Friday, July 16, 2004
Aargh. Not only have I not posted anything here in ages, I just had a new entry half-written and the computer froze on me. *insert quiet swearing here*
Weebl might have lost it finally. If so, thank god. In the glorious internet tradition of his classic creations such as BadgerBadgerBadger and Come to Kenya, we are presented with the musical stylings of Magical Trevor. Everyone loves Magical Trevor 'cause the tricks that he does are ever so clever. Look at him now, disappearing a cow. Where is the cow headin' right now? Where indeed?
Ryan Estrada proved to the world that he is truly insane. 24 hour comic day is the annual attempt of comic book artists everywhere to write and draw 24 pages in 24 hours. This means no sleep, no rest, and lots of drawing. Most people either wimp out partway through, or go the full 24 hours but still end up with less than 24 pages. For those who have no personal experience of such things, it takes a lot of work to make a finished comic book page. Under normal circumstances I'm lucky to get one finished (written, pencilled, inked-- not colored, that takes longer) in 2 or 3 days, and usually it takes longer than that. So 24 pages in 24 hours is quite the feat.
But Ryan laughs at the limitations of us mere mortals! No paltry 24 hour comic day for him! He recently became the first person in recorded history to ever attempt the imposing 48 hour comic day. That is to say, 48 pages in 48 hours. And by Cats, he finished it. A few hours early. With no coffee. The man is a miracle in artist-form. I still don't know how he survived it, unless it was just through sheer bloody-mindedness. I don't think I would be capable of coherent speech after being awake for 48 hours straight, let alone steady inking ability.
Anyways, he made sure to chronicle the event for posterity, and it makes for a good read. He quotes people with whom he spoke about the event before it happened throughout his little journal. If you scroll down a bit, I'm quoted in there. Calling him crazy. I hold to that assessment, but we can throw some awe and admiration in with it now.
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Lessee, interesting things that have been happening. Jess and I went to a Red Sox game. It was ace, they won 11-2. They were my dad's seats (he usually goes with my brother, but he was out of town for work that night), so they were really close to the field, right on the third base line. Niiice. I ate a Fenway frank, and was extremely proud of myself for not getting sick afterwards. If you've never had one, they are possibly the most undercooked hotdogs in baseball. They're also quite famous. Jess did the sensible thing and had a giant pretzel.
Here we are, decked out in our Bostonian finery, with the beauty of Fenway in the background.
The ride back from the game was uneventful, other than some minor issues navigating the crowd and the construction at Kenmore. The ride there, however, was marked by quite an Incident. We were stopped at the light on whatever street it is when you first pull out of the Nahant rotary and are headed to Wonderland. A couple of kids on motorcycles pulled up in the lane next to us. We noticed them right away because one was wearing a helmet that looked like an old WWII helmet, and not at all safe for motorcycling.
We noticed them a lot more when, for no readily apparent reason, a man suddenly darted out into the middle of the street, stood directly in front of the motorcycle driven by the kid with the funky helmet, and started wildly berating him. Scary. Scarier still was when the light turned green. The kid tried to edge his bike around the crazy man. Crazy was having none of it, so he sat on the front of the kid's motorcycle. Eek. At this point the light had been green for a bit, and the kid was probably (understandably) freaking out a bit. So he shoved the crazy guy. Hard. Crazy goes right over onto the pavement, and the kids tear out. Worrying all 'round, really.
Anyways, I took some pictures, which may be found in this here album. Captioned for your comprehension and amusement.
Another good time which yielded some nice photos was the Revolutionary war reenactment in Marblehead. Apparently they do it every year, but this was the first time I had gone. It was a really lovely day out, and they were having the reenactment at Fort Sewall, which is literally right on the harbor. It's done by the 14th Continental Glover's Marblehead Regiment. They set up a bunch of tents in the fort, and they live there for a few days, all wearing Revolutoinary-period clothing and eating over food cooked over fires in pits in the ground and shooting rifles at each other at intervals.
It wasn't all older people, as you might expect. There were a bunch of kids my age (read: college or late high school) who were into it, and there were a lot of little kids too. Their parents or grandparents are in it, and the kids get into it too. It was a ridiculously good time. My mother and I wandered around and looked in the fort and the tents and things, and then we climbed the little hill to get to the other side of the fort, where the 'British' were camped out. We had a really long conversation with two of them about guns and historical restoration of houses that was surprisingly pleasant.
Pictures from this may be found right around here. There are some shots of Marblehead harbor in there, because it was just such a nice day out. Also captioned, For Your Reading Pleasure.
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Hm. According to the Sorting Hat, I belong in Ravenclaw  . Overwhelmingly so. It's like a personality test, but it's really serious and scientific, with 112 questions and a detailed scoring system. The breakdown for me was as follows:
Gryffindor: 57
Ravenclaw: 81
Hufflepuff: 59
Slytherin: 56
and now that I've taken it, I can see how that would be a pretty accurate assessment. I was as honest as possible on the responses, and this seems right. I mean, if there was such a thing as a Sorting Hat, and the houses were as they are described in the book, I think I probably would fit best in Ravenclaw. There's no one house that seems to emphasize artistic nature more than the other, but that's sort of immaterial, since it seems rather appropriate that someone who has 'research zoology' as one of their overwhelming passions in life would get put in Ravenclaw.
Go take the test, you lazy sods. You know me, I never put things like this on here (while other bloggers post every damn quiz known to man on their blogs.. *cough*Chris*cough*), so you know it's quality. And answer honestly, otherwise it's no damn fun. Then tell me what house you got in, so I can mock you appropriately.
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MassArt has been treating me well so far, other than the sheer horror of getting out of bed at 6 am every. single. morning. so that I can get there in time for a 9 am class. I start going batshit insane if I'm waiting at Government Center and every train except for the E-line has come twice already (which happens sometimes) and it looks like I'm going to get there at 9:15. I haven't quite worked out why this is, as the class has about 20 people in it and there are usually only 5 or 6 at 9.... people routinely waltz in late. Not just 10 or 15 minutes late either. I mean to say that people routinely come in at 10, 10:30. For a 9 am class. Granted, it's a four hour class, but still. To miss an hour or more of it seems excessive. And I refuse to even be a minute late. I'm going to give myself ulcers one day.
I can already definitely tell that the anatomy stuff we're learning has been helpful for me. I now know all the artistically-important (i.e. visible) muscles of the leg: how to draw them, where they are, and what their names are. And it's ever so nice to be doing drawing from models over the summer. Life drawing is the greatest. I miss it when I go too long without it.
The models we've had so far are pretty good. We did the skeleton for most of the first week, so we had this obscenely skinny model in. You could see her ribcage most alarmingly when she did poses lying down. Then we moved on to muscles and mostly have been having this guy, Paul. His forms are amazing, all really defined and whatnot, but the man cannot hold still. I suppose it would be one thing if he had to stretch out during the half-hour or longer poses, but he can't keep from fidgeting for the 5 minute ones. For cat's sake, the guy's getting paid for two things: his willingness to be naked in front of a bunch of people who will scrutinize his flesh for 4 hours, and his ability to hold still. You'd think it would be the least he could do.
My classmates are eclecticly delightful. Dana is the 27-year-old who's taking the class because her fiance is working in Boston over the summer and she figured if she was going to be around she might as well take classes. We take the green line back after class together, so we chat quite a bit. She's very nice, but seems perpetually amazed that I'm going to be a sophomore in college. Apparently, I "sound much older than that... like someone really dry and sarcastic and in their 30s." That's a direct quote. Don't ask me, I have no idea.
Lisa is a lady in her 40s (I think) who started talking to me in class one day when she saw the Michigan Wolverines pin I have on my backpack. Turns out she just recently moved to Boston, and before that she had lived in Ann Arbor. So we discuss that. She also never has a pencil sharpener, oddly.
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The T (subway) has been exceedingly interesting. This very morning I got out of my car at Wonderland to hop on the blue line, and who should I see but the diminuitive and vivacious Mrs. Green (my teacher in freshman high school history... now she's moved up in the ranks and will be teaching, among other things, AP history)! Turns out she has a paid fellowship to do historical research at one of the big historical societies in downtown Boston this summer. That's like someone paying me to study the behavior and habits of caracals over the summer. In other words, if it's your kind of thing, it's heaven.
We had a lovely long chat about the ol' high school, what I got up to at U of M, what research she was doing for the fellowship, and South Africa. When she heard that one of my majors was zoology she insisted that I go to Krueger National Park in South Africa. Apparently she has family out there and I would be allowed to spend jewish holidays with them :) Heh. But it is supposed to be just an amazing park. And it's not jungle, so maybe the mosquitos wouldn't be as bad as they would be in, say, Madagascar. Tempting though the lemurs are, I'm not so sure a jungle climate is for me.
A few days ago, on the blue line home, a man got on with a snake. A boa constrictor, to be precise. She was only 2 months old, so she was pretty small.... probably only about a foot and a half long. And it's not as though they're poisonous. But it still didn't strike me as something you were particularly allowed to take on the T. Oh well. We chatted for almost the entire ride (he got off two stops ahead of me). I had been able to see she was a boa constrictor when he first brought her on because boas have a really distinctive head shape. But I asked him about what he was feeding her and where he was keeping her and how big she would get and whatnot. I'm not sure it's a good idea to keep snakes as pets, but this guy at least seemed like a very knowledgable owner who genuinely loved snakes. So, it was lovely.
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OK, I'm tired. That'll have to hold you until the next. I'll make a conscious effort to update more often, I promise. There's a brunch at Noah's mother's house on Sunday, so at the very least I should have something to say about that.
Goodnight, all.
11:49 PM
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