I love Fall!

So there are 3 main things I love about Fall. I look forward to each of them for months! They are: Halloween, BYU Football, and the new season of TV! I have a little to say about each:

"103 UNANSWERED POINTS!!!!"

And you would be disappointed in the lack of Halloweenness in my home so far. I usually decorate the house for Halloween on Sept 16 (My Birthday), and spend birthday money on new decorations. This Year, I live in a real, live, haunted-house-looking victorian! But I sold most of my decorations before moving to CA and it depresses me to think how cool it 'could have been' compared to what it 'will be'. I am feeling repentant though and will be decorating very soon!

As for the TV shows. THANK GOODNESS the new season finally started!!! We were going insane watching stupid reruns of stupid shows all summer long. I checked for all our favorites and wrote down a schedule of when they premier and what we will watch each night.

It works out great! We will be watching Chuck and Heroes on monday, House and Fringe (If I can get passed the main girl's 'always worried' eyebrows) on Tuesday. Wednesday is the only problem, Val likes Pushing Daisies, I like Bones. (That is a weird sentence if you don't read it in context), followed by Ghost Hunters (the only cable show on our schedule). Thursday is "Play XBOX with Val night" until The Office is on, and Friday is dvd date with Val.

It's silly that I look forward, for months, to 6 1/2 hours of TV each week - but I do. I just worry how our near perfect TV schedule will hold up in early 2009 when we will need to squeeze in LOST (and possibly 24).

The End of the World and Eating Slugs

A couple of weeks ago something very significant happened in the scientific community. The Large Hadron Collider went online allowing scientist to study things that have only been theorized before. There has been a lot of fear about the LHC though. So much so, that some girl in India killed herself rather than be destroyed by it. What's so scary? Well, I'll tell you.
The purpose of the LHC (according to CERN - the people who built it) is this:

To smash protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light into each other and so recreate conditions a fraction of a second after the big bang.

Sounds academic enough, until you realize what the conditions after the Big Bang were like. If you know any physics at all, you probably know the Law of the Conservation of Matter. That is that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Well, it's not entirely true when we're talking about the big bang. To understand what happened think about this: The number 0 means nothing right? That's what there was before the big bang: 0. But this also equals 0: 1 + -1, or 1zillion + -1zillion. When the big bang happened, that 0 was torn into 2 halves. Suddenly there was all the matter in the universe (1) as well as an equal amount of antimatter (-1). So we instantly get everything from nothing. This splitting of nothing into something released an unimaginable amount of energy. In fact, just 10 to the -43 (thats "point" followed by 43 zeros and a 1) seconds after the big bang, the temperature was 10 to the 34 (1 with 34 zeros after it)degrees Kelvin (imagine Celsius if it's easier, there's only about a 273 degree difference).

So with temperatures that hot, will the earth just incinerate?



The other big fear is that scientists think they will be able to create a black hole. Yeah, that's right. The thing that is so dense that even light can't escape it's gravity. The thing that sucks everything into it never to escape. At least if they do make make a black hole, France will be the first to be sucked in.

One more fear. Did you ever read "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown? Remember how it all started when someone stole the antimatter from CERN (yes the same people who are behind the LHC), and it was going to cause an annihilation? Well, the LHC is expected to make antimatter too (remember: 0 = 1 + -1). That antimatter will surely meet matter and you have the big bang in reverse - with a huge amount of energy being released.

The only reason I bothered to explain all this, is to share a website with you. You can go to this site to see if the LHC has destroyed the world yet. It's real scientific. They actually have a program on the web site to see if the world has been destroyed, and they have a warranty - just in case the world ends and they failed to update the site.


In related news, I was eating pot stickers the other night. We eat them often and love them. As I was thinking about how much I loved them, I suddenly found myself wondering why we love them. There are so many reasons why I shouldn't.

They smell horrible. For hours after cooking them, the house smells like a poopy diaper. It's even worse when that smell comes out of your mouth when you burp!

They look and fee like slugs! I can't help thinking of Ron Weasley puking up slugs in "The Chaber of Secrets" when his broken wand backfires on him!



The insides look like an owl pellet. You know, owls swallow their prey whole, then puke up the fur and bones that they couldn't digest in the form of a pellet.





Despite all that I still love pot stickers.

My Birfday... and PS I have the Best Wife!

So Tuesday is my thirty-somethingth birthday. I say Thirty-somethingth , not because I feel old and don't want people to know how old I am, but because I can't really remember which thirty it is offhand. After about 25 I kinda stopped caring how old I was, so when people ask me, I have to do the quick math to figure it out - and if you know anything about my allergies to math, you would know there is no such thing as "quick" math. Ok, Fine. If you must know: I was born in 1975, that means in 1985 I was 10, 95 I was 20, 2005 I was 30, in 2015 I will be 40 minus 5 = 35 in 2010, it's 2008, so take off 2 more = 33. There I'm 33 - and that wasn't much of an exaggeration of how my mind caculates math.
Not that that pain is over with, let me tell you about my Birthday present. I've never really been one for big birthday celebrations. Parties are fun, but usually more stressfull than they are worth. As for presents, I never know what I want. Cash is usually a safe gift, but then it burns a hole in my pocket and I just end up buying lunch with it. Valerie is pretty observant about the random times I'll be watching TV and a commercial for the newest Batman or GI Joe toy will come on and i'll exclaim "Ooo, I want that!" But this year she gave me an awesome gift! The gift of nothing. That's right, this year she said she wasn't going to do or get me anything for my big day. Instead, what she did, was let me spend the entire Saturday (this past one) Hanging out with my friends.
The morning started early. I met my friends Jacob and Emron (both of whom I went to BYU with and who work at Pixar with me now) at Lou's house. Lou works at Pixar too but was about 12 letters off and went to NYU instead of BYU. The four of us loaded up in Jacob's spacious extended cab F-150 with our golf clubs in the bed and went golfing. Jacob even played Gwen Stefani for me while we drove. The course we went to was a tiny pitch -n- put par 3 course. This was Emron's first time golfing (though he dressed like a pro), and Lou's first time since he was a kid. We had a great time. We basically had the course to ourselves and played several balls each. The best thing is, I started with 5 golf balls and fiished with 20! Ohh Ye-ah! I would have had dozens more, but the fairways are lined in Blackberry bushes. THORNS! These are some pictures Jacob took - which is why he's not in any of them.




We finished golfing in time to head back to Lou's to watch the BYU vs UCLA slaughter on his wall with his High Definition projector. 59 -0?! Are you kidding! That was AWESOME! After that we played Call of Duty 4 on the PS3 (1080p HD!) That is a seriously fun game! We tried a bit of Halo3 on the xbox360, but Call of Duty was really much cooler. Finally after about 12 hours of fun, I went home to my beautiful wife who was glad that I had a fun day. That was such a fun birthday present!
Now tomorrow we'll have cupcakes to celebrate, but that is really for the benefit of Val and the kids. They all love birthdays way more than me so I don't mind a little partying for their happiness. After all, I do have the best wife and kids.

PS Val made this Blog for me because I kept complaining about not having time to start my own blog. Thanks Valerie!

PPS I just want to clarify, I know there is a picture of Barak Obama in my header surrounded by things I like. I am not currently a Barak Obama supporter (or democrat even), I'm just not convinced yet that McCain/Palin will be any less fascist than our current emperor.