south carolina

i got back yesterday from myrtle beach, south carolina. usually i don't post about my life because it's boring but this was pretty cool so why not.

south carolina was my 21st state i've been to, and that includes states i've only been to because of airplane stopovers. yes that counts. i'll argue this point to the death, even though i've found not many people agree with me. my goal is to go to all 50 states.

i thought new york bars were expensive. in myrtle beach the standard cover is 10 dollars. although that can be brought down to 8 with a handy coupon printed by a machine at the hotel. man am i cheap. when our waiter at pizza hut told us to go to this one place because you can pay one cover and get into 12 bars, we were very excited. but when we went we found out that by 12 he meant 3, and when he said that senor frog's was one of the 12, he actually meant it wasn't.

one day we went to a beach with all black people. literally everyone around us was black. i thought about it and realized that this must be what it's like for a lot of black people who are always surrounded by white people. it made me think about race in a different way after being in a situation like that.

all south carolina liquor stores close at 7pm every day. that really sucks. and in one place, they took a picture of me because i was under 25. weird.

oh and i also almost got arrested on the drive down and one night i got thrown to the ground by a bouncer. i can cross those things off my life to do list i guess. and the one night i did 14 shots in an hour, my new personal best. that was the bouncer night.

i wonder what the most shots anyone's taken in a night is. freshman year at school i watched my RA take about 35 shots of vodka, and he claimed he did 50 that night. he was kinda large though so i guess it could've been true.

and oh yeah, i got a job too. what a relief that is, and finally i won't be so piss poor.

the insert key

this has to have happened to everyone in the world who has used a computer. you know that 'insert' key near the backspace that you always hit by accident? and it makes you type over what you already wrote instead of inserting it inbetween? does anyone ever use this key for its real purpose?? i say no. it has only ever caused frustration to me, never help.

if i could vote one key off a keyboard it would be either this one or the windows logo key between ctrl and alt. i've never used that one.

nothing to lose

one thing that always really bugs me while watching sports is when the announcer will say 'this team really has nothing to lose." it's heard most during playoff time, when a heavy favorite is taking on an underdog. or sometimes if a team is making a late comeback in a desperate effort to win the game. they always say this team has 'nothing to lose.'

not true. they have the GAME to lose. by definition, a game is something you can lose. and if it's a playoff game, they also don't have just the game to lose, but also their entire season in which they worked so hard to get to that point. actually, they have everything to lose.

in fact, it would be quite a disadvantage if one team indeed had 'nothing to lose.' if, say, the outcome of the game didn't matter at all because said team was gonna advance anyway. that just wouldn't be fair at all. and even then there would be potential injuries to star players, that's something to lose.

what a stupid saying.

the origin of words

this is a topic that i've tried to write about before but somehow i can't express it clearly into words and it just ends up sounding dumb. so i'm gonna try and keep it short.

do you ever wonder where certain words come from? obviously the majority of words have logical latin roots or are combinations of existing words or whatever. but there a lot of words that simply couldn't have been around when language was invented/discovered.

just off the top of my head, take the word paint. who the hell knows when paint was invented, but i'd guess sometime in the last millenium. so when the first carpenter or scientist or whoever came up with paint, where did he get the word from? did he just slap it on a wall and say, 'hey i think i'll call that paint!' it must have sounded totally strange at the time, but somehow it became part of our everyday vernacular.

some may say that all words have specific derivations and etymologies. okay but even if 'paint' came from something else, this dude probably didn't know about it, he's just some guy who invented paint, he wouldn't know about languages and derivations and all that. and sometimes a name is given to something and then the public renames it based on what they like because it catches on. well where would the masses get some random word like paint from?

this works for all kinds of words, mainly objects that are relatively recent addtions to our way of life. just look around your house. rug, window, cement, desk, pencil, curtain, fireplace. okay that last one was a joke. but surely, language was pretty set in stone by the time these things were introduced to society.

many i have posed this question to have dismissed it as a stupid question that probably has a simple answer. but if you can't tell so far, that could be the answer to a lot of my blogs.

whose fault?

i was driving around today, in my painfully hot car which no longer has AC, and i saw an ambulance on the road and started thinking. ambulances, when they have patients in them (are they called patients? or just passengers? i say you don't acquire patient status until you actually get inside the hospital), anyway, when this is the case, they have their lights and sirens on and can run red lights and people have to move to the side to get out of their way and all.

well what happens if you get in an accident with an ambulance? is it your fault automatically? say you're driving along coming up to a green light listening to some loud music. an ambulance is racing along with a passenger in the back on the intersecting road approaching the same light, and for them it's red. you don't hear the sirens and you collide with the ambulance. (i know they slow down and all, but there was bad visibility at this intersection and you got in a wreck).

are you at fault? would you have to pay to repair your car and the ambulance? my hunch is yes you would. but i mean, all you did was go through a green light. it seems the ambulance's only defense would be that you're supposed to hear their sirens and slow down. is it your fault because you were listening to loud music? and it's not like you could stop and exchange insurance and all because they would still be in a rush to get to the hospital.

if they said it was my fault i'd be pretty pissed, but i probably wouldn't get a lot of sympathy because after all i did just hit an ambulance with some dying guy in it.

EDIT: tim pointed out that new york state has a law that you're not allowed to listen to music so loud that you can't hear emergency vehicles. i imagine all states are probably like this.

but this raises another question, can a police officer arrest you for playing music too loud while you're just driving? if so, how loud is too loud? is 6 dots too much? i like to play mine at 6 dots. of course the dots aren't a universal system. there doesn't seem to be a standard scale for dots or bars or numbers in car audio systems. and how could the cops prove what you're listening level was? sound radar? this is just a legal mess waiting to happen.

what would you see?

what if someone made a room that had mirrors on the walls, ceiling, and floor. all mirrors everywhere you looked, you're totally surrounded. what would you see? i guess you would see just you, because everywhere you looked your line of sight would bounce all around the room and eventually back onto you. i'm trying to think what it would look like, but i really have no idea. i bet it would look really cool though.

now say for a second you were invisible and you were in this room. what would you see then? if it's all mirrors then what would they reflect? there would be nothing to have light bounce off of and onto the mirrors. in fact now that i think about it this room would be pretty dark, like pitch black, because if you put a light in it would just reflect that. hmm. what if you brought in a flashlight with you and waved it around. that would be awesome i think.

what about one-way mirrors? a portion of one wall could be a one-way mirror, and you could shine light through from the other side. does light go through a one-way mirror? that would be kinda weird, i mean, what would it look like from the mirror side? maybe that wouldn't work. if it did though, you wouldn't have to be invisible because you could just be in the room on the other side with the light and looking through the window. and the room would still be all mirrors. wow, what would you see?

EDIT: nicole found this helpful and interesting link: http://science.howstuffworks.com/question421.htm. the last paragraph says that shining a light through from another room would not work. damn. something tells me i'm trying to play god here. god shmod, i want my mirror room!

where'd they come up with that?

i think a great idea for a book would be to talk to a lot of famous bands and groups from all genres and eras of music and find out why they named their group what they did. there's thousands of groups out there but unless you're a hardcore fan, you really never hear about the origins of their name.

each group could get a few paragraphs or so. there's probably a lot of funny stories to be told here. what a great coffee table book that would be, and a good conversation starter as well. i'd definitely buy it.

i bet a lot of bands would just be like, it sounded cool, so we made it our name, and probably wouldn't have cool stories. they could all get listed at the back or something. but yeah, i should try to publish this.

how many time zones can there be?

i started this blog for three reasons: a) my cousin has one and it's pretty funny and after reading what he has to say about the world i feel like i have some things to say as well ... 2) i sit at home a lot these days and have nothing better to do ... and d) reason number two all over again, it's important enough to be listed twice.

since my life isn't very exciting, i'll just use it to post about random shit that enters my head. it will serve much better purpose this way.

first topic. i'm adjusting my profile on this website, and it wants my time zone. fair enough. but there weren't just 24 options, one for each hour. there were like 200, including about 30 different cities for the eastern time zone alone (the old -5:00 GMT).

first, what possible reason could there be for the government - or whoever does it - to distinguish all these zones from one another? i know there are some half hour exception deals here and there around the world, but 30 different cities in the eastern zone alone? something else is going on here. do these places really all have their own area-specific time rules? how confusing.

second, why was philadelphia not on this list? hello, 4th biggest city in the country, or something like that. i saw a town called knox, indiana on the list. i have legitimately never heard of this city. if there are any bloggers from knox, this must have made their life. why do some loser towns get listed on these lists but not the biggest ones? something tells me the answers to both these questions are related to each other. begrudgingly, i went with new york, although san juan was tempting...

another thought. it dawned on me that the eastern time zone is probably the best damn time zone in the whole world. think about it. new york, philly, boston, montreal, toronto, baltimore, dc, atlanta, miami, orlando, pittsburgh, knox, even detroit is in our zone (i was surprised to learn this). and that's just in north america. im sure some of brazil is in there too, and you know how hot the girls are down there. seriously, what other time zone is fucking with us? i say none.

be proud, east coasters!

EDIT: nevermind about brazil, i was way off!! check it out: http://www.travel.com.hk/region/timezone.htm look at asia, could these zones make less sense? why couldn't they just draw vertical lines?

EDIT #2: check out the border between pakistan and china. if you walk from pakistan into china, you jump forward 3 hours! when i get enough money saved to travel the world this will be one of my stops.