At Home

So right now I'm at home, with my family, and I'm on vacation, and I'm trying to write something funny, but everytime I try nothing comes to mind. It's not that I don't have several things or grievances that I could write on, it's just that this computer is down in the family room, and being that it is in the family room there is always family around. "How dare you blame your family and bring disrespect on their head!" you say? Well, I don't disrespect them or blame them, it's just that there's so many distractions in here that it's near impossible to write coherently for 30 seconds let alone 3 minutes to get everything down.

Speaking of which, my blog was mentioned on the BYU board, Right Here, specifically the post about the Calculus flyer. Which I'll talk about later if I can find 30 seconds of free time or peace and quiet. I sincerely doubt it will happen since we're rather a noisy family, but there's always hope.

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Back in the Day

Just a few really quick funny stories from my high school days.

Story #1
Back in high school I was a really shy kid. I mean REALLY shy. I let this one girl, April Miller, call me Sebastian (my name is Christian) for the first few days I knew her in class. Thank goodness somebody finally told her, "Um, I don't think that's his name."

All sorts of problems happen when you have the name 'Christian'. I love it as a name, but people get it wrong all over the place. This might have happened to other Christians as well, but I can't vouch for them. Like on trophies and certificates and other awards I got my name would show up as Christine or Christina - and this happened a few times. Teachers would always say "Christina" when calling roll. "HERE!" I would yell back in my deep voice. They'd get embarrassed and say "Oops". I can understand all of those mistakes somewhat, but frankly I wasn't too happy when they put "Christina" on my high school ID card.

Story #2
The first car I ever had was a 1975 Buick Regal that my grandpa gave to us. It was copper-orange colored with a white vinyl top, and was as long and wide as our 1976 suburban. The doors were 6 feet long and 6 inches thick. That car could take any damage. I swear that I could have rammed it into a semi without getting hurt. I once hit our basketball pole with it (Yes, I can just hear all of you guys saying, "Ha! What a crappy driver!" Well, I DEFY you to be a 16-year-old driver and drive a 1975 Buick Regal and NOT hit anything.) - the pole tilted 3 feet and left just a 2-inch scratch on the car. I finally did some damage to the car when I accidentally backed into a cement wall and smashed the bumper in a couple of inches.

Later on I accidentally fixed it when I was in the Hardees drive through, and the back bumper got caught on the hose faucet - the car made this horrible noise from the rear, and when I finally got free I checked for damage, and instead found that my car was fixed. I was quite proud to tell my parents about that one.

There's a pretty main road in south St. Louis called Baumgartner - a decent amount of cars use it to cut from one main road to another. It's a 2 lane road - the speed limit is 45 mph, and one day my friend and I drove the Regal down this road at 15 mph. Oh man we were beastly kids to do this. We must have had about 30 cars lined up behind us honking at us, and every time one of them would try to pass we would speed up just enough so that they couldn't get by. We told the story later on at church and one lady said, "Oh man that was you guys? I could have KILLED you guys!"

Just thinking about it now makes me laugh, and to everybody out there who has ever been a victim of a tragedy such as this, I want to say that I am truly sorry. Truly! Honest! Hehehehe

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Professor Lynn Garner Writes Calculus Book

Hello students! Have you had the wonderful privilege of taking a math class from one of our BYU Professors? If so, then have you had the extra privilege of that math class being one of the Calculus courses taught here? And if that last statement is true, did you take that class since 2002? If not, then you’ve been missing out on a wonderful new experience brought to us by the BYU Math Department. One of our professors, Professor Lynn Garner, http://www.math.byu.edu/~lynng/ has written a Calculus book. And frankly, it’s about time that the ENTIRE BYU Community learns about the contributions he’s made through his book.

This book has literally made waves in the small community of Provo, Utah since it has come into print. I myself have had first hand experience when dealing with the new found features it has in it.

The first and best feature of the book is the hundreds of errors that it has incorporated into the book. No other Math Book I’ve ever used has had this feature. I’ve even used 3 other calculus books before and don’t remember even once having the joyful experience of looking at a list of ‘errata’ and going through on each page of the book to correct the mistakes that were made on each one. You may be thinking to yourself: “What a horrendous thing! I would not wish to go through and correct pages on a book that I paid a significant amount of money for!” I thought so too until I realized what Professor Garner was doing: he was using the errors to make us go through and read the whole book and therefore we would learn more than we would from a book with no errors! Oh what subtle genius it took to write this book.

The next best feature is something that has been done to increase Student/Professor Relationships in the classroom. You see, in all of my previous math books I could go back and read explanations on calculus procedures and look at explanations of what to do and say to myself (I said this inside my head mind you. I had that Saying Inside My Head thing down pat by Sophomore year I’m proud to say) “Oh, now I see, the derivate of sinx = cosx” but with Professor Garner’s book, you can’t do that! With his book, you are instead required to go email your teacher, or call them up at their home and ask them. You might even be forced to ask 1 or maybe even 2 questions in class to further your understanding of Mathematics. Soon with this new system, you will come to know all of your Calculus professors intimately, and will be having Sunday dinner once a month with them and babysitting their kids on weekends, and racquetball every Tuesday and Thursday.

Teachers and students alike have come to love this book. I’ve heard students singing praises in the hallway, praises in the form of, “Oh boy, does this Math book by Professor Garner increase my dependence on learning from class rather than being able to rely on the book!” and teachers saying, “Thank goodness we have this calculus book which is clean and doesn’t contain all that darned cussing that our previous Calculus books had.”

Yes, Professor Garner has gone on to help many people through this book, people like the Bookstore, who cannot buy back used copies of this Calculus book because a new version comes out each year. People like students who used to have no social skills because they could just sit there and learn from a book instead of having to ask other people and students for help, and mostly, people like Bill Gates, by showing that it IS possible to develop a small monopoly, which can’t be governmentally shut down, by requiring all Calculus 1,2, & 3 classes at BYU to use his book. Oh Professor Garner, where would we be without your subtle genius?

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Overly Dependent Students

I work in a computer lab on campus - helping students out with various computer projects and problems that they have when dealing with these projects. It's a fun job for the most part and has helped me learn a lot. Because of this job I now know about HTML, and actually know the ins and outs of Microsoft Word, and believe you me, there are a lot of those when dealing with that pain-in-the-butt program and its auto-word corrects, and auto-saves and auto-bulleting and auto-erasing of things you just typed. But the one thing, the absolute ONE thing that I really truly hate at this job - is when students think that the purpose of the computer lab assistants, is to be Slaves to the Students.

Most of the people that come in and use the computer lab are respectful. They come and use your help for computer problems, or they come and ask for assistance when the instructor provided outdated instructions showing how to burn CDs using outdated software from 1994. Then there are the minority of students, the ones who never do their own work.

This one person would come into the lab every week, on the exact same day, and around the exact same time just like clockwork,and then they would say to me and my coworker, "Hey guys! It's time for web pages today!" Or "Hey guys! We're going to be having fun with Excel!", and then they would proceed to ask us for help with every problem on their homework.

For most students you would show them how to work on something for a few minutes, and then let them at least try to figure it out, and they do pretty well with it. But this person couldn't figure out anything - it was like they were a helpless baby. They were a business student, and they asked me to show them how to write flow charts - and here I am - open major - never written a flow chart in my life except for maybe in 6th grade, and I'm showing a business student how to write a flow chart.

Frankly if I were to have my way these students would never get a degree and instead their degree would go to the people that earned it for them: the Lab Assistants.

Oh well - what can you do, except laugh maniacally at the thought that when they get out in the real world they'll get their come uppance when they can't do any work their boss asks them to do?

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Dating: The Stupid Gene

There comes a time in every person's life when they start to like someone. I don't just mean like as in 'it is fun to hang around them' but I mean like in a romantic sense. They wish to date this other person. The second they start to have romantic feelings for this other person, a new feeling arises inside them, a feeling brought on by what I have come to dub: The Stupid Gene

At this point I can just hear all of you biologists, micro, macro, and otherwise just screaming: "THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A STUPID GENE!" To which I respond: How could you possibly know that there is no such thing as a stupid gene? The human genome is huge and immense, full of millions and millions of genes. Are you so pretentious and stuck up that you dare to pretend like you know what each and every one of them does?

The stupid gene is very simple to explain. Let's say you're good friends with someone of the opposite sex for years or months or perhaps even one week. You (you plural where you means 'you and person of the opposite gender') go out and hang out and can talk about most anything, from really meaningful things like your fear of Winnie the Pooh to boring things like what your favorite writing utensil (eg. crayon) is and why. Then all of a sudden, you start to have romantic feelings for them. You start thinking about how beautiful or handsome that person is. And the second that happens, you can no longer say even one little intelligent comment when you're around them. It doesn't even matter if you're talking to them directly - if that person is in the room, you will think and act stupid.

Here's an example of the stupid gene in action: A nuclear physicist is talking with a colleage, "Yes, I do believe that the amount of waste produced by fission could be reduced if only we used Uranium-148 isotopes instead of..." the person they like walks into the room, "Um, I'm sorry - refresh my memory - what's a nucleus?" Or if the person they like asks them how to spell their first name, they will stutter a bit, and just smile goofily at the person they like.

Now some people have come up with an idea for a solution to the stupid gene - a way to get past the barrier of letting somebody know that you like them. We have The Whiteboard Theory. It's simple: Everybody should wear a whiteboard on their chests - and on the whiteboard they will write the top 5 or 10 names of people they like or are interested in. If they don't like anybody, they don't have to write any names. If the people on their White Board don't like them back, all they have to do is come and erase their name from the list. If they do like them back, they could put like a gold star next to their name. It's simple! It's easy! And since it's bound to make people look foolish it will NEVER work - but we can dream!

Note: For all of you super-serious people out there (see comments by Anonymous under Dating: The Setup) please remember that the above is a joke. The above does not in anyway mean that males are absolved from the responsibility of asking females out. If when you read this you get this seething righteous feeling to tell me 'what's what', then calmly step away from the computer, and go eat 6 tablespoons of sugar, wait 30 minutes, calm back, and read it again when you're either hyper or slap happy.

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The Antics of Fanatics

There are many different types of fans of things out there in the world. Fans Who Could Care Less who might possibly go see the movie if a group of friends are going to go see it and there's nothing else better to do than sit at home doing dishes, Fans Who are Merely Devoted that will go watch a movie in the first week it comes into the theater, Fans Who Care that will wait in line for a couple of hours to get a ticket, and then finally there's the Ultimate Fan.

The Ultimate Fan is the person who devotes every facet of their existence to something. The sort of fans who will convert their car to a Star Trek Spaceship. The sort that will not only dress up like Darth Maul once, but will shave their head, and get electrolosis done on it, then have their entire body tattooed and have horns implanted and get a special red/gold dye injected into their irises, and then go take ninjitsu lessons and devote the rest of their life to figuring out how to build a working lightsaber, just so they can become Darth Maul. Not that a working lightsaber wouldn't be cool, mind you!

One such Ultimate Fan lived in my complex last year. She was a huge fan of Lord of the Rings - and I mean HUGE! She wanted to call her bedroom "The Hobbit Hole", to which her roommate put her foot down. She loved the books as well as the movies, and defended them fiercely.

One day a couple of guys were over visiting her roommates, and they were discussing the movie version of Return of the King. One guy says, "I thought it was good, but it was a little too long." At this the Ultimate Fan started twitching, but held in what she thought. Then another guy, "Yeah, and Frodo and Sam were just a little too...gay...near the end of the movie," The Ultimate Fan could hold it in no longer! She started screaming at the top of her lungs, "ROSIE! ROSIE! ROSIE! ROSIE! ROSIE! ROSIE! ROSIE!" And she points her finger at them - not just a little bit - but she really flung that finger with fervent vigor! And she yells, "Sam wasn't gay! That's why they put Rosie in there - to show that Sam & Frodo were NOT gay!"

She yelled this at the top of her lungs with full anger. One of her roommates said, and I quote, "If there would have been a gun in the apartment, I would have feared for my life."

We thank you for reading A True Example of an Ultimate Fan

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Cheers' Take On Mormons

Cheers Clip
This is a really funny video about Mormons that was on Cheers. Just right click on this link, and hit 'save target as' and download it to your computer to watch it.

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Dating: The Setup

This week I wish to discuss dating and marriage and BYU's ultimate goal of getting the whole world married. Oh BYU will never come out and directly tell this to you - at least no official person at the university. But every member of every Bishopric of every BYU Ward must go through some secret leadership training which brainwashes the heck out of them until all they can talk about is dating, marriage, and courtship. Seriously - you name a subject - and they WILL work it into a subject on dating. Like video games: "Yes, Kingdom Hearts is an awesome video game, but you know what my favorite game is? The dating game..." or "Doing dishes again, eh? Yes, doing dishes and having them nice and clean to use is truly wonderful, but you know what's even better? Dating!" Eventually with all this talk about dating & the problems that happen therefrom, people (most often girls) get this wonderful idea that they could make the world a happier place by setting up one of their friends with another friend to make them into 'oh such a sweet and perfect couple'.

Setups can occur at any time and place - by any person and for any person. Most often the setup is done by freshly married people. As soon as they get married they lose all experience with the previous dating life they experienced. It doesn't matter if they didn't get married until they were 35, the second they get married, they go through 'Marriage Amnesia" in which they forget everything they ever knew about single life. Single life is as much a blur to them as life before you were 2 years old is a blur to you. All they can remember now is that they're married, and happy, and the WHOLE WORLD should be as happy as they are. So if you don't want to be setup, you should avoid associating with newly married couples until they hit, say, their 10th anniversay. If you do want to be setup though - associate with nothing but married couples. Follow those 2 simples rules and you're set!

I myself have never set up any person at any time. I personally don't feel qualified to make such a judgement for other people. However, the number one rule for setting people up, as far as I can figure out, is that the two people MUST look really similar to each other in order to be compatible. If a guy has red hair he should go out with a girl that has red hair. Midgets (I'm sorry, I mean little people) should date each other. Skinny person with skinny person. Fat people with fat people.

Now you're thinking I'm just being cruel about this last one, but this is totally and 100% true! I am NOT joking around here! I myself am a hefty person. I've been hefty for the past 5 or so years of my life. Back when I was slim I was setup with slim people, but ever since I've become fat - every single person I've been setup with has been fat. People have this mindset where they see 2 fat people (1 guy and 1 girl) and they think, "Hey! He's fat! She's fat! They'd be absolutely PERFECT with each other!" Let me just tell you right here right now: 2 fat people does not necessarily a perfect couple make!

One of my friends didn't believe this until I proved it to him. We went to a party where this girl said she had a friend she wanted to set me up with. "You're perfect for each other!" she said! "You'll make a lovely couple!" "Watch this, I bet she's the fat one. It always is." "No way - they don't do that do they?" "Just watch." And lo and behold it was the chubby one!

My Rule #2 for setups is to NEVER be setup by a member of your immediate family. Your immediate family has no qualms whatsoever with pestering you to death about dating a person they tried to set you up with. They will continually ask you: "Why don't you go out with Susie Johnson(fake name)?" No matter how many valid reasons you give to not go out with that Susie Johnson they will still ask you this everytime you see them, until you get to the point where you would rather hide in your bathroom with the lights off for 6 hours than talk to people and chance broaching that subject.

However, some percentage (0.2%) of setups actually succeed, and on top of that they're a great way to avoid the responsibility and fear that comes from having to call up a girl and inform her of your intentions of asking her out on a date, which subject we will broach tomorrow.

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Misadventures In Landscaping

A few years ago I decided to take a job as a landscaper. It was a beautiful job, a wonderful marvelous job, a job which led me to do many wonderful things that I never knew myself to be capable of before in my whole entire existence. A job where I had no real supervision, and no experience - and I was sent out into the world to wreak havoc wherever I could.

On the first two days the only thing about landscaping I experienced was the fact that when your fellow landscapers who are supposed to teach you the ropes don't show up, you get to spend the first hour flipping channels and watching Night Court until your boss (Jack) says, "OK - come back tomorrow and we'll have some work for you."

On the third day of Landscaping I experienced work with Jack. This is where he decided my fellow landscapers were all terrible deadbeat quitters and that I would therefore be the entire landscape crew for a while. He went out and showed me vital things about landscaping, like what things are nasty weeds and what are beautiful plants. He also demonstrated proper landscaping terminology, like "Move this (bad word) pile of (bad word) over there next to that (bad word)." It's a nice & to the point sort of terminology.

On the fourth day Jack said to me, "So, have you ever used a chainsaw before?" "No, no I haven't." "Okay, come here." We go outside, he points to the chainsaw - I look at it. "You just push this button, & pull this cord," he says, "There you go, have fun." And off I went by myself for the day. My boss had lots of faith in me.

On the 7th day I finally got coworkers. So there we were, a fine crew: me with one week of landscaping experience, and Joe with no landscaping experience, and another kid who I think had 3 weeks experience somewhere else but I swear knew less than either me or Joe. We were landscaping professionals! Landscaping engineers if you will! Roaming the land! Doing good for our fellow men & spreading joy wherever we went!

We had many amazing adventures and astounding experiences, experiences like:

Learning Experience #1
One beautiful thing I learned in landscaping was that you buy sand & mulch in measurements called 'yards', and we'd order it like so: "We'll take one yard of top soil." "Where you want it?" "Back of the truck." So up comes a guy with one of those power shovel things full of top soil, and he stops before putting it in the truck. "What the crud is he doing?" I say to Joe, "I don't know" and we motioned to him to dump it in. We head back to our yard, all happy for our deeds well done, and then we go out to look for our tools.

"Where the heck are they?" "Didn't we just have them here?" and we're running around to look for them. Then I look at Joe and get this sinking feeling - "Um, we left them in the back of the truck didn't we?" and then went back to the truck and dug into the top soil to get all of our tools back out. Unfortunately the shovels were also buried, so we had to use the next best thing: hands.

Learning Experience #2
We show up to work at 8 a.m., Jack looks at us, "Any of you guys ever towed a 30 foot trailer before?" "Nope" we all say. "Hmm..okay..." he looks around at all of us, I'm screaming inside, 'PLEASE don't pick me, PLEASE don't pick me!' and he throws the keys at Joe, "OK - you're gonna learn how to tow a trailer today."

Learning Experience #3
While we fertilized lawns we also went around spraying weed killer all over the grass as well. One time our boss also told us to go out and fertilize about thirty rounds, and right after he told us that, he said, "also, head to the store and pick up some Roundup." We, being the landscaping geniuses that we were, decided by association, that since he wanted us to pick up some Roundup, that what he wanted us to do was use the roundup to spray on the lawns.

We ran around happy as clams spreading joy and spraying roundup everywhere. The one kid was so happy he even sprayed a smiley face in the lawn with the roundup. "Please take good care of my lawn, we just barely got it just the way we want it after 10 years of hard work," one lady said. "Don't worry," I said with the smile of a super hero doing good deeds, "We'll take good care of you!"

We proudly told our boss what we did the next day, and all he said was, "Oh (bad word) oh (cuss word), well, I guess we'll be doing a lot of resodding this summer."

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