Awkward

I was reading the news today, and found out that India issued an arrest warrant for Richard Gere because of this:



First the gerbils, now this! Hilarious.

Midterm Done

Well, I finished what is hopefully my last midterm ever. It went alright, but we'll find out when I get it back.

Summer is approaching and I've been thinking about various things I want to, which got me thinking about things I'd like to achieve sometime in lets say 20 years. Here is what I've thought of so far:

1) Finish school
2) Get a job
3) Buy a house, with a nice deck to drink beer/watch weird people walk by
4) Meet someone who would like to sit on said porch with me
5) Have the house be powered by non-CO2 producing means (solar or whatever)
6) Have a vehicle that doesn't produce CO2 (technically I already have this with the bikes)
7) Have a cabin in S. Utah to enjoy the desert in
8) Bike around Patagonia, Australia, and Europe for a while (probably multiple trips to each)
9) Learn spanish, which I see coming in handy for #7 and future family gatherings

Thats about it, if I got to do all of these things I think I'd be a happy camper.

NBA

Does anyone watch the NBA anymore, or for that matter, care about the NBA playoffs? College basketball is far superior, at least the teams try their best for every game. Where is Clyde the Glide? His retirement was the end of the NBA.

Last Midterm Ever!

I have a midterm on Monday, and I think it is my last for the foreseeable future, just one final and a prelim left, assuming I don't fail the prelim in August. I am tired of taking tests.

Adam is in Alabama for the weekend so I have the house to myself. This means that I am rarely wearing pants, a nice feeling indeed. I also baked a pie, it is delicious although I wish it was cherry instead of apple. I watched two "chick flicks" over the past few days, I think my subconscious wants me to get a girlfriend. This would involve me meeting new girls, so it probably won't happen.

The first movie I watched was "My Super Ex-Girlfriend". This is not Luke Wilson at his best, although I found myself extremely attracted to Uma Therman, probably because she had glasses on for most of the movie.

The second movie was "The Break-Up". It pretty much sucked and I do not recommend it. I'm tired of Vince Vaughn and his whole I can talk fast thing. It was also fairly shocking to see how fat John Favre has gotten since Swingers. I hope this is not the future that awaits me.

Monday Morning

Today has been a good day so far. I woke up around 7:20, ate some breakfast, did some laundry, and cleaned my room. I've decided to give running another shot, since my knee has bothered me for quite some time so I headed out on the bike to a trail south of town and did a 3 or 4 miler. It was a super nice morning, and a ton of people were on the trail. I felt pretty good, but towards the end had some slight twitches of pain in the knee and my shoes were giving me blisters.

I went home showered up, and headed to Boulder Running Company to see what I could do about the shoe problem. These shoes have always given me blisters on the sides of my feet, the insoles were pealing away on the sides. Anyways, the people at Boulder Running Company (where I bought the shoes) gave me a brand new pair of insoles for free! The guy just looked at them and grabbed a new pack off the shelf. This made my quite happy and I recommend that everyone buy their shoes at this store from here on out.

I've decided to get one of those knee bands for my right knee to see if it improves things, I hope so.

To top it off, I stopped by Great Harvest for some bread and they had fresh out of the oven this cherry and blueberry bread and now I'm eating it! It is delicious. I hope the rest of the day works out as well.

Ride To Ward

Yesterday, myself and three of my friends went for a ride up to Ward, a mountain town about 20 miles from Boulder. It was an amazing day, not a cloud in the sky to be found. We ended up riding past ward up the road to Brainard Lake, but once we got to the gate the road was covered in snow. Here is the route and elevation profile provided by the insane GPS device that Ben has:





Is was a great ride, pretty casual but grueling as well. When we finished, we stopped at Amante's Coffee for a little food and sunbathing on the patio. That combined with riding all day without sunscreen resulted in this:



This should make for an interesting tan line for the rest of the summer.

Interesting Fact

I found this little factoid today:

"In 1972, 87 percent of children who lived within a mile of school walked or biked daily; today, just 13 percent of children get to school under their own power, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

Why wouldn't a kid want to ride a bike to school? I used to do it almost everyday when I was in elementary school (not to mention that I pretty much do it everyday now!).

No Snow

It has become clear to me that people who predict the weather have no idea what they are doing. It didn't snow at all last night or today!

Snow = Lame

There is a winter storm warning for Boulder starting tonight at midnight and going through Saturday until 6PM. A foot of snow is possible.

I am tired of snow, its April. Give me rain showers!

On the positive side, I got a hole-in-one on Tiger Woods today.

Questions On God...

While procrastinating at school, I found this article on CNN:

Collins: I'm a scientist; I believe in God

For those of you unwilling to click on the link, Dr. Francis Collins is the head of the human genome project and a devote Christian. I found that I agreed with the first part of the article, mainly the idea of a higher power makes sense to me, just based on what I know about the complex world we live in. It is somewhat mind boggling that life can exist in this universe, especially in such a complex form. The number of things that had to come together to make it all work out is incomprehensible.

The break I see in Collins thought process is where he leaps from a belief in God to Christianity. It is not clear to me how one can pick a particular religion. For me, it seems that a belief in a high power is self-evident, for all time any human that has or will exist could look around the world and come to the conclusion that there is something bigger than them in the world. This is not true of Christianity or any religion for that matter.

Think about it, were the billions of people born before 0 BC not privy to the "correct" faith? What about those who never had the chance of being exposed to this point of view? In undergrad, I had a man from Campus Crusade For Christ talk with me. He was explaining to me that the only way to heaven was through Christ, otherwise you're headed to hell. This made me think heaven was a pretty empty place before the birth of Christ, and things didn't really start filling up until Constantine spread the religion across Europe. Needless to say, his answers to my questions on the subject left something to be desired.

Sometimes, people point the way to Christianity as through the Bible, i.e. it was divinely inspired and all that. All these arguments are flawed, in that you can use them in the exact same manner with the Koran to lead you to Islam or any other religion with a sacred text. How can one choose correctly?

My belief is that the only reasonable view of God is one without a particular religion backing it. This view allows for all who came before us and those that will come after to believe in the same higher power regardless of when or where they have or will be born. I see individual religions as extremely polarizing, just look at the motivation for many of the conflicts of today and in the past! Christian vs Muslim, Sunni vs Shi'ite, Catholic vs Protestant, Judaism vs everyone else, and the list goes on. Take away these polarizing sects and there is nothing to argue about, everyone would believe in the same thing. This seems like the path a higher power would desire. People's beliefs bringing them together, not tearing them apart.

I welcome comments destroying my point of view.

Sports Are Over Until Next Fall

Last night's championship game between The Ohio State University and Florida officially brings and end to this school year's sporting season, mainly because the only thing I like about baseball is annoying my roommate with questions on obscure rules. Just like last year's tournament, the Big 10 let me down by getting blown out. Had Ohio State won, I would be $25 richer. My impression of Greg Oden did go up quite a bit after seeing him dominate on the inside, too bad the rest of his team was horrible. I hate Florida.

Another thing that is coming to an end is television shows for the year. Last night was the season finale of The Hills, the greatest show MTV has ever made. The end wasn't as satisfactory as I hoped, but hopefully there will be another season. Only a few more episodes of Lost and The Office are left as well. On the plus side, this will make me ride my bike more as I'll have nothing else to do, other than play Tiger Woods Golf on the Wii.