Preface: So I was up all night last night writing a massive amount (totalling 100 lines) of poetry. Needless to say, after slogging my way through rondeaus, sonnets, and kyrielles, I was about to my limit. My solution? Start making crap up. Anyway, this poem provides a revealing and some might say frightening look at my sleep-deprived psyche.

Pure Nonsense (With apologies to Lewis Carrol)

The thadrury thinder sat thickening long
And looking all thatchy from leafy-long prong.
A flea-flicking finnerer flitted and flong
From the finstering flannigands to said leafy prong.

The glommering glibtruck grabbled along
Gibbering glibly and glinging a gong.
A ruby-red rimring relinquished his song
To the ringing and ranging and rung of said gong.

And a hurrying howlinger hobbled and hrong
Hergething, hamming, and horking a hwong.
Whilst a wheeling whitebearder wheezed wizelong
Wooting a whirlybird into said gong.

So the glommering glibtruck she glibbered right twong
And glommed onto Gooey, that son of a kwong.
And zip ziffer zoodah and zimmery zan,
The zeebles and zeepas all zlop-zlop and span.

Tags: poetry, nonsense, jabberwocky

Friends of the blog (all two of you) might have noticed that the blog was down for a bit this evening. Don’t even worry about it, it was just me banging on some stuff under the hood so that I could announce that I’m officially running on the latest version of Wordpress. That’s right, I now have all the bells and whistles and hacker-proof-ness that my fellow Wordpress users have been enjoying for MONTHS! Yeah, I know, it’s been a while. Now we return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Tags: wordpress, upgrade, hallelujah

I’ve decided to try an experiment. I’m going to blog every day this week- yes, every single day- just to see if I can do it. Word on the street is that if you want to be a really good writer, you need to do it every day. I wouldn’t mind :

First, I’ve had two professors, both of which have published commercially successful books (one of them is actually finishing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series as we speak), swear by this. “Write every day,” they both say, sounding like broken records.

Second, I got addicted to dooce.com. I love Heather Armstrong’s writing, and when I first discovered her (thanks Jenn) I was so enthralled that I went back into her archives and started reading from the very beginning. And I discovered something in the process. While she was a pretty good writer at first, she was nowhere near the writer that she is today. Her posts were amusing (some moreso than others), but not the engaging, vibrant, colorful posts that she writes today. What was the difference? I’m going to go out on a limb and say “practice.” She’s been writing for a few years now, so she’s got a ton of posts under her belt. And it shows. I’d be willing to bet dollars to donuts that you’d see this pattern with virtually every other A-List blogger and writer out there.

So there you have it. It’s not exactly a cloud of witnesses, but it’s sufficient for me to want to give it a try. So keep an eye out, and I’ll do my best to keep the daily posts from sucking. But if they suck, it’s because they’re practice.

In the meantime, check out my latest writing project for my class…

An Adventure

Tags: experiment, writing, blogging tips, tips, blogging

So I have good news and I have bad news. The good news it that with school being the way that it is, I’m writing a ton, and it gets me in a writing mood, so you’ll probably see a lot more being posted on my blog. The bad news is that I’ll probably be posting a lot of the things I write for my classes on TI as well. So bear with me, because a lot of them are going to be long. I’ll try to just post them as pages and link to them from a post, but no guarantees. The first one is called “Statistics.”

That is all.

Tags: writing, english, publishing, statistics

Back when the solar system had nine planets, it used to be that when someone was proven completely wrong/incompetent/ignant you would tell them that you got “moted.” (There is some debate about how to spell this word, but the most obvious etymology would be that it’s simply an abbreviated version of “demoted,” hence “moted.”)

However, the times they are a-changing. In a highly-publicized move, the International Astronomical Union “moted” Pluto from “planet” to “largest member of the Kuiper belt” status. In honor of Pluto’s astronomical fall from grace, you’ve no longer been moted. The new term is “Plutoed.” For example…

Guy: “Don’t tase me, bro!”

Cop: *tases guy*

Onlooker: “Wow, that guy just got Plutoed.”

Make a note of it.

Tags: plutoed, moted, moded, putdown

Apparently my tax dollars are going to help Bank of America acquire Countrywide (and its massive portfolio of junk bonds). This is great! Now they can roll that money into sending me even more junk credit card offers!

Source: Taxpayers to help foot BofA’s $4.1 billion Countrywide bill - Fortune Magazine - Jan. 11, 2008

Tags: taxes, mortgage, countrywide, bank of america

There are very few things that I appreciate about the university library at BYU. The mere thought of the hours of wasted lifetime sequestered in the dusty shelves surrounded by the annals of academia is enough to make me shudder. And then there’s the smell…

There is one thing, however, that I love about the library. About 15 minutes before closing time the staff plays loud music in an attempt to shoo late-night studiers out the door. Normally this would be irritating. After all, I’ve had my sleep interrupted many a time by the tinny tunes piped through the library loudspeaker system. However, it’s the music choice that redeems this practice.

You see, while they could be playing something annoying like polka or the latest Hillary Duff album, they choose to play soundtrack selections instead. And not just any soundtracks, they always choose something from “Pirates of the Caribbean” or “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.” This brings me to my point:

Every time the music plays and I walk out of the library, I feel like the freaking man. It’s like I’m Bruce Willis walking into the hangar on Armageddon. I’m Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum walking out of the desert after pwning the aliens at the end if Independence Day. I’m Tom Cruise walking down the tarmac after killing some MiGs in Top Gun. Come on! I’m freaking Nate Kartchner strutting out of the library after pwning that paper! I’m a bad, bad man.

Don’t worry, I also do this when I drive…

Tags: music, soundtrack, library, byu, studying

And there was blog…

Tags: blogpost

Notice to all Provo event planners and marketers: I hate coming outside to my car and finding your lame-o flyer for your lame-o party that I’m not going to attend sitting under my windshield wiper or tucked into my driver’s side window. Why can’t you just be satisfied with putting up big, obnoxious, spray-painted lame-o signs on the side of the road? Seriously.

So here’s my promise to you: I will always litter when I find your crappy fliers on my car. I figure that at some point, the management will get tired of having to clean up these fliers and they’ll actually enforce their no flier policy. It hasn’t worked so far, but I figure that maybe, someday, it’ll pay off. And then you’ll be the one to pay.

And seriously, if I ever catch one of you using TAPE to stick your fliers to my car EVER again, I’m going to go postal in the very real sense of the word. Take that to the bank and smoke it.

That is all.

Tags: Rant, Flyer, Litter, Angry

Welp, failed another Spanish test. And what better way to celebrate my bitterness than with a completely original poem!

Ode to Spanish

How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.
I hate thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when sitting in class grasping
For threads of sanity and at least some understanding of what the crap the teacher is talking about.
I hate thee to the level of every
Fiber of my being, from head to miserable toe.
I hate thee completely, as men despise, and strive to squash a big, ugly cockroach.
I hate thee unabashedly, as they feel about a neighbor who doesn’t ever return anything he borrows.
I hate thee with a passion put to use
In all the Spanish classes I’ve ever taken in my life, and with my childhood’s angst (caused by said classes)
I hate thee with a hate that I will never lose
With my lost good mood, - I hate thee with the groans,
Frowns, whining, of all my life! - And if God choose,
I shall but hate thee better after death.

Thank you. Thank you.

Tags: spanish, hate, poem