Thursday, October 2, 2008

:: who knew diagramming sentences could be this fun?

my least favorite part of english class, in all my years in school, has to be diagramming sentences. i hated it. i never really understood why you had to do it. i still don't understand why it was so important. i guess it was supposed to show me how to better construct sentences, but it really just irritated me.

something else that irritates me :: sarah palin.

i just can't stand her. i don't know why, but when she starts talking every fiber of my being starts to cringe. some people just love her to death, but since the first time i heard her speak, the morning after the dnc, when she was nominated, i disliked her. maybe it's because she came right out of the gate and lied about so many things (she said "thanks but no thanks" to the bridge to nowhere? really?). maybe her attitude gets under my skin. maybe it's the fact that she just re-treads every speech and every joke and just runs it into the ground. maybe it's the fact that whenever she gives an interview she just strings key words together into some poor semblance of a sentence that makes no sense whatsoever, and people dismiss her answer as the result of a "trap question". maybe because i see her whole candidacy as a ploy by the republican base to make mccain seem interesting and to grab those women who feel disenfranchised by the democratic party since the end of hillary clinton's campaign for the presidency. maybe it's all of those reasons. she just irritates me.

but when i found this article, i had to chuckle. it's the combination sarah palin and diagramming sentences. someone actually took some sentences from sarah palin's interviews with katie couric and charlie gibson and attempted to diagram them. you can read the full article at that link, but here is the jist.

here is a quote from sarah palin ::
It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where do they go?


and here is the diagram of that "sentence" ::


here is another quote from sarah palin ::
I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.


and here is that diagram ::


wow. she can seriously make absolutely no sense sometimes. i'm glad that the sentences i had to diagram in high school were nowhere near this bad. i'd have to kill myself. did she just spit these words out as they came to her? did she even think about the sentence that she was constructing?

to be sure, barack obama and joe biden have made there share of verbal gaffes. obama misstated the number of years he'd been married, saying 15 instead of 16. he also misstated that he'd visited 57 states instead of 47. biden recently said that theodore roosevelt wouldn't have gotten on the television during the depression, which is correct, essentially. mostly because roosevelt wasn't the president during the depression, and the television hadn't been invented yet. blast away at those guys for those mistakes. but it seems like every week, every chance sarah palin gets, she says something stupid. i think that's why i'm so anxious to see the debate tonight. it's like a little game :: "follow sarah palin's meandering sentence construction". i hope you'll be playing along with me.

more to come...

:: a search engine blast from the past

here's something cool that i discovered. to celebrate google's tenth birthday, they have provided users the opportunity to take a quick search into the popular search engine's bank- exactly as it was in january 2001. you'll get all the results you would have gotten then. try searching for something recent. try sarah palin or 9/11. if you did this now you'd be bombarded with results. in 2001, i don't think you'd get a single link to the vice presidential candidate sarah palin, and in january 2001 the events of 9/11 had even occurred yet. it's strange to imagine what has changed in just a short amount of time. (ok, it's been 7, almost 8, years since that point in time. but it really doesn't feel like it's been that long, to me at least).

give it a try. i thought it was pretty interesting.

:: quick facts :: thursday, october 2

thursdays are always the longest day of the week for me. this one has been no different. there's lab at 11, social psych. at 12:30, and the whopper- my 3 hour behavior modification class. but i like that last class, so it's not so bad. plus, thursday is now my friday. from this point forward, i don't have any classes on fridays. this means more time to sit around and do nothing. it's great. but that's enough of that.

here are your quick facts ::

current time :: 5:55 pm

current location :: the apartment couch

current inside temp. :: 71°F

current outside temp. : a glorious 77°F

currently watching :: cnn news, debate prep.

fact :: i got my b-mod test back today. i scored a 93. ace!

what to watch :: i don't think you have much of a choice tonight. every channel, including abc, cbs, nbc, fox, cnn, fox news, msnbc, c-span, the discovery channel, the weather channel, mtv, bet, the nasa channel, comedy central and qvc will be showing the vice-presidential debate. this could be as good as the snl sketch!

what's rambling around in my head :: "jesus is a friend of mine". i can't get it out of my head. sorry you got addicted, corey...

number of days till 2009 :: 90

today in history ::
  • charles schulz' peanuts comic is first published in 1950


born today in history ::
  • groucho marx

  • bud abbott

  • george mcfarland (spanky, our gang/the little rascals)

  • graham greene

  • don mclean

  • sting

  • efren ramirez (pedro, napoleon dynamite)


your video of the day ::



more to come...