Phew

Rotten Tomatoes came out with it's 100 worst movies of the decade.

I look over that list and see a minefield of movies I have never seen. Yes that's correct, the number of movies on that list that I've seen is zero. As in none, not one. I'd like to thank my brain for being smart enough to guide me away from these terrible movies. Which is a remarkable feat considering how many bad movies I like from the 90's. I'd like to thank myself for having much better judgement this decade then last, when I watch movies like Bio-Dome, and anything with Pauly Shore. I just feel so relieved that I haven't paid or spent any time to watch any of these 100 movies. Let's hope the next decade is just as successful.

There goes my Halloween idea

A couple weeks ago and friend and I were watching TV when that SNL skit about Chippendale's dancer's came on. You know the one where it's Chris Farley and Patrick Swayze and they dance to "Working for the Weekend". Then they decide to hire Swayze because he's got a "much much better body". A light in my head went on and my friend and I talked about one of us being Patrick Swayze and one of us being Chris Farley and going around dressed like Chippendale's (I would be Farley by the way). Unfortuantly due to the passing of Patrick Swayze we won't be able to do that costume. I for one don't like to make jokes on the recently deceased, and also I refuse to do a costume that now everyone is going to try. You'll probably see 50 Swayze's out there this year...or Michael Jackson's, or whatever.

Oh well back to the drawing board. Also I'm sorry Swayze died, "To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar" is my favorite Swayze movie although I like "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" better. Odd that the two best drag queen movies came out in back to back years.

I literally fell out of bed this morning

So in an effort to start my week off correctly this morning (monday) I stepped out of bed and fell flat on my face, which made a loud noise at about 5:15 this morning. I laid there for a few seconds after my crash to revel in the joy that was my life. The reason I fell was that my calf cramped up while doing ju-jitsu on saturday after I spent the morning running stairs at the convention center downtown. Muscle cramps leave your muscles destroyed for usually a couple of days afterward. So Sunday I had problems walking around because of my calf. If you don't use a muscle that has had a cramp you can't just go back into using it right away, and when I tried to use my calf to walk this morning I didn't do so very successfully. Luckily nobody will know of my folly since I was by myself and I don't have to tell anyone.

"We're going to teach you to be rebels. Not with guns and daggers, but with science and technology."

Dr. Norman Borlaug Died

My favorite scientist of all time is Louis Pasteur, who's innovation and studies on immunization and the spread of germs have probably saved millions if not billions since his discoveries. But my second favorite scientist of all time is Norman Borlaug. A man who is directly responsible for saving somewhere between 250 million and 1 billion lives on this planet. Not too shabby. Dr. Borlaug developed semi-dwarf high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties notably in Mexico, India, and then Asia and Africa. He was responsible from turning Mexico into a nation that imported wheat in vast quantities, to a nation that was able to be self sufficient and even export wheat to other countries. In the mid-1960s, the Indian subcontinent was experiencing widespread famine and starvation despite the U.S. making emergency shipments of millions of tons of grain, including over one fifth of its total wheat, to the region. Due to Dr. Borlaug's work India and Pakistan went from dire famine, to being wheat self sufficient by 1974...

He also wrote a hypothesis that was supposed to aid in the fight against deforestation, "increasing the productivity of agriculture on the best farmland can help control deforestation by reducing the demand for new farmland." There's some debate as to whether that holds true or not but it is a pretty powerful thought.

Dr. Borlaug was not without his critics, many dislike his cross-breeding of wheat for one thing, many also dislike that he brought large crop farming industry to countries that had previously relied on smaller subsistence farmers. Also that he helped huge US agribusiness companies make unseemly profits off the need of other nations and that his new farming techniques have led to greater irrigation problems and deforestations. I see both sides of the argument, but let me put it this way, the goal for him was to solve a problem, and for the time being he solved the shit out of that problem. That problem was to stem starvation and increase wheat yields in places in the world where people were quite literally starving to death. His cross-breeding and research have led to some of the largest countries in the world being able to have enough food to feed everyone in their country. The man best says it himself:

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things".

He also had further concerns for the future, which are well justified: "Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the 'Population Monster' ... If it continues to increase at the estimated present rate of two percent a year, the world population will reach 6.5 billion by the year 2000. Currently, with each second, or tick of the clock, about 2.2 additional people are added to the world population. The rhythm of increase will accelerate to 2.7, 3.3, and 4.0 for each tick of the clock by 1980, 1990, and 2000, respectively, unless man becomes more realistic and preoccupied about this impending doom. The tick-tock of the clock will continually grow louder and more menacing each decade. Where will it all end?"

How many people can honestly say they left the world a much better place? It's not too often you can stop and say, "Look at what he did, without him the world would be an exponentially worse place." He certainly won't get all the press and accords of a Michael Jackson, but he should.

My Other Ride is Unmanned

As I was driving out of the parking lot at lunch time to go do ju-jitsu today I saw maybe my favorite bumper sticker of all time. It said "My other ride is unmanned" which for the majority of the population means jack. But for the psuedo-science Navy inclined folks like myself, it's a cool bumper sticker. I've spent no small amount of my career dealing with unmanned vehicles, whether they be air, water, or even land. From the developmental research stages to depolyment some of the programs I've really been the financial analyst since inception till deployment. So I was tickled pink when I saw the bumper sticker and I kinda want one now and there's like 100 people in the country who would laugh at it.

Sometimes my Navy finance jokes don't go over so well...

I used to be good

I wonder if other people who write feel this way, but I read some of my old stuff from 2007/2008 and think it's much better/funnier then the crap I'm writing now. I keep thinking I've grown as a person since then but how can that be true if my writing hasn't gotten any better and in fact has gotten significantly worse in my opinion. Stupid salad days.

Labour Day Weekend

You know how sometimes you get a long weekend and it's really productive? Yeah I didn't manage to do that this weekend. It wasn't totally worthless, I didn't rage the entire weekend, I just didn't accomplish anything other then generally trying to be a gentleman and going to the gym. So while I had my lofty goals set to try and cure cancer, it is more likely that insread of shooting the moon down I just kinda managed o not infect the world with rabies. So I didn't do anything good, just nothing too bad. I danced alot, but didn't catch up on my reading. I went to the store and my living room looks really nice now, but I didn't hang all the paintings I have in the house, I also didn't clean the whole place. I didn't go out and eat junk food all weekend, but I didn't really eat healthy either although I cooked what I thought was a pretty good skirt steak for a BBQ on Saturday.

So all in all I'll give this weekend a C for accomplishments. Also there's a joke in the title of this post, sometimes I think I'm so damn witty.

Back at it

For the 4th year I'll be writing a weekly college football column. It sucks and you'll actually get dumber reading it. But it can be found here:http://www.fatkidmusings.blogspot.com/

Ahhh real football.