Thanks to the wonderful people over at TwilightSource.com, here’s the new widget!
why so serious? the dark knight premieres tomorrow. July 16, 2008
i logged on to wordpress just now to check my blog stats for the day – judge me – and i noticed that the stats for my last post about the dark knight had shot up, giving me over 50 views for that one post today, and it’s not even noon yet!
i’m pretty pumped because i’m going with some friends to see the midnight premiere, so hopefully i’ll have lots of good things to say about it. one of my friends who’s in australia right now has already seen it and said it was AWESOME, so that’s really really exciting. i just can’t wait!!
right now i’m reading the gossip girl books and some of bill mckibben‘s stuff. i just finished “you know you love me” for GG and i’m starting “the end of nature” for mckibben right now. i feel like i’ve sunk to a new low for reading GG, but…all of my friends have read it, so i figured i might as well catch up on the times.
besides, i’m writing again, and reading books about people in the late HS/early college age group can do nothing but help me at this point. i just thought of a short story the other night, but now it’s growing into a monster of a book. it’s been two days and i’ve already tapped out twelve pages, and i’m not even close to being done with the beginning. i know i still have at least 70,000 words to go before it can even be called anything good, but…i’m looking forward to it. it’s been fun and easy to write, so that’s what’s important, right?
i always thought that when writers talked about figuring out the end of the novel after they’ve written a few chapters and about how characters seem to take control of the novel seemed almost ludicrous, but…i’m a firm believer now. i started writing, not knowing exactly where i was going to end up because i don’t want to write some dumb YA romance book, and suddenly it all got laid out in front of me, and i knew exactly which characters were going to be important, and where they were going to take themselves. i’m sure i’m still in for a few surprises, but…i really like it so far.
i started writing because i have to take a few creative writing classes in the spring, so i thought i should get a head start on having something written, but…now it’s turned into something i love, haha.
that’s pretty much it for right now. go see the dark knight at midnight!! i am!
this next video is kind of scary. i don’t know if it’s fan-made or what, but…yeah.
my life on twitter June 28, 2008
so i finally created my own twitter account – ok, that’s a lie. i’ve had one for a few months now but i know NO ONE who uses twitter so i would tweet every few weeks, to no apparent avail. however, i do have one good friend who finally clued into the potential of twitter, so we’ve started twittering back and forth a couple of times a day. why should we twitter when we can just talk? well, we do that, too. we just like twitter.
unfortunately, however, the majority of our tweets appear like the above image. neither of us has the most adrenaline-pumping of lives, so my tweets consist of “going to work,” “doing accounting homework,” and “sitting around,” and hers lately have consisted of “I HATE BEING SICK.”
i found this picture that was the comic a few days ago for toothpastefordinner and died laughing because it is so me, and i thought i’d share. drew is a genius, as is his wife natalie dee.
workin’ for the man (by that i mean my dad) and the age of digitizing print June 18, 2008
well, when i started summer job hunting, i had no intentions of working for an actual professional company like the oklahoma press association, where my dad is the exec vice prez (aka the boss man). i worked in a doctor’s office last summer as an “administrative assistant” (i don’t get my panties in a wad when called a secretary, though), but that was only so i could rake in the big bucks to use as spending money for my study abroad last fall. this summer, my highest aspiration was to be a starbucks barista or a movie/music guru at randy’s m&m, the local, well, music/movie store “chain” of three stores.
but then the girl who did the full-time “page shooting” (getting there, don’t worry) at my dad’s office, OPA, quit at the beginning of the summer, so the head advertising lady gave me a call and asked if i wanted to give it a try, since they knew i needed a job i could start immediately and then they wouldn’t have to waste time hiring someone while the workload piled up. this is a job that has to be done literally every day to keep up with the times.
so what do i do? it’s really actually interesting. the majority of my job is to sit in the basement and use a camera/computer setup contraption to take pictures of each individual page of (now) about half of the newspapers published in oklahoma. when they started the program, they had to do it for every paper, including the hooj ones like the tulsa world and the oklahoman and all of that. luckily, they now upload their PDFs to the program so it saves me some work.
so why am i taking pictures of newspapers? well, how it ends up: let me show you it. these pictures are uploaded to a program that rotates and reads them, and the other part of my job is to enter the program and search, using keywords in a boolean search, to find advertisements based on ad order number and an image of the ad i’m supposed to find, and make sure the ads ran in the right papers on the right dates.
it sounds pretty tedious, and sometimes it is, but it’s actually a really neat concept. the program just got started about a year ago, and we’re now selling subscriptions to it so people or companies can find articles that mention them or that they would be interested in (or for a higher fee, we can find those articles for them).
but my favorite part of the job, and the reason i’m writing this post is that a lot of the newspapers i see are small-town papers, the kind that make people think we’re so redneck (most of us aren’t, promise). and since the files get saved, i can access them anytime i want. so here are a few of my favorites 🙂
these two links are PDFs – just be warned. i know i hate it when i accidentally click on a PDF and it takes a long time, so i just wanted to let you know. but “pet of the week” and “snakes slithering among us” are worth it.
these just make me laugh. one of them is in “rough” form before it got changed by the program, but that’s the only copy i could find today. still pretty hysterical.
in indonesia we call it the sajarang gigi June 17, 2008
well, according to BBC News, there’s a new hunt for the yeti going down pretty soon in the jungles of india.
“According to the author and environmentalist Llewellyn Marak, such stories cannot be dismissed out hand.
“I saw the footprints for myself last year,” he said, and they cannot easily be explained away.
“The prints were different from other animals – and were almost human in appearance – apart from the fact that they were about 18 inches [46cm] long.
“Both my father and grandfather also saw the creature at different times. Each said that it resembled a large gorilla.”
Mr Marak argues that the Meghalayan forestry department has not seriously investigated the sightings because they are “uninterested and too lazy.”
yes, marak, that must be it. it couldn’t possibly BE a large gorilla, could it? and since no one has ever actually caught the yeti, no one would be able to accurately describe it, would they?
why is there such a fascination with finding the yeti? that i do not understand. i suppose the same reason people are still searching for the loch ness monster, which is reputed to still be swimming around after hundreds of years, although it may have been found by a small family and kept in a toilet for a brief period of time, then more commonly known as a water horse.
“Meghalaya’s Divisional Forestry Officer Shri PR Marak denies suggestions that his officers have not properly investigated alleged yeti sightings – which he argues is an expensive exercise in thick jungle only accessible by foot.
He uses diplomatic language when discussing whether yetis exist in the state.
“I have gone to see the evidence for myself and have even taken a plaster cast of one of the footprints,” he says.
“As you know the presence of such a creature is an important part of our culture – passed down to us by our parents and grandparents.
“But we have no concrete evidence it exists, and there may even be a possibility that some of the evidence has been manipulated to create a stir.”
do we really not have better things to do with our time? i mean, i’ve heard it said that i’m part choctaw indian, but i’m not out searching down the origins of my past. if there were a giant unexplained mystery encompassed by my heritage, though, i’d be packed up and gone yesterday to hunt it down. for sure.
“The truth is out there somewhere,” says Dipu Marak sincerely.
“But like the Loch Ness monster this creature is obviously not fond of giving too many photo opportunities.”
ah yes, we return to our friend le loch ness monster. i suppose the yeti, yowie, sajarang gigi, whatever you want to call it (in canadia they prefer sasquatch), must ever remain the greatest unsolved mystery of our time. don’t be alarmed, however – there’s a veritable army of men surnamed “marak” out looking for it.
priority one – yeti
priorities two through the end – world peace, poverty, illiteracy, etc.
on a lighter and even less serious note, here’s a joke my boyfriend told me. i chuckled for a good fifteen minutes, but then again, i think most things are funny.
once there was a man named mr. opporknockity who tuned pianos. one day he went and tuned a woman’s piano, and it then made such a glorious sound, and she was thrilled. she played and played and played for a few months, and then the sound started to be less glorious. she became less and less happy with the sound of the piano, and she called him up to ask him to come retune her piano. but he listened to her story and then said, “i’m sorry, but mr. opporknockity only tunes once.”
ba-dum-cha. say it out loud if you don’t get it.
katie maurice 
