Up Up and Away! Brizine Seventeen

Introducing: Kalan Porter

I want you all to carefully observe this lovely mini image gallery. This is Kalan Porter. Now, think carefully about what you think his voice would sound like.




http://www.kalanporter.com/multimedia.html
then head there and check out In Spite of it All (Kalan’s hot new video!) under Current Video Features.

Do it now! Before you read on!

And, like, wo.
Kalan was the 2004 winner of Canadian Idol (I bet you didn’t even know that existed). And he’s 19. And he’s got a really surprising deep voice. And I love him a little bit.







Don’t you just LOVE when people highlight their textbooks? And then you have to read them? And the highlighting is totally illogical? Yeah. Love it.
There are a couple different styles of illogical highlighting.

I Want the Whole Page to be the Same Color Highlighting (AKA My Hand is Too Heavy to Lift Highlighting)- entire paragraphs, pages, or chapters are highlighted. Kinda Sorta defeats the whole purpose of highlighting. A little bit.

My Highlighter Ran Out of Ink Highlighting- It’s a big textbook. If you keep doing that “I Want the Whole Page to be the Same Color” stuff you’re definitely going to run out of ink eventually. What do you do then? Some would say get a new highlighter. The owner of my Euro book would say “Underline!” Yup. Underline. With pen. When using this technique it is advised to have a very steady hand. Otherwise, you end up with large portions of text... crossed out. I guess that could be some kind of reverse psychology – I want to read it more because I can’t see it?

Not Quite Getting the Point Highlighting- Good, now we’re not highlighting as much. But, sometimes that’s not quite enough. Sometimes we need to pay attention to content. Otherwise we get highlighted portions that say things like:
No male heir aristocratic outlook
Any form of honest work was pleasing in the sight of God.
“livery and maintenance,”
painting, sculpture, and architecture
virtù, the quality of being a man
bridges were built a...
timeless values and personal salvation
heavier plow
harnessing horses

If you were paying close attention, you probably already knew that those sections are taken from A History of the Modern World, my European History textbook. And you probably noticed that I was flipping backwards.

Actually, I would be amazed if you could decipher anything from those words... other than that the previous owner of my text was paying 0 attention to what they were reading.
Just Plain Random Highlighting- At one point in my Euro book it definitely seems that the owner went into convulsions. Orrrr got really bored. They just highlighted punctuation marks. And random letters. Ummm yeah.






H3.
The smaller hummer.
But still too big to parallel park in Sewickley.







Martha Stewart gets on my nerves.
Am I alone on this one? Come on everybody, you’re with me, right? She’s just... *shudder*.








Do optical illusions ever make you feel stupid?
They ask you “Which line is longer?”
And you look at it. It’s pretty obvious. That line on the left definitely looks longer.
You look up the answer. They’re the same.
Shoot. You were wrong. You even thought the answer was obvious. You got it wrong though. You LOSER.
So then you try another one. “Are the sides of this square caving in?” they ask.
You think about this one more carefully.
It sure looks like they’re caving in. But are they really? You know this is an optical illusion. So in your mind you decide that No, the sides are not caving in.
You look up the answer. You got it right!
But wait... that wasn’t fun.

Optical illusions still make me feel stupid.







http://www.cryingwhileeating.com/
the internet should be a nonrenewable resource. Then maybe we wouldn’t waste it like this.







Colour Crisis [please ignore the different spellings. This is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to my best Canadian friend, and I was too lazy to change the spellings.]

I’m having a minor crisis in my life right now. Extremely minor. I lost my favourite colour. I’ll explain that. My favourite colour has been blue for as long as I can remember. I don’t think I had a favourite colour at all before blue came along. I thought they were silly. There was a long period in my life when blue was a big part of my life. I had a lot of blue clothes. I had blue walls, blue sheets, the list goes on! But suddenly I’ve realized... I don’t think blue really does it for me anymore. It doesn’t mean more to me than the other colours. But I don’t know what to do! I don’t have another favourite colour as back-up! I don’t know what I’ll say if someone asks what my favourite colour is. Actually, I’d probably tell them this whole dilemma. They’d probably get scared and run away. Please don’t run away! I’m telling you all this because I want to know if you have any advice for me. I need your help!!

No seriously. If you have any advice, IM me or e-mail me. If you don’t have my e-mail... IM me.




In the News


Over 38 years Edmond Knowles of Flomaton, Alabama, collected $13,804.59 in pennies. The gas-station owner recently deposited them at a local bank. George White, a spokesman for Coinstar Inc, said the amount Mr. Knowles collected is about the same amount as passes through a person’s hands over the years. “Ed just took the time to close his hand,” he added.

Does anyone remember when Mr. Surloff told us that he throws his change away? He doesn’t want to bother with it, so he just ditches it somewhere and never touches it again.

According to Coinstar, there's more than $10.5 billion in loose change sitting idle in American homes.

Nice move Mr. Surloff.







My favorite newspaper article from this summer (see if you can pinpoint why I like it so much. Please don’t think I’m really mean):

Teen on life support after motorcycle accident

An 18-year-old girl was on life support last night after being thrown fromthe back of her boyfriend's motorcycle and suffering massive head injuries.The girl's parents were on their way back from a vacation in Portugal lastnight to be with their daughter, police said.Her boyfriend, 22-year-old Carlos Silva of Gilmour, Ont., has been chargedwith dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing bodily harm.Police say Mr. Silva was showing off by popping a wheelie when the accidenthappened.

Haha did you see that?
Popping a wheelie.
Good one.
You see, I love when news reports that are trying to be very official are forced to use slang. It just makes the whole thing awkward. And that entertains me.
Is it wrong to be laughing at this article?









See? That wasn’t so bad!