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Sumiki

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Blog Entries posted by Sumiki

  4. Sumiki

    Another New Signature

    By Sumiki,

    From the much more recent short, "From Hare To Eternity".
     

    What's up, Doc? DOC? I ain't no doctor! Get off my treasure chest or you'll be needin' one! (A doctor, that is.)

    *honk* You're cute. *honk*
    I AM NOT CUTE!
  5. Sumiki

    Antichicken

    By Sumiki,

    Like matter and antimatter, a chicken has a polar opposite: the antichicken. And while matter and antimatter collide and destroy each other, chicken and antichicken create three pounds of mashed potatoes when they hit.
     
    Antichicken is now becoming the leading producer of mashed potatoes. Scientists are worried about the overall safety of the industry, however, and experts are saying that while potatoes can be now used for other useful functions, such as making batteries, it is driving up the cost of chicken wings and other chicken products.
     
    Antichicken wings are impossible to eat, with a rubbery texture and the smell of rotting fish.
     
    Experts cannot agree on the origin of the antichicken species. Some say it's a genetic defect found in some wild chickens, others that it's a virus that mutates regular chicken eggs. Still others believe that the antichicken came from Jupiter's moon Callisto in June of 1957.
  6. Sumiki

    Approvals

    By Sumiki,

    Here lies the list of approvals that this blog has accrued.
     





    My Approval


    CF's Fusion Approval


    Chunky's Canned Approval


    Chunky's Awesomenees Approval


    Chunky's Zen-Master Approval


    Chunky's WOW-ful Approval


    Nidman's Amusing Approval



    Morgoth's Dynamic-Page Approval


    Lhikevikk's Error-Message Approval


    Blue Dragon's self-proclaimed small approval



    VB's creepy approval



    Toa Dave's Freaky Approval


    Brickeens' Text-Bubbly Approval



    Dr. Evil's Bald Approval


    Mysterious Minifig's Mysterious Approval


    Kylus's Photok Approval


    Kylus's Awesome Drawn Approval


    Gorgnak's Desert-Formation Approval


    It's-a-Ziko's A-Mario Approval


    The Official Brickeens Awesome Award


    Keanu Reeves' Drawn Approval


    Ballom's PURPLE Approval





     

    Bitter Cold's Wishful-Thinking Approval






     

    Porky Pig's Doubled-Up Approval



    Taka Nuvia's Clever Approval



    I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT DR. EVIL'S HOGAN APPROVAL


    Mesonak's Onua Mistika Approval


    Cash Chicago's "By the way" Approval


    Lewa Krom's Shaky Approval


    Cherixon's Tree-and-Scanline Approval



    Cherixon's Mata Nui Approval


    Rawr's RAAAAWR Approval


    Shut up, it's Peter Griffin's Approval


    LewaLew's Major League Approval


    Toa Spirit's Awesome Drawn Approval


    Toa Spirit's Calvin-and-Hobbes Approval



    VB's Messy Approval


    The Rabid MOCists's Quizzical Blawg Approval (x2)


    Christo1096's Dark Kopaka Approval


    Shadix's Drawn Approval


    Ran Yakumo's Guitar Approval



    Ran Yakumo's Second Approval



    Shadix's Flashy Approval


    Ran Yakumo's Third & Updated Approval



    Daiker's Nuparu Approval


    Daiker's Second Nuparu Approval





     

    Unit#phntk#1's Text Approval



    Ran Yakumo's Fourth Approval



    Zakitano's Ripoff Approval


    WE'RE DOING THIS's Somewhat Philosophical Approval


    Legolover's Approval


    Blademan's Indecipherable Approval


    Ardros's Surprisingly Non-Octagon Approval


    tent163phantoka's Olmak Approval


    Toa of Smooth Jazz's Ood Approval


    Dual Matrix's Somewhat Hyperactive Approval


    The Lonesome Wanderer's Homestuck (?) Approval


    Total Approvals



    -58-



    this is getting to the point of utter ridiculousness


  7. Sumiki
    April.
     
    Is.
     
    EPIC WIN.
     
    First off, we have April Fool's Day. I haven't played any really good pranks on somebody in a while, any suggestions, BZP?
     
    On the Fifth, the Major League Baseball season starts up. That makes a month win even if everything else is boring.
     
    Next, Series Five of Doctor Who starts on BBC America, starting April 17th. Words cannot describe the happydance!
     
    Finally, some other assorted things that I can't think of right now but are awesome anyway.
     
    Compounded, April is epic, epic win.
  8. Sumiki

    Around the Bend

    By Sumiki,

    Today was a day in which we steeled ourselves for a whole lot of nothing, although there was a bit of fun with dirty clothes. Specifically, someone had dropped two absolutely grungy socks onto the hallway on our floor. When we checked out, someone had picked them up ... only to stick them halfway behind a flower pot on a table in the mini-lobby area where the elevators are. This made the whole ordeal much worse.
     
    The greater Boise area, still full of confusing road work, was slightly more negotiable in the light of day. However, we needed to go further into the suburb of Meridian towards an Office Depot, for we had realized in Craters of the Moon that we had left our road atlas in Idaho Falls. (Also, one of the twin wires in the little cord that connects the iPod to the car speakers had broken, leaving any music played through it coming in consistently on the right side but everything from crackling to nothing on the left, so we needed to get another one of those as well.)
     
    The area was absolutely swarming with people on the roads, but was managed to locate the store and purchased the items. Surprisingly, we were one of the few people in the store who didn't work there, and the employees seemed to notice that we weren't from the area.
     
    (Side note: the further away we go, the more our slight southern accents sound like drawls. We don't speak any differently than we normally do, but the surrounding language has such a different flavor that we notice how much our own stands out. This was probably most noticeable across the Canadian prairies two years ago, but has been noticed every trip.)
     
    The Interstate still had road work, but it was not as bad as last night and we soon got to the Oregon border, where we stopped at a welcome center full of slightly creepy old men. We exited relatively unnerved and ready for the long drive to Bend.
     
    If you look at a road map of Oregon, you will see in the western half of the state that there about three paved roads. Towns are extraordinarily tiny when they exist. US-20, the major road for this whole quadrant of the state, goes for stretches of 70 miles at a time without gas stations.
     
    We got gas in the town of Vale, where we remembered that Oregon doesn't let you pump your own gas—but only after we noticed a bald man with a name tag staring into the window.
     
    At first, US-20 through this section of the state is full of large barren hills. The road goes this way and that, mostly through the valley where the hills are so close as to look like proper mountains. Eventually this straightened out and led us into the northernmost portion of the Great Basin, an arid expanse which encompasses much of the traditionally barren western areas, such as Nevada.
     
    This is where we learned that Oregonian drivers are absolutely suicidal. Now, we've seen an immense amount of stupidity on the road from drivers in every state, but I'm just about convinced that Oregon has the worst ones in the country. US-20 has about as many blind curves and hills as anything else, and these drivers would go 80 around convoys of trucks four or five strong. There was nothing we could do but see them hit the gas as they careened towards the inevitable oncoming traffic and cut behind further slow-moving vehicles. (Well, the trucks were technically also going over the speed limit, which goes to show just how ill-advised they were.) This scenario happened at least ten times, with the worst of them occurring when an RV tried to do this in the face of oncoming traffic trying to do the same thing in a passing lane. How we didn't witness a crash is beyond me.
     
    Our only stop along the route was in the little town of Burns. My dad pulled into a garage to ask about filling in a tiny crack in our windshield we'd had since Sioux City, only to be told that, due to its angle, filling it was as likely to make it worse as anything else. It's not even an annoyance, but we'd like to get the windshield replaced if it's convenient, which likely would be in California.
     
    After that, we went into a Safeway for some snacks, only to find a full-scale deli. I had a chipotle chicken wrap with pepper jack sauce, which had a kick but was not what I'd consider spicy. My parents both went for small subs featuring turkey, avocado, and bacon. We got some caffeinated drinks for the road ahead and steeled ourself for more of the same.
     
    Thankfully, the road from Burns to Bend was relatively flat and relatively unpopulated, leading to fewer passes. It was the most desolate drive I've ever made. Towns that appeared on the map and on road signs had a population of anywhere from zero to three. It was like the drive across Nevada on our first trip, except with more scrub brush on the sides of the road and hills in the foreground. After this drive, we eventually saw the Cascades in the far distance, with their snowcapped peaks poking through the distant clouds.
     
    Bend is more at the foothills of the Cascades, and the traffic picked up as we wound our way to the hotel. As it turned out, the increase in traffic was at least partly to blame on a Doobie Brothers concert somewhere in the vicinity.
     
    We walked across a bridge over the beautiful Deschutes River, which was filled with kayakers and folks of all kinds carrying their lawn chairs to and from the concert, which made for a pleasant bass background at our distance. We ate at Anthony's, a seafood place that has their own fishing company which supplies them with salmon directly from the Copper River in Alaska.
     
    This offer of freshness was simply too good to pass up, and so we all got the salmon. Cooked to perfection with a buttery wine sauce on top, the salmon came with a large helping of garlic mashed potatoes (clearly hand-mashed) and snow peas. Our strawberry lemonade was somewhat pulpy, but we weren't dissuaded and in fact took it as an emblem of freshness. They didn't have enough strawberries for their desserts, but we were able to get a cheesecake with raspberry drizzle over it, which I was able to eat more than my fair share of when our waiter began talking to my parents about cell phones.
     
    From there, we went a little ways down the street to REI, for we all need better shoes if we are to go on the hikes we plan. It's an interesting building, as it's housed in an old mill and retains the three smokestacks which can be seen all around town. But it was closed by the time we arrived, so we wandered around the small outdoorsy mall, winding between the bikers and skateboarders and enjoying the cool mountainous air.
     
    We went into a place called Simply Mac, which is an Apple specialist store that locates in places too small for full-blown Apple stores. With no one in there save for the employees due to the concert, we began talking with one of the folks there. He told us a little about the Crater Lake area, the store's business model, and—most intriguingly—of the famous residents of Bend. Celebrities in Bend include a number of high-profile actors and athletes. Sam Elliott and Drew Bledsoe are perhaps the two most recognizable names from each category. According to the guy we talked to, the famous residents are in fact very down-to-earth folks.
     
    Bend suffers from high inflation and was hit hard by the recession. Relatively small houses that went for half a million were suddenly under 200K. Suave investors are now making pretty pennies off of the economic recovery. Compare that to the deserted nothingness along US-20, where acres literally go for pennies due to their aridity and worthlessness.
     
    Bend is a very nice little city. Though with a population a little over 81,000 and a greater metro area with about 166,000, the vast expanses which surround it mean that it has a place to spread out and breathe under the gaze of the nearby Cascades. It's clearly a very green place—as one would expect from Oregon in every sense of the term—but the retiree population exceeds the young and hip crowd by a wide enough margin for the average age to be significantly higher than comparable cities.
     
    Tomorrow: Crater Lake National Park. With our westward travel through, we now begin the southwards leg of this trip.
  16. Sumiki
    We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
    But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
    One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
     
    Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
    You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
    Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
     
    If the plural of man is always called men,
    Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
    If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
    And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
    If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
    Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
     
    Then "one" may be that, and "three" would be those,
    Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
    And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
    We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
    But though we say mother, we never say methren.
    Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
    But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!
     
    Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England. We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
     
    And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing,
    Grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?
    Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends
    But not one amend.
    If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all
    But one of them, what do you call it?
     
    If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
    If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
     
    Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? We ship by truck but send cargo by ship. We have noses that run and feet that smell. We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway. And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
     
    You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm goes off by going on.
     
    And, in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother's not Mop?
  22. Sumiki

    Auditions and Recitals

    By Sumiki,

    This next week will be one of the most important weeks of my life.
     
    I have back-to-back music auditions on Friday and Saturday, and it's been an interesting setup thus far. I have ties to both schools, but they have very different audition standards and admissions offices.
     
    One requires a piano audition, which I'm not excited about—not that I'm not competent at the instrument (far from it), but that I'm afraid I'll be judged in that area against full-time prospective piano students with whom I would be competitive were I not also a composer. Basically, my piano repertoire is a little more offbeat than the usual and I haven't the slightest idea how much the piano portion will weight my overall audition.
     
    The other has had a few mishaps in the admissions office. I'm not particularly concerned about that since everything has been straightened out, but the fact that it was straightened out so close to my audition means that it only takes one thing to slip through one crack for the audition to have complications.
     
    I don't know what the deciding factor will be in this matter. I don't know if there will even be a deciding factor. There's no clear-cut favorite at this point.
     
    Oh, and then the day after I'm in full-on recital mode, including a rendition of the only piece I've written that I've also memorized, because my brain somehow has a hard time remembering things that I write. I suppose that it's because I write them.
     
    Musically, I have every reason to be confident in what I've done. My orchestral pieces have been compared to Haydn in humor, and my piano pieces to Chopin in scope. Something outside of my control going horribly wrong, however, is not something I'd be able to take, mentally speaking.
     
    The little time I've had in recent weeks has been devoted to:
    putting my fourth orchestral piece into notation software
    editing my complete piano pieces as a gift for my piano teacher at the end of this semester
    composing a new choral-ensemble piece (featuring a libretto partially by Sumiki's Dad)
    sketching ideas for a piece for cello and orchestra, partially as an experiment in orchestration (cello concerti are notoriously hard to orchestrate), but mainly as a gift for a cellist friend (who is one of three people on the planet to have beaten me in a pun war).

    It's somewhat hard to focus on these various things, but it's kept me from stressing over the auditions more than I already have, so I guess that's something.
     
    In other news, my neck scar is healing quite nicely (the stitches come out for good tomorrow!), my grandmother is walking around as well as she has in about three years, and my senior year of high school baseball begins with a practice on February 9th.
  24. Sumiki

    Avast, Ye Swabs!

    By Sumiki,

    Arrr, this here day be the International Talk Like A Pirate Day, ye landlubbers!
     
    Yar har, fiddle di dee,
    Being a pirate is alright with me!
    Do what you want, ‘cause a pirate is free,
    You are a pirate!
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