Chance's Weekend Update: 04/13/2008
"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going"
The week that was gets an A+ for awesome. Besides all kinds of interesting news and some nice weather--we (roommates, some guys from the team, girlfriends, and myself) won a game show on campus. It was called "ThinkFast", there were three rounds of trivia questions, (two qualifying, and one final) and $200 in cash to the winner. We strolled into the crowded room completely confident of the outcome, and were completely undeterred by our poor performance in the first round--we were just warming up. A big team effort put us on top
as we expected going into the finals, and we elected my roommate, Kennedy to be our representative in the finals--because he reads Entertainment Magazine, and yes I know that is embarrassing. There was some strong competition, but Nate dominated the finals--I cannot recall more than a few questions being completely finished before he buzzed in. We may be confident, but we are not greedy, so we shared the money with everyone who came out to support our cause. To add to my excitement, I was given a 2007 Oak Lawn High School Cross Country shirt (my second shirt supporting OLCHS XC--a big Thank you to Mrs. Wantiez). Now I am not a billboard, but I love free shirts and this has been a good week for t-shirts. I could use some new pants though, so there is still advertising space available...just kidding. Anyways on to the good stuff:
Some things that don't suck:
Ryan Hall Ran 2:06:17 in the London Marathon, after slapping around all of the top U.S marathoners at the Olympic trials this past fall in New York, Ryan Hall stepped up his game and ran another incredible race (fastest ever marathon by a U.S born citizen). In true baller fashion, he saw that some guys were struggling when they cruised through the halfway point under world record pace, so he asked the pace setters to "pick it up" because he wanted to test the field more. He did fall off pace to finish 6th, but he went down swinging like a man, and is in great position to bring back a medal this summer in Beijing.
A house for $100 and 500 words, instead of selling their Colorado vacation home in a sinking housing market for the appraised $171,000, the Ludlow family has decided to hold an essay contest--accepting 2000 entries with a small fee--to get rid of it. But wait, "how does this work?"...2000 essays x $100 + media attention = $200,000 in their pocket and a $100 house all to yourself. Pretty sweet idea I'd say.
Automated Restaurant, who needs waiters when every table has a touch screen for orders and a roller coaster system to deliver your meal. Now we should have known after the whole space race thing, and probably even before that with the invention of calculus (
Leibniz--not Newton), but coming up with a way to avoid paying tips at a restaurant finally seals the deal that Germans are smarter than us.
Subway Car Reef, Surprisingly enough, throwing our giant rusting garbage into the ocean is a good thing. For the past several years, the state of Delaware has been building a HUGE artificial reef on the barren sea floor with old New York City subway cars. These luxury condos for fish are more than paying back in dividends. The new population of small fish that now call these cars home is drawing larger fish in from the deep in record numbers that commercial fisherman can hardly keep pace with. You could read all about the stats if the New York Times online didn't suck, so you are just going to have to take my word for it.
CTA via Google, for an out-of-towner, getting around Chicago can be tricky. Until now, most everyone had their CTA authority to call--girlfriends dad, a friend, or a teacher that lives in the city--you tell them where you are standing and without a moments hesitation they tell you a bus number or the nearest stop and all connections you need to make to get where you are going. Everyone else was stuck just hating everything about the city. But now the CTA has teamed up with Google (the savior of the free world, GOOG--really you should buy some while its still on a fire sale for the next couple of months) and added a feature to Google Maps, where after searching for your directions you can click the "take public transit" link...here is an example,
Union Station to Navy Pier--$4 round trip p/p instead of $22 per car.
Being Famous, well maybe I am not famous, but the limerick that I wrote to save Wrigley Field was published on the Sun Times website (along with tons of others) and that is pretty sweet. If you want to check it out, you will probably have to search for my name with "ctrl-f" or you will be scrolling all day. As far as the contest goes--I think they have dropped the ball seeing as there were never any results posted last Friday as promised. And further, the page which promised the free t-shirt to the top 100 has been taken down. Fortunately for me,
Katie saved the day and she surprised me by ordering one. This could be taken one of two ways: she doesn't think I can rhythm well--and she potentially has a lot of evidence to support this theory--thus failure to acquire a shirt by my own devices, or she is a wonderful person and will not stand for the newspaper disappointing me. To keep my ego intact I am going to lean towards the latter...
Giant Pumpkin Season, Last year I set out on a mission to grow a giant pumpkin, but unfortunately I lacked an understanding of the birds and the bees and I only planted one...thus no pollination...so despite having a child sing to my plant every week, all I grew were giant leaves, my $1.69 giant pumpkin seed was completely wasted. This year is going to be different though and with prime planting coming up in about two weeks, it is about time to order seeds! I love contests, so if you want to participate, send me an email or something and you can be my gardening nemesis until the fall when the proof will be in the pumpkin / giant jackolantern.
A Spy Watch, this is straight out of the movies...a cell phone watch...this is that dorky calculator watch on drugs--only it doesn't look terrible. The numbers for dialing are on the band--to avoid a huge face, there is over a gig of storage, an mp3 player, a camera, and a touch screen. It costs about as much as an iphone, but I blame that on the exchange rate. It is overpoweringly cool though.
Illegal Immigration slowing down, this may come as a surprise, but it is happening because Mexico is cracking down on their migration problem. As it turns out, a large portion of the migration flow is stemming from Central America--where poor immigrants are heading to Mexico for higher wages and opportunities for work (sound familiar?). Mexico is becoming more intolerant of this flow and thus it is slowing down at our end. I had no idea that this flow existed, but reading about it was pretty interesting.
Some things that do:
Psychologists don't know math, but we'll let them off the hook this time because it is a little tricky. If you have not heard about this then you are probably living under a rock, but in the spirit of clarity, mathematicians recently discovered that one of the basic assumptions used while designing cognitive dissonance experiments the past 52 years was wrong. The counterintuitive phenomenon can be observed by playing the "Lets Make a Deal" game famously known as the "Monty Hall Problem" (the link is provided in the left hand margin of the article). If you would like to look through the actual argument made my the Yale Economist,
click here.Police caught off guard by revolving door, an inmate escaped this past week while being escorted into a hospital because you can only go through a revolving door one at a time...so his restraints had to be removed so that he could use hit crutches alone...then he went through first (bad choice policeman) and when the police officer came through he was promptly hit in the face with a crutch, haha. The prisoner then exited the revolving door and ran to a waiting car--apparently they completely expected this lack of good judgment. This article is very watered down compared to the first one I found, but it is all that remains of the incident. As a follow up, the guy was caught later that same day--staying with relatives.
Subcategory- Local Idiots:
Gov. Blagomoron, I spoke too soon last week when I said, "at least with all eyes on Gov. Looks-like-a-chipmunk, he wont do anything else stupid..." because within 12-hrs of me posting that comment he signed a bill for Illinois to
bypass the electoral college. The upside, the popular vote would actually elect the president. The downside, small states wouldn't matter at all really, and any error would require a national recount instead of a small localized reelection. I wrote all about it January 20th of this year,
here.
Mayor Daley, beyond challenging legal precedence and the public opposition to plopping the children's museum down in Grant park a stone toss away from the colossal failure of the parking deck project to pay for Millennium Park--the Mayor has upped the illogical ante by championing a movement to change the city motto from "Urbs in Horto" (City in a Garden)...to something like "City of Children". So maybe I am being repetitive here, but what a dumbass. Changing the city motto is not going to make up for squandering millions of tax payer dollars on half-baked ideas which in no way benefited the city or the children he loves so much.
St Xavier Student, they haven't caught the kid yet...but I am sure once the school posts a reward of like $1000 dollars or a stack of man hole covers all of his friends will be standing in line to turn on him (or her--girls can be stupid too). The note reading "Be prepared to die on 4/14" was written on a bathroom wall by a student who just can't wait to go to jail. Classes for at least Monday have been canceled on campus and at four nearby schools.
Until Next time,
-Chance Kelch 
