Episode III: A beginners guide to being a well cultured motherf**ker

At some point someone will invite you to go to an art museum with them and you will go either through a legitimate interest or out of some obligation. either way your going to have to know something about art, or at least maintain the outward appearance of someone who does. Alternately if no one has ever invited you to a museum you should probably go back to plowing your fields / cousins and watching Larry the cable guy stand up special for the forty billionth time. For everyone else I have put together a short guide for looking like you know something about art.

Part 1: Faking it
The best part about art is you can be an expert in something you know absolutely nothing about, the key is to keep your comments vague enough so as not to arouse suspicion. This is much easier then it sounds and, with a little practice, you'll be saying things like "this panting represents the struggle between good and evil" in no time!

Here's a mad lib to help you along:

"I think this (panting/sculpture/poem/jazz music) represents the struggle between (any two different things: man vs. nature, pie vs. Saudi Arabia etc.) you can tell by the obvious symbolism of the (noun) and the way (he/she/it) is portrayed here. This (panting/sculpture/poem/jazz music) is a classic example of the (word ending in -ist) movement."

Try to use this format whenever someone asks you what you think of a piece of art.

Part 2: I like it!

If you see a piece of artwork you like, it is important people around you know why you like it. Saying things like "It has pretty colors", "all the people look funny" or "it would look good over my fireplace" might give you away and would all be things to avoid. Instead try to say things that describe the piece while continuing to be as vague as possible. Try things like "it has a very effective message" or "it invokes strong feelings inside me".

Part 3: Is it good?

The cardinal rule of artwork is that the quality of the work is directly proportional to the fame of the artist. People will wait in line for hours on end to see a piece of artwork a famous artist accidentally made in 30 seconds when they tripped over a coffee table and spilled paint all over a canvas, while paying no attention at all to the painting that took an unknown artist 3000 hours of fine tuning every intricate detail. Its kind of like when you go to buy a pair of jeans, people will lay down $200 for a pair with a famous label even though the ones for $20 were still made by the same Korean children. Basically the rule of thumb here is if you recognize the name of the artist its a good piece of art.

I hope you find this guide helpful during your next art experience. And remember: even if you really hate art museums it could be worse, you could be going to an independent film festival.

Episode II: CNN, the mullet, and the Republican party

In an effort to avoid doing any real work today I have entered my schools hub of unproductivity: the computer lab. The computer lab at central contains about 100 or so students at any given time. Out of those 100 I estimate that about 5-6 of them are actually doing anything school related. As for the rest of these people there is a fair amount of email checking, instant messaging, myspace page updating and even some CNN watching going on. Speaking of CNN Id like to share with you one of my favorite CNN moments: About a month ago CCN was covering a speach being given by a one Sarah Palin. Nothing unusual at first, this particular speach was being given in the middle of a large, monoethnic crowd of people, typical republican rally. But as the camera panned across the crowed a man in the front row caught my eye. What set him appart from the rest of the group was the fact that he was sporting a typical red-neck hair style, commonly refered to as the mullet. "How funny" i thought to myself "a perfect example of someone who looks like they would be a Mcain/Palin voter". But then i started to wonder why no one else around him seemed to notice...was this such a nomal occerance at these things that no one gave any thought to the fact that some one with a rediculously hilarious hair cut was standing right in front of the camera on national televsion? Then I started to think about what kind of peson would go to these rallys anyways and I discovered I couldnt do it, I couldnt immidiatly figure out why ANYONE would think this was a good team to be on. clearly this would take considerably more thought then I had first expected, "Id better go get a snack" I thought "this could be a long one".
I returned 20 minutes later and I was still drawing a blank, when I remembered something that happened years ago that i didnt understand the significance of untill just then. The year was 1992, I was in my first grade elemetary school class and since it was an election year our class decided to do a mock election. As some of you may or may not remember the two major canidates for the 1992 election were Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. Anyways our teacher explained what an election ment and who the canidates were and wrote their names on the board. We each wrote our votes on slips of paper and put them into a hat that was passed around the room. Now, being 6 years old the only things i knew about the two canidates were thier names, and that one had been president for four years and one had not, so when it was time to pick one to vote for I decided to vote for Bush because he had already been president and he had a silly name. Apparently this line of reasoning was the norm for the entire class (being made up of 6 and 7 year olds) because when the votes were counted Bush won by a land slide. From this experiance I concluded that republican voters have a similar mentality to that of a 6 year old. Keeping this in mind suddenly it all makes sense.

Episode I : Man triumphs over machine: I solve a rubik's cube

When I was about ten years old my grandfather gave me a Rubik's cube to play with. After about ten minutes of flipping blocks around randomly I decided that it was the most useless device ever created and deposited it on the nearest horizontal surface. Rubik's cube 1 , Ken 0 or so it would seem. Fast forward a decade or so and i found my self once again staring down an angry looking , albeit colorful, collection of randomly oriented cubes. It was go time, and this time I would be ready. Unfortunately for Mr. Rubik, he didn't bank on me having Wikipedia and Youtube at my disposal, and after about an hour of trying to remember what "left inverted" meant while holding the thing in the right direction; I came out with a nice little segregated cube. Huzzah! I win! but what? Surely i could have spent that hour doing something productive like studying for my calc 2 exam or watching an episode of ghost hunters. But no, I learned how to get a bunch of blocks to fit together nicely without the aide of vaugely russian sounding MIDI music. (tetris referance for those of you who didnt catch that....which would be....most of you...). Anyway I did it, but I still think its the most useless device ever created, with the possible excpetion of devices used to move the plot in an M. Night Shyamalan movie.

And so it begins....

So apparently Ive started a blog, kind of an odd thing to do for someone who never got anything above a C- in any English class. Fortunately for me a cursory glance at the next few blogs on this site indicate that I may not be alone in this matter.

This blog will be updated about once a when-ever-I-feel-like-it and is for the moment, solely for the entertainment of Mikey and Chrissy should either of them choose to read it.

So let the good times roll and look forward to Episode I: Man triumphs over machine: I solve a Rubik's cube.