you could do for a phone interview. For anyone taking on a phone interview, here's a few tips to remember.

• Remember, the phone interview is usually used as a screening interview. Usually you get the HR person who is doing the leg work for the busier hiring manager who may not really want to interview you. I'm honestly surprised that my second interview is going to be with the hiring manager.
• Make sure you have everything that you may have sent with the application. A copy of your resume, maybe a work sample. You don't want to have them seeing something that you sent them on purpose thrown back at you because you failed to remember it.
• Do your research on the company and possibly, if you know who you are speaking with, research on the interviewer. It's becoming common practice for companies to root out the people who know the company as opposed to someone who just goes through and applies to a butt load of job. Two hours of solid research now will eliminate ten seconds of awkward silence on the phone.
• Silence isn't always a bad thing, though. It's helpful to pause for a moment and collect your words. Unlike a face to face interview, the interviewer can't see the awkward face you may make at one of their questions. So, stop. Think. Then answer.
  
• Dress up. I know that this may seem like a preposterous idea but think about how good you feel in that suit or that skirt. That same feeling will translate over the phone into a higher level of confidence. I don't think many of us would be comfortable going to an interview in our pajamas in real life, why risk it now?
• Make sure you are alone and will not be bothered. Kick the family out of the house if need be. Also, depending on how strong your cell phone service area is, you may want to consider using a home phone if you have it. The last thing you want is a dropped call.

This is just an overview of the things you may want to consider before you step up to the phone and interview for that perfect job. Remember: be confident, be nice, and don't interrupt the interviewer at any time (short of the walls around your house falling down).

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A Quick and Simple Way to Make Noodles Without Water

My roommates have all but moved out, save Karl, and I am down to a teapot, and two frying pans.

So as I was deciding what I was going to do with the pork that my roommate had left me, I got a novel idea.

I took my two pounds of boneless pork loins and cut them like you would for stir-fry and put them into some Ziplock bags that had teriyaki marinade in it. Normally I would have let the meat marinade for a few hours but since it was almost 7:30, I decided to let it sit for roughly twenty minutes.

After twenty minutes, I pulled the pork out and put it into a screaming hot frying pan that I had let gradually come to temperature. Using my wood spatula, I started to fry the meat, moving it around quickly in the pan.

I had also been thawing some stir fry veggies while the meat was being prepared so they would cook faster. I dumped them into the pan with the pork and as I started to rummage through the cabinets, I came across a half a pack of Asian style egg noodles.

But without a pot to boil them in, what was I to do? I took the hunk of noodles and tossed them into the pan.

As the juice from the pork seeped into the noodles, they essentially cooked in the liquid of the meat and veggies. In all, it took roughly ten to fifteen minutes for all of the noodles to come loose and cook.

I plated it up and tossed a bit more of the marinade on top for good measure. T'was delicious.

Because we all have done something like this

This is a VW commercial that I was reintroduced to by a guy that lived on my couch for a month last year. When we would go out out with my roommate, Couch Guy would sit in the backseat and just sing this song over and over again.

I have also been riding around with one of my other roommates and passed a piece of furniture and we stopped and actually looked at it and decided if we wanted to pick it up or not. Fun times.

This video says everything that I have felt for the last two weeks. Ten hours of researching tech information about Eastern Europe. Then I get to play around with a Wiki Space to get all of it up there. I'm now white and nerdy.

So apparently I Am Paranoid

My girlfriend told me so last night. But I am not the normal type of paranoid that comes with my line of work, no. I am paranoid about the weather.

Coming from Tennessee to Pennsylvania was a major shock. There actually is something referred to as Fall and it lasts more than two weeks during football season.

We get all the pretty color change stuff back home but we rarely get the cool evenings and semi warm days that PA seems to find common place.

Then, on or about, the third week in November, the bottom drops out in a crazy deluge of thunder snow and bitter temperatures.

The first time I saw more than an inch of snow, I almost shit my pants. I am use to a dusting at best. As a matter of fact, as I sit and write this, Nashville is expected to get snow today. It probably will not amount to much.

So when I do my morning news rundown yesterday, I was surprised to see that we had a winter storm watch issued for Erie. They predicted a couple inches of snow at best for tonight into tomorrow. Imagine my further surprise when I get to class today and see that it has been upgraded to a winter storm warning, just as I predicted.

I told my girlfriend, who happens to be from New York, that I thought it would get bad again before the weekend and she called me paranoid. I can't help it.

Well I think He's Gonna Go.

With all the talk about Kaka's supposed trip up to England to play, thank God he didn't, I think I saw maybe two stories that actually quote Kaka. The rest.. well... that's another story.

These players have agents for a reason, so it blows my mind when someone on the team they play on starts piping up about the players prospects. Chances are you know about as much about his future as you do your own.

And then to top it all off, you have veterans and statesmen in the world football community that share their thoughts on why it was a bad idea to not transfer. Ultimately the choice comes down to the player and there is nothing that Maradona or Pele can say that would change a players mind.

Graduate-itis

This was most of us in college.

Sprawled out on a blanket in the quad on a nice sunny day when you knew Spring was coming and so was graduation.

Wait, why is it so cold out? Oh that's right! You were skipping your team meeting and your only class of the day because you just did not feel like going.

I have long since moved past those days but it seems that some people have not.

So when did graduate students become so lazy?

I think it is the simple fact that while yeah, we have tons of work to do on top of looking for a job and trying to get to our current job on time, lets not forget that their is a thesis in there too somewhere, we carry our undergrad habits with us. Most of us break them in the first week or so when there is suddenly a stack of reading that comes to your knee.

Unlike undergrad, the professors will know when you are not doing the work. Well, if the professor is any good they will. The Socratic method becomes your worst enemy, especially if you are in law school. You never really seem to get your head above water.

Two classes a term my ass. You might as well be taking a seventeen hour schedule with Farsi or Chinese as your foreign language.

I am mostly doing this article because I have become burned out. Graduate school is just not kicking it anymore for me but with one term left, I'm not gonna bug out now. That's dumb. I would not have left with two terms left just to work at the Men's Warehouse and contemplate going back to school.

I don't sleep in past meetings just because it seems like the fun thing to do. I go to class and if I still had a job, I would go to work. I would come home and do my reading, fire off a handful of emails, make some dinner, do more reading, workout, shower, watch the new, and go to bed. I would get up and do it all over again the next day. I might invite my girlfriend over. You never know.

Graduate-itis is no better than senior-itis but to sit around and blow off stuff when you are this close is just lost on me. I do not understand that laziness that pervades the student culture these days.

Inauguration Day

As a political science major in undergrad and an intelligence studies major for my graduate work, the time when America gets a new CEO means a lot to me.

Barack Obama became the 44th POTUS today and even though I did not vote, I can say that I watched the speech and was generally pleased at the promises that will undoubtedly be altered in the coming years.

One thing that has really bugged me today is some of the blog coverage that I follow.

I read alot on a daily basis. I follow forty-five news feeds and other recreational feeds on any given day and the sentiment seemed so harsh out of those that took the time to make a post today.

Some were calling Obama the first affirmative action president ever elected. I think that is a cruel statement to make when you look at the PR campagin that his staff put on.

He done something that has been a key in warfare back to the times of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, he won the hearts and minds of America. He connected with first time voters in a way that no presidential candidate had ever dreamed of. John McCain's daughter, Meghan, had a blog that she contributed to but that no where skimmed the surface of the Obama campagin.

I had a teaching job over the summer and I am still friends on facebook with some of the kids I taught. These are high school kids who won't be able to vote until the next election in 2012 but you would have thought that US constitution had been rewritten to allow for the average sixteen year old to vote.

In short, it was a strategic if not an operational failure for all the other candidtates who stepped up to the plate this year. The Obama team struck at key points quickly and rounded up the support to win an election of historical precedence.

Good luck, sir and may God bless your administration and the United States.

Christmas and New Years Round Up

We are three days into 2009 and I am finally sitting down and talking about the holidays. I did not end up getting anything footy related this year for Christmas but that's fine. I did make out rather nicely though. I got a Tennessee jersey, The Dark Knight, a new wallet, and very nice pocket watch. I have not got my presents from my roommates or my girlfriend yet, so there is no telling what I am getting when I get back to Erie tomorrow.

I did go out and buy myself some stuff after Christmas. I got a new cardigan, and two new sweaters, and new tie.

I have also been giving my humidor a workout as of late. I have found a new favorite smoke in the form of the CAO LX2. It is a really smooth smoke that allows the smoke time to cool between puffs.

I also had a Partegas maduro a few weeks back. It was rather splendid as well.

I recommend, if you are a smoker, to go out and patronize these two cigar companies. They are both amazing brands and are worth some praise.