"Thankavurimush"

Monday evening Amanda and I had the opportunity to attend a concert put on by Josh Groban. I'll just assume you're a member of the human race and know who that is. Admittedly, he doesn't have a huge male fan base, and Amanda gave me a hard time for liking some of his stuff, but I'm not really concerned about it. I really like seeing live performances, because you're able to see the singer talking and making jokes and telling stories and things. I think Josh is a little younger than me. One funny thing that he did was after each song he sounded like an Elvis Presley wanna-be while expressing his appreciation for the applause.

So we get to the concert 45 minutes early, call everyone we know on the cell phone (takes about 20 minutes), wait around for the concert to start (starts 10 minutes late), and then the opener comes. Some African lady with her band. Singing stuff I didn't even remotely recognize. It was pretty boring. And she kept singing, and singing, and singing, and another song, and one more, and "okay just 2 more songs", and then everyone in the arena is getting frustrated and begin chanting "josh josh josh josh". After her there was about another 15 minute set-up time for Josh and his people. So, overall, I'd say almost 2 hours pass between the time we get there and the time he sings his first note. Speaking of, it was pretty funny to see how he entered. First you hear the singing and everyone starts to scream and stuff, and the curtain comes up, and you see his band, but where's Josh? You still hear his singing while he levitates up out of the stage. Pretty funny. Overall, I very much enjoyed it.

So, for an abreviated American Idol report, Sanjaya is a scary scary (man?), black girls are overrated, Phil will be dead in 3 weeks due to a terminal case of leukemia, Chris. S. knocks off Taylor Hicks, and Haley turns around almost 180 degrees. Most likely to get voted off tonight? Random crying girl.

"YATAA!"

Well I did it. I survived my first semester back to school all the way up to spring break. Granted, school's not likely to get any easier between now and the end of the semester. But I've been on top of things so far, and if that lasts a whole semester, it's fairly likely to last another 5 or 6.

As I said, today begins Spring Break. And I'm really not sure what to do with myself. Amanda had her break last week, so yeah, that worked out just perfectly. (sarcasm?). I could study all week and pretend it's not a break at all. Good thing my TV's not on spring break I suppose.

We visited my in-laws in their new Houston house this past weekend. It was a nice little trip. They now live about five minutes away from the Houston Temple. That might be useful whenever Amanda and I get around to redoing our wedding pictures.

Let me explain that for a second. (Sung to "Alice and Wonderland"'s Walrus and Carpenter song) "The sun was shining on to us, shining with all its might. We did our very best to keep our eyes all wide and bright. But this did fail because, you see..... the light was so dang bright!" Basically, we're all squinting really bad in our otherwise great looking pictures. So we decided on a redo.

Tonight's our Josh Groban concert. We're pretty excited. I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow.

B.Y.O.S.

So, Texas is weird. This hasn't happened to me yet (and I hope it never will, but I know it probably will), but various classes here at UNT require you to buy your own scantrons before you take a test. If you don't have one, well, tough luck I suppose. I ran into a guy this morning on my way to my poly sci class who was all panicky because the bookstore wasn't open yet and he needed a scantron. How mean can professors be, really? Don't they have a budget for this stuff? Then again, one could make a business off of having 200 scantrons available on testday.....

Amanda and I finished season 5 of "24" yesterday, meaning we don't have any more to watch (that's out on dvd). It's a bit of a dissapointment, because I want to continue watching (season 5 did NOT end well), but the show's on at the same time as my other favorite show, Heroes. Conflict? Not really. I'm too addicted to my Heroes.

For those of you who don't watch Heroes, I implore you to start. If you can see past the occasional copy-cating, it's really a very good show.

Lastly, allow me to comment on this season's "The Amazing Race". I have to say that I don't really have a favorite team. They picked the wrong teams to come back, and it's really making me not like this season very much. The producers (I guess) did it because these are the teams that cause controversy and get viewers. I think controversy makes me less likely to view really. They should have hired me to pick the returning teams.

"It's awesome baybee!"

Here we are at the beginning of the college basketball tournament, and what do you know, UNT made it this year. That hasn't happened since what? 1980? Never? I don't really know. We're enjoying it while it lasts, and good luck humbling ANYBODY here at UNT if they pull off some miracle on Friday. I'm intelligent enough to know this is unlikely, but seeing as BYU and UNT are both in the southern conference, wouldn't it be fun to see them play? (While I'm typing this, the folks at ESPN, including our VERY old friend quoted above, are predicting BYU to win over Xavier, but probably not Ohio)

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the Dallas Mavericks are getting annihilated by the media after ending their 17 game winning streak. They are 2.5 games ahead of the 2nd place team, and yet they're SUCH a horrible team suffering now from a 2 game losing streak. Okay, lets think about this for a second. "A 2 game losing streak". Does that make any sense to you at all? The Mavericks have been a big media target for a long time, likely because they've never won a championship.

My brothers and I had the chance to go to a Dallas Stars game on Tuesday. It was really a lot of fun. Philladelphia is a very big, VERY physical team, and there was plenty of rough playing. Mike Modano made the night a special one when he scored his 500th career goal. Everyone was on their feet for a good five minutes or so.

Bipolar Festival

So Amanda and I went to go see "Corteo" put on by Cirque Du Soleil about a week ago. I was the one who was really excited about it, whereas Amanda was just kinda along for the ride. I had been once before, when I was living in Florida. They have "La Nouba" stationed in Orlando, and THAT is an amazing show. So I expected about the same thing.

It wasn't, at least not really.

"Corteo" is the most varied show I have ever seen. The audience will literally be on the edge of their seat not taking a breath one moment, and then a few minutes later they will be dozing off from boredom. It's just very weird to see an amazing show of acrobatics (big hulking guys flinging people back and forth over a big trampoline, eight people on a single set of paralell bars) followed by two midgets putting on a puppet show.

Speaking of midgets, I'm sure you are all aware of the old stereotype in which the circus is accompanied by various side shows featuring giants, freaks, midgets, dwarves, and other interesting things. I, for one, assumed that was very ridiculous and fake. No, Cirque du Soleil aparently feels it wise to pursue those stereotypes further. There was a deformed dwarf, a literal giant, a couple midgets, and some other interesting people. In the days of political correctness, these people likely get paid BIG money just for appealing to the audience's stereotypes.

If you ever have the chance to see a show by Cirque, go see it. That is, unless it's called "Zumanity"....

Don't bother getting expensive tickets though. Every seat is fine.

He looks like an owl...

A few nights ago John McCain (one of the three frontrunners for the Republican presidential nomination) officially announced his canidacy over network tv. This was very interesting to me, because he did it while on the Late Show with David Letterman. Yes I know it's sad, but I watch that almost every day. Anyway, David Letterman used to have this fascination with a guy you might know named Larry King, and the "fact" that he "looks like an owl". Interesting comparison. Larry King has a talk show of his own, of course, and a week or two ago he had the unique opportunity of having Rudy Giuliani announce his own canidacy for the same position on Larry King Live. Rudy will, of course, be running against John McCain. And so we run full circle. (Sorry Mitt, you don't fit in here). Now, of course, I'm sure that this doesn't imply any sort of formal support of the canidates from these different talk shows. It was just interesting to see how things connect.

Would you say that the David Letterman fan base is different from Larry King's? It seems to me that Dave has a show that's basically "pop-culture" centered, whereas Larry's is for old people who want dry facts. Will this affect voters at all? John might be running the risk of making a mockery of his campaign, but while doing so, he's going out of his way to appeal to a larger audience. Rudy seems to be playing it safe. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Unauthorized Access

If your last name doesn't consist of only one letter, you might not know who this is, but at the same time, are probably not really as interested in that as you are in reading some sort of witty remarks written by a complete stranger. I, for one, have always enjoyed reading a random blog and scouring it for random bits of humor.

So I'm sitting here at school, having a VERY hard time finding things to do between classes. Unfortunately, I was unable to avoid having a great big two hour break in between classes. Study, you say? Yeah, more like read, browse the bookstore, dink around on the computers, walk around aimlessly, read the newspaper, doze off, read more, and find out that I still have an hour until my class starts. This will not happen again next semester.

It occured to me yesterday that Amanda and I probably watch entirely too much TV. You know you have a problem if you remember what day it is by what's on. You know you have a really BIG problem if, besides that, you still have to check out various seasons of shows from the library and speed through them at an alarming rate.

Speaking of TV, I found out something I never knew yesterday. When something on the TV says 8/7C it does NOT mean 6M/5P. This may seem obvious to some, but somehow it escaped me. If the powers-that-be don't want shows to be pushed out of prime-time on the western portion of our country, why don't they just put it at 8 pm across the board? By making the show begin an hour earlier in central than in eastern, they are creating a false pattern. I'll begin lobbying for legislation prohibiting this widespread lie.