Voting went up for this week's LJI topic - If you liked my entry about Bears That Threaten Our Way of Life, please vote for it!

My poll is here:
http://www.livejournal.com/poll/?id=1489049

The entire voting entry is here:
http://community.livejournal.com/therealljidol/273076.html

Read. Amuse thyself.

Or the bears win. And not in a football sense.

A man I love, admire, and respect said it best.

"I believe all God's creatures have a soul — except bears, Bears are actually Satan's children."

That quote is from the one and only Stephen Colbert. There's no one like him. Except perhaps the real person of the same name. But nonetheless.

Bears. They are evil. This was not always the case.

Bears once wanted peace. Peace and honey. And fish.

(Image: Winnie the Pooh with his head in his "hunny.")


(image: bear catching salmon)

But then, humans came along. We wanted to love the bear. To (as Stephen puts it) give him freedom - the freedom to dance, the freedom to be caged, the freedom to entertain us.


(image: dancing bears)

This is when the bears turned. When they became evil. When they became a threat to mankind. Bears now have one mission - eradicating humans.


Granted, their strategy is familiar, but effective. Make us forget about them. Sure, they call it "hibernation," but I see it for what it really is: Effective military strategy. When we see a bear that isn't in hibernation, it's at the circus, or in a zoo. But then...they strike.


(Video: Bear attacks a woman)

It doesn't take long for them to strike. Those massive creatures move quite quickly when they need to. Much like myself.

They've even made more attempts to become mainstream.

(image: a teddy bear.)

Sure, we always hear that they were named after Teddy Roosevelt and all that, but it's really one big, giant propaganda campaign. They're cute, they're cuddly.

You let them into your home.

The bears are lying to us. And because of sheer ignorance, we are letting them. Letting them destroy us.

Step up and save the world: Kill bears.


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This entry was written for therealljidol Topic 5: Bearing false witness. The poll won't be up for a while, but if you liked my entry and are willing to help dispose of the world's bear menace, please vote for me when the poll goes up on Sunday. The human species thanks you.

So, I took a nap. One that caused me to miss the Idol deadline entirely this week. Oh well, I still have one more bye!

So here's what had been floating around in my head. It would have put me in the largest tribe, unfortunately, but I think I would end up squarely in the middle. Or closer to the bottom, since I'm never entirely confident that people actually like what I write. (Though if I'd gone with your suggestions, I would be immune this time. Oh well!)

I think I'm just going to do a little smattering of what I would've written. I was going to do all the topics, but that doesn't work so much. So:

Moments of Devastating Beauty

I live for the thrill of the moment. My weapon of choice: Theme parks. Yeah, in all their expensive, manufactured glory. The twists and turns of gleaming steel connecting smooth wheels to a track that whips speed-hungry passengers around tight curves and through multiple loops and twists.

I wasn't always this way. Until I was 14, my idea of a thrill was the tiny dragon roller coaster with four cars that took me over two hills per trip, over and over again at my school's fall festival.

Growing up an hour and a half from what I consider America's theme park capital, Orlando, I should've been used to something a little stronger - like needing double the substance to get the high.

When I was finally forced onto a roller coaster ride that actually did something besides approximating a mine shaft, it was kicking and screaming. Or at least crying. My dad and I were at Universal Studios Florida's "Islands of Adventure" park during it's initial few months. It wasn't all that busy.

My enemy: The Incredible Hulk.


Photo of the ride from my summer 2008 trip.

Ride video:


I guess he could have picked something a little less...abrupt. But that one ride was really all it took. The whole park was my oyster. I now spend time looking for coasters and rides that do more and more and more. (The addict metaphor really isn't so far off.)

I have my favorites, of course, but theme parks aren't theme parks without...well, the theme. The process of actually getting to the ride is almost as important as riding the thing.

Hulk puts you in the dead-center of Bruce Banner's lab. Bruce has problems, most of which I'm sure you can surmise. Dueling Dragons, another favorite of mine, puts you in the midst of an ancient battle between two dragons. Tower of Terror puts you inside the hotel. Everything from the handrails to the decorations puts you in that scene.

This is where I get really dorky. People spent months, maybe even years of their lives deciding what fabrics to use here or what the ride attendants should wear. It's like designing the most extravagant house you can imagine and filling it with things to keep the vision going. It's amazing. Every time I set foot in a park, I love noticing the tiny things that are done to keep the magic alive. It is someone's job to keep the manhole covers in-theme. It is their job to come up with signs that fit the area. It's amazing. It's beautiful.

But then, there's the other side. I could get my adrenaline fix from a roller coaster assembled in the middle of the desert. Why here, amongst these building facades and warehouses?

The fact is, something about it is just beautiful to me. I've always been drawn to human fabrications...theme parks just take it to another level where the immersion just astounds me.


(Ride video of Doctor Doom's FearFall at IoA.)

I wonder a lot what used to be there, before we had Google Maps and satellite photos and all that. It makes my hippie heart hurt a little to think that once upon a time, there were trees and lakes and I don't even know what else, because it was before my time and before anyone even comprehended something so grand.

Perhaps beauty isn't exchangeable.


-------------

This is what could have been. Assuming I wasn't a lazy bum who likes to wait until the last day. But I am.

Good:
Will decided to buy an Xbox360. Despite our mutual hatred of the system. He just really, really wanted to play the Xbox GTAIV exclusives. So my Gamertag is mskweenie, add me. Even though a month from now I won't have Gold membership because we think that paying for Live is stupid. (Clearly the monetary situation has improved substantially, but I still need to get stuff together to try to sell.)
I am trying to play Dead Rising, but that shit is clunky as hale. Also, I am dying a lot. I thought I would like it because of the photography angle (it reminds me of Beyond Good and Evil sort of), but the clunkiness...Capcom, I am surprised.

------For the record, we still hate Xbox. I mean, no wireless card? Paying an extra $70-100 just for a little USB POS? It doesn't play Blu-Ray movies? You have to buy battery packs just to make the controllers rechargable? (I bought them for the Wii, but that was $30, included two, and has a cute little stand for the Wiimotes that lights up and everything. Totally worth it, IMO.) Um...why not include those capabilities with the freaking system? I mean, Sony did that, and it didn't work out for them, but I think Microsoft could do it and get away with it. Maybe an Elite Pro or something. I don't know. I think Microsoft should stick to making software, not hardware.

Bad:
One of the journalism profs Will tutors for was going to be part of a comedy open mic in Birmingham. So I got ready and we headed over there only to find that the open mic was completely sold out. We didn't think that would happen. The main show in the main room still had tickets open, but the open mic did not. What.

Good:
We decided that since we wouldn't be getting tickets and it was only like 7 pm that we should have a sushi dinner somewhere in Birmingham, followed by a movie at the Summit. We found a place, I got directions, and off we went.

Bad:
Apparently my iPhone was slightly off. Decided to input the address into my Garmin. Opened up the glovebox and...no Garmin. No iPod, either. Both have been stolen. What. That makes the second time this year that we've had a GPS unit and an iPod stolen from his truck. (He forgets to lock it sometimes. The first time they were both out in plain view, this time, not so much.) I am especially upset because these were both mine. My iPod had my name engraved on the back and barely worked (it was from September 2005 and has been through a war), but still. We don't think that calling the police will help this time (it didn't last time), so we're just going to complain to the rental office. Maybe they will install those gates that make white people automatically feel safer.
Maybe we should just park farther away. We live so close to the entrance that really, anyone could just take ten steps, yoink, and be gone in less than a minute on foot.

Good:
The restaurant was apparently just beyond a hill, so we couldn't see it.

Bad:
Every space in the parking lot is full, and it's not the hole-in-the-wall that we were expecting.

Good:
We decide to just go somewhere else. We stop at Hooters. Boobs.

Bad:
Our waitress most definitely will never be a Rhodes Scholar, forgot 50% of the things we asked from her, and the food tasted weird.

Good:
We saw Law Abiding Citizen, and while it won't be winning any Oscars, it was at least entertaining.

Bad:
The Hooters gave me food poisoning. Things decided that they wanted back out of me midway through the movie, and my tummy made one of the loudest rumbles ever. So loud that the girls a couple rows in front of us were all, "WTF was that?" I suffered from these ailments for the rest of the night.



...I guess everything kind of evened out, but that was my worst-ever Friday the 13th by far.

Oh, and I did make a wishlist.
http://amzn.com/w/2221HVEQ2C3HA

Am I forgetting anything?