What happens when our kids find our Facebook profiles?

When I was a little younger, probably 16, I went to Thanksgiving at one of my cousins' houses.  My dad had 6 brothers, so we had a lot of cousins there and stories were constantly told but at this even there were props.  Someone had uncovered a box from grandma's house that had artifacts from my uncles' schooling, but those didn't interest me.  I wanted to know about my own father and how he had done in school.

Looking back on my schooling, I could have done plenty more.  I never really took my education too seriously, always falling back on the comfort of how much praise I received for even the most mundane achievements.  I knew in the back of my head I could scrape by and eventually I would be able to work hard enough to be comfortable in life.  Unfortunately for all those people who want to heap coals on the heads of me and those in my generation, it seems like all those assumptions I held were correct.  The other people responsible for my perception of life?  My parents.  Are they to be blamed for my apathy toward school, perhaps yes, and they certainly thought so.

When I went to grab my father's report cards and find out just how great a student he was - clearly he must have been given that he had a decent job at this point and our family was doing fine - I was told I couldn't see them "until I graduated from college".  I was only allowed to see his senior picture, which as it turns out was probably as or more identical to mine as our grades. 

From that point I can remember trying to notice what my dad does and become more aware of my own tendencies.  It shouldn't come as any surprise that we are very similar.  It's nice now, I'm staring down graduation and cross country relocation and starting a family and the more I know about myself the better.

But, was hiding his bad grades from me at that age the right move by my father?  He has made very few mistakes in rearing his children from my perspective so I will argue yes, which begs the question:  What happens when our kids find out Facebook profiles?

It's happening soon.  If you are anywhere near my age, and on the same prescribed path of directives, you may have kids in 6 years or less, or maybe you already do.  Plenty has been said on the issue of whether to "friend" your aunts/grandparents/teachers/parents, but what about your kids.  I'm not talking about today.  Facebook became really popular only around 2006, most adults probably didn't start posting on a regular basis until ~2008 or later and if they have kids who can read now, they were probably around 24 when they made their first posts.  The typical parent today posts predominantly pictures of their own children, but when I have kids, they could conceivably dig back to my sophomore year of high school and read through snippets of many years of my life.

By that time I will probably have very different opinions, goals, fears, dreams, everything will likely be different.  Just as my dad and I can now look back at our schooling years and wonder how we got where we did.  How much can knowing that much about your own parents, and to a certain degree yourself, change your life?  It's almost like Marty McFly going back and meeting his young mother and father, it could be scarring just as easily as it could be inspiring.  Funny as easily as it could be sad.  It's a completely uncharted territory for children from the next generation and I don't know what the answer is yet.

Musings from February 18th, 2013

I would like to post a short summary of news events around the world.  In an attempt to get people a little more interested in things who maybe aren't already.  I found out over the weekend that my parents had no idea Oscar Pistorius, the Paralympic sprinter from this past summer's Olympics in London, shot and killed his model girlfriend early in the morning on Valentine's day.

Since then plenty of new reports have come out and essentially it has come down whether or not you believe what he and his family is saying of the incident.  That is, whether or not you believe the people who are genetically bound to take his side no matter what even when presented with a mound of evidence suggesting he killed her violently and with obvious intent, according to the investigation.  Most recently it has been suggested that after the most recent of domestic disturbances resulting in police coming to his home, Pistorius shot Reeva Steenkamp in the hip, beat her with a cricket bat, followed her when she fled to a bathroom and shot her 3 more times from the other side of a door, then carried her down the stairs,waited a few hours to call the police and then lied, saying he believed it was an intruder and he thought she would be surprising him for Valentine's Day.

Then on Friday morning, a Meteorite was seen by everyone's dashboard GoPro cameras in Russia.  Why you ask?  Check out this video or this (really just the first few seconds, I couldn't find the gif of it sorry...).

Regardless, it's a good thing they do or we wouldn't have about 6,000 videos of the meteorite that reportedly injured 1,100 Russians.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson talks about it on the Today show.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you don't want to watch this awesome man, he basically says that people got hurt because they walked over to glass windows to look at the sky after seeing a huge flash, just in time for a sonic blast to blow the windows out and cover them in broken glass.  He also says the meteorite was coincidental to the meteor shower scheduled to come hours later in the day, calling it a 'once in a decade' event.

In other News, the hacker group Anonymous continued its attack on the U.S. Federal Reserve with a megaphishing attack that resulted in a large number of secret information being leaked.

The Pope's resignation is starting to make more and more sense after some documents were leaked in what is being called Vatileaks, revealing the Vatican is corrupt and split over a number of issues, most notably the cover up of child abuse around the world.  Apparently Ratzinger wanted to try to end some of the corruption he saw as a major issue with the church upon his coming into the position, but the geriarchy (new word for me, means a government controlled by the elderly) of the Catholic church is not quite progressive enough yet, and the man Ratzinger thought might be able to help him was essentially exiled to a plush position here in the U.S. to keep him as far from Italian politics as possible.

Unfortunately, in addition to being tied to an obsolete and dying system, there is almost no tolerance amongst these eldest of elders for any sort of progress, which means when they 'elect' the new pope he probably will be young ( 60 > 80 ), white, European and want nothing to do with contraceptives, homosexual relationships, abortions, ending the child molestation pandemic by his own priests or anything that many citizens of the world would like to see the Pope do.  In fact we will probably have to wait until the 20 year old priests currently working their way through seminary have made it to the ripe old age of 70 to have any of those things coming down from the top.  But I predict that in 50 years the growth of the 'nones' will have so far outpaced the decline of the Catholic church that not only will Italy have demanded the church begin paying taxes, but there will be so few Catholics left in Europe that the Vatican as we know it today will no longer exist, instead moving to somewhere in a war-torn African or South American country where the percentage of practicing Catholics is much higher.  I base this on the trend of European Catholicism which is now more a meaningless social practice than a faith experience.  When the Vatican is forced to pay taxes for the land it borrows from an Italy on the edge of bankruptcy, paying its $945 million will certainly cause tithes to increase by quite a lot around the world.  God forbid the Cardinals in the Vatican be forced to lose their plush lifestyles.  In Europe this will force most to do a cost benefit analysis of attending church and most people, seeing the benefit as effectively null, will choose to instead pray in their homes instead of in church.  Not able to afford its massive bill, the Vatican will close up shop and move somewhere else.

I recently discovered the OKcupid blog, I will probably only read it one time, today, but I'll share it with you.  Via reddit, I have learned about which religions are most likely to lie about masturbating, if Twitter use has any effect on relationship length and at what age females stop enjoying rough sex (luckily I'm not out of luck yet!).  It's a pretty neat blog with some funny charts.

There is a ton of stuff going on in the world and the more you know now, the better you will be at understanding "I love the 20-teens" 15 years from now, so get on it!

Quick rundown:

Paul McCartney's Grandkids beat him at Rock Band

U.S. Prison populations are out of control

(Not that new) Portugal (Port of Gaul)'s drug use is down by more than half after decriminalizing hard drug use and treating users as sick patients instead of criminals

Not a link but if you have Netflix, the ESPN 30 for 30 series is up Here is IMDB's rankings of the films I recently watched Straight Outta' LA and Small Potatoes, both were pretty cool.  I was born in the midst of a lot of this stuff as were most of you reading this but I had no idea it was going on.  Plus Donald Trump being a dick, except with some hair.

Spoiler Alert:  Donald Trump ruined the USFL, which could have become something really cool, think a relevant league for the Columbus Destroyers.. in the springtime.  For those of us who don't really like Baseball and Hockey for anything but highlights, we could be watching high quality professional football ALL YEAR LONG.  Thanks Donny, asshole.


That about wraps it up. Try eating Sushi, it's good.  Don't buy anything from Wal Mart and try the new Budweiser Crown whatever beer.  It's pretty decent.  I hate myself for loving Starbucks and for doing nothing all weekend, I hope you were all much more productive than I was.

Guns, Drugs, and Money

      With plenty of big issues being discussed in the news, Senate, water cooler, and dinner table I thought it would be a great chance for me to contribute what I think on the subject via Daywalking.  I haven't posted in awhile and this will certainly be more involved than a Facebook post.  For now though I will only write out the abridged version, with a longer version to follow, hopefully. 

      When I was in 7th grade I wrote a hit list as a joke.  For some reason a few of my friends and I thought school shootings were intriguing.  I still think they are - tragic - absolutely, but interesting from a psychological standpoint.  Anyway I got caught and was suspended for two weeks and had to see a counselor and do some other things including study the Columbine Massacre.  Now I'm about to compromise all journalistic integrity I attempt to hold myself to and make this a quick argument, broken up, you can take it or leave it.  Keep in mind I'm a self-professed conspiracy theorist, and that I don't really want this to offend anyone or change any lives.  All I want is for people to be more literate consumers.  Let's begin.

      First, I don't believe for one second that the government or Obama wants to "take our guns".  It's asinine to believe they do.  However, some kinds of guns are pretty deadly and maybe shouldn't be in the hands of certain people.  Heart disease has killed at least 23 times more people in the U.S. than can be attributed to homicide.  Homicide includes guns, knives, asphyxiation, and all the other stuff you see people dying of on Law and Order.

     It's more of a personal rant unrelated to this article, but why are we even giving two breaths to gun control when in 2005, something mostly preventable (by not being fat) killed 652,091 people in the U.S. and homicide only claimed 19,544?  The reason surely isn't suicide, which claimed less than twice as many as homicide at 32,637.  What I'm trying to say is, why aren't we as a country getting violently animated over very preventable deaths?  If every overweight American all 111,236,850 (35.7% of adults) of them did insanity once a week and drank one less Coke per month, the number would probably drop off by about the number of yearly homicides.

**(that last statement was not based on fact, just a guess.  If you're skeptical, that would only be ~1.7%.  By the way the percentage of waking hours in a week (12 * 7 = 84) given up for a 1.5 hour insanity workout is 1.7%, and a person who drinks one can (12oz) of Coke every day (3 gallons = 373 ounces per month) giving up one can per month is cutting their consumption by ~ 3.4%, or 1.7*2%.... coincidence? I THINK NOT!)

      If you know me you probably know the one thing I really don't like discussing is suicide, but today I will.  As you have probably heard an 11-year old girl in London, OH committed suicide this week because of "bullying".  I don't want to make light of bullying, but her parents are saying it was because she wore thick glasses to school and had ADHD and the other kids made fun of her.  Now most of us were 11 once (s/o to all my 10 year old readers!) and if you were 5'4", 150lbs with ginger curly hair, no pigment so speak of outside of epic freckles everywhere with glasses, braces and these like me, you probably caught your fair share of grief.

      Again, I'm not trying to downplay bullying, in fact the only thing that makes me fear reproduction is the idea of having a little person I love more than anything in the world come home crying because someone called them a name or made them feel otherwise inferior.  However, for my argument I must notice one thing from this rather short narrative.  The girl was diagnosed with ADHD.  Diagnosis usually means prescription, and in a small rural community like London, OH, the combination of ADHD and apparent depression because of bullying at school probably meant a litany of drugs for this poor girl.  I hate to speculate, but I'm guessing based on what I've seen on the internet (take with grain of salt) that this girl was taking Prozac or Zoloft.

     Let's return to the Columbine shootings.  Eric Harris (Columbine Shooter) was taking Luvox, his parents released his tox screen after autopsy and he had it in his sytem.  Luvox is just a stronger form of Prozac or Zoloft.  Dylan Klebold's screens came up negative for any type of prescription medication and his parents never released their son's medical history.  There are however plenty of other instances of students on Zoloft and other drugs killing their classmates.  Only 10% of school shootings aren't linked to anti-depressant medications.  Violence isn't a new thing, but turning guns against teachers and classmates is strictly a 20th century invention.  

     The first school shooting in the U.S. that didn't appear to be motivated by any prior violence was a principal shooting two teachers in February of 1960.  In 1966 Charles Whitman got climbed into the bell tower at Texas University and famously shot at innocents walking around the campus.  He was taking Dextroamphetamine, an early drug for treating ADHD.  These types of drugs were introduced in the 1950s.  Cho Seung-Hui the Virginia Tech shooter was proscribed Prozac.  James Holmes the Colorado Batman midnight premiere was overdosed on prescription drugs.  Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, was on Fanapt, an anti-psychotic prescription medication unapproved by the FDA. 

     Now I want to make this blog worth your time.  Some of you may not tune in to sports radio every day like I do, so I will give you a short brief.  Currently in the world of football many people, including the president (yes, that president) are talking about the dangers of football in light of several suicides by professional football players committing suicide due to chronic and sustained injuries to the head and the lasting effects of those injuries.  Sports media has moved through blaming increased size of players, increased aggressiveness, bad coaching at the entry level for players, helmets that do not adequately protect the head.  

     Similarly to how people guns, bad parents, bullying and everything else possible, we now have people condemning contact sports because they're causing suicides later in life.  Depression is real, alcoholism is real, and the fact that adults are mixing these things with prescriptions drugs is real and scary.  I have no idea how you can see a depressed drug addicted alcoholic kill himself and think "wow, that must have been the concussions he had 15 years ago". 

     In the U.S. in 2011, 212,681,364 people were prescribed with anti-depressant drugs with 57,883,832 coming from Zoloft and Prozac alone.  Obviously not all of those people are committing school shootings or taking automatic weapons to movie theaters, so I don't want to say these drugs are totally evil.  But something is.  I don't buy prescription drugs, luckily, but I found a site that said brand named Prozac was $2.40 per capsule which means if all 57 million people took one pill a day, the upper bound on the amount of money spent is $50,706,236,832 or 50.7 BILLION dollars.  That's an upper bound of course, but even if the generic brand costs half that, we're still talking about BILLIONS of dollars for prescription drugs companies.  Would you like to know why people are constantly turning a blind eye to the obvious correlation between prescription anti-depressants?  Advertisers have believed for a long time that the American public is stupid, impatient, immature, and hungry for answers.  In our world there is a drug for every disease.  No longer is the cure for depression counseling and increased attention, it's drugs, expensive, potentially suicide inducing drugs. Wake. Up. 

     Now, prescription drugs can help.  Again, millions of people are not committing suicide or mass murder.  I'm not saying they ever will.  If you're depressed and the medicine is helping, you're doing great and I hope one day you can stop taking those drugs and be yourself again.  But look, football is not the issue, bullying is not the issue, and gun ownership is not the answer.  Those are all things that we may want to give a little more focus on making safe, but they're not the reason people shoot themselves.  Let's temper our responses and not take the easy way out anymore.  Americans play the blame game exceptionally well and when we threaten others' rights to insure the safety of a few it's an atrocity on an order much greater than any school shooting ever could be.  There is no way to guarantee complete safety anyway, but if there is an obvious link between something we have the option of ingesting and violence against others, it seems like there should be a little more control over that, not the methods of that violence.

Drugs Induce Violence

Another Source

An Unexpected Journey

      Twelve years ago my father read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit to me as a bedtime story over the course of what I remember to be a few months.  So like Star Wars I have an emotional attachment to The Hobbit related to my dad.  This is unlike a lot of other things for me notably, any super heroes and Lord of The Rings.  (The reason I mention this is so people can draw parallels to their own lives, and in case I reference how uninterested I am in the Avengers and similar movies, it will make some sense).  So I had high expectations for the experience I would have going with my dad to see the movie this afternoon.

       

      The film started by establishing a link to the Lord of the Rings which immediately sent up a red flag for me.  In my mind, The Hobbit is mostly independent from LOTR except for the presence of the ring.  Furthermore when you read The Hobbit the power of the ring isn't even touched on, for all you know it's just a magic ring that makes the wearer invisible.  I'll probably talk about that a little later.

      One thing I did sort of like is the description of how Smaug took the lonely mountain hold and routed the dwarves and all that, it was a cool sequence until....  The "Pale Orc".  The Pale Orc will now become synonymous with additional characters added to a story for an unnecessary, similar to the way "Jump the Shark" now stands for when a TV series becomes ridiculous.  It was not needed, not part of the story and seemingly only existed to add another antagonist to the plot.  Splitting the film into three parts meant that they wouldn't have much of an enemy for the first two installations so they added some extra characters to fill the void.  

       Now, I can't evaluate the film objectively as a stand-alone work because as I mentioned, I have a boyish love for the book.  However, if someone said to me "As a 10 year old who hasn't read the book, I liked the movie" I would weep for the decay of young minds, but also be open to that as a take on the whole thing.  I just thought I would throw that out there.

      I don't even want to speak in depth about some of the parts that were stupid and had nothing to do with the book so I will just list them here:

      - Rhadagast the Brown, his rabbit 'sleigh', the spider thing, the necromancer thing, the bird poop in his hair thing... etc.

      - The tepid allusion to Sauron.  Why?  It would have been fine without that.  I get it yeah yeah it links the Hobbit to LOTR but I didn't want that, okay?  It wasn't like that in the book...

      -  Saruman being in the film.  Again, why?  

      -  The scene with the stone giants playing rock 'em sock 'em robots.  I hate this less because it was obviously for the little kids so whatever.

       There are a few things I did like however included the whole scene where the dwarves come to bag end and trash everything and clean it all up again with a drinking song.  That seemed to do the book justice and I thought it was just well done in general, chaotic and fun.  Also, and by this point I wanted to actually get up and leave the theater, the riddle game.  The riddle game between Gollum and Bilbo is one of the most vivid scenes in the entire book and it's so distinctly Tolkien, they really did it justice.  I was very happy to see that and the rest of the movie from that point.  The goblin - biter killing the goblin king was another little stupid joke for the kids but when they alluded to the chapter name "Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire" I was satiated.  The eagles came to save them and flew them away and that was all well and good except of course for the silly part relating to the pale Orc and Bilbo being a hero and all that.

      I think the biggest thing is that this movie, like other movies and video games and books coming out now, was watered-down for stupid people.  They spoon fed you the hero's journey, the plot twists, who the protagonists and antagonists were... It's like they really don't want anyone to have to think to hard while they're watching and that disturbs me deeply.  When I finish a movie or a book I want to walk out thinking about it, a few days or hours later I want to finally say "Oh.. now that makes sense.."  I don't want the whitewash, I want to employ what I learned in High School English class.  I know I'm not getting any smarter so that must mean everyone else is getting dumber and that's more frightening than fiscals cliffs, school shootings and certainly pale Orcs.

Summer Workouts Presenter by KKPsi Week 7!

Monday, July 23th:  CrossFit  - Meet at the Tuttle Park at 8pm

Run 5 minutes turn around and go back in less than 5 minutes

{

                21 vertical jumps (2 feet above your reach)

                21 pushups

                15 each

                 9 each

}

                3 times through!

Wednesday, July 25th:  Sprint/ Burpee Circuit - Meet at Tuttle Park at 8pm

10 rounds for time of: 

               100 meter sprint and 10 burpees

Friday, July 27th:  No Class today!  CSO Performance

Saturday, July 28st:  Pending, not sure of CSO schedule

For Vigor!

* There will be absolutely no vomiting on my watch.  If you feel so fatigued that you cannot possibly go on, stop or slow way down until you feel okay again.  I am serious I will be pissed if you throw up, it's not good for you and no one wants to see/smell that (trust. me.)

Summer Workouts Presenter by KKPsi Week 6!

Sunday, July 15th:  

Monday, July 16th:  CrossFit  - Meet at the Tuttle Park at 8pm

     15 minute A.M.R.A.P (As many rounds as possible in 15 minutes)

o   5 pull-ups

o   10 hand release push ups

o   15 Sit ups

After that we will do the Core Cardio and Balance video from Insanity.  You'll be okay I promise.  It's easy.

Wednesday, July 17th:  Sprint Circuit - Meet at Tuttle Park at 8pm

           Filthy Fifty

-  50 Push Ups

-  50 Sit Ups

-  50 Air Squats

-  50 Burpees

-  50 Pull Ups

(Or terrible 25)

After this we will do a nice 2-3 mile run south on the Olentangy Trail

Friday, July 19th:  Meet at the RPAC at 7:15

  - The RPAC Class will be... Pilates!  If you plan on attending more than one of these classes during the summer I'm going to nicely ask you bring $10 to one of them.  That is $10 TOTAL, for the entire summer.  Just once, one time only, bring $10.  Then you will be covered.


ONCE AGAIN, YOU DO NOT NEED TO HAVE YOUR BUCKID ACTIVATED TO DO THE CLASSES.

Saturday, July 21st: CHALLENGE #3  Meet at stadium at Noon

Challenge #2 will be Spartacus

This is a Men's Health workout I used to do, it's a lot like p90x but I think it's fun to do and we will try to get as many reps as possible.  We will probably go through the whole thing three times.

For Vigor!

* There will be absolutely no vomiting on my watch.  If you feel so fatigued that you cannot possibly go on, stop or slow way down until you feel okay again.  I am serious I will be pissed if you throw up, it's not good for you and no one wants to see/smell that (trust. me.)

Kappa Kappa Psi Biggest Loser Workouts Week 5

Sunday, July 8th:  Meet at St. John Arena at 9am

  -We will walk to Fred Beekman park where we will RUN a 5k.  This will be a little earlier than normal, at 9am instead of 11, because of the heat.  It should take about 40 minutes.

Monday, July 9th:  CrossFit  - Meet at the Band Center at 8pm

“Barbara”

o   5 Rounds for Time of:

- 20 Hand Release Burpees

-  30 Hand Release Push Ups

-  40 Sit Ups

-  50 Air Squats

Wednesday, July 11th:  Sprint Circuit - Meet at Tuttle Park at 6pm

  - 3 times though

{

  - 10 second sprint

  - 20 second job

  - Repeat 6 times

  - 3 minutes of rest abs

}

{

  - 20 push ups

  - 20 reverse push ups

  - 20 diamond position push ups

}

Friday, July 13th:  Meet at the RPAC at 7:15

  - The RPAC Class will be... Water Fitness! So Bring a bathing suit!!  If you plan on attending more than one of these classes during the summer I'm going to nicely ask you bring $10 to one of them.  That is $10 TOTAL, for the entire summer.  Just once, one time only, bring $10.  Then you will be covered.


ONCE AGAIN, YOU DO NOT NEED TO HAVE YOUR BUCKID ACTIVATED TO DO THE CLASSES.

Saturday, July 14th: CHALLENGE #3  Meet at stadium at Noon

Challenge #2 will be Spartacus

This is a Men's Health workout I used to do, it's a lot like p90x but I think it's fun to do and we will try to get as many reps as possible.  We will probably go through the whole thing three times.

For Vigor!

* There will be absolutely no vomiting on my watch.  If you feel so fatigued that you cannot possibly go on, stop or slow way down until you feel okay again.  I am serious I will be pissed if you throw up, it's not good for you and no one wants to see/smell that (trust. me.)