Warning: multiple subjects

As the title implies (well, not really implies, it rather comes right out and says), this blog post is going to have multiple subjects.

We just finished watching Bee Movie... it was amusing. It went back and forth between clever and stupid, but overall the "clever" beat the "stupid." (I guess that's what to expect from Jerry Seinfeld, eh?) I can't bee-lieve they missed the ending, though... at the end, you see the bees fly by, and the screen goes black, and the words "the end" show up on the screen. What they should have done was to have the bees fly by, freeze the screen on the tail/stinger of the main character, and have the words "bee end" show up on the screen... that would have been right in line with some of the other comedy in the show.

I wonder if there was some subtle underthemes in there... like making fun of frivolously stupid lawsuits, and how we should be careful about trying to make major changes to things (they'll work themselves out, like global warming: the planet will take care of itself; there's not a lot we should, or even can, do about it). Of course, I could just be reading things into it... did you ever wonder if those authors you read in your literature classes really meant any of the things you wrote about in your essays about their stories? Maybe they were just writing a story and didn't really have any underlying themes in there. For instance, my aunt, Peggy B. Jolly, wrote a college textbook called The Freshman Sampler. It's a collection of short stories. She asked if I wanted to write one for it, so I did: "The Dogs of Draaken" (you can pronounce it like "dracken" if you want, but really I was aiming for more like an old English "dracula" - sort of "drocken" perhaps). It's in that book (thus, I'm officially a published author!). After using the book in her class for a couple of semesters, she sent me a copy of the book as well as some of the essays some of her students wrote about my story, and all the underlying messages I'd subtly woven into it. Yeah, I didn't know I'd put all that stuff in there!

Over to the left you'll see the crew that went scavenger hunting yesterday. All except for yours truly (which is a strange way of saying "me"), since I's ("I was" - "I'm" would be mixing verb tenses, I think) behind the camera at the time this picture was taken. Now, take a look over on the right... apparently the ducks at Aldridge Gardens are allergic to (or maybe just simply don't like to eat) geese. Whatever, just don't feed the ducks geese.

As a final note for this post, Π. That is, "Pi" - the Greek letter that represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter (you know, C=Πd, where C = circumference, d = diameter (and can be replaced with 2r, where r is the radius), and Π = Π). Why Π? To have a reason to post this video:



By the way, that's not the end of Pi - it's a non-repeating, infinite (?) sequence. Go read that Wikipedia article if you're interested in Pi... some strange stuff there, like a Chinese guy who recited 67,890 digits of Pi (over a 24-hour, 4-minute period) without error (apparently beaten by a Japanese man who recited 100,000 digits, but the article says that's not yet been confirmed by Guinness). Or the Cadaeic Cadenza, a story written such that the number of letters of the words in the story make up the first 3834 digits of Pi. (If you're interested, the text is here - I've not yet read it, so I've no knowledge about its content.)

Hope you've enjoyed this post! Hope it wasn't too hard to follow, or too long...