WATCHMEN

So over the weekend I saw Watchmen. Twice actually. The first time with a couple of friends, including one who works at the theatre and got me and another friend in since we weren't seventeen yet. I haven't read the book, but what I saw Saturday really impressed me. Everything about it was great and there weren't many parts that I disliked.... Actually I can't think of one part. The visuals, the acting, the story, everything. And from what I've heard, the movie followed the comic frame for frame which is really cool and you almost never see.

The movie starts out showing the death of a man named Eddie Blake, later revealed as "The Comedian". He was a member of the Watchmen, a group of costumed crimefighters bent on making the world a better place... At least at one time. They were officialy put out of the job after a law was passed banning their use. That didn't stop all of them though. Rorschach is a crazy, dillusional vigilante bent on fighting crime on his own terms. Then Dr. Manhattan and The Comedian were working for the government to continue fighting for the military.

After The Comedians death, Rorschach begins to investigate in his paranoid, crazy way, and he eventually uncovers a terrible plot to end war. Wait, a terrible plot to end war? How could it be so bad? Well it is. But I don't really feel like telling you so I'll just let you watch it.

The one thing that surprised me most after watching it was how messed up and disturbing it is. I was expecting something along the lines of 300, but ended up getting something along the lines of Seven. It was gruesome, twisted, and pretty sad at parts. But that just added to the movie and showed the true nature of some people, the side that we never want to see.

The guy that played Rorschach was amazing. He had a Heath Ledger like performance (although still not nearly as good) and portrayed the role perfectly. He was the only real stand out actor in the movie, but the other actors didn't bother me. He was just so much better, because his role was so messed up and now I'm rambling so I'll wrap this up. Watchmen is a good movie for people with good stomachs and who aren't easily offended and I recommend it.

P.S. It will be a very awkward movie to watch with your parents. cough cough silk spectre

Jake Kelly?

So my dad and I went to the Iowa-Penn St. basketball game early saturday afternoon. Neither of us were expecting much because of our history this year. As we crowded into our not so great corner seats, we excitedly waited for the tip off. Penn St. got the tip off and the game got underway. Unexpectedly, Iowa played pretty well and was ahead for most of the half until Penn St. tied it up at 24 before the half was over.

We were really excited for the next half after the game we had been seeing so far. Cyrus Tate and Jaryd Cole or however you spell it were having great games- Tate offensively and Cole defensively. Kelly was also doing good with something like eleven points in the first half. We got the ball again and after two possessions no points had been scored. As Kelly dribbled it back up court slowly, he yelled something over to one of the Iowa coach's and they called a timeout. He then ran off court into the locker rooms, and returned within a minuted.

" Pee break I guess." my dad said laughing.

I laughed along and didn't think much of it. The second half continued on almost exactly like the first half. Hawkeye's did very good for most of the half and were leading by eigth with like three minutes left. That's when they made a series of very costly mistakes and before we knew it, they were down by two with thirty seconds left. I don't remember who scored but someone did to tie it up and send it into overtime 54-54.

Penn St started off with the ball in overtime, but it was dead even between the teams and they tied again at 61 sending it into double overtime. In this overtime they were still all tied up until Jake Kelly hit a three with 55 seconds left to pull ahead three. After that, Penn St. had to begin fouling and we hit the free throws and won the game 75-67.

Jake Kelly finished with 22 points, and 11 assists. That's like the fourth game in a row with over twenty points, and what's even more impressive is what I found out after the game. I read the next day that Kelly was actually sick that game and had a fever of 101 degrees. That one timeout early in the second half, he had told the coach he was going to puke so they called a timeout for him to do so. That's pretty good to score 22 points when you're that sick.

Linn Mar

This weekend our show choir went to urbandale and competed. We didn't do that great for us, but we still managed to pull up a first runner-up, only behind Ankeny 30 points. That's pretty good. Linn-Mar happened to be there and was second in the country. They got fourth. So when the rankings got updated, they were twelfth, and we're sixteenth. Make sense to you? It sure doesn't to me. We have a second, first, and second. They have a first and fourth.

Then to add on to my ill feelings towards Linn Mar, my old school, our basketball team is getting beaten by them by thirty points right now. We are undefeated and second in the state and they are third with a loss. It's a little dissappointing, especially since they've beaten us for the last three years. I'm beginning to develop a hatred towards them.

Why I Blog

Because I was assigned to. But i guess that doesn't really help anyone so I will say what I think about it.

Blogging is great for some people, and not to good for others. It really depends on what type of person you are and if you enjoy writing. With me not being a writing person, I don't like it all that much. But that doesn't mean I don't see the appeal and wonder of it.

The best part is, it can be anything you want. You can review stuff on it, complain about stuff, use it as a diary, or do anything else on it. Yes you can also just have a diary or notebook. But with those, people don't see it unless you show them, and you also don't get comments unless you show someone. Blogs can let anybody in the world see what you're writing and put there own opinions on it or give you advice if needed. And if the privacy thing is an issue for you, you can just set the privacy setting to allow only you to view it.

You also can't put videos into a journal and pictures would be a pain to insert to it. Well blogs solve that problem. Picture's, video's, you name it.

I use mine as a kind of update for Hawkeye fans and to express my opinions about what's going on in the program. I also took about other random tidbits in my life and it's a much better alternative in my opinion then keeping journals.

Kids

After reading one of my friends blog, I saw that he used his blog to vent his anger towards the world on it, so I think I'm going to try that for a post.

I'm sick of kids. It's nothing against them, but there are just too many of them. Maybe I'm just sick of parents. After all it's their ignorance to keep having kids. I'm not talking about all parents and saying that no one should have kids. That would obviously end our species. I'm talking about people having eight or more kids. Why would you do that? Religion. Most people do it because of religion. They read the bible and it says go now and populate the earth. Yeah that was over two thousand years ago. WHEN THE EARTH WAS NOT FREAKEN POPULATED! DAMNIT PEOPLE, NOW IT IS NOW OVERPOPULATED SO USE YOUR BRAINS THAT WERE GIVEN TO YOU AND USE A CONDOM!

The most recent case of ignorance and irresponsibility is from Nadya Suleman, who just had octuplets. Now I'm not mad about this because of the octuplets. You can't really control that. I'm mad because now she has FOURTEEN kids. That means she already had six. Now if this was a normal case, I would have just said fourteen kids? How about you use up some more of the earth's resources and hurt it more. But no. She's going to be using up the earth's, and our governments resources for her kids. Now why would that be? How about because she 33 year old single mother that is unemployed. And before these kids, she was already getting $490 in food stamps. Now taxpayers are only going to have to pay more for her and her kids because she's not intelligent or responsible enough to know when enough is enough. Honestly how do you get that stupid? You're doing good for no one. Not the earth, your species, your government, or your kids. They will grow up in poverty since you now will hardly be able to provide for any of them. Birth is not a miracle when you're kids are brought into a life where they are set up for failure. I'm not saying because you're poor you will fail in life, but statistics do show that people in poverty don't do as well in life.

This situation makes me just about as mad as the Duggar's, but not quite. The Duggar's just had their last kid this past December. Their EIGHTEENTH FRICKIN KID. That's just pathetic. I went to their web site and it's pretty clear their loaded as seen with their huge mansion. But it's also easy to see that their hardcore christian. That's what makes me so mad about this whole situation. They make Christians look bad because these people are too dumb to see that not everything is supposed to be taken literally. It talks about how to treat your slaves in the bible. Does that mean that we should get slavery? These people probably think so. So when it says go populate the earth when it was sparsely populated, it probably meant go ensure the survival of your species by populating it enough for everyone to be safe and live in harmony with the world. Not to start overrunning it and destroying it, and once it's close to it's breaking point, continue to repopulate by having eighteen kids. Do the Duggar's expect us to go to another planet? No. I can almost guarantee you that they say, oh well my kids won't be around long enough to feel the impact. The same people that take the bible so literally and go to the extreme, are the same people that don't give a shit about the environment and don't care about what God gave to us. Oh it's not my problem they say. I'm not saying that is the case with everyone, but I've seen it way too often and I'm willing to bet that that is the Duggar's opinion for it.

MAGIC!!! continued

The next trick he did involved someone from the audience so he pulled up a mom. He then handed her a paintball gun and explained what was going to happen. She had five shots, but had a hard time listening to directions and Tim had to repeat them over and over again. It was funny at first, but then her stupidity started to get annoying. She was supposed to shoot the paintballs at a huge piece of paper with a lifesize sketching of a person on it. When she finally took the shots, she missed her first two and then landed the last three, two pink, one green.... I think. He then went to open a box with a lock on it that had been sitting on the side of the stage the whole time. He took out a key and approached it. After it was opened, a small piece of paper with the same image on it, and it mirraculously had the excact same arrangement of colors and they were in the same spot. As the lady took her seat, the croud applauded loudly.

Tim then announced that the next trick was his favorite to perform, and that caught everybodies attention. He grabbed a table from offstage and set it in the middle of the stage. He also had a cloth in his hands and set that over the table, and put a box on top of that. He picked up two corners of the cloth, braced himself, and the table lifted up off the ground and began floating, with him just holding the cloth out from it. He would take one hand off a corner, lift up the other sides to show there was nothing underneath, and it would keep floating with him only holding onto one corner. After making it float for a bit longer, he set it down and moved to the next trick.

This was a card trick and he said he would need someone to pick a card for him. He called out to an old woman in the crowd and she replied "The ten of queens!" Apparently she had been asleep and he then asked her to join him on stage. So she did and picked a card. She then held the card as they went back to back and he got his big drawing pad and began to draw the card. He turned to the audience and held up his picture and it was.... the shape of a card with nothing on it. "Smartass" i thought as I laughed along with everyone else. He then transformed that card on the paper into a deck and held the pad up and told the audience to watch. Slowly, a card started to creep up from the deck on the paper and she held up her card to find that they were matching cards. It got even better when he went to rip the paper off the pad and we saw that the card was now drawn onto the paper since we could see the ink had leaken through onto the back of the sheet. It was truly impressive.

Then Tim announced the finally was coming up and he sat down on a stool as a blue light was cast down on him. Music was playing that sounded like it was from the polar express and he began telling a story about how he told a kid he could maked snow. He took out a napkin, folded into quarters and began ripping edges off to make the paper snowflake. He then went on with the story and went on with how he then showed the kid this: and he began a rapid motion with his hands out of our view, as little shreds of paper began flying up from his hands. And I mean flying. Hundreds were shooting up and it lasted for a good thirty seconds. It was a perfect ending to a great show.

MAGIC!!!

Our choir held a fundraiser Tuesday night, but not in the typical fundraiser way. It was a magic show. And not just a lame cheap magic show. It was a legit, Las Vegas magic show, with a legit, Las Vegas magician. Do you know how I know it was legit? Well besides the tricks, he had a panther, and a leopard to help him perform. That ended up being the only flaw with the show: then animals weren't allowed to perform because they didn't get a license front the city in time. Everyone was very bummed out because of that, but it was still great. And it was probably the some of the funniest two hours of my life and I was laughing the entire time. That sounds odd for a magic show, but it was extremely funny.

But the show started with some simple tricks; tricks with doves and ducks. Making them appear, disappear, then change species. This was very impressive but i had seen it all before, and was shown how in movies like the prestige (although in that movie, to do the trick they crush the bird and kill it and I was hoping they weren't doing that with these birds). After the bird stuff he put a cloth over a big ball on a stand in the middle of the stage after a few seconds he took the cloth off and his assistant appeared inside the ball. We were all amazed as she stepped out and walked up next to him. He finally spoke and told us about the himself and the show. He informed us that it was a comedy, magic show and that when his tricks were right, it was magic, but if he messed up, then it was comedy and we should laugh to save him embarrassment.

Now I'm going to do my best to type everything the way it happened, and in the order but I'm not sure how exact it will be since the show was so overwhelming that I can't remember everything. After the whole dove routine, he took out a huge pad of paper and drew a bowling ball on it and wrote around it "Bowling Ball". He closed the pad and started moving it around and all of a sudden a big lump was in it. He moved the lump towards the ground, and a bowling ball fell out of the pad. Our jaws dropped at about the same rate as the ball and when he opened the pad, the words "Bowling Ball" remained but the picture of the ball was missing. Then he called my friend's uncle up to the stage to help him make sure the bowling ball was real. It was and the magician told him to throw the ball up to him and so he did. But then the magician dodged it and scolded him for throwing it at him, bringing in the comedy aspect to the show.

The next trick brought out the star of the show, which happened to be in the audience. He was a four year old named Sam. He was selected when the magician, who i've decided I'm going to call Tim, took a tin can with a stick around the audience hitting the can. He would hand the stick over to a few select audience members to try to repeat the sound he had just made. Four of them failed before he came to Sam who did the noise perfectly. Tim then took a few steps back and held it out for him to hit it again. He did and then Tim took a few more steps back, leading him to the stage little at a time, in the same way a person would lead their dog somewhere using treats. When they finally got on Stage and the following conversation took place.
"Well what's your name?" Tim asked
"Sam"
"How old are you?"
in a tired voice accompanied by a sigh "Four."
" Oh really? Too bad you have to be five to be on stage. Hey Sam how old are you?"
In the same sigh, "Four."
"Oh? Too bad you have to five to be on stage. Hey Sam how old are you?"
Sighing "Four."
It could possibly be one of funniest conversations I've ever seen a little kid have. Tim laughed then pointed at another girl from the audience to come up and join them. She did look about five, maybe four. Her name was Emily. He then said what he wanted them to do was use their imagination, grab a floating (make believe) coin from mid-air and put it in the tin can. He demonstrated and we misteriously heard a clink inside the can. Then Emily tried it. She reached out, closed her fist, and let it go over the can: another clink. Then it was Sam's turn. Tim told Sam to reach out and grab a coin to place it in the can. So what does he do? He reaches his hand inside the can, grabs the coin and drops it back in it. Tim tried to tell him what to do but he kept grabbing the coin from inside and dropping it back in. When he produced a few more laughs, he smiled and kind of spasmed, where he slapped his hands against his legs and shook back and forth which produced a bigger laugh. He was just so cute! I feel gay now but whatever. He did finally get it right, but when he dropped the invisible coin in, no noise was made. Until Tim put the can behind him under his butt and tugged his arm. We misteriously heard a coin drop. After a few more of these tries he sent the kids back to their seats to begin another trick, which I'll get to in the next post.