A Poem Everyone Has Read.

Okay, so you know how I posted a poem on here a couple of months ago?  Well, as it turns out, my blog has kind of gained…circulation around the school recently, and Jenni Wilson (the girl who wrote the poem) was told by someone that I posted it up here.

It was kind of surprising to find out.  She just came up to me, told me her name, and asked if I knew who she was.  Well, I didn’t.  You know how when someone comes up to you, and they know your name, but you don’t have any idea who they are?  It’s awkward isn’t it?  Just when I was about to say that I honestly had no idea who she was, she told me who she was.

Wow.  I never thought anyone would actually read my blog.  Much less anyone I actually wrote about.  I guess that means I have to be careful about writing about anyone of my teachers.

The Good Ol’ Days

“These are the good old days…”

-An Old Song from a while ago.

Approximately once every summer in Fort Scott, which is the town I go to school in, we have a fair type event called the Good Ol’ Days.  It’s essentially just a scheme that someone cooked up a long time ago to encourage tourism to a town that has a rich history, yet still has a struggling economy.

It lasts about 3 days (Friday to Sunday).  The first day is essentially a parade.  No, it’s not the fun type of parade.  It’s more of the type of parade that’s consisted of the High School Band, several floats advertising local businesses, former veterans of the town, horses, street cleaners to clean up the horses’ whatsit, and, if it’s an election year, cars with advertisements for political candidates on the sides.

The rest of the days are spent with your typical rides and games that are geared more toward small children, although you’ll occasionally come across one that teenagers can ride without being social outcasts for life, and an entire street of stands selling everything from T-shirts to jewlery to those annoying little pictures and/or phrases you find on every car in America (such as the one with Calvin relieving himself on a brand of car’s logo.  Evidentally, Calvin isn’t biased: he does it on both Ford and Chevorlet.)

Well, I decided to go Saturday.  I don’t usualy go, but I had nothing better to do, and I thought it would do me some good to get out of the house.  I was apparantly wrong about the “it would do me some good” part because I got sunburned.  You see, I’m of Irish descent, and I therefore never tan, I just go strait to burn.  That and the fact that my brothers and I have horrible allergies might be why we never go outside.  That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

Where was I?  Oh, yes.  It took a while to get there due to lack of a parking space.  Every legal parking area was taken in about a 3 block radiace.  We finally had to take one of the spaces in the orthodontist’s parking lot (It’s okay, they were closed.)

I found out something interesting when we got there.  Apparently, this year we had the famous Budweiser Clydesdales.  I wasn’t exactly sure what to think of the mascots of an alcoholic beverage visiting Fort Scott, but it was kind of nice that they visited Nowhere, USA…I guess.  They were really big horses (Mom said they were six-feet tall at the shoulder) and they all had a white stripe down their faces and white hair below their knees.  Apparently, they all need to be like that.  Just something that Budweiser decided needed to be mandatory.  I have no idea why, but I instantly thought of muppets.  Specifically, those huge muppets that have to be played by a guy in a costume, like Big Bird and Sweetums.

So after Mom stood around and took pictures for about half and hour, she gave Pika and me (Gameboy didn’t come along) $15 in cash for spending on food, rides, and maybe games.  Naturally, we immediately spent $5 total on a slice of pepporoni pizza for each of us.

We then wandered around for about 15 minutes while I tried to persuade Pika to get on a ride.  ANY one of the rides.  I was always afraid to get on rides when I was a child.  I was always petrified that the ride would come apart while I was on it.  Well, I’ve been recently trying to get over my fears, and I determined that I would ride at least one of the rides before I went home.

After meeting up with Mom again, we finally got in line for a ride called The Blaze, or The Blazer, or something like that.  It was a moderately long line, but seeing as how half the line got on every ride, it didn’t take that long.  The man running the ride was this middle-aged black smoker.  The ride itself was this tilt-a-whirl type thing.

The sign said to put on your seat belt.  Unfortunately, I was way too big to fit in the set version of the tight seatbelt they had for the small children.  No matter what I did, I couldn’t loosen it.  I tried to tell the man running the ride.  He mumbled something at me that might have been “put it on” and went on setting up for the ride.  Fortunately, the lady next to me loosened it.

The ride then started.  Beforehand, I promised myself I wouldn’t scream.  That seemed easy for the first three seconds…but then the fourth one came.  The ride kept getting faster and faster until I got to the point when I had to hold on the the handlebar just to keep from falling over.  I started to think of many things: how it was lucky that the nice lady next to me managed to fix my seatbelt or else I’d be pavement jelly by now, how I’d probably be pavement jelly anyway if this ride didn’t hold together, how the annoying kids in front of me were sticking their arms up in the air, and about writing this event for my blog because I haven’t written for a long time.

The rest of the day was rather boring.  We went down the street with all the stands and met many people that Mom knew.  You can imagined how annoyed I was what with the blazing sun and the promise of going home soon always being broken.

Anyway, what was the point of this post?  Oh, yeah.  I hate sunburn.

School + Computers = Always Bad

To err is human, to really screw up you need a computer.

-Anonymous

Yeah, been having problems with computers lately.  Who hasn’t?

It was after lunch in school today, in my Constitution class taught by Mrs. Campbell (one of the Mrs. Campbells in the school).  Mrs. Campbell had decided that she would give us a break today, so instead of giving us notes or an assignment like usual, she would give us this fun, educational game on a Constitution website to do all hour.  Well, she was right about the “all hour” part, other than that….

The main problem was that we were using laptops that use wi-fi to connect to the Internet.  Now think about this.  An entire classroom of laptops.  All using wi-fi at once.  Not the smartest thing to happen all school year.

The problems started when I logged in.  The first problem was that nothing started.  Not for a while, anyway.  It took FOREVER to get logged in.  I must’ve wasted about $1,000 dollars of my life (see previous post) waiting in front of that stupid contraption that’s said to work at the speed of light.  Light stuck in a black hole, maybe.  I eventually had to restart the computer.

After it took it took FOREVER to restart, I went on to the Internet and onto the site we were supposed to be on.  That was the only part that actually worked well.  Except if you count the point where I had to close the screen when it froze up as I was trying to get to the games menu.

So I, with some help from my neighbor, finally got to the actual game.  It was a game that taught you what choices a congressman has to make when voting on a bill, by putting you in the shoes of a congressman/woman and voting on a bill that would make flag-burning illegal. 

At least I think it was, I never really got that much of a chance to play it.  The reason being was that when I got to the point where I was supposed to enter my gender and last name (so they got to call me Congressman Hart), the button that was supposed to lead me to the actual game didn’t show up.  It didn’t matter how many times I closed the window and brought it up again, it never showed up.  Meanwhile, everyone else in the classroom has advanced beyond that problem and gotten to the latter ones, where the game keeps freezing up.  I know I was never the fastest kid around, but….

So after about $800 (once again, previous post) of closing the screen and bringing it back up, the kid in front of me (he would usually be to the left of me, but Mrs. Campbell had us turn our desks so she could see our screens because of an unmentioned incident in 1st hour) kindly let me use his computer.  He had already pretty much finished the game, it was just that it kept freezing up at the point where he was supposed to cast his ballot.

So, I played the “game”, which basically consisted of going to meetings, taking phone calls, and reading email.  By doing all that, I mean having a voice actor read off words that was on a screen, trying to persuade the player to vote for their side, and telling the game if this persuaded you to vote for or against the proposed bill.

I never finished the stupid game, simply because it kept freezing up and making me start all over again.  I eventually had to quit because it was almost time to go.  I apparantly didn’t miss much, though.  According to the same guy who gave me the computer (he finished the game on someone else’s computer), after you casted your ballot, you were taken to a screen that either said “you voted yay” or “you voted nay”, and had two actual congressman explaining why they voted for the side they did.

It wouldn’t be that bad of a game if it wasn’t for the fact that it had an unsatisfactory ending, especially if you waded through the bog of computer crashes.

I keep hearing a rumor at the end of every school year that next year we’ll be replacing all our books with laptops that we’ll carry around all day.  Now I know why we never did.  Besides the fact that it would take too much time/money.