My Alternate Universe

I'm going to go in reverse order of the title and start with the Cray-pas. For those of you who didn't go to Winn Brook Elementary school, you might not call all oil-pastels Cray-pas. I googled the word to get the correct spelling, and apparently it's a brand name of cheap oil-pastels for "junior" artists. I don't use that brand, but I still call all oil-pastels (and all pastels, really) cray-pas. It's like calling all tissues Kleenex... same deal. So lately, since my dad put my giant tub of oils somewhere I can't find, I've been using my cray-pas to assuage my artistic cravings. Here's the latest installment, though be warned that it's a really bad picture of a great little drawing... I took it with my cellphone and it's all weird and distorted. The gunk in the sky are little stars made out of tin foil.

When I asked my notoriously loving and supportive mother what she thought it was a picture of (before the palm tree went on) she said "smog?" Thanks, mom. I guess sunrise isn't too far off... it is pretty smoggy around here!
**
Murder in the hood. Yikes. So after an uplifting weekend of General Conference, I'm thrust back into the harsh realities of life. As I drove to work, there were all these helicopters circling and the gated community that I was in was swarming with Police and security guards. Turns out, a man who was in dire financial trouble shot and killed 5 family members and then himself in his home last night... 2 blocks away from where I work. Here's a news truck that I snapped out of my windshield on the way home:

My mom told me when I got home that the headlines on the local news said "man kills family and self over economic crisis." Oh, the sensationalists. Great.
**
So when I was at Whitney's party ruining my life with some delicious homemade pizza, I talked to one of her friends about "The Master Cleanse" -- a cleanse where you basically flush the heck out of your bowels and intestines and eat nothing, but drink up to 1200 calories a day of a homemade lemonade mixture of fresh lemon juice, grade b maple syrup, cayenne pepper and water. Since I have some pretty gnarly IBS and my internals hate me, I decided to try it. A little over a week after the party (I hadn't pooped since the pizza at this point) I started the cleanse. Every night you drink a laxative herbal tea, then in the morning you drink a quart of salt water (which is like a laxative, only MUCH stronger and MUCH faster) and then you do the lemonade throughout the day, plus water. I'm at the end of day 4 out of 10 at this point, and I'm feeling pretty dang good! I'm not ridiculously bloaty like I am most of the time, and I just feel better in the tum-tum. I've kind of had enough of this whole no food thing, but I can make it a little longer. I've realize just how much I crave WHOLE WHEAT BREAD! All I've really craved is bread bread and more bread, even though I would have expected to crave mostly fruit and diet coke. Nope! Oh well, it's totally worth it. Apparently a lot of people use it as a crash diet, only drinking 500 calories a day of the lemonade and therefore losing 20 lbs in the 10 days. I've lost 2, probably because I'm drinking sufficient lemonade to stay healthy. Seriously people, 500 calories a day IS NOT GOOD FOR YOU! And on those crash diets you just gain it back anyway. Ridiculous.
**
So that's the update, sorry that I talked about pooping. It's on my mind a lot... IBS really sucks. Here's the token picture of Miss Hadley, the love of my life. It was taken during game 2 of the ALDS (GO RED SOX!). She loves to nestle herself in the pillows, and she wasn't about to let Caroline's leg get in her way!

Lately I've been reading three newspapers everyday -- we've been getting the Los Angeles Times since we moved here, but I find it ridiculously superficial. On one of the early days of the economic crisis, the front page headline was about the Emmy's. So I decided to scan those headlines, but really invest myself in that wonderful source of news, the New York Times. So, I read the Times electronically in the morning, and scan the (subordinate) Times over cereal. That was working for a while, until... Dad decided he had also had enough of the LA Times, and subscribed to the Wall Street Journal. Thus, I read 3 newspapers. Needless to say, though I'll say it anyway, I get a lot of news.
One would never expect the two to go together, but last week I stumbled across the unlikely synthesis of Metallica and the Wall Street Journal. On the bottom of the front page was an article entitled something like "Metallica too loud even for heavy metal fans." I enjoy a dose of Metallica here and there, and I saw them in concert in 2004, so I read on. (AWESOME concert, by the way.) The article explained how lately bands have made their recordings "louder" so that they stick out more on the radio and on iPods. I can't say I had noticed. The article goes to on say that producers increase certain layers of the track at the expense of minute musical details and expression to give the illusion of a louder song, and that the new Metallica album "Death Magnetic" falls prey to this folly.
Well, I was curious, so I determined that when I got home from work I would investigate these vicious felonies -- WHOA! Law and Order SVU took over for a second... that I would investigate these claims myself by comparing "The Day That Never Comes" with an older song, say, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" from the album "Ride the Lightning." Well, being busy, that never happened.
Luckily, my burning curiosity was assuaged today as I sat in my car and the radio so lovingly played what I needed to hear. Though I am by no means a Metallica connoisseur like, say, Ian Ward, I could definitely hear a lack of musicality in the new song. Metallica, whether you like them or not, is a group of pretty fabulous musicians. It's impossible to deny that. And though the song is extremely well written and really fun to listen to, I did hear a lack of depth in dynamics and the balance seemed off... like the bass and the cymbals were too loud. Great album, guys, but I'm guessing your more loyal listeners aren't going to appreciate the cheap tricks...

I personally am not good at keeping touch with the news, but I come from a family that's pretty well connected. The only thing I do with the newspaper is the crossword, and when I watch TV it's for the TLC reality shows or ABC dramas. Anyway, a few interesting articles have passed by me lately, and I thought I'd share two. One is for fun and fascination, and the other is for reflexion.
---
"Weird Beastie" Shrimp Have Super-Vision"

National Geographic is getting some free advertising from me tonight!! So I saw this crazy freaking picture scrolling through on the homepage of the aforementioned equivalent of ecstasy, and I had to read on. This "weird beastie" is a crustacean called a Mantis Shrimp (it's not a shrimp though), and the cool thing about it is that it can see 12 or 13 primary colors! So we see 3: red, yellow, and blue. This freaking thing can see 4 times the amount of colors we can! Infrared, UV, different wavelengths and polarizations, etc. My favorite part about the article was the ending: "What the significance of that is... not clear." These brazen scientists spent all this money finding fancy colors that they can't even see, for fun! Well, at least they're honest about it.
---
"Ex-USC student pleads no contest in dumping of newborn in trash bin"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that USC was a pretty good school, and that you had to have some degree of education and sense to get in. But of course, Miss Holly Ashcraft didn't have enough sense to snap on a condom! This 23 year-old woman has dumped 2 -count 'em 2- babies in her short life-time. And of course, she is serving no jail time after her court hearing today. Once when she was 19 and once when she was 21, this chica has dumped her newborn baby like a sac of rotten fruit. Can anyone explain that to me?
As horrifying as this is, the most interesting thing for me was a reflexion from my mother. She mentioned that people are horrified about a woman dumping a newborn, but most don't even blink at abortion. She was saying this in political neutrality, probably because she didn't want to start a fight with her most flaming liberal offspring, but really it was an interesting commentary on our society. What changes in the 6 months between an abortion and the murder of a born baby that makes us go from apathy to horror? Just something to think about.