Yesterday, Becky and I went to the Birmingham International Auto Show. I've been to the one in Detroit and the Birmingham version is minuscule in comparison. It's still pretty neat though. The concept cars are always fun to look at and since there are far fewer people at the Birmingham Auto Show, you don't have to wait long to sit in the car of your choice. When I used to go to the show in Detroit, my friends and I would have a contest to see who could be the first to find the car where they forgot to disable the horn (there always seemed to be at least one). There always seems to be one at the Birmingham show as well. Becky frowns upon that little ritual, so I didn't try to hard to find it, though I did hear the horn from time to time. Also, Becky ended up "winning" a Nalgene-style bottle from the people in the Suzuki area. She was pretty happy about that.
Here are some pictures from our day.
This is a Chevy concept car. Becky is testing out the seat in a Mitsubishi. ALWAYS keep your eyes on the road, even when dealing with paparazzi. Ever since I was a kid, I've always wondered why no one ever made a car entirely out of chrome, since people like it so much. Well, this it what it would look like. That kid holding onto the chain is as shocked as I was that someone finally decided to make an all chrome car. This looks like a concept car, but the sticker in the windshield means it isn't. That was the leather seat, I swear. ...or was it? The coolest dune buggy I've seen so far.
Man, I woke up this morning and it felt a little like Christmas. I finished another draft of a paper that I'm going to try to get published. I finished it last night and sent it to my adviser to read over. That lifted a huge weight off my shoulders and I slept pretty good last night. Then, this morning, I turn on the news and hear that the Democrats have taken the House and could take the Senate as well. Wow. Let's see if they actually make some worthwhile changes. To top it all off though, Donald Rumsfeld is quitting! It's about friggin' time. I hope his replacement is at least slightly better.
Better than all that though, it's currently sunny and 65 degrees here. Nice.
By the way, Election Day is probably one of the most important days in the U.S., so why don't we get this day off? How many people (and what demographic) can afford to take off on a Tuesday?
According to this list, 61% of the cities on the list are safer than Tuscaloosa. This place has about the same number of people as Sterling Heights, MI (my hometown). Only 4% of cities on the list are safer than Sterling Heights and it's a suburb of Detroit (99.7% of cities are safer). All of the largest cities in Alabama are pretty high on the list. The safest city in Alabama is Tuscaloosa and the most dangerous is Birmingham where 98.7% of cities on the list are safer.
There really aren't a lot of cool things that happen in Alabama, so when something comes around you have to jump at the opportunity. Good bands hardly ever come to this state. There might be someone worth seeing once or twice a year, while they are on their way to Atlanta. Last summer this state was lucky enough to host 311, Papa Roach, and Unwritten Law. Becky and I went to that concert and it ROCKED! I don't know if it's because I haven't been to a concert in a very long time, or if they really were that good.
Anyway, one of the few worthwhile performances in this state happened last night and Becky and I were lucky to get tickets to it. We tried months ago but it was already sold out. Yesterday afternoon I figured I would just check again. I really don't know why. It seems that they opened up some extra seats and we managed to get the last two of them together.
So, who did we see? Who was willing to come to this lame-ass state and entertain the minority of the population? One of my favorite comedians, LewisBlack!
This is probably the best picture of me ever taken.
My autographed ticket. John Bowman was the opening act. He's the guy on the left in the above picture. He was pretty funny, but definitely not as good as Lewis Black.
I just finished watching an episode of Heroes on NBC. It's a decent show but it has a lot of plot problems. The biggest one I noticed on tonight's episode had to do with the blonde lady and her kid. She drove them both into the desert at night in a convertible with the top down. She parked the car and proceeded to use a shovel to dig up a corpse a few feet away from the car as her son was sleeping the back seat. Later she opened the trunk, removed two dismembered bodies and buried them. She didn't finish until what looked like noon, just as her son woke up.
Now even if this kid isn't a light sleeper, who wouldn't wake up with a trunk opening and closing a few feet from your head? Also, what kid sleeps until noon in a convertible with the top down in the desert? When I'm camping I have a hard time sleeping past dawn. It just gets too bright for me. If I was sleeping in the desert, I think the heat and dehydration would have woken me up.
My favorite character is Hiro, the Japanese guy with control over space and time. Peter is my second favorite, but the cop is growing on me. The character I have a problem with is the cheerleader girl. I have to say she is pretty damn lucky her power is to cheat death and have a Wolverine-like healing ability. I've never seen anyone get mangled more than this chick. Even Wolverine TRIES to avoid using his healing ability. This chick accidentally impales herself on sharp sticks, puts her hand in a garbage disposal, jumps off of grain silos, etc. Isn't self-preservation still one of the few instincts that humans have? Millions of years of evolution have hammered that into every fiber of our being, so wouldn't you still feel some doubt about your power even if you knew that you couldn't die? Personally, I would find it more plausable if this chick would think, "well I didn't die those other dozen times, but maybe my luck will run out the next time." That would definitely add a little more realism to the story, which I belive the creator was going for. Then again, he was probably just jumping on the comic-book band wagon and sold a half-thought-out idea to NBC. I read somewhere that he never read comic books and he wanted to get a more realistic take on people with powers. I don't think he succeded.
Anyway, this show definitely needs some more thought put into the storyline. Clearly, it's no Lost. It's a lot more similar to one of the creator's earlier attempts at a superhero tv show, Misfits of Science (I LOVED that show).
I saw this on the BBC News website. The caption reads,
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity near the rim of Victoria Crater. Victoria is an impact crater about 800m (half a mile) in diameter at Meridiani Planum near the equator of Mars. Opportunity is the dot at the centre of the zoomed image. (Nasa/JPL/UA)
Yesterday, Becky and I walked down to Steamers for her birthday dinner. The restaurant looks like a Joe's Crab Shack, only not quite so tacky (although it's not from a lack of trying). They have a main dining area that is a big open patio that overlooks the Black Warrior River. The dining area is decent, but the restaurant is in a bad location along the river. The bridge over the river for the highway is a stone's throw away. It's a good effort to have river-front dining though.
The food at this place was not that impressive. I had blackened Mahi with rice, a baked potato, and cole slaw. The Mahi and the potato were pretty good. The rice wasn't cooked enough so it was still crunchy and the cole slaw was bland.
Overall, I'd say save your money. It's pretty pricey for what you get, a so-so meal with an ok view.
Here in Tuscaloosa, there are almost no sidewalks in subdivisions. The places where you see the most people outside are along the river walk (where there is a path), the sidewalk around the Quad, and the Quad itself (big open field where people play football and frisbee). I definitely agree that if sidewalks were built in this city, people would use them. You can tell by the number of people crowding these areas in near desperation.
If they built bike paths, this town would go though a major change. I definitely think that a significant percentage of the population would use them. I think people are afraid to ride in traffic in this town, so the people that do ride are on the intermittent sidewalks, dodging pedestrians. If bike paths were built, this town could reduce it's traffic problem, the University could reduce it's parking problem, and people would be in better shape while saving money on gas. The town is not that big, after all. It's just poorly planned.
One of my best friends had his birthday yesterday. We graduated high school together and he's the first one of the gang to hit 30. It sucks that his birthday will forever be "the day after 9/11." My birthday is is on "the day that will live in infamy," but that happened a generation ago, so I guess it's not such a big deal anymore. Things seem to be going pretty good for him. He's married to a great gal, he has a ham of a dog, he's got a nice little house, and he's about to start his MBA program.
30. I remember when I turned 24 and thinking THAT was old. *sigh* What can you do?
I had to put these pictures on here because I thought they were pretty funny. The pictures are of us at Mardi Gras. From left to right in the first picture are Angel, Mike, Becky, Megan, Me, and Zac. In the first picture we are excited about going to our first parade. In the second picture we are sad that the parade was cancelled for the afternoon. The second picture looks like an album cover.
Ok, now have another look at the pictures. Notice that Zac seems to have the exact opposite reactions as everyone else from picture to picture. That's pretty funny.
Well, the reason Zac looks pissed in the first picture is because some water or something leaked all over the inside of his backpack. I don't know why he's so happy in the second picture though.
I just read this article from Reuters about an ice core sample that was taken in the Antarctic. Here's the gist of it:
It is from air bubbles that we know for sure that carbon dioxide has increased by about 35 percent in the last 200 years. Before the last 200 years, which man has been influencing, it was pretty steady. ...carbon dioxide today is not just out of the range of what happened in the last 650,000 years but already up 100 percent out of the range. The ice core record showed it used to take about 1,000 years for a CO2 increase of 30ppmv. It has risen by that much in the last 17 years alone.
If that's a natural occurrence, that's quite a coincidence. Even if it is natural, it still means that people need to decrease the amount of CO2 they put in the atmosphere. No matter where it comes from, too much CO2 is bad.
